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TriQuarterly

I3I

Editor of this issue: Henry S. Bienen

Editor

Susan Firestone Hahn Contributing Editors

Associate Editor

Ian Morris

Operations Coordinator

Kirstie Felland

Cover Design

Gini Kondziolka

Editorial Assistants

Samantha Levine

Amy Levine

Assistant Editor

Joanne Diaz

TriQuarterly Fellow

Holly Zindulis

John Barth

Lydia R. Diamond

Rita Dove

Stuart Dybek

Richard Ford

Sandra M. Gilbert

Robert Hass

Edward Hirsch

Li-Young Lee

Lorrie Moore

Alicia Ostriker

Carl Phillips

Robert Pinsky

Susan Stewart

Mark Strand

Alan Williamson

essays 7 The Other

Henry S. Bienen

13 The Making of Strangers: Muslims, Jews, and the Other 1492

Fouad Ajami

71 Understanding Zimbabwe: The Conflicting Logics of Race and Governance

Jeffrey Herbst

89 The Other is Dead: Mourning, Justice, and the Politics of Burial

Bonnie Honig

I 12 Stranger Blues: Otherness, Pedagogy, and a Sense of "Home"

E. Patrick Johnson

157 Notions of the Other

Lawrence Joseph

169 Race, Faith, and Sexuality Or a Snapshot Genealogy of the Grateful Negro

Dwight A. McBride

206 In the Shadow of National Conflict: Inter-group Attitudes and Images of Arab and Jews in Israel

Elie Rekhess

237 Citizenship as Foundation

Richard Sobel

264 The New Balkan "Other"

Andrew Wachtel

photography

39 The Other Country

Lan Samantha Chang

45 Bait

Stuart Dybek

49 Island

Reginald Gibbons

187 Tetanus

Joyce Carol Oates

57 The Brides of Christ Consider the Hunger of One Hundred Children, the Forty Sick, and Many Old Men Who Linger without Relative or Memory; The Matter of the Raspberries; Feeding My New Son with an Eyedropper, I Remember Coming to This Country with My Parents, One Trunk, and Seven Words of English; Brother Churchianity's Garden

lana Harris

186 A Mayfly

Paul Muldoon

201 Two Poems; Annuals; Laundry; Artemis to Aphrodite; Gaia

Alicia Ostriker

129 Photographs

Fazal Sheikh

273 Contributors

Front and back cover photographs by Fazal Sheikh

Photographs on pages 4, 48, and 70 by Jeremiah Ostriker

Henry S. Bienen

The Other

God made men and women and all the tribes so they would know one another. ,

From the Holy Qur'an

I have long been interested in problems ofethnicity and foreignness. Why do individuals and groups define themselves in certain ways, often in opposition to, or solidarity with, other individuals and groups? The "we" and "they" distinctions have played out over the centuries with respect to differences over race, religion, language, country of origin or birth, region, geography, clan, tribe, caste, family, class, social status, income, occupation, age, gender, sexual preference, style of dress, or hairstyle. The formation and dissolution of identities fascinate sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists but also political actors and everyday observers. Millions have been killed over "real" or presumed differences. Identities have been given to individuals who might not have chosen such identities for themselves. For example, Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany insisted on defining who was Jewish-whether or not an individual himself or herself recognized that identity. Similarly, laws passed by whites in southern states in the United States defined Negroes and "coloreds" based on some presumptive share of their ancestry.

Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi were long identified by height or other physical characteristics and also by occupation-despite

intermarriage between groups and despite the fact that those designated occupations were held by both groups as the economy evolved.

At one point in time, observers of Somalia considered that country to be, by African standards, homogeneous because everyone spoke So' mali and, overwhelmingly, were Muslim by faith. Language, tribe, and religion are often the defining characteristics for so-called ethnic divisions in Africa. Today, Somalis fight each other for political position and economic control, and their clan and sub-clan identifications determine group cohesion and alliances. Sub-group identities have become the operative political forces.

As someone who lived and worked in Africa for many years, I was always struck by the array of traits or identities that could characterize groups. These identities were by no means fixed. Groups came into being as people migrated to new areas and new identities were formed that did not exist before. Recent decades have witnessed massive migration. Urbanization intensified this process. Thus, saying that ethnic groups were primordial, that is elemental and, going far back in time, seemed to me mistaken. Many so-called "tribes" are relatively recent creations, like the Sukuma in Tanzania or the Baluba in Zaire. Rather than group and individual identities being fixed, I, like many others, have been struck by the fluidity of identifications.

True, there are characteristics that one acquires at birth, and sociologists call these ascriptive characteristics, for example: language, ethnicity, and religion. Whereas achieved or acquired characteristics are obtained over time. Examples are class, income status, occupation. But these labels do not tell us much.

We know that in societies with little social mobility, there can be generations of farmers or butchers in a family. Occupation is mixed up with caste and class in India and elsewhere. Slave societies can fix occupational status, but slavery, itself, may be fixed by race or ethnicity or gender.

So-called ascriptive characteristics, those given to children by their parents and families at birth, can be changed. Religious identification is hardly unchanging in the United States. People take on and slough off specific denominations when they move up or down in status, migrate from urban to suburban communities, marry someone of a different faith, or convert to a new religion for a multitude of personal or social reasons. People change "first" languages when they migrate. Race and caste, presumably fixed identities, can also change. Social status changes more easily in some societies than others.

Individual and group identifications are complicated and dynamic

processes, not simple fixed ones. How one defines oneself matters. This is first-person identification. Others, individuals or groups, can and do accept or reject those first person identifications. I may call myself a believer of a faith but someone or a group may not accept my selfidentification because I am not "pure" enough, or, born into the religion, or for some other reason.

Millions have been put to death for being heretics or nonbelievers. Some people try to "pass" from one race or caste to another, and mayor may not succeed. People who reject or accept your self-identifications have not until recently had access to DNA testing. Even if they did, neither religious nor language-based groups would show much genetic differentiation.

When others accept or reject first person identifications, this is "second person identification." These "second person" identifications are weighted with significance, perhaps even more than "first person" identifications. Murder-even genocide-based on religion, race, language, and ethnicity has been with us for a long time. So has class-based killing of kulaks, sans-culottes, aristocrats, and workers.

To make "we" and "they" distinctions even more complicated, there are "third-person" or "third-party" identifications. These are the identifications the State places upon its people, such as laws in the past in the United States, India, and Germany, and the apartheid laws in South Africa. In some countries, Islam is a state religion. And one cannot simply opt out, and say-"I no longer am a believing Muslim"without fear of great penalty. The state can compel individuals to stay within the group.

Some societies pride themselves on being pluralistic. This is the case in the Untied States. We are not always clear on whether we want to be a "melting pot," which conjures up the image of a stew, with various elements all floating in the stew. Or, are we an assimilationist society, a la the French model? (A model set more in theory than in France's present reality.)

As large numbers of Spanish speakers have migrated to the United States, more and more we hear that all of them should learn and speak English; that they should assimilate in the United States as English speakers. Struggles over language are played out at the level of school boards, cities, states, and country. Others say the rest of us should learn Spanish.

The United States, after the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury waves of migration from Europe, seemed to put forth a model that was neither the melting pot nor the assimilationist model, but rather

a model of "hyphenated" Americans. It was all right, at least until World War I, to be German-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, Catholic-American, Jewish-American. Will it be all right to be MuslimAmerican? For larger recent waves of migrants we have come to use new terms: Latinos and Hispanics. Spanish-American or Hispanic-American is used less frequently. New groups and new political pressures alter the way Americans of different origins and different politics think about multiple and/or overlapping identifications, heterogeneity, and foreignness.

A number of things, then, led me to this topic. Myoid concern with ethnic and other identifications has been reinvigorated by the politics of immigration now roiling the United States, leading us to ask again: who and what is "foreign" to us? Worldwide flows of refugees and immigration to Western Europe from Africa and Eastern Europe and South Asia make this a topic of great interest beyond the United States. Within Africa, the movements of populations across borders are huge, as has been the flow of people across borders at different times in recent years in the Middle East and South Asia. Earlier, mass migrations caused by religious conflict in South Asia were striking.

The invasion of Iraq by the United States led to the dissolution of central authority and state control in a society differentiated internally by geography, religion, sect, tribe, and clan. This society has divisions within divisions, a violent history, and after the downfall of the regime a status reversal for the ruling Sunni clan. The United States has become deeply involved in a complicated civil war that it seems not well equipped politically, militarily, and administratively to handle, or even to understand.

My interest has also been engaged by this topic because of the worldwide conflict that the Bush administration has described sometimes as the "War on Terror" or "World War Ill," and others have described as a clash of civilizations, a term popularized by Samuel P. Huntington in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The United States appears to its foes as the devil. It is demonized by leaders of Al Qaeda but also by political movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and by a head of state in Iran. We seem deeply "foreign" to some because of our religions, the openness of our society, our Westernness, and our foreign policy. On our side, we emphasize "foreignness" too, even portraying it as a lack of humanity.

For all these reasons, I wanted to explore "the other" and "foreignness." TriQuarterly, however, is not a journal devoted to ethnic studies,

or to foreign policy. It is not a journal of politics or social science; although, in its pages we find social analyses as well as fiction and poetry. And, it is an international journal.

Thus, I went to people whose work I admire: poets and fiction writers, a photographer whose images speak for themselves but who also has written text surrounding those images; I went to essayists; social scientists and social historians; political theorists, and a performance studies theorist.

In the pages that follow you will find work on race, ethnicity, American citizenship, Jews and Arabs. Eminent fiction writers have put their hand to stories that explore "the other."

Fiction writers, playwrights, and poets have had much to say on themes of class and privilege, fear of foreignness, societies in flux, race. August Wilson, one among many, took up all these themes. Questions of rights and religion have been taken up by Arthur Miller.

In these pages, the fiction writers provide us with stories that ex, plore themes that resonate elsewhere in this edition.

Joyce Carol Oates in "Tetanus" writes about an Hispanic boy and an employee in New Jersey involved with a family service organization. The metaphors of inoculation and wounds are fascinating. We are ex, posed to much in this story-ethnicity, class, fear, age, parentage.

Reginald Gibbons sets his story in a foreign land. His protagonist moves across geographical boundaries and his aspirations to move across class and status lines are strong themes. But the character is rooted in his old life and cannot get out. This is a story about disorientation.

Stuart Dybek's story is one of family, generational differences, recollections and retrieval. "We" and "they" can be "mine" and "his," too.

Lan Samantha Chang's story evokes magic and mystery. The setting is the everyday suburban life of a woman who moves across time and place to a very different country, indeed. She is a traveler in a fairy tale, but she has a home and place and roots. The story is about all these things.

Paul Muldoon's poem is about transformation.

Alicia Ostriker's poems take up many themes but "Laundry," especially, imagines a prison we all well know, a prison in a foreign land.

[ana Harris writes of different countries, languages, hardship and faith. Women in a religious order travel, move, strive, and learn.

A number of political scientists have contributed. Bonnie Honig, a political theorist, questions who has claims in a democratic society, and

what about the claims of the dead? She invokes Sophie's Choice and Antigone to explore her concerns, demonstrating how political theorists can draw on literary sources to explore issues.

Richard Sobel asks about rights: specifically, the rights given to cit, izens by birth, and otherwise, at a time of vast migration to the United States. Who is foreign here?

Jeffrey Herbst, as political scientist and Africanist, analyzes who has been designated "foreign" and "the other" in Zimbabwe since independence. He explores how and why an economy can be destroyed and impose huge hardships on a population in the name of nationalism, and then for the purpose of domination by an elite.

Lawrence Joseph is a lawyer, a poet, and a novelist. He looks at no, tions of "the other" by stringing together excerpts of analysis from some of the great social theorists of the twentieth century. He invokes many non,social science sources and uses literary references as well, and touches more than once on the Middle East and Arabs. Two other pieces go to these places, as well.

Fouad Ajami, well known for his work on Arabs and Islam has been, over the last years, one of our major public intellectuals writing on Iraq, Unites States foreign policy in the Middle East, and inter-Arab state re, lations. Here, he tells a complicated story of Muslims and Jews and 1492, offering a revealing commentary on the formation of identities in an historical perspective. It is a parable for our times.

The Israeli social scientist, Elie Rekhess, explores the status and identity of Arabs in present day Israel. He shows the dynamics and par' tial fluidity of group roles and political positions in Israel, as these are affected by inter-state conflict.

In a memoir, Patrick Johnson tells us of his travels along a very per, sonal road. A story about different "homes," and new places. It is not an easy voyage, made to different university venues, involving the identification of race, vocation, status, and performance.

Dwight McBride examines sexuality and race, also via a personal account, reflecting on exclusion within the black community.

Fazal Sheikh's images speak for themselves.

Andrew Wachtel, in a review of recent Balkan literature, looks at "the other" through various novelists' treatments of national identity. This mix of approaches allows very different writers and commentators, in their own mode, voices and chosen forms to say much about these crucial issues that confront us all.

We hope you find all of it interesting and provocative.

Fouad Ajami

The Making of Strangers: Muslims,

Jews, and the Other 1492

As a child of the Arab world, I was given a touched-up version of the history of al-Andalus, a fabled time of Muslim splendor in the Iberian Peninsula. A brilliant Arab-judeo culture had flowered there, Arab history taught. A poet of our time, the Syrian-born Nizar Qabbani who had written Arabic poetry's most moving verse, had once remarked that while on a visit to Granada he had roamed its streets while searching his pockets for the keys to its houses. A hill overlooking that enchanting city had summed up the Muslim grief over its loss: El Ultimo Sospiro del Mora, the Moor's Last Sigh. On that ridge, the storytellers say, Boabdil, the last king of Granada, had paused to catch a final glimpse of his lost realm. Boabdil's unsentimental mother is said to have taunted him during his moment ofgrief. "You should weep like a woman for the land you could not defend like a man." The fall of the city had taken place on January 2, 1492.

It was not in Granada, but further north, in Madrid, in late 1991, that the cult of al-Andalus came back to me, a good many years after quitting Beirut, the city of my boyhood. I had come to Madrid with a television network to witness and comment on a grand diplomatic spectacle that American diplomacy had assembled in the aftermath of the first American-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. The occasion was scripted, few things were left to chance. This was taking place amid the retrospectives, and the celebration and the rampant revisionism of the

Quincentennial of Columbus's voyage of discovery. It was a good "venue," the innocent said of Madrid, the right place for Muslims and Jews to come together. They had built a world of tolerance, it was said, and they had shared a similar fate-banishment and expulsion in the very same year, the year Columbus set sail for the New World. This history had its complications: a portrait of Charles V slaughtering the Moors was hurriedly removed from Madrid's Royal Palace, the conference's site. Then Yitzhak Shamir, the Prime Minister of Israel, a man with no eagerness to please, allowed himself a remembrance ofwhat had happened in Spain: "In its two thousand years of wandering, the Jewish people paused here for several hundred years until they were expelled five hundred years ago. It was in Spain that the great Jewish poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi expressed the yearning for Zion of all Jews, in the words, 'My heart is in the East while I am in the uttermost West.'"

This was an evocation of "the other 1492," which ran parallel to Columbus's voyage to the New World. If Granada had fallen on January 2, the "Edict of Expulsion" of Spain's Jews was issued on March 31. It gave the Jews a grace period of four months: they were ordered to quit their land by the end of July. By a twist of fate, and due to the pleas of one of Iberian Jewry's most influential courtiers of Ferdinand and Isabella, Don Isaac Abravanel, they were given a reprieve of two days. Don Isaac had pleaded for his people's right to stay, but it was to no avail. The ships bearing them to exile left Spanish waters on the second of August. This "fleet of woe and misery," the historian Samuel Eliot Morison has written, was to sail parallel to a "fleet of high promise." Christopher Columbus's fleet was ready for sea on the second of August. The men received their communion at the Church of St. George in Palos on that day. The Captain General set sail in the dawn hours of the next day.

Three destinies were being forged: the expulsion of the Jews and the Muslims and Spain's high adventure in the New World. Those in Madrid, in 1991, had they known the history, could have heard both the Moor's Last Sigh and the pleading by Don Isaac to Ferdinand of Aragon and to Isabelle of Castile, that fell on deaf ears. For those in the know, these two tales of banishment had been linked, seen as a bond, between Muslims and Jews. It was in that vein that Yasser Arafat, four years after Madrid, in 1995, and then in the middle of a brief reconciliation with Israel, would evoke that history. "I understand that before the British Mandate, Arabs and Jews used to live together in peace. Remember, we were both expelled from Spain in the thirteenth century." The crafty

chieftain had the wrong century of course, but he had fallen back on that fabled history. Men make of the past what they wish. What follows is another attempt to tell what was shared-and what wasn't-in an Iberian Peninsula that once was a venue where Christians, Jews, and Muslims together made a tangled history.

History is kind and generous to Abravanel; he had been a faithful courtier of the "Most Catholic Sovereigns." He had given Ferdinand and Isabella eight years of distinguished service: he had organized the chaotic finances of Castile and Aragon; he had been helpful in the final push against the Muslims of Granada. The work of the Reconquista against Muslim Spain completed, Don Isaac was suddenly thrown into the supreme challenge of his life.

Don Isaac (I437-1508) hailed from the apex ofIberian Jewry. Born in Portugal, he had risen in the life of its court; he was treasurer and confidant of Portugal's ruler, Alfonso V and a leader of the Jewish community of Lisbon. But fate and court intrigue and the death of Alfonso in 1481, a conspiracy which earned Abravanel the enmity of the new Portuguese King, drove Abravanel across the border to Castile. The Holy Office of the Inquisition was busy at work grinding down its victims when Don Isaac had found his way into the court of the Spanish Sovereigns. But the obsession of the Inquisition was with the Conversos (also known as the Marranos, Jewish converts to Christianity). Jews like Don Isaac thought they were beyond the fire's reach.

Fragments survive of Abravanel's futile pleas to the Spanish Sovereigns. There is the narrative by Don Isaac himself recorded in exile: "Thrice on my knees I besought the King. 'Regard us, King, use not thy subjects so cruelly.' But as the adder closes its ear with dust against the voice of the charmer, so the King hardened his heart against entreaties ofhis supplicants." Don Isaac and his fellow Jewish notables appealed to Ferdinand's greed, offered him vast sums of gold. The drawn-out war against Granada had run down the treasury. Ferdinand was sure to show some interest in the offer. But he brushed it aside at a later meeting. The Jews would give it one final desperate try: They would beseech Isabella. But there, too, they would fail. Where Ferdinand had hinted to his courtiers that Isabella's religious piety had forced his hand, she was to shift the burden from herself. "Do you believe that this comes upon you from us? The Lord has put this thing into the heart of the King."

Ferdinand and Isabella offered Don Isaac and other Jewish notables in their service the chance to stay in Spain with their wealth and position

intact. In return, they would of course have to undergo baptism and conversion. Abravanel chose dispossession and exile; the edict had prohibited the Jews from taking any gold, coins, or silver with them. The proud Jew had lived in the shadow of one forced conversion: his grandfather, Don Samuel Abravanel, had, under duress, converted to Christianity late in the preceding century during a terrible time for Castilian Jews. Some years later the grandfather had slipped across the border to Portugal and returned to Judaism.

The tale of the grandfather had only steeled the will of Don Isaac: He would leave the "land of persecution" behind him. There were lands where the life of the faith could be lived-the Italian city-states, the Netherlands, the Muslim domains of the Ottoman Sultan, the Barbary states of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, and there was a haven in Egypt. Don Isaac chose the city of Naples.

Boabdil would not fare so well with the Muslim historians: he had lost a kingdom. But in truth, there was not much that Boabdil could have done. Granada was living on borrowed time. The impetus behind the Reconquista was too tenacious for Granada to withstand. The Moorish chieftain cut the best possible deal: an estate for himself, a pledge of safety for the people ofhis city, safe passage for those who could not bear to live under Christian rule. The victors made yet another promise: Muslims who stayed behind were not to be molested; their religious rights were to be honored. That pledge would be violated. The Mudejars, the remaining Muslims under Christian rule, would face, a decade hence, the same choice offered the Jews: conversion or exile. A century later the Moriscos (Moorish converts to Christianity) were expelled.

Spain was for the Spaniards: there was a mission ofdiscovery at sea, and there was a mission ofzeal at home. The bridges to Islam and to the Jews would be burned. Spain was awakening to a new sense of power. As Fernand Braudel put it in his great work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Spain, an outpost of Christendom and an underdog in Europe's affairs, was recasting itself as the quintessential "Church Militant." The "two unwanted religions," Islam and Judaism, would be "pruned" like some excess growth. Limpieza de sangre, purity of blood: This was to be Spain's way of integrating itself with Europe. What had been a land offluid and mixed identities, a ChristianMuslim-judaic setting, now sought the comfort of purity.

The Pyrenees had been more of a barrier than the Straits of Gibraltar: North Africa had had a more formative influence on the Iberian

Peninsula than did the societies of Europe to the north. The only way out of this cultural confusion, it seemed, was a violent extirpation of the cultural patterns of what had passed in the Peninsula since its conquest by Islam early in the eighth century. Set the Jews aside and consider the Christian-Muslim relationship: Cultural hybrids of every kind emerged in that tangled relationship. They are recounted for us by the historian Americo Castro in his celebrated book, The Structure ofSpanish History. There were the Mozarabs, bilingual Christians who lived under Muslim rule, the Mudejares, Muslims who lived under the Christians, the Moriscos, the Muslims who had converted to Christianity. Then there were Muladies, Christians who turned Islamic, and the Tornadizos, Moors who turned Christian. To all these were added a special breed, the Enaciados, men and women who roved back and forth between the two religions and went wherever fear or ambition or fate took them. When Fernando III of Castile declared himself, in 1236, "King of the Three Religions," he expressed the cultural diversity of a land at the crossroads. There came a time when Spain wanted to "resolve" all this cultural confusion, put an end to it. The way out was provided by militant Catholicism, a state religion, which brooked no compromise, and a relentless doctrine of purity of blood. That purity was of course delusional, as the sober among the Spaniards knew. Half a century after the establishment of the Inquisition, a luminary of the Spanish realm made the observation that speaking evil of the Converso "touches the majority of the Spanish nobility." But the drive for purity would be rendered more deadly and more neurotic by this kind of inheritance.

In the legend of Moorish Spain, the Jews of Toledo opened the gates of the city to the Muslim conquerors. They were eager to welcome the Muslim armies, which had overrun the Visigothic Kingdom early in the eighth century. The legend is groundless. In the war between the Goths and the Muslim armies, the Jews were, for the most part, quiet spectators. To be sure, they were glad to see the defeat of the Goths. The same must have been true of the Ibero-Roman natives of the Peninsula. The Goths had been severe rulers. They had not allowed the Jews to sing their Psalms, to celebrate Passover, to testify in court against Christians or to observe their dietary laws. Forced baptism of Jews was a recurring phenomenon under Visigothic rule. Centuries later Montesquieu was to observe that all the laws of the Inquisition had been part of the "Visigothic code" that regulated the conduct of the Jews in seventh-century Spain. It was a polyglot world that the Muslims came to rule in the Iberian

Peninsula. There were Arabs, Berbers, Jews, and blacks, Muslims of native Spanish stock, native Christians. Islam was over-extended in Spain; it thus made its accommodation with its habitat. The world of the Jews, turned on itself under the Visigoths, grew larger with the coming of Muslim rule. The Peninsula had been opened up to the international order of Islam, to the culture of the Mediterranean basin and the commerce and the traffic. Islam stayed long in the Peninsula: eight centuries separate the conquest from the fall of Granada. The Jews were there for all the changes of fortune. The romanticism about that golden age of Iberian Jewry under Islam should be kept in check. There were seasons of bliss and there were calamitous times. The "golden age" was brief: Several generations of Muslims and Jews and Mozarabs (Arabized Christians) were its beneficiaries, from the early years of the tenth century to mid-eleventh century. At its zenith, Iberian Islam built an urban order of tranquility and brilliance. The cities thrived. Cordoba, on the banks of the Guadilquivir, then the seat of Muslim rule, with a self-styled caliph (successor to the Prophet) at its helm, had a population of a quarter of a million people. It was unmatched by any European city at the time; its only rivals were Baghdad and Constantinople. It is principally from Cordoba's great moment that the romance of al-Andalus is drawn.

Romance aside, Jews did well by the onset of Muslim rule. They were favored by the rulers: they were loyal and useful subjects. The politics of the Peninsula were a whirlwind: Berbers from North Africa versus Arabs, tribal Arabs who came with or after the conquest versus "nee-Arabs" keen to claim their share of the spoils of the new dominion, Slavs who were soldiers and mercenaries striking when the occasion presented itself, and Christians with some ties of faith to their coreligionists in the lands to the north. The Jews were unique in this politics of factions. They needed the protection of central authority, and they paid it in the coin of loyalty. "They tied their destiny to Moslem dominion and stood by it in all areas of life as loyal aides," Eliyahu Ashtor tells us in his work, The Jews ofMoslem Spain. Christians under Muslim rule had been defeated, but there were always monks and priests ready to fling themselves against the dominant faith. The proximity of Christian states to the north, Navarre and Castile, and the states in the Asturias and Galicia, provided the Christians with hope that revenge may yet be had against the Moors. The Jews wanted nothing to do with the past. The Muslim order was not fully theirs, but it afforded them protection. It was not long before the lands of Andalusia, now lands of

immigration, attracted a Jewish migration from North Africa and from the eastern domains of Islam.

The economy of Muslim Spain, tied as it was to the larger economy of the Muslim world, boomed and provided the Jews with the material bases for a cultural awakening. Virtually all sectors of the Andalusian economy were open to the Jews. They were active in agriculture, tilled their own lands. They were fully present in the textile works of An, dalusian cities, in the international commerce carried out between the lands of Islam and those of Christendom. The grandees of Jewish society, the men with wealth, emulated their Muslim counterparts: They subsidized poets and men of letters; they nurtured a lively environment. Literacy spread. Jewish academies opened in Cordoba, Granada, Toledo, and Barcelona. A rich body of[udeo-Arabic philosophy was to become the distinctive gift of this age. By the tenth century the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula who had looked to the Babylonian academies and the Tal, mudists of Iraq for guidance felt confident enough to stand on their own. Those old academies in the east had fallen on hard times because the political center of the Islamic caliphate in Baghdad had eroded. Stability had done wonders for the Jews of Muslim Spain. Abdulrrahman III, an enlightened ruler in Cordoba who had reigned for an incredibly long period of time (9I2 until his death in 962), had given the Jews, and his own people, a reprieve from political disorder, and they had made the most of it.

This was the age of the great Jewish courtiers, men who rose by their talents in the courts of Andalusia. For a good deal of his reign, Abdulrrahman in Cordoba relied on Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, a learned and subtle Jew who had made his way on a familiar track from medicine to court life and politics and diplomacy. A patron of the arts, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut sponsored studies of the Torah, acquired rare manuscripts of religious texts, and used the weight and the access he had as one of Cordoba's leading diplomats and emissaries to protect his own community and up' hold its interests at court.

A secular political culture prevailed in Andalusia: The Muslim ulama and theologians railed against this attribute of court life, this nearly cavalier way toward the faith. This was what had enabled the Jews to succeed at court. "No office, except that of the ruler, seemed to be out of the reach of a talented and ambitious Jew," Norman Stillman has written of Andalusia in his historical survey, The Jews in Arab Lands. Success at court was not without its hazards, though. It called forth its steady companion-the wrath of the crowd. Courtiers rose but the wise

ones among them understood the fickle ways of fate. The life of Shmuel Ben Neghrela (993-1056), a figure of great accomplishment in the Andalusian world as a poet and a courtier, spanned the possibilities and the hazards of Jewish life in that world: the author Hillel Halkin had described this poet and courtier of renown as the first "post-ancient Jew" in both the realms of politics and letters. At the apex of his fame and power Shmuel Ben Neghrela had risen to the rank of chief minister of the court of Granada; he had become the first Nagid, or governor of the Jews of the realm. This courtier had been born in the cosmopolitan world of Cordoba to a family of means and learning. He had been tutored by great Talmudists and had prospered in the spice trade. He was a "learned merchant," the backbone of Andalusian life. He had made his way to Granada after the fall of Cordoba to Berber forces in 1013. From tax collector he had risen to the peak of court life, under two Berber kings of Granada, one Habus ibn Maksan (ruled 1019-38) and his son Badis. Shmuel Ben Neghrela commanded the troops of Granada for nearly two decades.

The full irony of Shmuel Ben Neghrela's life, the precariousness of the journey that he had made and the hazards of Jewish existence in Andalusia, are given away by the fate of his son Joseph. Ten years after Shmuel's death, his son, the inheritor of his position as Nagid, was crucified by a mob on the city's main gate in an anti-Jewish riot. Joseph had taken success for granted. Where the father had lived in the Jewish quarter, the son had his residence built on a high hill in Granada where the Muslim nobility lived. Joseph was, says one chronicle, "proud to his own hurt and the Berber princes were jealous of him." This riot was the first massacre of Jews in Muslim Spain. The date was December 30, 1066. About 1,500 families perished in that riot.

More troubles were yet to come. The political unity of the Andalusian world had cracked. The authority of Cordoba had slipped away. By the mid-eleventh century, it was the age of muluk al-tawa 'if, the Party Kings, the warlords and pretenders who carved up Muslim Spain into petty and warring turfs. The Party Kings were "men thrown up by the road." They were adventurers and mercenaries, Berbers from North Africa, soldiers of fortune who had overthrown their masters. There must have been some thirty-odd mini-states in Andalusia at the height of its fragmentation. Six of them were the leading states: Zaragoza in the north, Badajoz, Toledo, and Valencia in the center of the Peninsula, Seville and Granada in the south. The fall of Toledo in 1085 to the armies of Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile put on cruel display the weakness

of the Party Kings. Toledo had been the ecclesiastical seat of the Old Visigothic Kingdom: its return to Christian sovereignty was seen as evidence of divine favor. This was certainly the way Alfonso billed it as he claimed the city and sponsored the establishment there ofSpain's largest archdiocese: "By the hidden judgment of God," a charter of his read, "this city was for 376 years in the hands of the Moors, blasphemers of the Christian faith Inspired by God's grace I moved an army against this city, where my ancestors once reigned in power and wealth."

Chastened by Toledo's fall, the Party Kings sought deliverance and help from the Muslims of North Africa. They appealed to Almoravids, Berber camel nomads who had subdued Morocco. The Party Kings knew the risks of bringing the Almoravids, a violent lot, into their midst. But they chanced it. The ruler ofGranada justified the gamble by saying that he would rather end up as a camel-driver in Morocco than a swineherd in Castile. The North Africans checked the Christians, but only tern' porarily. The Berbers could not arrest the chaos: They brought a fair measure of it with them, as they set out to extract from the population what they believed was their due. Another Berber invasion, one of a wholly different nature, that of Almohads, a more religiously zealous and fanatic lot, was to take place nearly a century later. The men of this expedition (the Taliban of their time) were a tyrannical lot, intolerant of Jews and Christians and of the "free souls" within the Muslim population. No sooner had they swept into Spain than they began a ruthless assault against its old ways. Andalusia had fallen on hard times, but it was still light years ahead of the wilderness of Morocco. A ruler of this band ofpuritans found the relative freedom of the Jews difficult to countenance. He decreed that they were to wear distinctive dress, "because they had become so bold as to wear Muslim clothing and in their dress looked like the noblest among then, mingling with the Muslims in ex, ternal affairs, without being distinguished from the servants of God." More important still, the North African zealots sought the conversion of the Christians and the Jews of their conquered realm.

The Jews scattered in every direction. Vast numbers ofthem migrated north into Christian lands. Some fled into the eastern provinces of Islam. Moses Ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides (1131-12°4), quit his native Cordoba for Morocco, then finally found a haven in Cairo, where he became a physician of the great Muslim ruler Saladin. The "Golden Age" of the Jews of Muslim Spain had drawn to a close.

No measure of zeal could keep the Andalusian world intact. In 1212 Almohads sustained a major military defeat against Christian forces;

soon they quit the Iberian Peninsula and returned to North Africa. The Muslim states were defenseless. Cordoba fell in 1236, Valencia was conquered by the armies of Aragon in 1238, Seville's tum came ten years later. By 1264, all that remained of Islam's rule was the kingdom of Granada and its surroundings.

Luck and geography worked in Granada's favor. Historian L.P. Harvey's book, Islamic Spain: I25I-I500 sums up the reasons of Granada's longevity: "a mountainous situation facilitating defense, distance from centers of Christian population, and a long sea coast, through which could pass military aid from North Africa." Granada stayed the hand of fate for more than two centuries. It looked away as other Muslim strongholds fell to Castile. It may have participated-on the side of the Castilians-in the demise of Muslim rule in rival principalities. Granada's rulers stood idly by at a crucial time in 1264 when Muslim rebellions erupted in Lower Andalusia and in Murcia against Christian rule. The defeat of those rebellions left Granada as the sole stronghold of Andalusian Islam. The jurists rendered opinions that worked in Granada's favor. Muslims living under Christian rule were encouraged to migrate to Granada where the life of the faith could be lived. This proved to be a mixed blessing. Granada had the soldiers to withstand the warfare of siege and attrition. But hers was a divided and turbulent population. Once Christian Spain finally had a singular royal will at work as it did after 1474, the Granadan stronghold was marked for extinction.

Nor was Granada helped by what had transpired in 1453 in the great fight between Christendom and Islam, the loss of Constantinople to the Turks. There came to the societies of Europe a new politics of religious passion, a desire for revenge, and for a measure of absolution for what had not been done for Constantinople. (The loss of Constantinople was no small factor in the zeal and eschatological excitement with which the project of Christopher Columbus came to be viewed; new lands of the faith, new conquests had to replace what was lost to the Turks.) Constantinople, a doomed and dying city, had fought and fallen alone. West� em Christendom had not cared much about the fate of Byzantium. The Venetian galleys that were supposed to come to the rescue of Constantinople never turned up. Venice had hedged its bets; her commerce with the domains of the Grand Turk was of greater importance to her than the struggle for Constantinople. A small contingent of Genoese quit the fight as the final push for the city was unfolding. France was recovering from the ravages of the Hundred Years' Wars; England was run down by her French wars, and, besides, Constantinople was a distant world.

Aragon was close to the fire, but her monarch, Alfonso V, was busy with his campaigns in Italy. The Papacy had tried to rouse Europe to the defense of Constantinople. But it was too little and too late, for the Papacy itself had waged a long campaign of its own against the schismatics of Byzantium. Men being what they are, Constantinople was ennobled by its fall and loss. Four decades later, the fall of Constantinople would be avenged in the fight for Granada; a doomed Muslim outpost in the West for a doomed Christian outpost lost to the Muslims.

The pressure on Granada had subsided prior to 1453. Castile, whose brash energy was to drive the politics of the Peninsula and to fashion the new history of Spain, was to launch six minor expeditions against Granada between 1455 and 1457. A sly Castilian monarch undertook these expeditions because they were genuinely popular, and because they were a good way of raising revenues, doing God's work under papal auspices. Nothing durable was to come of these expeditions. The final push against Granada would come later, after the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon: Granada now mattered. It stood in the way of a great cause. Its conquest would provide a heroic enterprise worthy of this new Spain and its sovereigns.

The Reconquista was above all, though, a true embodiment and reflection of Castile-both of its ideology and of its material reality. J. H. Eliott's book, Imperial Spain, has given us a definitive portrait ofCastilian society. A pastoral, nomadic society, Castile was aristocratic and religious and, by the end of the fifteenth century, over-populated. Sheep farming was a mainstay of the Castilian economy. The push southward, into the agricultural Muslim lands of Andalusia, was the pushing outward of a religious and an economic frontier. Reconquista gave the hidalgos, the minor nobility of Castile, and its priests, a calling and a project and an escape from the limitations of their harsh, barren soil. The "Reconquista," J. H. Elliott writes, "was not one but many things. It was at once a crusade against the infidel, a succession of military expeditions in search of plunder, and a popular migration." All three aspects of the Reconquista stamped themselves forcefully on the forms of Castilian life.

The Castilian advantages over Granada had become overwhelming by the end of the fifteenth century. There was, to begin with, a great demographic disparity. The figures for those years of the fifteenth century are admittedly unreliable, but they do give us a sense of scale: the population of Castile could have approximated five million then, Aragon around a million inhabitants, while Granada's population a mere 300,000. In the end, though, Granada was doomed because her agricultural hinterland

had fallen to the Castilians. The land onto which the Granadans had been pushed back was of poor soil and could not produce the grain and foodstuffs they needed. True enough, there was treason in Granada, and there were divisions: a bitter feud between Boabdil and his father, for all intents and purposes a civil war, sapped the unity and the confidence of the Granadans. But the harsh balance offorces, those facts ofdemography and economy, had rendered the judgment that mattered. There were hopes in Granada (those echo the idle hopes of the defenders of Constantinople four decades earlier) that outside help would come to the rescue. But Granada stood alone. Its surrender came in a public ceremony, with Boabdil handing over the keys to the city to the Spanish monarchs. In his logbook, Christopher Columbus, who was there for the final permission to embark on his endeavor, recorded the scene:

On January 2 in the year 1492, when your Highnesses had concluded their war with the Moors who reigned in Europe, I saw your Highnesses banners victoriously raised on the towers of the Alhambra, the citadel of that city, and the Moorish king come out of the city gates and kiss the hands of your Highnesses, and the prince, my Lord. And later in that same month your Highnesses decided to send me, Christopher Columbus, to see those parts of India and the princes and peoples of these lands, and consider the best means for their conversion I departed from the city of Granada on Saturday May 12 and went to the port of Palos, where I prepared three ships.

Hope had deluded the Jews in the domains of Ferdinand and Isabella. Faithful to the crown, they had done what they could for the final push of the Reconquista. While the military effort against the Moors went on, the public animus toward the Jews in Christian Spain seemed to subside. But this was deceptive. Spain no longer needed her Jews. The Crown, traditionally the protector of the Jews against the church and the townsmen, would be more audacious and independent now. The Jews would be dispossessed and fed to the mob in the service of royal absolutism. The great calamity of Spanish Jewry, the destruction of the Sephardic world, was unfolding like some set play. There was nothing the Jews could do to avert the wrath of those who sought their destruction. Pick up the trail a good century before the Inquisition and Edict of Expulsion: Over the course of that pivotal century the place of the Jews in Spain had become untenable. The Jews farmed the taxes of the state; they were the ideal scapegoat for all the

disgruntled. The mob and the priests who led the mob in intermittent outbursts against the Jews saw a Jewish conspiracy behind every cruel tum of fate. Jewish physicians were carrying poison under their finger, nails, Jewish sorcerers were everywhere, a Jewish cabal was out to undo Christianity. When the great plague, the Black Death, swept Europe in 1348-49 and wreaked havoc everywhere, a rumor swept Spain and the lands beyond that a Jew from Toledo was the principal culprit: with the help of a rabbi from France the culprit had put together a deadly con, coction of dried snakes, frogs, and scorpions, mixed with a consecrated host and the heart and liver of a slain Christian. The Holy See pro' claimed the falsity of the charge, but it was to no avail: 15,000 Jews were killed by the mob in Toledo.

The Jewish world was hit with great ferocity in a wave of massacres that took place in 1391. The trouble began in Seville and spread to Cor, doba, Valencia, Barcelona. The economic life of the peninsula had stag, nated, the oppression of the nobility had impoverished the land. A fiery preacher, one Fernando Martinez, worked with this deadly material. Be' fore the great terror subsided, some 25,000 may have been killed. The crowd and its preachers offered the Jews of Spain the choice of baptism or death. More than half of the Jews of Castile may have chosen con, version. A new legislation of great severity was passed in 1412: the so' called "Ordinance on the Enclosure of the Jews and Moors" at Valladolid. The Jews were now to wear a distinctive yellow garment; Jews and Moors were banned from serving as spice dealers, tax farmers, moneylenders, physicians, or surgeons; they were to live in separate en, closures locked and guarded at night. A massive wave of conversion was to take place from 1412 to 1415.

Baptism bought time for those who chose it. But the cruel century separating the great terror of 1391 and the Edict of Expulsion posed a new crisis for the Jews at every tum. Where they had been a people apart, the sin of the Jews was separation. Now it was their assimilation that agitated their enemies. The basic alliance at work against the Jews had been a coming together of the Church and the burgher class towns, men. Most of the clerical establishment had accepted the conversion of the majority of Spain's Jewry as the final word on the matter. But the burgher class had felt cheated by the willingness of the Jews to come into the fold. The enemy was now within.

The Grand Inquisitor doing his work in the 1480s would claim that he was hunting down crypto-jews among the Conversos. We know bet, ter now, thanks to the massive research of the Israeli historian Benzion

Netanyahu. (Benjamin, a son of this historian, would become Prime Minister of Israel.) His huge book, published in 1995, The Origins of the Inquisition turns that great story inside out. In the drama laid out for us by Netanyahu, conversion to Christianity had worked. It had depleted the Jewish world and increased the self-confidence of the Conversos. They were no longer a minority who had gone astray; they now outnumbered the Jews of the realm. Moreover, forced conversions had given way to voluntary ones: "The attachment to Judaism was weakening: the trend toward Christianity was intensified. The migration from Spain, which at first was not inconsiderable, was, after a few years, reduced to insignificant proportions," Netanyahu writes. Here and there the Grand Inquisitor may have found a Converso who did not eat pork or who ate meat during Lent, who observed the Sabbath, but the trend toward assimilation was unmistakable. And the Jews soon wrote off the Converses: they were lost to Judaism, "Christianized beyond recovery." Conversos now flocked into professions from which they had been excluded-the law, the army, the universities, the clerical establishment. By 1480, half the important offices in the court of Aragon were occupied by Conversos or their children. Spanish life now yielded a new breed: the Conversos bent on undoing the world of their erstwhile faith and kinsmen. The case of Solomon Halevi, once a chief rabbi of the city of Burgos who was christened Don Pablo de Santa Maria and rose to the rank of bishop of his city, and the more celebrated case of the Talmudist Joshua Halorqi, who became one of the great, merciless defenders of his new faith, illuminate this terrible force at work.

Halevi had gone over to Christianity during the great terror of 1391. His learning and talent and ambition took him to the heights of power in his new faith: he served as an advisor and a tutor to two Castilian monarchs: he was papal nuncio of Benedict XIII in the court of Castile. In his new incarnation, as Don Pablo de Santa Maria, this Converso was seized with a deadly animus toward the Jews. Writing in his old age, in 1434, in a document entitled Scrutinium Scripturarum, he described the Jews as people of "diabolical persuasion who had risen to high stations in the royal palaces and the palaces of the grandees," a people who posed a deadly menace to the souls of the Christians. He went as far as praising the massacres of 1391 as deeds stirred up by God. "The rabbibishop," the Spanish historian Americo Castro has observed, "was conjuring up, as he wrote, the ghosts of his own life-shouting down the voice of his own conscience."

The Talmudist Joshua Halorqi, christened as Jeronimo de Santa Fe,

was to serve as the Church's principal spokesman in a disputation convened by Benedict XIII in the city of Tortosa in 1413 between the Church and the Rabbinic establishment. The former Talmudist was un� relenting in his attitude toward the Jews. He, too, at the end of his career published a notoriously anti-Jewish work, Hebraeomastix (the Scourge of the Hebrews). A wicked sentiment had been unleashed: the politics of purity. A reign of terror, of informers preying on others in the hope that they themselves would be spared, had descended on the Jews and the Conversos alike. The Jews had been quick to understand the enmity of the Conversos: They were to dispense with the cherished notion that the Conversos were anusim (forced converts) who were destined to return to the faith.

The eagerness of the Conversos to belong to the new faith and to assimilate would bring them no relief. Their success backfired. Since the Conversos had been beneficiaries of monarchic power, they were caught in the unending struggle between the rulers and the cities of the realm attempting to defend their prerogatives and their autonomy. The leaders of the cities, Netanyahu writes of them, had gotten rid of the Jews in high office only to see their descendants "in the very offices from which the Jews had been ousted, and in many others which they had never held. To the patricians of the cities it appeared as if history had played a cruel joke upon them."

Kings could pledge and provide protection when their power and interests dictated and made possible such protection, the well-intentioned authorities of the Church could welcome the new converts, but the patricians of the cities and the urban mob, the little people (populo menudo) would not be reconciled to the gains made by the Conversos. There was no way that this animus could be appeased. It drew on the old stereotypes of the Jew; worked them over to serve new socioeconomic and psychological resentments and extended them to the Conversos. Where the Church had blessed the intermarriage of old and new Christians, the enemies of the Conversos saw this phenomenon as an evil sure to contaminate Spain and bring about its ruin. The racist agitators who grew increasingly shrill in the decades that led up to the Inquisition convinced broad segments of the population that the Conversos had worked their guile and their evil ways on nobility and court alike. If the Jews had slipped through the gates as converts, they had to be banished and destroyed. The line had to be redrawn.

This great new force of hatred for the Conversos was fully understood by the Catholic sovereigns when they set up the Holy Office of

the Inquisition in 1481. It is said that Ferdinand of Aragon, the cold and unsentimental ruler who drove and manipulated the Inquisition, was the model on whom Machiavelli fashioned his own ideal prince. Ferdinand was crafty and shrewd and unwavering. For him, the Inquisition was an instrument of royal power: The wealth of the condemned would be his, and there would be renown and moral credit thrown into the bargain. The persecution of the Conversos was one sure way the commoners of the realm would be won over, convinced that they and their rulers were engaged in a common enterprise. Hitherto, sheltered by royal power, the Conversos would now become its helpless victims. The Conversos and those who remained true to the Jewish faith may have taken two separate paths. In one swift, terrible decade, they would be brought together: The Inquisition in 1481 against the Conversos, the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews in 1492. The campaign to root out heresy among the Jewish converts led to the banishment of an entire people.

Don Isaac Abravanel was shrewd and wise enough to know that the animus and the spirit that seized the Iberian Peninsula would know no rest. He didn't think that those who opted for conversion could ever convince the old Christians that they were of them. In one of his cornmentaries on the Conversos, he wrote: "The indigenous people of the land will always call them 'Jews,' and they shall be designated 'Israel' against their will, and they would be accused of Judaizing secretly, and they will be burnt at the stake."

Spain had prevailed: She had cast out her Jews and subdued the Muslims. But she would remain brittle and insecure. The fear (partly real, partly a phantom called up by the state's functionaries and the diehards among the clergy) persisted of a Muslim invasion from North Africa or from Turkey. Those generous terms offered the Muslims during Granada's capitulations ran counter to the spirit of the age. The first Archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, a man of great civility and tolerance, did his best to preserve the dignity of the Moors, to reconcile them to the new order; he refrained from a policy of forced conversion to Christianity. But Talavera was overruled and pushed aside by Francisco de Ximenez de Cisneros, the Archbishop ofToledo, who came to Granada in 1499 bent on eradicating Islam from the newly conquered realm. The harshness of Cisneros's policy triggered a rebellion in Alpujarras, the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, in 1499. The rebellion was put down, and the Moors were given the choice that had been offered the Jews back in 1492: conversion or exile. The Granadans had converted

en masse, and the new policy of forced conversion was extended throughout Castile.

The Moriscos, the new Christians, as they came to be called, clung to their labor and to their agricultural work and their crafts in the aftermath of their conversion. "They were diligent in the cultivation of gardens," one Spanish chronicler, Friar Alonso Fernandez, said of them. "They all paid their taxes and assessments willingly, and were moderate in their food and dress." They were a humble lot, he added, and lived apart from the society of Old Christians, "preferring that their own life not be the object of gazing." The silk industry in Granada provided them with a decent living. In Valencia where they formed a tight community, they were perhaps the mainstay of the economy and of the feudal estates of the Christian landowners. The latter had a vested interest in protecting the Moriscos, in keeping religious and racial zeal in check. But there would be no easy way of staying the furies. The Holy Office of the Inquisition was anxious to do its work, to root out heresy from the land. And the rank and file among the Old Christians resented the Moriscos for "spending too little, working too hard, breeding too fast." The Moriscos had submitted but had retained their customs and their attire and their ancestral language. The Christianization had been skindeep. It was an uneasy kind of coexistence, with the "New Christians" keeping to themselves. No Christian victory, though, could take from the Moriscos the memory ofwhat had been theirs-the splendor and the power. Victor and vanquished knew that old history, were caught in its grip. Andalusian communities in the cities of North Africa dreamt of the restoration of their world. Spain was never sure that its Moorish nemesis had been slain once and for all.

The peace between Spain and its Morisco communities broke down between 1566 and 1567. The balance had ruptured at a time of great difficulty for Spain. The Turks were on the move in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa; Protestant rebellions and agitations had hit the Netherlands and Flanders. Fear gripped Spain of a double encirclement: the Muslims from the South, the Protestants from the North. Keen to demonstrate its zeal in defending the faith, the court issued an edict prohibiting the use of Arabic, banning Moorish attire and forcing Morisco women to unveil in public. At a ceremony in Granada, all artificial baths, those symbols of Moorish culture and "decadence," were destroyed. The bullying came during a troubled time for the silk industry. The result was a great rebellion, again in Alpujarras, in 1568. The rising was put down with great difficulty.

Troops had to be brought home from campaigns in Italy and Flanders in order to subdue the rebellion. For one fleeting moment, it seemed, the phantom that had stalked Spain since its victory over Granada came to life. "Don't you know that we are in Spain, and that we have owned this land for 900 years?" said the rebel Morisco leader Don Fernando de Valor (Ibn Humeja) as he summoned his followers. "We are no band of thieves, but a kingdom; nor is Spain less abandoned to vices than was Rome." The rebels had given it all but could not win. Spain would take no chances in the aftermath of this second uprising. The Moriscos were to be dispersed throughout the Kingdom. The Moriscos of Granada were to be "thinned out," and thousands were dispatched to Castile to fend for themselves in hostile, new surroundings. The Turks were to be denied a "fifth column" in so vital and so exposed a location in the Peninsula.

The experiment in assimilation had proven a failure. In 1590, the Cardinal of Toledo described the Moriscos as "true Mohammedans like those of Algiers." Spain was done with assimilation. She had won renown in the Christian world by her expulsion of the Jews, Braudel tells us. There was no price to be paid for her cruelty to the Moors. The fate of the Conversos was a preview of what would befall the Moriscos. In the years between 1609 and 1614 radical new legislation during the reign of Philip III would sweep the Moriscos, a community of some 300,000 people, out of the country. They were herded to the frontiers and shipped to North Africa.

No welcome mat was rolled out for the Moriscos in the cities of North Africa. Ahmad Ibn Mohammed al-Maqqari (d. 1632), a North African historian who wrote an exhaustive and poignant history of Islam in Spain, described the cruel fate which awaited the evicted on the other shore: "Many thousands of the unfortunate emigrants went to Fez, thousands to Telemsan, from Oran; the greater part took to the road to Tunis. Few, however, reached the place of their destination for they were assailed on the road and they were plundered and ill treated, especially on the road to Fez and Telemsan. Those who directed their course to Tunis were more fortunate; they, for the most part, reached that place in safety, and peopled the desert towns and districts of the country. God, indeed, is the master of all lands and dominions, and gives them to whomsoever He pleases."

Spain now wanted to be done with everything Moorish: customs, architecture, and attire, and public baths. All these were banned, along with Arabic, the language of the "proscribed race." J. H. Eliott illumi-

nates in authoritative detail the context that nurtured this radical new spirit. Spain was a deeply troubled country by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The court needed a sideshow and a scapegoat, and the expulsion of the Moriscos provided it. The Spanish war against the forces of international Protestantism, the Dutch and the English, had ended in stalemate and frustration. The defeat of the Armada had been a blow to the nation's sense of itself. The Castilian economy, hitherto heated by the influx of gold and silver bullion from the New World, had run aground. The hidalgos were restless and embittered. The windfall society and its inflationary spiral had unsettled Castile; its confidence had cracked. Empire had been heady and extravagant and costly but its benefits were not easy to see. The world of the merchant families and beneficiaries of the Atlantic trade had grown larger with the new wealth: appetites had been whetted among the merchants for the ways and lifestyle of the nobility. Then that world had closed up again. It was these second thoughts about empire and the new wealth from the Indies, which Cervantes had immortalized in Don Quixote, the great literary work of this period of Castilian history. "Is it not better to stay peacefully at home instead of roaming the world in search of better bread than is made ofwheat, not to mention that many who go for wool come home shorn?" Don Quixote's exasperated niece asked her uncle, the knight-errant and fantasist. A pastoral society had wandered far and now felt betrayed. Castile had come out of a cruel past, and after so much striving felt itself short-changed and trapped: "Happy times and fortunate ages," said Don Quixote as he sat amidst a group of goatherds, "were those that our ancestors called golden, not because gold (so prized in this our Iron Age) was gotten in that era without any labors, but because those who lived in it knew not those two words thine and mine. In that holy age all things were in common " Spain had begun to wail for itself. There was a sense that divine providence had been withdrawn. The assault on the Moriscos was good royal theatre, and perhaps a bow to the heavens and to the True Church, a hope that the favor of divine providence would return.

Banished and cast out, the Morisco would now become a benign ghost: Cervantes gives the Morisco, once Hispanic through and through, a fleeting and furtive return to his old land. Ricote, an old Morisco, turns up in his ancestral land amidst a band of German travelers. This Ricote, speaking pure Castilian, is a man who had found within himself some acceptance of the great banishment: It was not safe, he is made to say, "for Spain to nurse the serpent in its bosom. In exile he still retained the

memory of home: Wherever in the world we are, we weep for Spain, for after all, there we were born and it is our fatherland. Nowhere can we find the compassion that our misfortunes crave; in the Barbary and other parts of Africa, where we expected to be welcomed and cherished, it is there where they treat us with the greatest inhumanity. We did not know our happiness until we had lost it."

A tale of dubious authenticity has the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (ruled 1481-1512) wondering about Ferdinand and about the folly of his expulsion of the Jews: "Do they call this Ferdinand a wise Prince who impoverishes his kingdom and thereby enriches mine?" The tale aside, the lands of Islam provided safe havens for the Jews. The gates of many Muslim realms were opened before the Sephardim. They were a skilled people, and the new lands were eager to accommodate them. They brought with them new skills in the making of weaponry and gunpowder, in printing and medicine. They knew the languages of Europe. In the great struggle of the age between Islam and Christendom, the Jews found a reprieve. For the rulers of the Ottoman empire the Jews were ideal subjects. By the standards of Europe in the High Middle Ages, the world of Islam was, on the whole, a tolerant world. It was not an "inter-faith utopia" (to borrow the words of the distinguished historian of Islam Bernard Lewis). The life the Jews led was circumscribed. It was a life without illusions. There was a clear division of labor; political power, careers in the bureaucracy and the military were off limits. There was a body of discriminatory law: houses of worship could not be built higher than mosques; Jews and Christians were often required to wear distinctive garb. They could not bear arms or ride horses. They had to pay higher taxes than those paid by Muslims. And some Muslim realms were harder than others. Morocco stood out in the degradation it heaped upon the Jews. Here Islam was frontier Islam, embittered by wars against Portugal and Spain. The Jews were the only non-Muslim community in Morocco. The limits imposed upon them, enclosed ghettos, which functioned like the juderias of Aragon and Castile, recalled the degradations of Europe. The Jews of Morocco lived at the mercy of the elements; it was feast or famine. Merciful sultans alternated with cruel ones. What the Sultans gave, the preachers and the mob frequently took away. The protection the rulers offered in this wild and anarchic realm could never withstand what one historian described as the three miseries of Morocco: plague, famine, and civil war.

It was easier in other Muslim lands. The private domain Islamic rule

conceded the freedom from forced conversions must have been seemed particularly generous when compared to what prevailed in Medieval Europe. A Jew writing to his coreligionists in Europe described Turkey as a land where "every man may dwell at peace under his own vine and fig tree." The Jews were a people on the run. The tolerance in the new surroundings seemed wondrous. A Converso who made a new life in Turkey and returned to the faith spoke of Turkey in nearly messianic terms, described it as "a broad expansive sea which our Lord has opened with the rod ofhis mercy. Here the gates of liberty are wide open for you that you may fully practice your Judaism."

Jewish centers of learning and commerce sprouted throughout the Muslim world. Salonika, conquered by the Turks early in the 1400S was to become, for all practical purposes, a Jewish city. Jews became the city's overwhelming majority, dominated its public life until its loss to the Greeks in 1912. A substantial Jewish colony put down roots in Istanbul. The town of Safed, in Palestine, attracted Jewish textile makers and scholars, became a famous center of learning. Close by there was a protected niche for the Jews in the life of Egypt. Baghdad's Jewry was perhaps in a league by itself. It had its academies, a vigorous mercantile elite with far-flung commercial operations.

Then the world of the Jews of Islam closed up. It happened over a long period of time. The civilization of Islam itself went into eclipse; its Ottoman standard-bearers were overtaken by Europe in the seventeenth century. The Jews who had done well by a civilization in the midst of a surge were to suffer its demise. Increasingly the Christian European powers set the terms of the traffic with Islamic lands. For intermediaries these European powers preferred the local Christian communities-Greeks, Armenians, Christian Arabs. And these local Christians were sworn enemies of the Jews, bent on cutting them out of international commerce and diplomacy. The knowledge of foreign languages, of science and medicine that Jews had brought with them from Europe had receded and been rendered obsolete. European missions were busy at work shoring up the skills and the privileges of the Christians of the east. On the defensive, the Islamic order itself was growing increasingly xenophobic and intolerant. The submission to Europe had to be hidden under displays of chauvinism. The Jews of Islam headed into a long night. The center of the Jewish world had long shifted westward. Historian Bernard Lewis sums up the closing up of that Jewish world in the east in his book The Jews of Islam: "The growing segregation, the dwindling tolerance, the diminished

participation, the worsening poverty, both material and intellectual, of the Jewish communities under Muslim rule."

From this long slumber the Jews of the east were awakened by a movement fashioned by their kinsmen in the west: modem Zionism. It came calling on them, summoned them to a new undertaking. The Jews of Islam had been spared both the gift of modem European history (the enlightenment, the bourgeois age, the emancipation) and then the horrors visited on European Jewry. Zionism had been spun with European thread. But the Jews of the east took to it. To be sure, there were many who had wanted to sit out the fight between Arab and Jew in Palestine and to avert their gaze. Some of the leading figures of Egyptian Jewrythe Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum, the head of the community, a banker by the name ofJoseph Aslan de Cattaoui Pasha whose family had presided over the community since the mid-nineteenth century-were men devoted to "King and country" and had wanted nothing to do with Zionism. But the ground burned in Egypt. Fascist doctrines of nationalism and a new Islamic militancy were sweeping through the place. Palestine and the struggle between Arab and Jew were too close: The world of Egyptian Jewry couldn't withstand all of this.

It was now past living those circumscribed lives. Modem nationalismin its Arab and Jewish variants-blew away the world of the Arab Jews. The braver and younger souls among the Jews of Arab lands didn't care to live the quiet and worried lives of their elders. When the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 broke out, there were some eight hundred thousand Jews in the Arab world; some six percent of world Jewry. A decade or so later, harat al Yahud (the Jewish quarter) in Muslim cities belonged to memory. The large Jewish communities in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq were banished. There was a new and altered geography ofJewish life; the center ofgravity had shifted again, toward two poles: the New World and Israel.

Setting sail to the New World, Columbus had had little to say about that parallel "fleet of woe and misery" that carried the Jews out of Spain. He was careful to note, though, that he wanted the Jews excluded from the lands he would discover and claim for Spain. History outwitted him.

Chroniclers are forever writing the present into the past, working their will, and their needs, on it. Benzion Netanyahu wrote his big history of the Conversos as a cautionary tale against the follies of assimilation. Within the Zionist world, he belonged to the Revisionist current of Vladimir [abotinskv, You can see the conversos and their destruction as

a statement by Netanyahu on those within Israel who would think that there was a "normal" world for Israel beyond the siege that has marked its history. For my part, I have told my small (derivative) history against the background of the passing of the world ofArab Jewry, and ofthe rise, within Europe, of a militant Islamism. The world of the Arab Jews is familiar to me. I saw it in its twilight. There was a Jewish quarter in Beirut, Wadi Abu [mail, there were synagogues, and Jewish banks and schools. They were part of the city of my boyhood. Today the Jews are gone, Wadi Abu Jmail is a Hezbollah stronghold. The "return" of Islam to Europe is an altogether different matter. Madrid and London and Glasgow and Amsterdam have had their encounters with this new politicized religion. This is not Eurabia and never will be. A new history of Islam in Europe is in the making. The story of Iberian Islam twists and turns. It can be irony or precedent, it can be read as a tale of civilizations in conflict, or of neighbors who once knew the normalcy of quotidian life.

On March I I, 2004, there would befall Madrid a shattering event that overwhelmed all that had been said about Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. In the morning rush hour, ten bombs tore through four cornmuter trains, killing more than two hundred people, wounding some fifteen hundred, in the deadliest terror attack in Europe since the Second World War. The initial suspicion that this was a deed of Basque terrorists immediately gave way to the real verdict: this was the work of terrorists drawn from the ranks of al Qaeda. "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the Crusader, and American ally in its war against Islam," read a letter sent to a London-based Arabic daily. Islam had re� turned to Spain, brought forth by young men from Arab and North African lands-drifters, Jihadists on the run from their governments, desperate men driven by economic need. This was not an Islamic reconquista, though there were true believers given to such thoughts. It was the pressure of over-populated lands with a "youth bulge"-shades of Castile, in earlier centuries, pushing southward into the Muslim principalities of the Peninsula. Across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain, the despair was deep. In Algeria there were young people who were called the harragga, those who bum their documents-figuratively bury the past-to cross the straits into Spain, and European destinations beyond. A circle was closed: in the history given Arab and Muslim children, there is a place of honor for the commander Tariq bin Ziyad who led his Berber troops into the Peninsula in the year 7 I I. The history insists that he had burned his ships after he landed on the coast and exhorted his men that they had no choice but to fight, for they had the sea

to their back and the enemy in front of them. (Tariq would give his name to the place of his disembarkation, Jabal Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq or Gibraltar.) Those Straits, simultaneously dividing and beckon, ing people, had seen whole histories pass to and fro.

Notes

The departure of the Jews from Spain, and the role of Don Isaac Abravanel in the final futile pleas, are the subjects of large body of writings. Jacob Minkin, Abrabanel and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (New York: Behrman's Jewish Book House, 1938) is a storyteller's account. Benzion Netanyahu's Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1953) is a more formidable scholarly treatment. J.B. Trend's edited book, Isaac Abravanel: Six Lectures covers the scholarship and writings of Abravanel. Eliyahu Ashtor's three-volume, The Jews of Moslem Spain (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society ofAmerica, 1992) is are' liable account of that subject. Samuel Eliot Morison's The Great Explor, ers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) juxtaposes the two departures from Spain: that of Columbus and that of the Jews. It is from Ashtor's book that the discussion of the Jewish courtiers is drawn. Also helpful was Norman Stillman's The Jews in Arab Lands (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979). The life of Shmuel Ben Neghrela is the subject of Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Shmuel Hanagid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). The essayist Hillel Halkin takes up Shmuel's life in "First Post-Ancient Jew," Com, mentary, September, 1993. Peter Cole's magnificent new book, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950- I 492 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) provides by far the most authoritative treatment of the [udeo-Arabic literary tradition in the Iberian Peninsula that I have seen. Interestingly enough, the title and epigraph of the book come from the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. Cole, a [erusalern-based translator, and poet in his own right, opens his book with Darwish's words:

Andalus might be here or anywhere, a meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture It is not only that there was a Jewish-Muslim coexistence, but that the fates of the

two people were similar. Al Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem.

The age of the "Party Kings" of Muslim Spain is covered by L.P. Harvey, Islamic Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and by Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). The North African historian Ahmad al-Maqqari's traditional chronicle, Nafhu+Tib Nim Ghosni�L�Andalusi�R�Rattib, written in 1629, is available, abbreviated, in English under the title The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain. It was translated in 1840 by the Spanish scholar Pascual de Gayangos (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1964). The account of Alfonso VI's conquest of Toledo, and of the establishment there of a Bishopric is from Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain: 1469-17 I 6 (London: Penguin Books, 1990) provides both narrative and interpretation of Castilian history. Benzion Netanyahu's The Marranos ofSpain (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1966) is a revisionist account of the Jewish converts to Christianity. It is superseded by Netanyahu's more recent work, The Origins of the Inqui� sition (New York: Random House, 1995). The more conventional assessment that the Conversos or the Marranos were crypto-Jews is that of Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos (New York: Hermon Press, 1974). Netanyahu's is by far the more profound and the more disturbing exploration. On the Conversos at war with their old faith, and so much else of Spanish history, few if any books can rival that of the Spanish historian, Americo Castro's The Structure of Spanish History, published in 1948, by a liberal historian who was in exile from Franco's Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954). It is from Castro's superb work that the tales of Solomon Halevi and Joshua Halorqi are drawn. Don Isaac Abravanel's bleak prophesy about the difficulties of assimilation is from Jose Faur, In the Shadow ofHistory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). On the Moriscos and their diligence and their eagerness to stay out of the limelight, Americo Castro's The Structure of Spanish History is provocative, vivid and convincing. The resentment of the old Christians toward the Moriscos spending too little is from J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain. The Morisco leader's remarks in summoning his followers to rebellion is from Castro's The Structure of Spanish History. Two accounts on the Jews in Turkey, and the Muslim 37

domains stand out: Norman Stillman's The Jews of Arab Lands and Bernard Lewis's The Jews of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). The Jews of Morocco are the subject of Jane S. Gerber's very good scholarly book, Jewish Society in Fez: 1450-1700 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). Perhaps the best and most accessible single volume on the culture of medieval Spain is Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2002).

Lan Samantha Chang

The Other Country

For William Maxwell

There was once a woman who loved to travel. Or perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that she would not stop wandering. She had a comfortable house, a gentle husband, and two lovely children with golden eyes who needed her very much. As a girl she had survived great trouble, and now she was a doctor who listened to her patients, considering their problems. Her patients, young and old, needed her too.

But despite these blessings, there came a summer when she could not stay put. While walking to her clinic, she would meander from her usual path to visit the town green with its dandelions and young musicians. While driving to the mall, she would pull over and gaze at the line of trees against the view. At night, she lay awake; and every now and then, with her husband sound asleep, she would slip out of bed and put one foot in front of the other.

She was searching for something she had mislaid, or forgotten, without knowing what it was or when it had been lost. Without it, the shade of green in the trees seemed not so radiant as the summer before. The sun did not rise quite so early each morning, nor so beautifully. Nor was the twilight as mysterious or the stars as cold. Even the questions of her children had become predictable. She could not say exactly what was missing, but each time she wandered further.

One evening in late August, she left the house and followed a

narrow road, rough with potholes and large stones, which the town council had declared closed for construction. She ignored the workers' caution signs, rounded the pumpkin patch, and made her way past the drive,in theater. There she stepped off of the gravel and into the trees. In this place she was surrounded by a violet dusk. She picked out a faint path along a wild, rushing stream and followed it around a lake, through a wood, and across a fragrant field of clover, until she found herself deep in another country.

There, the passage of time had come to a pause. Everything was green, as if it were the height of spring, although the sun set early for that warm season. It was setting now, under low, rosy clouds, and the soft air quivered with bats and dragonflies. Varieties of evening primroses, growing in profusion, circled trees and laundry lines, their white blossoms snapping open. The houses were well tended and the people friendly, but she had no desire to stop and chat. Something in this place felt known to her; she sensed she had not yet reached what she had come to find. On her first visit she went as far as the blacksmith shop be, fore turning back toward home. On the following evening she stayed later, venturing past the village, and on the third evening still later, although she had to navigate her way back through the gloaming by the sound of the stream. On the fourth night, she kept walking until well past dusk. Half a mile beyond the town, through a dark screen made by a cluster of tall trees, she glimpsed a dim light high in a tower that led her to the castle where the young prince lived.

The prince of that country was very lonely. He stood in the doorway holding a white candle, watching her with large, somber eyes. She waited patiently for some time before he would speak.

"Why are you here?" he demanded at last.

"I feel at home here," she said, and sensed this to be true.

He scowled. "How did you find me in the dark?"

There was no way to explain that she had known he would be there.

"I am the source and cause of all the darkness here," he said. "It comes from my unhappiness; I can't fight it away. Every day I leave the castle, looking for a friend. But no one understands me, nobody will help me. In the village, they say I am a monster."

She examined him with her compassionate doctor's gaze. Beneath his turbulence he was lovely and afraid. "You are not a monster," she said. "You are only young."

"If that is true," he said, "then I don't want to be young."

"Oh yes, you do," she pointed out. "You'll understand in time."

"How would you know?"

She told him the truth, but he found it impossible to believe that she was nearly four decades old. When she tried to convince him she discovered that the reference points of her world held no meaning for him; and rather than waste their time together on logistics, they might as well discuss the fiery planets, and the stars, and the reasons we are alive, and the dream she'd had when she was a girl and knew that she would someday die.

They talked until the sky turned pale and it was time for her to go. The prince stretched out his arms to her. "Please come to me again," he said. "The nights are very bad here."

She promised to return.

Sometimes one of the children had the flu and required ather, mometer at three A.M. Sometimes her husband held onto her in his sleep. But through the long autumn and winter of her own world, she managed to get away more often than not, and in time she grew to love the other country: its eternal, fragrant June, its evening primroses whose blossoms never withered. She began to love its prince, with his courage and his sorrow, he who seemed accursed not to grow old. She became his advisor and a balm to his heart. He became her secret sol, ace and her most cherished friend. They both knew he should seek companionship with those of his own land, but their hours together were too precious to deny. And at times during the day, sitting in traffic on the parkway or playing with her children in the fresh new snow, she would think about his country and know it was more real to her than her own.

The holidays drew near, and passed. The days in her world length, ened, but in his world the sun set earlier and earlier. Presently, although she left her bedroom each night as soon as she could, she found herself traveling only by instinct past the wild rushing stream, around the lake, and through the lightless meadow. She began to pack a flashlight for possible emergencies. One night, when she approached the castle, she could only dimly trace the outline of its tower against the stars. Fright, ened, she rushed ahead. She hurried through the open gate and switched on her flashlight, searching labyrinthine halls until she found him in the observatory, clutching a dusty telescope, lost in a dream.

He said, "Sometimes, when you're gone, I am more lonely than I ever was before I met you."

She too had felt this way, but she was older, used to deprivation. Since girlhood, she had kept a place made ready for despair, and she had

long ago begun to wonder if she might at some point fail to gain entry to his world, if the rocky, gullied construction site might be improbably completed, or bulldozed, or simply cease to be-. What would happen to him then? She suspected they were each being punished for wandering from their appropriate spheres. In her bleakest moments, she believed he was the one most being punished for her wandering. Now she began to speak, but slowly, because she had dreaded this night when she would have to name the only cure she knew.

"I know how to leave this place," she said. "I can bring you to my country. Where I live, you won't be prince. You can forget about your cares. It's a good enough world, despite the current administration, and you'll have the opportunity to grow up and take your chances along with everyone else."

"It sounds wonderful," he said, and smiled for the first time in many days.

"There's only one thing," she added. "I can't guarantee that you will remember anything at all."

"Not even you?"

"Especially not me."

"Then I refuse."

But in the following weeks, his thoughts grew heavier until one night she found him still in bed, plunged in the darkness. She had to shake him with both hands and say the saddest things she knew. But even his sadness held no strength. "I am unraveling," he said, and they both understood that it was time to go.

With his hunting knife, she carved his name into her palm. This was meant to reassure him that they would always be together.

Then he reached for her good hand and they began the journey out of the castle, past the town, through the clover meadow and into the woods. They traveled much more slowly than she had expected; and in the woods her flashlight failed. Sometimes she stumbled and his arm steadied her. Sometimes he grew despondent and she held him. But they talked as they had always done. Despite their weariness, they could not stop talking, for they both knew that they were storing up a thousand conversations. As they made their way around the lake, and she grew more and more silent, the prince's voice sounded with a desperate eloquence. "Sometimes I love the dark," he said. "Sometimes, when it's pure black, I can see shapes and shades of color no one else can know." She thought she heard the wild rushing sound of the creek. "There's a depth in darkness more truthful than that of ordinary happiness. I can

depend on it. It's there for me. It reaches out its arms to me, and someday I will go to it."

She did not speak, for they were coming to the breach. He took a quick breath, as if in pain, and his voice flickered out. But then his gaze turned up toward the flat, pale shapes that moved before them, and he took another breath with the excitement of a child. They stood on the edge of town before the drive-in movie screen. They heard the static of the speakers and smelled the buttered popcorn. Although she found these things familiar, it seemed to her that she could see, through her tears, the shining visage of a new world.

Somewhere near the shopping mall, she lost his hand. She had held onto it with care, but when the time came he slipped away easily. She kept walking, for she had known all along that this would happen.

She hastened home on tired feet and found things in an uproar. It turned out that she had been away for twenty-four hours. She told her husband she had gone for a walk and gotten lost. He was a reasonable man and accepted her back, although he didn't believe her.

She went to their room and climbed into bed, hiding her injured hand. The wounds there had grown infected and given her a fever. Although she was an excellent physician who could sometimes make a patient's pains vanish just by thinking, she had to take antibiotics and stay home for a week. Some vital source of strength had been diminished. It was some time before she felt herself again, and when she recovered, the scarred letters had folded into the lines of her palm, altering them so that it was impossible to tell what they had been.

Late one summer afternoon, she and her children were walking home from town when her daughter begged her to take the path across the green. This would lead them off their route, but the woman agreed to the change. Although she no longer found pleasure in strolling the green, she could remember when she had liked to do such things. It was the season of dandelions and the children ran ahead to gather them, exclaiming. Following them, the woman heard a voice she knew.

A young balladeer stood singing to a group of friends. He was not strong on the guitar, and his lyrics were not new, but his tenor was as clear and pure as wild water. Even the children noticed it. They seized their mother's elbows and pulled her along until she stood before him.

She saw a beautiful young man, brown from the sun. His feet were bare and his hands strong; his sweet eyes smiled without a trace of fear. When he had finished his song, he looked back into her face, and he saw

yet another woman who desired him. She seemed a kind person, no longer young; and he accepted her desire with grace, thanking her for listening. She smiled back although her heart was breaking. Then, because it was dinnertime, she urged her children to come along, home to their father. They followed readily enough, but not until they had heaped their wilting dandelions into the young man's guitar case.

Stuart Dybek

Bait

Despite the shadowy shaft of light, clouded even on the brightest days, visibility was good. You could peer fathoms down to a bottom where the contours of broken flowerpots and fogged bottles took shape amidst a cobble of trash. Spongy knobs of moss bordered the foundation, and in the comers you could see silty webs, but not their spiders. The screwdriver that had plunged four stories was visible, too, its luminescent vellow handle resting beside what appeared to be the rotted arm of a doll. My father who could fix most anything had been using it to pry my bedroom window higher so that the room would be less stuffy on the hot summer nights. The window opened on what we referred to as an airshaft, although the so-called air smelled like an updraft of must. Leaning out for better leverage in a way that made me worry he'd fall, my father lost the grip on the screwdriver when he'd banged his funny bone on the window frame.

"Da damn, sonny boy," he said, mournfully rubbing his elbow, "that was my favorite screwdriver."

Even then, when his pliers, hammers, and wrenches still fit in the tool bag he kept in the closet atop his accordion case, years before he would buy the brick six-flat on Washtenaw, and the capacity of the tool bag would be expanded by an unfinished basement that gradually filled with grinders, pipe-threaders, buzz saws that threatened amputation, a torch and welder's mask, guns-pneumatic nail guns, caulking guns, mortar guns, solder guns-grouters, routers, a Roto-Rooter that could reach to China, I knew how my father valued tools. I'd seen that

screwdriver do everything from dismantling engines to opening sardine cans whose tabs had popped off, and I couldn't help but feel it had been sacrificed so that I might breath easier.

The day after the screwdriver was lost, my father brought home from the factory a brown lunch bag embossed with greasy fingerprints from which he emptied onto my bed a chunk of metal that looked like what I imagined a meteorite might. Its surface was machined to a dull, gray� pitted luster, and its edges were rough as broken rock. It was heavy enough to make an impression on the bedspread.

My father worked on the reaper line at the Harvester factory. He'd been employed there since he'd been forced by the illness of his father to quit high school at seventeen. He'd recently been promoted to foreman. The factory was on Western Avenue, within walking distance from our house. When on weekdays at five A.M. church bells chimed and factory whistles blew, I imagined I could hear the Harvester whistle and knew that, unless he was working overtime, my father in his oily, steeltoed shoes would be taking the short-cut of Blue Island Avenue, a street that ran on an angle, on his way back home.

Once, when I was little, he'd taken me to the factory, proud to show me where he worked, and the racket of the production lines, the foundry-scorched air, and the weariness on the grimy faces of the men had frightened me and made me cry, shaming him. It was a story always told in tandem with how, on my first trip to the Riverview amusement park, when he took me into the House of Horrors, I began to scream, and he had to carry me upstream against the crowd and back out the entrance. He never failed to add that at least he got them to refund our tickets. I vaguely remembered both incidents and of the two, the clanging Harvester factory with its nostril-searing furnaces was the more terrifying. The metal chunk resting on my bed looked like it could have been spit out white hot from one of those furnaces.

"Feel this, sonny boy," he said.

I weighed it in cupped hands, almost expecting it to still be throwing heat. It felt dense.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Bait," he said.

We sat on the edge of the bed while, with many twists and intricate knots, my father tied the metal bait to the end of a ball of brown twine he'd bought for a kite we'd yet to fly-a kite we'd yet to make. My father told me that when he was a kid, he and his buddies fashioned homemade kites from newspaper and sticks they trimmed with jack-

knives. We were going to use the funnies page from the Sunday Trib for our kite so that it flew in color.

He stood up and gave our bait a few test bobs. Satisfied that it was tied securely, he raised my bedroom window to as far as he'd managed to pry it before he'd dropped the screwdriver. We both leaned over the sill while my father paid out line from the ball of twine. The line twisted and the heavy weight at its end spun on its way down. When it finally touched bottom, my father began to jig it.

"Got it!" he said and grinned. He reeled up slowly, hand over hand, winding the twine back onto the ball. I could see the screwdriver dan, gling by its tip.

"Reel her in, sonny boy," my father said, handing the line to me. "Don't let it bang on the side of the wall or we'll lose her."

He gripped my belt loops so I wouldn't plunge out the window. I leaned out over the airshaft and carefully wound the twine back over the ball I clutched with both hands. I could feel the pendulous weight of the bait and the screwdriver dangling at the end of our line. When there were only a few feet left to go, my father pulled me back in and reached down and hoisted up the screwdriver.

"Lucky you don't have any fillings yet cause this will yank them right out of your teeth," he said, handing me the chunk of metal. To prove his point, he dropped his key ring on the bed and when I dangled the magnet above it, I could see the keys leap up to attach themselves. I tugged against the powerful invisible force to free them, then took the magnet into the kitchen and started on the silverware.

In my twenties, I'd move to an island where I could fish every day; I'd buy a faded wooden boat from one of the local fishermen who jigged for kingfish with hand lines; I'd paint the boat candy apple red and an' chor where the reef dropped off into blue depths of such clarity that I could see the schools of yellowtail rising to my bait like iron filings to a magnet, and sometimes the silver flash of barracuda drawn to the hooked yellowtail. The magnetism of bait made me think of the airshaft on Eighteenth Street, and of my first fishing trip-with my father, as first fishing trips should be-a trip that would remain our most productive: that screwdriver was the only thing I'd ever see my father catch.

Reginald Gibbons

Island

At my afternoon appointment today, the well-known editor kindly gave me some worthless software. It was on top of a filing cabinet in an office at his journal, and I understood that no one was intending to use it. He offered it to me for my publishing venture. Only I don't have a computer, but I didn't tell him that. I am sure that I smiled, and I thanked him for it. Everyone whom I meet on this trip remains more at ease when I thank them. The editor showed me all the offices of his journal, explaining to me that everyone is very crowded and cramped in space that is too small, and that it is a difficult struggle for him to obtain the money that he needs every year for the publication of the journal, that his staff are wonderfully loyal and hardworking and underpaid. I also thanked him for the spare copies of his journal, which he gave to me, which I must now pack in my suitcase and carry to the next city I visit, where I will throw them away, along with the worthless software. I carry such gifts out of the city in which I receive them because, if I throw them away in my own hotel, I wonder if someone might discover that I do not keep them. I made a point of being respectful and attentive as I listened to the editor explaining to me many things, which of course either I already know or I find I cannot apply to my own situation. I have no staff and no money, to begin with. And there are other limitations and obstacles, as well, that I cannot change.

The editor took me to his club and we sat in a very large room almost alone, because it was an early hour for cocktails, and a waiter made the

long journey across the floor-his shoes clicking when he walked on the smooth stone, and silent when he crossed each rug {"oriental" rugs, too-very beautiful ones}. While the waiter was crossing the floor we didn't answer each other so quickly as we had before. It was uncomfortable, listening to his shoes.

Then the waiter nodded to us and returned to his station, tapping across the floor, then silent then tapping, then silent, and went away, out ofsight, to make our drinks. The editor told me how to raise money in America, which I did not need to know because no one in America would ever give money for my little publishing venture on my island; how many years he had been working and what sorts of things he had done, which I had not known; how many important writers and other persons with whom he is acquainted, which did not do me any good; how poor the American culture is in terms of its respect for the writer, the thinker, and how poorly educated its children are nowadays, thus promising even less respect for writers and thinkers in the future {which may well be true but when I com, pare it to the circumstances on my own island, I cannot worry too much about America}; and how the important thing about political and artistic culture is that people must have access to the full variety of human ideas and cultural expression, so that gradually, if at all, we will move toward greater tolerance among peoples-which I thought meant that he might be interested in looking at a few pieces of my work, if I would be kind enough to provide them for him, but he said he would like to see me pub, lish, on my island, a special number containing the work of a few of the most important writers whom he publishes in his journal; and how the goal now is to gain ground, however gradually, against the mass media and the politics of exclusion, which I am sure is a very honorable goal but it is one which lies beyond my own hope, since on my island our rate of literacy remains so low, and the tiny foreign export income goes mostly to arnmunition and used arms, even though our island is so small and so poor, and so much just a little too far from the mainland, that no one covets the space we islanders occupy, no one wishes to invade us, torment and kill a good number of persons in order to set the proper tone, and then rule with sol, diers and limousines. {Our roads are very poor, but fortunately none of them is very long.) So what are the arms and ammunition for? They are a kind of symbol. Which one should understand how to interpret.

I remember when I came of age and my father asked me to what I should like to dedicate my life. I was already very fortunate in that my school,

teacher Mr. Holly had given me such a solid ground of training in the English language, in the classics of English literature, in the basics of algebra and geometry, and in the history of the world. With these advantages, I carne to see that I could not accomplish anything of note. But I also realized that I could not remain content if I labored as my father had done. (Because I was young and inexperienced, I wrongly thought that I would be able to avoid what made me so uncomfortable with my father-his way of being when he was with the owners. In my father I saw a man who smiled too much and who promised compliance with everything asked.) Nor did I feel I could worship wholeheartedly as my father had done, for I no longer believed. Nor could I-having spoken for many hours, over several years, with Mr. Holly and having read some of the great works of literature and discussed them with two friends, Adam and Eve, Mr. Holly nicknamed them, for they were his first two students, a year older than I-treat my wife or wives as my father had treated my mother and my two "stepmothers," as they would be called in the English language. ("Step" in this sense derives from the Old En, glish word steop, which meant related by marriage rather than by blood relationship-what a supreme pleasure I had, till it was destroyed when a storm blew in our roof at horne, from the small Oxford dictionary that Mr. Holly gave to me when I finished my course of studies'). With Mr. Holly's help, I was able to receive a scholarship to leave the island for one year. My fears at first were tremendous, and also my feeling of being alone amidst great hordes of people. But once I had learnt the life of the cities on the mainland, I did not really wish to return, and I stayed away for seven years. (However, these were years when I remained sick with a longing for my island, as well, even though I knew I could not be happy at home, and there were a few times when I came very close to ending my own life because of how far I felt I was from there, not only geographically but also in time, far from the life to which I could not retum in any case, since it belonged to my past.)

It was not that I especially liked the cities-first, the city in which I con' tinued my studies, although I did not complete them, and then the city where I went in order to seek work (a larger city) and to leave behind the accusations against me-but that having lived such a life I found that I could not bear the thought of doing without many city things. (Which, if I were to be truthful, were not only pleasures but also aggravations, much ofthe time.) There was the difficulty, perhaps I should say the impossibility, of knowing others, truly-especially young women

and young men to whom I felt very attracted; I had not understood this, at home. There was the need for much more money (as small as these sums were, relative to the lives of those in the limousines); and the necessity to organize one's time during the day according to impersonal exigencies (the pleasure of an office, and the horror of it); the noise; the sometimes confusing possibilities-of everything; the dangers of the streets; the constant imminence of civil war

So, in my second city, after several sorts of employment, working with many different persons, with certifications of my qualifications and some rather worn letters of introduction (dog-eared and with brown creases from having been unfolded and folded again so many times and with stains of dirty hands), I came to the end of a period of permission as an alien rather than a citizen and I was forced to leave. Not as a refugee, of course, of which there were too many even to be counted. But expelled, nonetheless. To my island. Not because of old accusations, which had been forgotten, perhaps, but because of the rigidity of a particular law, which could be softened only with money, and I did not have money.

My island had not much changed, except that it was not the same. I tried working with my father, but I could not bear it, in my mind, in my, if I may say so, spirit, even if my body served me well enough. I acted in a foolish and even dangerous way with a young woman, and, I should add, in all honesty, with a young man. I had to settle into something. And so with a typewriter and the services of the printer in our town, I began to publish my little newspaper, and I found that it gave me some satisfaction as well as sorrow.

I found that if I did not say everything that I wished to say in my little newspaper or journal or whatever it is, and if I printed certain kinds of information that the owners of things wanted the people to know, then it was possible for me to solicit advertising from small owners for their shops and services, and other advertisements which were really only announcements of the continuing presence of the large owners, announcements of their ownership itself-of such things as the plantations, the hotel, the bank, the petrol stations, a few new stores with many new kinds of things. In this way I kept my little publication alive, writing all of it myself, but I would not be saying the truth if I said that I kept myself alive in a full sense. For I had to learn to think in such a way that after my own thoughts crossed my mind, in the way they had learned to

do, like birds in the air who can tum in any direction they wish, and alight anywhere, I had to change them into something more like sheep, and herd them where I required them to go, and make them do not their own bidding but mine, and my bidding was also bidden by others. I quite understand this; I see it very clearly. I have not been able to change it, but I have never had the illusory conviction that I could change it. Yet my island is the only place I have found for myself, after going abroad to look at, to look for, some other place. And so I am living in this way.

When the American man, an agent of his government-and about the same age as I-visited my island (but really I should say "our island," after all, for I do not wish to give the impression that I have an inflated view of myself), I was introduced to him by his escort, who had brought him from the mainland to see an example of a very underdeveloped place that might be a profitable focus for long-term foreign investment. (This suggestion or invitation was quite false, and perhaps the American man saw through it, for no one has heard anything more about such investment, and it is probable that the American man's escort from the mainland was proposing that he himself be an agent of some kind for this investment, so that he could take for himself most of the money.)

The escort, the American man, the owners of the three largest plantations, the owner of all our petrol stations, some other businessmen, and I, went to the only hotel that we have, and in the bar we sat around several tables that the waiters pushed together for us, and there was a great deal of talk.

I listened. Two waiters took orders for drinks. It was a very long time before they brought the drinks, however, and in the meantime everyone was trying to impress the American man. I did not speak, because truly I had nothing to offer this man. I had been asked to join this group-I understood this, and they knew that I understood it-in order to tell a lie simply with my presence, without my saying one word. The lie being that we had a "press." But when the two waiters finally came to bring all the drinks, on two worn trays (they had not been able to find enough ice), the island men near me, who do not like me, began to poke secret fun at me, which the American could not have understood, by suggesting that I pay for all the drinks. These are men who have adequate personal wealth. I suppose that they wished to embarrass me in front of the American man, so that if he did speak to me, he would not be inclined to believe me if I said anything that he found troubling. The bill for the

drinks was not a very large amount, but it was substantial, and I would need to work for several days to earn enough to pay it, and only by spending less in the meantime could I regain my loss. But I offered a toast to the American man and invited everyone to drink this round as my guests, and they all looked at me. And then, smiling in the same way they might have smiled if they had happened to see me step into some filth in the street, they lifted their glasses into the air and thanked me. I was aware that I too was smiling. So hard, in fact, that my face was almost aching with it.

I do not tell of this in order to convince anyone that I am a generous person. I am not. I have published my newspaper for almost four years, I have found that I cannot live by it, I cannot marry and provide for children, nor can I save money for a trip to the mainland, to the cities of my youth, where I discovered such great pleasure in the midst of lone' liness and apartness. But there are moments when the only choice one has, to preserve one's self, is to do precisely as others wish. I also was em, barrassed by my poverty. But, I have told myself, after all, I am not breaking my back in the fields every day and sleeping on a floor at night. I do not have to find pieces of tin to block new rat-holes in the walls of a hut. I do not drink to excess on Saturday nights and sleep on Sunday before returning to the fields on Monday. I do not stand idle in vacant lots and in the dank smoky social clubs. I do not wear the same dirty, oil, stained trousers and 'Tshirt to work in a garage every day.

It pleased me that the American man spoke with me for a few moments, before he left, asking me about my work. He wrote down my name and address (I had no business card until I ordered them to bring with me on this trip), and I gave him copies of my newspaper. I did not think I had told him anything of substance, but six months afterward, I received a letter inviting me to travel to the United States to meet with newspaper and journal editors.

When I reached the first city of my American journey, I was met at the airport by a beautiful young woman who drove me to my hotel. She talked to me all through our entire time together-she had a diplomatic badge and came into the customs area to help me with my luggage, but I had only my one suitcase, so we stood together in a special line, which was short, and she spoke to the customs official, and then took me to her car, which was waiting at the curb. The car had no insignia on the door,

yet {she told me} it was not her own car but an official car. She told me many things as she drove the car into the city-an enormous city, a real city. Not a vast settlement of huts and shacks on dirt roads, but an expanse ofhouses made ofwood and brick, on paved streets, and at the center, a tall irregular mass of skyscrapers. At my hotel, among the skyscrapers, she spoke to the clerks, and she accompanied me to my room. She said it was a very nice room, and then finally she left me alone, promising to pick me up the next morning to escort me to my first appointment. After the heavy door had closed behind her, I sat down in one of the soft chairs of the room and I could not help weeping. But I got over my disorientation and I think I have done well, since that day. My father and mother, and my two stepmothers, live in a house that is about the same size as my room in that first hotel. It is a relatively nice house.

I believe that I have a realistic view of myself. I do not expect to be rewarded for my work, although I see that if I were to give myself completely to the owners I could find a role for myself, which would bring me more money. And a certain status. But so far I continue to feel that I must only hope to get by. I do not think that my wife, if I am able to marry, will be especially beautiful or especially intelligent, or that her family will provide me with interesting conversation. It does not seem very likely that she will care about my thoughts on matters. I do not expect that my children, if I have any, will be able to obtain an education and make some small mark on the world. They may spend their lives on our island and suffer the appointed pain of such people as weordinary deprivations and humiliations, very near horizons and very small knowledge of the world.

The well-known editor eventually seemed to have exhausted his store of information and advice for me, and when he fell silent for a moment, I thanked him for his generosity with his time, his gifts, his counsel. He nodded to me, although the expression on his face was vacant, absorbed as he already was in some other thought. He has not had the training I have had in a constant attention to others, working at guessing their thoughts before they speak them; he has the luxury, I would say, of remaining within his own thoughts, of knowing someone is waiting on them. He looked at his watch and put down his empty glass, with which he had been toying as he spoke to me. I would have appreciated another glass of American whiskey. He said that he had to go upstairs for a dinner, now, with a visiting political analyst whose essays he published.

And that he hoped I was enjoying my visit to the United States. He stood up, and so I also stood. We shook hands and he left, crossing that wide floor. I was wearing my blue blazer and my woolen trousers, which have turned out to be quite wrong for this climate. Both my white shirts need another washing. Perhaps he noticed my clothes. I have bought a pair of blue jeans and beautiful basketball shoes, but of course I cannot wear them to my appointments. I had a plastic bag, which the editor had given to me, now rather heavy with the useless software and the copies of his journal, which is thick and handsomely printed, with very artistic covers. I do not think it is bad that he publishes it, or that the beliefs he holds cannot really account for my island. The realities of it. I sense that basically he is a good person. I lingered a while in the club, looking at his journal, until the waiter came all the way across the broad room and asked me if there was anything more I wanted, which I understood meant that I was not welcome to want anything more.

Jana Harris

The

Brides of Christ Consider the Hunger of One Hundred Children, the Forty Sick, and Many Old Men Who Linger without Relative or Memory

Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart* to Sister Mary of the Precious Blood, Mission of the Sisters of Providence, Fort Vancouver, Washington Territory 1864

Sister, we cannot dwell on the drudgery of these begging tours, our grim need for money and our desperate straits.

To you, of the Precious Blood, God gave the face of a dogwood flower, one that pries handouts from the tight-fisted without ever a "no" lodged in the heart.

Et pour moi, God had another plan: men hear in me the abrasive bugle of a water buffalo while from your lips, Sister Mary Precious, the words of this impossible Anglias pour like mead.

"Ester Pariseau, b. 1823 Isle de Jesus, Quebec

Nearly ten years here and the language still confounds me, as do the Americans and their mysterious paper money. Our convent abacus screams debit, debt, credit denied, along with one other important truth: Now is the time to acquire land, to celebrate our belief in mortar and stone, to build and build impressively because what we erect upholds the Glory of God. Sister, with your seraph's face framed in crisp bandeaux and veil of one who is fully professed, go to the Garrison Commander, beg for the lumber from his tom-down fort. Tonight I will point out the timbers I covet, the best oak beam and ironwood lintel.

If I went to the Colonel, my jaw would trip over his indecipherable verbs. I swear on my carriage-maker father's grave I can read every timber from ash to zebrawood, I have heard every confession a saw can exact. Trust me, my Sister, I know which beam black-hearted or faithful; unmistakable the scent of seasoned close-knit oak. A tree, Sister Mary, is like a good Christian, the toughest birch tempered by storm, bent by wind, supple enough to endure; no sapling sheltered from winter's pain will make good wood.

Think of it: a foundling home, a hospitala celestial chariot for each of us. Sister, I place my father's toolbox before you, so that you may venerate the haft of this pale brown elmwood axe.

I was weaned on species of wood and the blood of tools. Even in sleep I know how to grasp the hickory handle of a hammer to best advantage. I love the power it brings me almost as much as I love God. See, I keep it close hooked here on my belt. With this, and a saw, chisel, draw-knife, square, let us build a Holy House; let us feel the sudden expansive joy of our vocation swirl in our hearts till we can scarcely breathe for the happiness in us. Does it matter whose army governs this land or that our store of English is small and pitiful?

We have come here to lay up treasure for our True Homeland. Imagine it: hearths for fires, walls for crucifixes, the chapel bell tolling its six slow knells as the wind of our chariot fans the flames of altar candles enkindling evergreens. Neither God nor words can fail us, my sister, for the language of suffering needs no interpreter. Follow me now while I taste the blazing incense cedar and resinous pine; together our eyes will close, our souls depart, and our Bridegroom cometh.

The Matter of the Raspberries

Mother Veronica of the Crucifix*Petitions the Bishop of Montreal, St. Mary's Academy, Portland, Oregon, 1865

Oh, the oppressive green of trees so dark as to appear black, the wrong river, wrong mountains tethered to a ceiling of unremitting rain. When I sailed down the St. Lawrence shadowed by the Laurentians, crossed Panama, boarded a coastal steamer northward landing in the Lord's furthest untilled field, I felt shut inside a closet. But Sadness, it is said, is the eighth capital sin, and so I looked for diamond spangles in the Willamette, roses in a Cascade sunrise.

I learned long before I was missioned west that our Customs Book does not cover every detail of every incident; what is right is what puts the heart to rest. Yet what solution to apply to all these none-tao-clean children of the forest and other nameless waifs thrown at night across the convent fence?

*Hedwidge Onesirne Davignon, b. 1820 St Mathias, Quebec

Long ago, as a newly promised novice, I was sent with another sister to study teaching methods: We sang hymns appropriate to the day, memorized lives of the Saints, facts from the Bible, scribing in perfect penmanship, edifying examples drawn from Scripture. We resided at Maison de la Providence and, to avoid distraction, traveled in a closed carriage. En route, we intoned the Little Office of the Virgin. For fortification we cleaved to our Novice Master's rules: to speak in low voices, to receive no visitors, to always be together and to love to admonish one another. Never to speak on the street. And never to forget: although our fathers were of pure French origin, we were subjects to the enemy in our own country.

Some problematic moments occurred: On the avenue, the Cathedral's Canon stopped to chat, we lowered our eyes, but was it wrong to ignore a man who would be Bishop? We had obeyed The Rule so our hearts were peaceful. Then there was the matter of the raspberries: As we walked with Mother General in the convent garden, she offered handfuls. Our rules forbade eating outside the refectory. Unobtrusively we carried these morsels to our cell where they beckoned. Though hungry, we denied ourselves each red sweet; opened the window, casting the raspberries over the sill. Dilemma, solution. None of us doubted our road to perfection.

And now-days spent teaching, nights scrubbing floors, re-patching Holy Habitsit is not unusual during morning inspections or going to open the academy gate, to find tiny, wailing bundles.

Brought inside, given ministrations of warm water and soap, then baptized. Named for a saint, surnamed for their origin: Mary Brigit East appeared on the Vigil of the Epiphany. Clement LePort, found under the porch. Last night's Visitation, Margaret Redeemed, thrown with such force her face bruised and bloodied. Flickering only for a few hours, some of them, Our Savior culls these flowers who have opened beneath his smile. Today our little-girl-of-the-Epiphany transplanted to the heavenly garden.

Monsignor: salvaging and preparing for the grave so many cast off fruitdid I not offer myself freely for these tasks? I lay their ransomed souls before you and recommend them to your prayers. But how, each time, to put my troubled heart to rest?

Feeding My New Son with an Eyedropper, I Remember Coming to This Country with My Parents, One Trunk, and Seven Words of English

Pauline Krueger, Open Range Country, Idaho-Wyoming

1889

Until he moved, I knew nothing about him and almost the next week it seemed he wanted to be born. Alone, too soon, what could I do but wrap him in cotton battingeven in America, one does not name a child marked for death.

Bottle and nipple clumsy contraptions, too big for his mouth, I had to draw back his lip, spoon in nature's nourishment. His shoulders nonexistent, legs shriveled-how did I manage to mark him so?

Still all newborns bring their own welcome-he looks as alien as I did when first I came to this country: my funny name (Papa immediately dropped its harsher vowels), my funny dress, shoes clumsy as cod boxes. My hair braided wet, brushed until it stood out like a broom.

New York City.

The first American word I learned was hurry, the second, fifth floor walkup. That troublesome th, putting tongue against teeth made a sound of geese hissing, recalled the Von's white flock. In the old country we owned only the goose's feathers and eggs, never the bird or its golden liver. My brothers couldn't dream of owning the horses they curried. We carried our clodhopper shoes to church, so that our heels wouldn't wear. The boys went to school, receiving primers; I stayed home, reading the Von's old newspaper.

Every store in Manhattan owned by royalty-greenhorn, what did it mean? Mama-wanting me to fit in-bought me (I'd never before seen paper money) a green silk blouse. Trading my fishbox shoes for narrow pointy-toed boots, piling my hair on my head modishly, I went to market with my coins, my new name, new blouse, and my seven words of English which no one could understand; so pointed at one of a bewildering array of vegetables. I had no word for yellow cucumber and until that day had never known the word for banana, the fruit I bought.

Sweetened potato water, bread soaked in milk, nothing agrees with baby. Not that we have food to spare, but isn't there always room for one more? Soon I wondered how I managed to get along without him. Husband still away, it grieves me to pray alone, but God never blows the wind harder than you can bear. Busy hands make a busy mind, I whittle a thread spool into a top, three spools make a teething ring, baking powder tin half full of buttons, baby's rattle;

But he shows no interest in toys and looks a thousand years old. Squirming out of his clothes, too tiny to be dressed, he sleeps hours on end, never cries, will not nurse. When the clock tells me uncover and feed, I expect to find him dead.

Sleep with him, keep him in the bread warmer, finally tiny limbs begin to fill in. When at last I let myself think he'll live, I worry: Dear Lord, if there is any fault let it be in body, not in brain. So much hoped for and all we have this year is a crippled baby

With a sunny disposition, and even before he tries to walk can mimic on the mouth harp what he hears a fiddler play. Now his rattle makes a soul-satisfying sound and he chews anything he can get a hold of, sprouting teeth at an alarming rate.

At noon, at midnight, together with the clock's hands pointed upward in a prayerful position, I entreat in German so as not to tax God with my terrible English: Bitte*, give me strength to be the one tenderness between baby and this wilderness.

*please

(Reprinted from We Never Speak of It, Idaho-Wyoming Poems 1881}-90 (Ontario Review Press, Princeton, 2003)

Brother Churchianity's Garden

Matilda Sager Delaney, b. 1839

As a child I was taught: forgive, but nowhere does the Bible say I have to forget the wholesome truth.

After my parents died of mountain fever, after my brothers and my guardians were murdered, after Peter Skene Ogden bought us from the Indians, I was taken to Forest Grove into the one-room lean-to home of an intensely religious preacher.

If the fireplace coals died overnight, I walked barefoot and bare legged to the neighbors for a shovelful. An eight-year-old child cannot forget Brother Churchianity's wife pacing the floor with a toothache cured by knockout with a steel punch used for mending harness leather.

As he saddled up, my new guardian instructed: cut a switch thick as my thumb. I found a good one, for his horse, I thought, poor beast. I'd need correction while he was gone, he said, flogging my backside, then promised to beat me again when he got back. For years I wore the violets and stems of bruises and welts. Whipped so often it grew on me like Oregon rain: cold and inevitable, to be borne without complaint. My body a garden harrowed by coach whip, quirt, cane, belt, bridle strap. To this day I cannot look upon a deeply red, red rose.

Brother Churchainity left no feed for his sheep which froze or were eaten by wolves. My job to pull wool from lamb carcasses, washing away feces and grease in the icy creek. His wife carded and spun, knitting socks sold to miners else we'd have starved.

When Reverend returned, he told me to fetch my bonnet, catch his horse, climb up behind. We rode all day to a crowd assembled beneath a hardwood maple. My guardian said he wanted to impress upon me what happens when a child does not mind her elders. The sheriff brought out a man and hanged him. I still had nightmares about the death of my brothers by hatchet blade. For months I woke up frozen in sweat, dreaming of the executed: eyes popped, protruding tongue, the way he twitched.

I was beaten for going to a theatrical at the Congregational church where I met Lewis Hazlett twice my age; I was whipped for befriending Mary Allen a girl born out of wedlock. Finally the neighbors complained. I testified in court. Brother Churchianty pleaded with the hanging Judge: If I was bound out to him, he could fully control me. They argued. I mounted my own defense

And married Lewis Hazlett on his way to the gold fields. I won't say we had a good life, but we had five children. When Mr. Hazlett died, I had to take in wash. Today, I've outlived three husbands. No man ever worked me as hard as that clergyman. When people tell me I'm vindictive, I want to ask: of the flowers in your garden, how deeply red the rose? When you consider lilies-of-the-field, do you see the white unblemished backsides of children? Do you ever notice how willingly the necks of spring flora bend beneath the battering of an April rain?

Jeffrey Herbst Understanding Zimbabwe: The Conflicting Logics

of Race and Governance'

Zimbabwe has destroyed herself. A once-prosperous nation that was considered a breadbasket of Africa and that had arguably the best prospects on the continent now has an inflation rate of approximately 4,000 percent and is the recipient of food aid. Zimbabwe is in this state because it chose to destroy the agricultural sector of the country by taking the land of white farmers. However, few predicted that Zimbabwe would experience such ruin. Indeed, commentators, including myself, 1 writing after Zimbabwe received independence in I980, generally believed that the country had a bright future, especially as President Robert Mugabe seemed to be committed to racial reconciliation because he understood that this was the best way for the country to develop. Indeed, in those days, the greatest threat to Zimbabwe's future seemed to come from apartheid South Africa. It is a particularly bitter irony that Zimbabwe began its decline soon after Nelson Mandela came to power after the first non-racial elections in I994.

Zimbabwe destroyed herself because Robert Mugabe viewed it as the fundamental task of the revolution he led to seize the property of the 4,000 white farmers who controlled about half of the country's

"This paper was completed in fall 2007 with only some editing possible in July 2008, after Robert Mugabe had "won" the second round of an election that his opponent had decided not to compete in due to campaign violence and intimidation.

arable land. In fact, as has now become so clearly evident, he never be' lieved in the racial reconciliation that so many of us had thought would take hold in Zimbabwe. Nor was he willing, as we had supposed, to overlook the grievances that had motivated the national liberation struggle in Zimbabwe in exchange for relatively high growth rates and an eventually prosperous nation: the logic of governance. Mugabe and his compatriots would rather seize the land of the "others" who they viewed as foreigners, irrespective of their citizenship, even if it meant destroying the country in the attempt: the logic of race. Therefore, the first question this essay seeks to answer is why observers including my, self could not understand the continuing salience of race in post' independence Zimbabwe and why we were willing to posit aspirations of economic development and even democracy to a leader who saw elimination of the small white population as his fundamental goal even if he made his fellow Africans much poorer in the process.

The second question this essay will address is why African leadersnow supposedly committed to governance and democracy-have stood by and done so little while Zimbabwe implodes. Indeed, many of the claims for the greater legitimacy of the newly formed African Union (the suecessor continental organization to the Organization of African Unity) center around African assertions that the old days of non'interference in the face of the antics of dictators are gone and that the continent will en, force good governance through the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Zimbabwe makes a mockery of those claims. Indeed, the recent accession of Zimbabwe to the chair of the United Nations' Commission on Sustainable Development-a particularly bizarre event given Harare's achievement of failed state status-shows that Africa and the rest of the developing world (who triumphed over the US and Europe in getting Zimbabwe elected) are not particularly bothered by the descent of twelve million people into destitution. Or, put more bluntly, why is it that racial solidarity still trumps human rights, much less good governance, in international society?

The final, and most difficult, question that this essay raises is how has Mugabe been able to lead the country to disaster? Zimbabwe has without doubt suffered the greatest economic decline of any country in the world over the last ten years. There are still countries (albeit a diminishing number) that are poorer but none have lost as much as Zimbabwe. The life chances of almost all Zimbabweans have been severely diminished. Their hopes for their children's future-seemingly so bright in 1980 after finally gaining independence from the Rhodesians-are

extraordinarily depressed. Perhaps two million of the country's twelve million people reside illegally in South Africa where they daily risk the wrath of an increasingly xenophobic population, crime, and great hardship to scratch out an extremely meager existence.

The essay concludes by examining the lessons of Zimbabwe for South Africa. When Zimbabwe was being hailed as a success in the 1980s, there was a conscious effort to compare it to South Africa, in part to try to convince the white government in Pretoria that there was a future for whites without minority rule. Now that Zimbabwe has collapsed and its economy has been destroyed, it is still relevant to ask what Zimbabwe's present suggests for South Africa's future, although this question has become less popular since the news from Harare turned sour.

From Miracle to Disaster

It may be hard now to recreate the sense of optimism that greeted Robert Mugabe's election as Zimbabwe's first independence leader in 1980. The world had never known quite what to do about Zimbabwe. The territory now known as Zimbabwe became Southern Rhodesia when Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company (BSAC) conquered it in the late-nineteenth century, looking for mineral wealth similar to what had recently been found in South Africa's Witswatersrand. They failed but a white agrarian class that soon came to dominate the country's land took hold. By 1923, the BSAC had gone bankrupt and, despite being a miniscule part of the population, only whites were given the choice of becoming part of South Africa or a "self-governing" colony of Great Britain. They chose the latter but for the next forty years London ruled with a very light hand. When suddenly it became apparent in the mid- 1960s that the winds of change would soon buffet Southern Rhodesia, then Prime Minister Ian Smith-himself a classic white farmer-unilaterally declared the colony independent in 1965. Sanctions were imposed on the renegade colony but, with the help of South Africa, nothing much changed for the next decade. Finally, after Mozambique received independence in 1975 and began to provide Mugabe's ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) guerilla forces with rear bases, the military position of the 250,000 whites who governed millions of Africans began to deteriorate. Under the guidance of Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Minister

Lord Carrington, Smith, Mugabe, and Mugabe's rival Jomo Nkomo negotiated the Lancaster House Constitution. The country achieved recognized independence in 198o.

For the first several years, things seemed to go very well. Mugabe, at least in English, said all of the right things about racial reconciliation and the need for all Zimbabweans to move forward together. An early agrarian boom reassured white farmers and the government concentrated on social improvements. Indeed, although the Marxist lingo of the national struggle was not dropped ("comrade" was a common salutation and the party's chief decision-making organization was the Polit, bureau), Zimbabwe became a favorite of the Reagan administration. Then Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker was fond of saying that foreign aid was used better in Zimbabwe than in almost any other country in Africa. The conventional view, and one which I certainly subscribed to, was summarized by an important early article in Foreign Policy magazine by Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow titled simply "Zimbabwe is a Success."?

The process of racial reconciliation seemed straightforward. The white population had already declined from a high of roughly 250,000 in the mid-1970S to roughly half that by the late 1980s. Young whites had been leaving at a very high rate since the war of national liberation heated up in the mid-1970S, and the population would therefore soon become geriatric. In a generation, the white population would hardly constitute a threat and would become similar to those of Zambia and Kenya: more oddities left over from the colonial era than a significant racial grouping that should worry the government.'

Featuring quite clearly in any analysis (including mine) of Zimbabwe was what it said about South Africa. Simply put, if Zimbabwe's example could defy the predictions of the racists who said that majority rule would inevitably lead to disaster, then whites in South Africa would not have to fight to the bitter end to preserve apartheid. Indeed, the comparison of the two countries in the rnid-rcdos, was especially vivid. Zimbabwe was an example of where whites and blacks could cooperate in promoting prosperity while in South Africa the black townships burned and the country seemed destined to go over the precipice into a full-fledged race war.

However, all was not well in Zimbabwe. In particular, the government had acted with singular brutality in the mid, I 980s through a series of pogroms in Matabeleland, the southwest portion of the country that was predominately Ndebele {the African minority ethnic group

who constitute about seventeen percent of the population). The Ndebele had largely supported the Nkomo party during the liberation struggle and in the first election. There were tensions between them and the Shona (the majority African ethnic group in the country who constitute roughly eighty-two percent of the population) who had mainly supported Mugabe's ZANU throughout the latter part of the struggle and after independence. Although details are still not well known, the Zimbabwe army's Fifth Brigade rampaged through the Matabeleland killing many thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe described the initial deployment:

In late January 1983, 5 Brigade was deployed in Matabeleland North. Within weeks, its troops had murdered more than two thousand civilians, beaten thousands more, and destroyed hundreds of homesteads. Their impact on the communities they passed through was shocking. Most of the dead were shot in public executions, often after being forced to dig their own graves in front of family and fellow villagers."

The massacres received very little attention at the time, although the rough outline of the tragedy was well known. It was difficult for journalists to cover the events. In addition, the killing of Ndebele by a largely Shona government did not fit into the master narrative of Southern Africa that had captured the world's attention: the attempt by whites to stay in power by oppressing blacks. Academics familiar with Zimbabwe tended to dismiss the impact of the killings. Professor Terrence Ranger, the pre-eminent historian of Zimbabwe, could write after fieldwork in Matabeleland in 1988 that the region where he worked was a place of "enormous optimism" because of an amnesty that the government had issued.i In fact, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, writing ten years after Ranger, reported that people believed that "You can never have another political party in Zimbabwe or you will be punished and that "People also remain afraid that the violence of the 1980s can be repeated at any time in Matabeleland."?

The Lancaster House provisions for a separate white voters roll expired in 1987 and Mugabe quickly amended the constitution, as he was allowed to do under the deal that lead to independence. In the next few years, the country moved increasingly toward a de facto oneparty state even as democratic revolutions were beginning to spread

throughout Africa. Indeed, Zimbabwe was repeatedly embarrassed in the early 1990S by the pace of reform that South African President EW. de Klerk was pushing. For instance, de Klerk abolished the state of emergency in South Africa before Mugabe lifted a similar set of rules in Zimbabwe even though the provisions in Zimbabwe were justified in order to combat the threat that was thought to be posed by apartheid South Africa.

Throughout the early 1990S, Zimbabwe became more authoritarian but also adopted economic reform measures that seemed to address some of the structural problems in the economy. In addition, in the heady period after Nelson Mandela was released, it seemed that great days were ahead for Zimbabwe because all of Southern Africa would finally be at peace. In retrospect, it is clear that a central part of Mugabe's legitimacy rested on his portrayal of himself as one of, if not the, leading opponent of racism in South Africa. Suddenly, when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, Mugabe had no enemy to justify his or his party's monopoly on political power. Indeed, in what appeared to be a profound personal humiliation, Mugabe was no longer even perceived as the senior leader in Southern Africa; Mandela, by dint of his gravitas, personal history, and size of the country he lead was a giant not only in the region and throughout the continent but on the world stage.

There were two events that served as key markers in Zimbabwe's path to decline. The first was the protests in 1996 and 1997 by the socalled "veterans" (many appeared too young to have actually fought almost twenty years before) of the war of national liberation who were upset by how little they had received since independence. The protests were very public and often timed to embarrass Mugabe and his cabinet ministers. In addition, there was some property damage, including broken windows." However, the real trauma caused by the protests was that some were directly challenging the gains, and thus the legitimacy, from the war that had been central to Mugabe's justification for remaining in power. The government finally responded in November 1997 with a massive payout to the veterans that essentially wrecked the budget and derailed any hopes of economic reform. The government's response of trying to regain legitimacy through the use of patronage set the pattern by which it would treat other challenges.

The second signal moment was the defeat of the government's proposed constitutional referendum in 2000. The new constitution would have cemented ZANU rule. Its defeat was a great trauma for the ruling

party, especially because it seemed to herald the loss of political power to a rival moment that had sprung up, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). There were then great hopes that Zimbabwe would join the increasing number of African countries that were experiencing regime change through multi-party elections. It must have appeared to Mugabe and his associates that they would have to do something dramatic to stay in power.

The great issue that divided Zimbabwe was the distribution of land. Under white rule, roughly 4,000 white families owned half the land while several hundred thousand African families held the other half. The whites possessed almost all of the good land. This misdistribution of land drove the liberation struggle. African communities vividly felt the loss of the land: they had been moved off the earth that fed them and that held the bones of their ancestors. However, white farmers were the critical constituency in white-ruled Southern Rhodesia. The Lancaster House constitution therefore required the government to buy land on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis, a provision of tremendous aggravation to the Africans who did not see why they should purchase land that had been stolen from them during the colonial period. Still, that was the deal that Mugabe agreed to and it was felt that he would adhere to it. The conventional wisdom was that Mugabe had lived in Mozambique and had witnessed the economic destruction caused by that government's decision to collectivize the land. Mugabe, with much more to lose given the sophisticated economy he inherited from the Rhodesians, would therefore move carefully on the land issue. The logic of governance seemed extremely powerful.f

However, in 2000, Mugabe made a series of announcements and stage-managed invasions of white farms. Soon he declared that he was going to seize most of the white farms and, brushing aside constitutional challenges and white farmer opposition, quickly did exactly what he said he was going to do. The land owned by the "others" would be seized and the promise of the revolution that had lead to independence in 1980 would finally be realized. Vast tracts of white farmland, including valuable infrastructure like tobacco curing sheds, irrigation systems, and equipment, were quickly doled out to senior Zimbabwe leaders, used as patronage to buy support from the Zimbabwe black middle class, and "settled" by squatters. The result, simply put, was that an enormously productive agrarian sector was destroyed in a few years. Mugabe has now caused the white farmer class to disappear and made a mockery of any notion of property rights in the economy.

The results have been devastating, and utterly predictable given the importance of the white agrarian sector and the need for any country to insure property rights. The Zimbabwe economy has been in an absolute free fall for more than five years. Life expectancy has plummeted to 36.6 years (a truly amazing statistic) and the country is now one hundred and fifty-first on the Human Development Index (a broad-based measure of human welfare), in between Yemen and Kenya.?

United Kingdom Parliamentarian Kate Hoey described the human results of this great tragedy:

The cemeteries are filling up, but no blood is being spilled. People are just fading away, dying quietly and being buried quietly with no fanfare and no international media attention. Each week an estimated 3,500 Zimbabweans die from a unique convergence of malnutrition, poverty and AIDS. The figures suggest that, far from the media spotlight-no BBC cameras allowed in-more people die in Zimbabwe each week than in either, in the past, Darfur or Iraq. Those deaths are largely preventable, but without significant intervention the situation threatens to develop into a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions.l?

Indeed, the Weimar�like inflation has produced a catalogue of pathologies that is shocking considering that Zimbabwe was once thought by many, including myself, to be amongst the most likely African countries to be a success: the country no longer prints passports because it can no longer afford special paper for the passports, II the government itself participates in black market currency dodges in order to gamer enough money to pay bills, power blackouts are routine, and many people spend most of their days like an African version of the apocalyptic movie Road Warrior searching for gasoline. Indeed, Zimbabwe has entered the ranks offailed states because there is no way that it can come out of its collapse anytime soon, irrespective of how long Mugabe rules the country. Future presidents will be faced with the daunting task of demarcating and reallocating a large percentage of the country's arable land. Such an exercise is not only technically difficult but politically fraught as no successor will give the land back to the whites, but it is unclear who should farm the land. It will take many years, perhaps decades, to unwind the damage that Mugabe has done to the country.

Why did analysts like myself fail to predict Zimbabwe's selfdestruction? We were clearly taken with the logic of governance, which suggested that Mugabe would put aside the central grievance

of the liberation struggle so that the country could begin to develop. As the country seemed to be following the logic of governance in the first years of independence, it quickly became inconceivable that an' other path could be followed. However, in retrospect, it is clear that there was a warning about how Mugabe would eventually treat the whites and a large percentage of his fellow Africans who have suffered from the economic decline: the Matabeleland massacres of the mid, 1980s. If Mugabe could unleash so much violence against Africans, why should there have been doubt that he could do the same against the whites or against anyone who threatened his rule?

Indeed, Mugabe himself has explicitly rejected the logic of governance in favor of the logic of race. As he said at one public ceremony, "No gold, no silver is precious enough for our land. Zimbabwe is not for sale to the highest bidder in Europe.l'P The government has had many opportunities to reverse or ameliorate its economic decline by abandon, ing its attacks on its own land program but it has failed to so in every in, stance. Indeed, the Governor of the Central Bank publicly blamed cabinet ministers and other influential leaders who had been given land but not used it for farming for the country's economic troubles.P By 2007, it has become clear that Robert Mugabe has destroyed his country by seizing the land, but it is not clear that he cares.

A substantial part of the reason for the failure of forecasts about Zimbabwe's self,destruction lies in the political climate of the time. It was politically incorrect to predict that Zimbabwe would not be a suecess. Suggestions that the country would fail were immediately lumped, especially by Mugabe and his supporters, with the attitudes of the old racist Rhodesians who had been so comprehensively discredited and isolated by the world. In addition, since everyone writing about Zimbabwe had an eye on South Africa, to predict failure in Zimbabwe was also therefore to predict failure in South Africa at precisely the time when a large percentage of the world was rooting for Nelson Mandela.

It was not only the politically correct academics who got Zimbabwe wrong. The supposedly hardheaded Thatcher and Reagan adrninistrations had also invested heavily in Mugabe. Giving aid to Zimbabwe, and other countries in Southern Africa, was a way of showing the world that London and Washington were in favor of majority rule at precisely the time when both governments were being brutally criticized for not imposing more sanctions on South Africa.

While someone who predicted doom for Zimbabwe would not have been called a racist outright, the politically charged atmosphere com,

bined with many supportive academics (at least a few of whom were referred to as "comrades" in the Zimbabwe press), was enough to allow almost everyone to tum a blind eye to the atrocities in Matabeleland that might have been predictors of the chaos to come in Zimbabwe. It also allowed us to assume that Mugabe had almost instantaneously evolved from national liberation leader who fought for the land to a president who was most concerned about overall growth rates, in retrospect a seemingly implausible transition.

The ethical dilemmas posed by the Zimbabwe case are not trivial. One of the academy's great achievements over the last fifty years has been the analysis of racism, including the discovery of racial bias that is not overtly stated. However, it may be that the desire to identify and disassociate from even implicit racism has become so great that it has, at times, affected academic analysis. Suggesting that Zimbabwe had much less than a rosy future could have been done purely on the basis of the Matabeleland experience and Mugabe's growing authoritarianism, without any suggestion of racism. However, the international focus on the attempts to install majority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa were so great that an analytically justified negative verdict on Zimbabwe was not produced.

It might be suggested that Southern Africa in the 1980s and early 1990S was unique because nowhere else was racism so dramatically highlighted by the international community. This may be an overly optimistic view. Many of the criticisms against academics who produce even somewhat negative views of Africa (so-called "Afro-pessimists") have a tinge of the race card about them. In particular, critical analyses of South Africa are often met with rebuttals that suggest that criticism stems from racism. South African President Thabo Mbeki has pioneered this particular retort. 14 Hopefully, we will gain the ability to make difficult judgments about the fate of particular countries without having to constantly worry about being coded as a racist.

Economic Mismanagement in the Age of Governance

It is commonly said that African countries have learned from the mistakes of the past and are now committed to good governance and to fighting corruption. Certainly, most Western leaders would agree with former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in noting a revolution in African attitudes toward governance:

Corruption is a disease It's a threat to development everywhere in the world and I think in the past it has done enormous damage to Africa's development prospects But to see African leaders saying it's a problem, and not just saying it's a problem, but doing something about it, is one of the major reasons for feeling we're in a new era and at a turning point. IS

Similarly, the Commission for Africa justified a massive increase in foreign aid on the basis that, "Where change has occurred a new generation of political leaders is emerging, many of who voice a new commitment to the common good of the people.l'l" The Commission goes on to note similar changes in Africa's regional organizations, especially the demise of the old Organization ofAfrican Unity with its principle of "non-interference" and the rise of the new African Union with its dedication to "non-indifference."!"

Indeed, the centerpiece of Africa's supposed commitment to good governance is the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the major economic program of the African Union. NEPAD is supposed to clearly demonstrate not only Africa's commitment to good governance, but its willingness to promote proper political and economic management across the continent. In particular, NEPAD has set up a peer review mechanism that is dedicated to reviewing the efforts of the countries that voluntarily put themselves up for scrutiny. The long-term hope is that NEPAD will obviate the need for conditionality imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that the Africans find so objectionable.

More generally, the elimination of white minority rule in Southern Africa has created the terms of what the Africans hope will be a new era where they determine the agenda. President Thabo Mbeki has been most outspoken in claiming that the "African Renaissance" is near, in part due to the rebirth of popular rule across the continent and the end to minority regimes.l''

In the midst of the creation of NEPAD, the new commitment to governance, and perhaps even the "African Renaissance," Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a profound embarrassment. He is in many ways the embodiment of what Africa was not supposed to be in the new era: a leader who has destroyed his country in order to complete the agenda of destroying the "others" in his midst, even at the price of a tremendous blow to African welfare.

African leaders have therefore faced a profound choice when dealing with Mugabe: embrace him and signal very clearly that the

commitment to good governance is largely rhetorical or isolate him and confirm the emergence of a new era. Overwhelmingly, African leaders have chosen to embrace Mugabe. When Mugabe came to the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002, he was given a rousing ovation after castigating the West, and Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular, for supposedly interfering in Zimbabwe's internal affairs by daring to criticize the policies that were leading to economic destruction. Even more striking was the decision of third world countries in 2007 (after the full reality of Zimbabwe's collapse had become clear to all), against the objections of the United States and Europe, to elect Zimbabwe to the chairmanship of the United Nations' Commission on Sustainable Development. There seemingly could be no greater example of a country that was on a path toward collapse than Zimbabwe and the countries that supported Harare's candidacy must have known that they would make fools out of themselves. Still, the votes went to Mugabe's failed state. However, the greatest sign that African countries would not only not run away from Mugabe but, in fact, back him in the face ofsanctions from the West was the decision by the Southern African Development Commission (SADC) to support Mugabe in March 2007. The Commissioncomposed of all countries in Southern Africa-was under pressure to act because of the increasing economic crisis in Zimbabwe and the government's greater use of repression. Faced with the problem of a country destroying itself, the African leaders-who have committed themselves in other fora to good governance-sided with the dictator. As President Mbeki said,

"The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe; tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. And any government that is perceived to be strong and to be resistant to imperialists would be made a target and would be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the solidarity of SAOC, because that weakness will also be transferred to the rest of Africa."!"

Therefore, "At the end of the conference, African leaders threw their unanimous support behind Zimbabwe's Mugabe and called on Mr. Mbeki {not the West} to mediate between Mugabe and the political opposition. Leaders who had been critical of Mugabe before the conference, including Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, fell silent."zo

While African leaders criticized Mugabe's conduct of the 2008 elections, they defended him against attempts by western leaders to impose additional sanctions on the country. The simple explanation for Africa's continuing support for Mugabe is that for leaders racial solidarity is more important than governance. Mugabe has couched his political program as being opposed to two "others" that Africans find hard ever to be seen as supporting: white colonialists who used to run the country and the West. Thus, Mugabe said at the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome in 2005 (despite the putative travel ban that is supposed to con' strain his movements): "The voice of Mr. Bush and the voice of Mr. Blair can't decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Africa, who shall rule in Asia, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iran, who shall rule in Iraq."2l It may be understandable why African leaders show some sympathy toward crushing the old Rhodies but the cost should have made at least some wonder. In fact, even in South Africa, which has managed its political system and economy relatively well since the transition in 1994, there is an underlying sympathy for what Mugabe has done, even though most Africans south of the Limpopo would not want to go through a similar trauma. The West remains a credible opponent even though (or perhaps because) almost all of Africa is highly dependent on the West for foreign aid. Indeed, what is most remarkable about Mugabe's diatribes against the West is that most were directed against former Prime Minister Tony Blair, precisely the western politician who has done more than any other to mobilize support for Africa.

The African dynamic toward Mugabe is somewhat different from the admitted nonchalance that leaders on the continent often direct toward poorly performing regimes. Most very bad leaders are tolerated in Africa but treated with some degree of embarrassment. Mugabe, on the other hand, has made a conscious effort to actually mobilize his fellow leaders on the basis of race and has, to some extent, sueceeded. Zaire's Mobutu, Liberia's Doe, and Somalia's Siad Barre, to take just a sample of very bad leaders, could never attempt to mobilize African leaders to actually support them because they could not play the race card.

However, race still plays a profound role in Africa, even in the vast majority of African states that received their independence forty,five years ago and that never experienced settler rule. Indeed, there is in Africa a profound, albeit inchoate sense of an international order that is determined by race. Many African leaders, while publicly committed to

the economic programs developed by the World Bank and IMF, are nonetheless convinced that whites-perhaps including the very international financial institutions that they work with in Washington-will never allow any African country to truly develop. Mugabe therefore becomes a sympathetic figure who is seen to have undertaken great sacrifices in order to complete a revolutionary program of ending the last vestiges of white rule in his country, a very different portrayal than is common in the West.

Economic Decline and the Failure of Resistance

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Zimbabwe's decline to explain has been the failure of popular revolt. While it is perhaps understandable why other African countries have stepped aside and done little to nothing during Zimbabwe's self-immolation, it is not as clear why Mugabe has been able to perpetuate this program of destruction on his own people. Part of the reason, of course, has been repression. The government did send thugs to beat up opponents of the regime, or those seen as possibly opposing it, on a regular basis and many activists have been imprisoned. White farmers were also subject to campaigns of mass intimidation, including occupation of their farmers that were aided by government officials. In 2005, there was campaign Operation Murambatsvina ("Drive Out Trash" in Shona) that destroyed the homes of several hundred thousand urban dwellers because they were perceived as a hotbed of opposition. The repression after Mugabe lost the first round of elections in 2008 (only to triumph in the second round after his opponent pulled out due to violence and intimidation) was also a significant increase over the past although actual reporting has been stymied by the government's regulation of journalists.

There were various attempts after 1987 by courageous Zimbabweans to point out the early pathologies of Mugabe's rule. However, these attempts were usually sabotaged when Ian Smith suddenly appeared on the side of Mugabe's new opponent. The appearances by Smith and other prominent Rhodesians automatically delegitimized the new movement in the eyes of black Zimbabweans for whom the memory of minority rule is not remote. Mugabe, of course, did the most possible to highlight the role of whites in what he described as attempts to overthrow his government.

Part of Mugabe's ability to remain in place has been due to the

difficulty the opposition has had in opposing him. From the outset of the creation of the MDC, there was confusion in the ranks of whether the party was to be the official (and therefore loyal) opposition or whether it simply sought the overthrow of the Mugabe regime. It was for a long time, in fact, it is split between groups that want to be the legal opposition and those who seek to mobilize the Zimbabwe population into the streets. The weak opposition is, of course, partially due to the fact that Mugabe constantly exploits race to justify his actions. The MDC seemed, at least until the 2008 elections when it won the first round against Mugabe, somewhat bewildered on how it can avoid taking the side of white farmers while still condemning Mugabe.

In addition, African countries observing the disarray of the opposition also may have tempered their rhetoric toward Mugabe because they just were not sure what would replace him. The ANC government in South Africa was particularly unimpressed by the analytic confusion within the Zimbabwean opposition because the South Africans also prided themselves on a clear perspective on strategy and tactics during their struggle, even if their own implementation was haphazard. As a result, some South Africans speak contemptuously of the MDC in private.

Land has also proven to be an excellent patronage resource for the Mugabe government. Some disgruntled protesters, including veterans, or those who claimed to have been fighters in the national liberation struggles, have received parcels of land that have at least demonstrated to them the fruits of Mugabe's project to transform the economy. Perhaps more importantly, land patronage has proceeded further into the society from the top than is commonly portrayed. It is certainly true that Mugabe's top cronies in ZANU have been richly rewarded in the distribution of white land. However, senior and some not-quite-senior civil servants have also told me that they have received a farm. That is, precisely the segment of society who might have been expected to lead protesters against an economic program that destroyed their children's future, have actually benefited in the short-term, Whether these civil servants will actually be able to farm the land that they have received remains to be seen but for now they have bought into the logic of race when their class interests favor the logic of governance.

Finally, South Africa has become something of a safety valve for Zimbabwe. Roughly two million Zimbabweans are currently in South

Africa and there is thus about one-sixth of the population who, if they had stayed in the country, might have been a reservoir of grievance and a source of continual instability. The fact that there was somewhere for them to go-even though their lives in South Africa are extremely difficult-makes it more likely that Mugabe will continue to rule.

The overall result is that Mugabe has, against all odds, been able to continue to rule. If the future of Zimbabwe could somehow have been described to most observers in 1995 or even 2000, they would have said that any leader who brought about such a total collapse would by necessity have been forced out.

Conclusion

In Zimbabwe, the Mugabe government concluded that it was more important to dismantle the structures of the "other"-the whites who are still seen as foreigners by many black Zimbabweans-than to continue to have a viable country. Race permeates Zimbabwe although there are also a number of other reasons that Robert Mugabe has been able to hang on to power. Indeed, race remains the major political impetus in Zimbabwe despite the predictions of westerners who wanted to believe that Zimbabwe would be a success because the government could quickly move beyond the divisions of the past. The failure of international and domestic opposition to Mugabe is also due in part to his ability to cast his project in racial terms, even though this is supposed to be the era of good governance throughout the world.

Zimbabwe has always been a proxy for South Africa. There is no reason to believe, despite the number of wrong predictions about Zimbabwe's trajectory, that Pretoria will go down the path ofself-destruction blazed by Harare. Many in South Africa secretly, or in some cases notso-secretly, cheer Mugabe on but they have no interest in experiencing the kind of economic freefall that Zimbabwe has entered. However, the problems of governance in racially divided societies remain acute. Zimbabwe demonstrates that if someone wants to do mischief and can play the race card, there may not be a legitimate domestic or international lobby to argue against destructive actions because Africans may not want to appear to be protecting white interests. Therefore, while South Africa's future will not look like Zimbabwe's, there may be future politi-

cians so intent on wiping out the economic legacy of the whites that they may hurt the country quite badly. The experience of Zimbabwe compels us to be modest about what we think we know about South Africa's future.

References

I. I was Fulbright Research Associate in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Zimbabwe from January 1986 to June 1987.

2. Winter 1982-3.

3. I posited this theory of racial reconciliation in "Racial Reconciliation in Southern Africa," International Affairs (London) 65 (Winter 1988-1989): 43-54.

4. Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report into the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1985 (Harare: Legal Resources Foundation, 1999), p. 10.

5. Terrence Ranger, "Matabeleland since the Amnesty," African Affairs, April 1989, p. 161.

6. Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice in Zimbabwe, p. I I.

7. Andrew Meldrum, Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004), p. 106.

8. Jeffrey Herbst, State Politics in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 47·

9. United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2006 found at: http://hdr.undp.org/hdf2006/statistics/.

10. House of Commons debates, 22 November 2006.

I I. IRIN news report, "Zimbabwe: No Legal Way Out," December 7, 2006.

12. Pan-African News Agency, "Peasants Rejoice as White Land Dominance Comes to An End," August 27, 2002. Found at: http://www.fmalcall.com/international/mugabe0827-2oo2.htm.

13. IRIN, "Zimbabwe: Reserve Bank Governor Blames Ruling Elite for Country's Ills," February I, 2007.

14· See Jeffrey Herbst, "Mbeki's South Africa," Foreign Affairs 84 (November/December 205), pp. 93-105.

15· Wolfowitz Says Aid Alone Will Not Help Africa, Urges More Trade," YOANEWS.COM, June 24, 2005. Found at: http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/ 2005-06/2005-06-24-voa4.cfm?renderforprint= I &textonly= I &&TEXTMODE= I&CFID=151334I86&CFTOKEN=29304790 on May 18, 2007.

16. Commission for Africa, Our Common Interest, 2005. Found at: http://www.commission forafrica.org/english/report/thereport/english/r I -03-05_cr_part_I .pdf, p. 24.

17. Ibid.

18. See for instance, his speech, "The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World," 9 April 1998, found at: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/mbehhtml.

19. Quoted in Scott Baldauf, "Why Africa won't Reign in Mugabe," Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 2007. Found at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0516/poIsol-woaf. htm,

20. lbid.

21. Philip Pullella, "Mugabe calls Bush, Blair 'terrorists,'" Reuters, October 18, 2005. Found at: http://www.washtimes.com/world/20051018-I23536-978Ir.htm

Bonnie Honig

The Other is Dead: Mourning, Justice, and the Politics of Burial *

In political theory, the problem of the other is usually taken to be the problem of the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, perhaps the problem of sexual difference. In response to the problem so conceived, political theorists write books about the ethics and politics of multiculturalism, alien suffrage, the conflicting claims of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, internationalism and democracy, the politics of gender or sexuality in patriarchal societies. These are important, ongoing areas of inquiry.

But what if the other is dead?

That is, how should democratic societies relate to those others who are no longer around to make claims that need to be adjudicated, to those killed in the process of settlement or colonization, to the victims of civil wars, conflicts or genocide? In this essay, I look at two texts that deal with this question, a film and a play written over 2000 years apart but which speak to each other across that temporal chasm. The film, Sophie's Choice, movingly explores the tragic outcome of the divergent pulls of mourning and justice in the aftermath of genocide. The play, Antigone, stages a reflection on the politics of mourning and justice, two conflicting political responses to the dead.

*Thanks to Diego Rossello for his excellent research assistance in support of this article. I have benefited from conversations with Jill Frank, Mary Dietz and Viv Soni. Finally, I am grateful to Henry Bienen for reading and commenting on an earlier draft, and for asking me to revisit the theme of the other.

In "The Dead Body and Human Rights," historian Thomas Laqueur says there is "a tension" between mourning and justice, "between on the one hand truth for the purposes of remembering [or] communal therapy and medico-juridical truth, which grounds legal or political action." The bodies of the dead can serve either purpose but not both at the same time: "[I]t is not clear that the named bodies of the dead will serve us as both a corpus delecti [enabling justice] and as the balm of closure" enabling mourning. Indeed, "the rhetoric of memory is manifestly different from the rhetoric of justice; the question is whether the one might serve as a substitute, an excuse, for not pursuing the other" (92).

Faced with this conflict between mourning and justice, Laqueur searches for a bridge between them: the "bridge between the two functions of the dead body" is "that these are not the bodies of beasts; they did not 'die like dogs' outside of law and culture." But, as Laqueur immediately realizes, this bridge will not support him, for the people in question here precisely did die like dogs. That is the very problem to which Laqueur's essay, which focuses on murders, massacres and genocides, is itself addressed. And so Laqueur corrects himself: "Or rather, they did 'die like dogs' despite the fact that they were human This corrected claim is more accurate but it now fails to provide the sought after bridge. Instead it plunges us right back into the divide Laqueur sought to escape, as becomes clear when he adds: "which is why it is so important subsequently to determine their identities and their histories," so that "the named bodies of the dead" can serve as either "a corpus delecti" or "as the balm of closure." But not both. Justice and mourning are again at odds: "The will to prosecute may well be blunted by whatever peace remembering brings."! And the peace of remembering may well be disturbed by calls for justice. Neither justice nor mourning alone can offer the dead and those who survive them all they need and deserve. Laqueuer does not offer a solution but he captures the problem that divides and unites the protagonists of Sophie's Choice and Antigone.

In Sophie's Choice and Antigone, the conflict between mourning and justice is explored by way of characters deprived of the opportunity to bury their dead. Might it be that the apparent incommensurability between mourning and justice explored in these texts is in some way connected to that deprivation? The question seems simple and yet it is also vexed. Recovering the dead enables those who survive them to believe they have passed on; death makes hyper-empiricists of us all. The recovered body enables the survivors to mourn those lost, sometimes to reconcile themselves with those who have done the harm or, other

times, call for justice for those responsible+ At the same time, however, the focus on the dead named body, whether for purposes of justice or mourning, can be a distraction from, rather than a fulfillment of, ethical or political obligations. This last point is made forcefully by political scientist Thomas Hawley in a recent book about American POW/MIA recovery movements after the Vietnam War. Burial, dealing with the body of the dead, thus seems to trouble or unsettle the familiar opposition between mourning and justice. Before troubling that opposition, however, let us explore its workings in detail, as they are staged in Sophie's Choice and Antigone.

Sophie's Choice

In the film version of William Styron's Sophie's Choice, the fabulous Meryl Streep plays Sophie, a Polish Catholic woman who somehow ends up in Auschwitz and suffers unspeakable horrors. Before Auschwitz, Sophie was a secretary to her law professor father who demeaned and dominated her, a fate to which she re-consigns herself when she marries one of her father's disciples. That she married her father is further suggested in the film by her wedding photo, perched on a shelf behind her pre-war typewriter, in which Sophie stands in her wedding gown between two men and it is unclear which one is her father and which her husband. Both men are killed by the Nazis, but Sophie survives and after the war, in the U.S., Sophie tethers herself to the unpredictable rhythms of life with a schizophrenic, Nathan Landau (played by Kevin Kline), who by turns worships and torments her. In her hailstorm of a life, there is only one moment depicted in the film when Sophie seems to experience an autonomous pleasure. Soon after arriving in the United States, seated in an English class for immigrants, Sophie is moved by a poem recited at the end ofclass. The instructor offers it as evidence that the English language is not just torturously difficult but also possessed of great beauty.

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; the carriage held just ourselves and Immortality.

Sophie asks a classmate for the name of the poet and jots it down. Then she takes herself to the New York public library and seeks out the book.

"Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me what Where would be that listing in catalog file for nineteenth-century American poet Emile Dickens, please?" she asks the librarian in accented, broken En, glish. "In the catalog room on the left," the librarian gestures roughly, exhibiting an unmistakable disdain for her, for her foreignness, for her ignorance. " But you won't find any such listing," he adds, as she turns in the direction just indicated." "Oh, I won't find that listing? Why won't I find it?" she asks, her arched brow and her repetition regis' tering an awareness of his disdain and the wherewithal to return his mockery, somehow. "Charles Dickens is an English writer," he sniffs. "There's no American poet by the name of Dickens." "I'm sorry. No," she insists, her eyes again on the scrap of paper where she has jotted down the name: "that is, I'm sure, American poet. Emile Dickens." The librarian explodes, fairly hissing at her, his bigotry or mere impatience palpable in the impropriety of his response {a librarian shouting in the library?}: "Listen! I told you! There's no such person. Do you want me to draw you a picture?" And then, as she stutters to calm him and tries to leave his presence: "I'm telling you, you hear me?" Perhaps retraumatized by this reappearance of her father -a disdainful, demeaning, sarcastic, bullying, superior man-Sophie faints and then throws up as her head is cradled in the hands of a handsome stranger who comes to her rescue. It is Nathan, who takes her home, nurses her back to health and romances her with the poetry of Emily Dickinson, a volume of whose work he gives to Sophie as a gift on the night of their first meeting.

The mishap in the library is occasioned by the unimaginabiliry to Sophie and to the librarian of a woman poet. It is not Dickens, after all, but rather-as Nathan rightly discerns-Dickinson that Sophie seeks; not Emile, but Emily. This scene of comic-gothic error in the library is filmed as Dickens would be or, indeed, has been filmed. Like the judge in the I 968 film version of Dickens' Oliver Twist, the librarian in Sophie's Choice is propped up on a large desk that communicates and enhances his (self-) importance. He is an impatient, pettily powerful male, less brutish than Mr. Bumble but echoing him nonetheless, and powerful only in relation to Sophie, an Oliver, that hapless, weak-bodied orphan, lost and running a fever in a cruel world, but soon to be saved by the kindness of a stranger. Sophie's kind stranger, Nathan, is no Mr. Brown, low; but then Sophie is no Oliver. Hers is a death-driven world, not merely an indifferent or cruel one. Her world is Dickinsonian, rather than Dickensian or, better, it is both. Perhaps that is the point of the film's staging of the confusion of the two names. Their merger unites the

indifference and cruelty of Dickens' world with the thanato-eroticism of Dickinson's, and links Dickens's quest for a justice in which each gets his due with Dickinson's quest for proper mourning, in which death is not unwelcome.' In the merger as it is enacted here, the redemptions of Dickens and the light grace of Dickinson are lost. Moreover, both Nathan's and Sophie's quests, for Dickensian justice and Dickinsonian mourning, for a good life and a good death, will be for nought.

Whatever else it is, the story of Sophie and Nathan is also about literature and literariness. They meet in the library. On their first night together, Sophie reads to Nathan, at his request, from a Polish translation of Thomas Wolfe and he reads to her from a book of poems by Dickinson. The teller of their story, the film's narrator, Stingo, is an aspiring writer from the South who has moved to Brooklyn to write his first novel. Stingo enters into Nathan and Sophie's ill-fated relationship, and later records it for us. When Nathan welcomes Stingo to their rooming house, he does so by sending him Whitman's Leaves of Grass, with a card: "from one of Brooklyn's earliest bards to Brooklyn's newest one," (miming Emerson to Whitman, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career"). Stingo is moved into authorship by Nathan (who disparages and adores him by turns) and Sophie (who mothers and later sleeps with him before returning finally to Nathan). "I wanted to be and hoped or dreamed to be a writer," Stingo says in his narrator's voice at the film's beginning. "But my spirit had remained locked unacquainted with love and a stranger to death." These problems will be solved for Stingo by Sophie and Nathan.

The story Stingo had intended to write is about a twelve-year-old boy whose mother dies. (The story is his own, he admits at one point. His mother died "because I did not love her enough," he tells Sophie in a late night confidence. This confession gives the lie to his earlier claim in his narrator voice that he was "a stranger to death." Perhaps he was not acquainted with enough death to inspire writing. If so, Sophie will solve that problem for him, too.) Stingo's planned story of a motherless child (which the film audience never hears, although reams of paper are produced as Stingo types nightly), is replaced by "Sophie's Choice," the story of a childless mother, Sophie, whose two children died in Auschwitz. Subtly, the film suggests, the motherless child, Stingo, is America, willfully innocent, naive, and free of its past. The childless mother, Sophie, is Europe, a place with a past, but one that has no future.

The problem to which literature is here called to respond is that of stuckness in the face ofhorror or maybe merely ofhistory. In post-World-

War,II Brooklyn, Sophie, the European Catholic Holocaust survivor, and Nathan, the bipolar American Jew, cannot move past the war, Sophie because she suffered irreversible trauma in Auschwitz, and Nathan because he is, as Sophie says, "obsessed with the Nazis." The walls of Nathan's room are papered with pictures of Nazis not yet brought to justice. Nathan tortures Sophie with cruel interrogations about what she did to survive the war, when so many Jewish victims died. "Explain something to me," he says miming her Polish accent, "the reason maybe of why you are here walking the streets wearing this enticing perfumery while at Auschwitz, the ghosts of the millions of the dead still seek an answer." Sophie does not respond. She moans. The quest for justice in the face of the Holocaust cannot be satisfied. And Nathan is not wrong when he asks, did "the same anti-Semitism for which Poland has gained such a worldwide recognition did this similar antiSemitism guide your own destiny, help you along protect you in a manner of speaking, so you became one of the miniscule handful of people who lived while the millions died?"

One might think that Nathan's personal quest to bring the Nazis to justice is a symptom of his madness. He is not in any position to really do this work; he is not a lawyer, not a politician, not a vigilante. But one could just as well infer that the film's point is that he who pursues justice for the Holocaust-or chooses to do so--must be mad or will surely be driven mad by the impossible quest.

Nathan cannot stop talking about the Nazis. But Sophie, like many survivors, cannot bring herself to speak of them at all. Bit by bit over the course of the film, her story comes out, in different iterations, half,truth by half-truth. The details do not matter here. What does matter is that both characters are haunted, one by her proximity to the violence, the other by the guilt {the guilt of American Jews} that comes from having been distant from it. Each suffers survivor guilt, expressed in him through madness, in her through melancholia.

And each loves Emily Dickinson, who provides the film with its leitmotif. The poem Nathan reads to Sophie on their first night together is a burial poem that might also have been {almost} a wedding song:

Ample make this bed

Make this bed with awe; In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight

Be its pillow round; Let no sunrise' yellow noise

Interrupt

this

ground

At the end of the film, when Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide together, Stingo will stand at their bedside, gazing at their bodies coupled in death, and his eyes will fall on the Dickinson volume on a nearby tabletop. He will open the book, and read the same poem, as their eulogy-"Ample make this bed "-re-performing the conjoining of marriage and death ritual that scholars have observed is a staple of Greek tragedy."

Stingo then leaves the Brooklyn rooming house and as we watch him walk across the Brooklyn Bridge (referencing Whitman again: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") with the sun rising above him, his narrator's voice says:

And so ended my journey of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn. I let go the rage and sorrow for Sophie and Nathan and for the many others who were but a few of the butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the Earth. When I could finally see again I saw the first rays of daylight reflected in the murky river. This was not judgment day, only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

This, the last line of the film, rewrites Dickinson: "Judgment excellent and fair" becomes "morning, excellent and fair." Or perhaps, since it is a homonym, and the viewer cannot know, perhaps it becomes "mourning excellent and fair." Either way, or both, mo[u]rning replaces justice and Stingo walks toward a new day.

Taken as mourning, the line suggests Stingo is able to cross the bridge into a new future because he is now acquainted with but not broken by experiences of love and death. He is capable of the work of proper mourning. The eulogy of the poem and the telling of the story of Nathan and Sophie allow Stingo, an emerging writer, to work through the issues that trapped these bearers of justice and melancholy in their insane, impossible, death-driven romance. (Indeed, one critic refers to the novel as Stingo's bildungsroman.")

Taken as morning, by contrast, the line suggests that Stingo represents a new world naivete, possibly willful. He lets go. He just moves on, leaving the past and its ruins behind. He has a future. This second reading is supported by the film's intimation, throughout, that Stingo is foreign to

this place and its drama. He refers at the film's opening and close to these events as his "voyage of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn." To Stingo, Nathan and Sophie are exotics. He has never known people like this before. He is from the South. There is a bucolic horne to which he can retreat (he is heir to a farm "south of Virginia" on which he might live), an option unavailable to Sophie and Nathan who are stuck in their historicity. That Stingo is not stuck in his, or does not see himself that way, is made clear when Nathan taunts Stingo, suggesting that because he is a child of the South, he knows something of racial violence or lynching. Stingo takes umbrage at the suggestion. He thinks himselfentirely innocent of the charge. His is an American innocence, which is to say that by some force or chance he is positioned (or positions himself) as unimplicated in the racial history of his horne, while Sophie is utterly implicated even in America in the European racist past that still destroys her. Indeed, a third reading of the film might play on the pun of mo[u]rning, and ask whether there isn't willful (i.e., American) naivete in the belief that it is possible to elide or overcome the difficulties surveyed here (the stuckness ofjustice and melancholy, of Dickens and Dickinson) by way of a healthy, proper work of mourning, in this instance, by way of storytelling or literature. As we shall see, Whitman himself gestures toward something beyond the stuckness of justice and mourning, by way of a difficult reconciliation not just with our enemies but also with our own shared condition of mortality. In Sophie's Choice, however, even Whitman is inadequate: if there is here a reference to a Whitmanesque openness to a new day, it is a repetition with a dismal difference: here the first rays of daylight are reflected not in the "gladness ofthe river and the bright flow" by which Whitman says he is "refreshed," but rather in a "murky river."

Sophocles's Antigone

In Greek tragedy, all rivers are murky: no one is innocent, though many are blind to that fact. Everyone is known by the audience to be implicated in a history that precedes them and in a fate that is foretold yet is somehow not determinative. In Sophocles' great play, Antigone, Nathan's stuck, raging, impotent commitment to justice (or something like it) is represented by Creon'? Sophie's infinite, melancholic mourning (or something like it) is represented by Antigone (though the latter pair is importantly different: Antigone calls for her brother's death to be avenged and curses those responsible.f Sophie, perhaps because she feels

responsible for her children's fate, does no such thing. (The call for justice or vengeance is made by Nathan and could in fact implicate Sophie.) Other readers of the play see Antigone as staging a struggle between conflicting principles yet to be worked out in the classical setting: between family and city, divine and human law, the bonds of kinship and citizenship, oral and written law, the city's gods and the gods of the underworld, or between authoritarian and democratic rule. But the text opens up to us in new ways when we approach it through the lens of a conflict between justice (Creon's principle of giving each his due as a matter of political and civic responsibility) and mourning (Antigone's principle of lamenting the loss of a life in order to usher the dead along to the next life, where the question of just desserts-a separate issuewill be decided by gods, not men).

The play is set in Thebes, in the Bronze Age. With its spatial and temporal distance from fifth-centurv Athens, Bronze Age Thebes provided a way for Athenians to work through issues that might have been too close to home to be worked out safely in an Athenian setting." The play's distant setting might have allowed Sophocles to broach for public consideration issues that would otherwise be dangerous to consider. It may be for this reason that, as [ean-Pierre Vernant points out, the hero of Greek tragedy is almost always alien and from a distant past.!?

The play begins in the aftermath of near civil war. The conflict occurs in the wake of the rule of Oedipus who ruled Thebes wisely and well but who also, with his acts of patricide and incest (unintended, un� knowing, but still his acts), polluted the polity and brought it to near ruin. As the Greek audience would have known, Oedipus's reign ends with his wife's/mother's suicide and his own exile. Left behind are the four children of his incestuous marriage to Jocasta: Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone, and Ismene. The sons, Eteocles and Polynices both claim the throne after their father leaves. Some versions of the story suggest they agree to rule by turns. Eteocles takes power first but refuses to hand the throne to Polynices when the time comes to do so. Polynices raises an army at Argos and besieges the city to claim what is his. The brothers do battle and each dies by the other's hand.

The play opens with Antigone telling her sister Ismene awful news; Ismene has not yet heard it: their brother Eteocles has been buried with full military honors by Thebes's new leader, their uncle Creon. But Polynices, their other brother, it has been decreed by Creon, is "to be left," as Antigone puts it "unwept, unburied, a lovely treasure for birds that scan the field and feast to their heart's content" (35). Creon,

Antigone rightly perceives, has "graced one with all the rites and disgraced the other."

In so doing, Creon means to do justice. Although the chorus welcomes Creon as "the new man for the new day" (174), Creon does not begin anew. He begins by orienting Thebes toward the past, to prepare it for a better future. The city must pass judgment over the events it has witnessed. It cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that one brother besieged the city ("he thirsted to drink his kinsmen's blood and sell the rest to slavery," says Creon of Polynices [225-6]), while the other sought to defend it. One brother is a friend of Thebes, a patriot, the other an enemy, a traitor (233; d. 325). Creon means to stabilize Thebes in the aftermath of the brothers' conflict. To do justice, to give each brother his due, is also to broadcast the regime's determination to prevent the brothers' rift from permeating the regime and giving rise to ongoing sectarian conflicts between Eteocleans and Polyniceans. Thus, Creon promotes one as an honored son and denigrates the other as a traitor. In order to have the clarity that, in his view, a stable regime requires (this one more than most, perhaps, since it suffered from the lack of clarity that Oedipal incest introduced and symbolized), Creon does not inquire too deeply into the rights and wrongs of the situation. Had he done so, he might have found Eteocles in the wrong as well, for refusing to hand power to Polynices as promised. Even so, however, Creon might have said, we can acknowledge both wrongs while insisting that not all wrongs are equal. Eteocles may have been wrong to usurp power, but that does not rise to the same level of wrong as Polynices' action in attacking Thebes with a foreign army.

Most modern readers of the play consider Creon its villain and Antigone, who takes it upon herself to resist his edict and bury her brother, its heroine (Elshtain, Dietz, Butler, Irigiaray, Euben). Most also see Creon as a representative of authoritarian power and Antigone as a democratic actor. But neither character lives up to these labels. Creon's authoritarianism is put in question from the beginning; he issues an important edict but he seems to lack the power to publicize or enforce it: news of it does not reach Ismene, until Antigone tells her about it, and the edict is violated, not once but twice. I I For her part, Antigone may stand up to authority and so is in some way necessary to democracy, but she is not herself a democratic actor. Rather than mobilize a collectivity and inspire people to join together in common action, she alienates all potential supporters and allies in the course of the play.12

To pick either of the main characters as hero is to dilute the play's

tragic quality. Tragedy, after all, is the form in which there is no right thing to do because whichever course is chosen, another, equally com, pelling, is left undone (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Williams, Shame and Necessity). Besides, things are not so clear when it comes to heroes and villains in this play. Taking into account the brothers' destabilization of Thebes and the recent troubles under Oedipus, the reader may well begin the play with a certain appreciation for Creon's alertness to the politics offriendship and enmity. Rather than being blind to the importance of mourning and burial, Creon is highly aware of the implications of the practice. That is why he seeks to appropriate it for political purposes. He wants mourning to serve the cause of justice and justice to provide Thebes with stability. This is what leads him to prohibit the mourning and burial of Polynices, who after all went too far. Polynices pursued justice too far (it was his tum) and slipped into enmity.

In the end, Creon will pursue justice too far as well. He is not unlike Polynices. Creon too is immoderate. Dishonoring the dead is pro, hibited by conventional rules of warfare, themselves increasingly attenuated in this period and immediately after in the Peloponnesian WarsP Creon seeks justice without measure (an irony, since justice for the Greeks is about measure: giving each his due). Creon slides there, fore from being a potentially worthy captain of the "ship of state" into being an irresponsible navigator who will run it aground.!" That Creon and Polynices share this same flaw is suggested by the fact that they suffer the same or similar fates. The play opens with Polynices who, de, prived of burial rites, is unable to move from this world to the next, and it closes with Creon longing for death but stuck among the living, unable to move from this world to the next. The parallels continue. Just as Creon sought to prohibit anyone from clustering at Polynices' altar, so Creon finds at the play's end that no one is left to cluster at his, and it is this isolation that tortures him, though it is fit punishment: as Haemon earlier pointed out, Creon, who at that point would listen to no counsel, would be happiest ruling over a deserted island. Alone and bereft at the end of the play, Creon receives his just desserts. There is irony in this, too, since just desserts is what Creon and Polynices both told themselves they stood for.

Creon becomes, over the course of the play, a tyrant, but that need not be seen as his essence. In the end he learns his lesson, something that cannot be said of Antigone. Antigone mirrors Creon, but imperfectly. She represents the absolute imperative of mourning in opposition to Creon's principle of justice. In the absolutism of the imperative, we see

her immoderation. She does not deliberate or equivocate any more than Creon does. Both are sure of themselves; too sure. She stands opposed to Creon's edict, but unlike Creon, she ends where she begins, staunchly supporting her cause. Her character does not change, though her cause does shift subtly. She begins speaking on behalf of the gods of the underworld. The dead must be buried regardless of their deeds in the human world. She ends claiming a particular devotion to her brother, Polynices, son of her mother. No child or husband, she says, could move her to the same self-sacrifice.P Antigone's position shifts, perhaps as a result of her clash with Creon which may harden her, perhaps as a result of her disappointment with Ismene, who does not join her cause and offers only later to share her fate. While Antigone begins the play with the passionate declaration that the dead must be buried, and proclaims that all the dead are seen as equal by the gods of the underworld and must be so treated, she ends with a different claim, one that extols the singular importance to her of Polynices, to whom she refers as "son of my mother."16

These shifts and ambiguities notwithstanding, in her fundamental devotion to the cause of mourning, perhaps even stuck in melancholic yearning, Antigone does not waiver. Creon, by contrast, represents an absolute principle too, but his character changes: He begins in the voice of a measured lawgiver, then becomes a tyrant, and then learns to regret and tries to undo what he has done. There is no such curvature in Antigone, who dies unrepentant, albeit with some regret for her inability to claim entry into the kinship structure (which she, as a daughter of incest, surely troubles [Steiner, Butler]) by way of marriage and motherhood.

Most commentators comment upon the worth of Antigone's cause-the dead must be buried; the gods of the underworld must not be denied, the oral law must be respected; at the very least, she is said to help illustrate the idea that, as the blind seer Tiresias says later in the play, there must be a balance between human (Creon) and divine (Antigone) law (though Creon claims the gods too, for his side, and Antigone as the daughter and sister of previous kings is also identified to some extent with human law) (Gellrich 48-52). That the play calls for balance is clearly right; but this message does not by itself argue only against Creon. Antigone herself seeks not balance but rather fulfillment of her duty to her brother, no matter the cost. The point of the playas a tragedy surely must be that disaster would have followed as well had Antigone had her way, had mourning triumphed over justice. Mourning Polynices would fulfill an obligation, but to grace him with such rites would have left justice (giving each his due) undone. And this is no

small matter. Leaving justice undone was the omission of which Oedipus was accused, after all. It is only when Thebes is visited by a plague, after many years of Oedipus' rule, that Oedipus is finally led to open an inquiry into the death of Laius, the king whom Oedipus succeeded. Laius' murderer had never been found, had not even been actively sought, and had never been brought to justice. The plague is a sign: although the Thebans had mourned their king, they had not ever done him justice and, for this failure, Thebes is punished. It is as a result of the ensuing inquiry that Oedipus discovers a series of awful truths: the stranger he killed on the road to Thebes was in fact King Laius. Laius was Oedipus' true father. And Jocasta, the widowed queen whom Oedipus married upon his arrival in Thebes (the prize given to him for liberating Thebes from the terror of the Sphinx by solving her riddle), was none other than his own mother.

In sum, the play cannot be read as siding with either of its protagonists nor with either one's cause or principles. Instead, the play insists on the simultaneous necessity of justice and mourning. The play stages their conflict in a circumstance that renders the two incommensurable: In the context of treason, the two principles-the dead must be mourned; justice must be done-are incommensurable. The dead Polynices is left to die like an animal because he is a traitor. He is not left outside the city, like a true traitor, but rather inside its bounds. He is inside the city but not buried like a true member; rather he is left out to rot and to be fed upon by wildlife. Simon Goldhill points out: "the tensions of the play are emphasized by having Polynices' body left on the land of the city."17 Indeed. It is Polynices' liminality as both member of and traitor to Thebes that positions him in death as so deeply and troublingly productive of a non-negotiable incommensurability. Thus, the play calls the audience to interrogate the incommensurability that Laqueuer reports on, to reflect on the circumstances in which incommensurability is produced, the circumstances in which people die like dogs, and their aftermath.

Burial Rites

For some readers, Antigone's inflexibile commitment to her cause is a shortcoming, but it is clearly also the source of her great power. Perhaps, however, we should read her inflexibility not as cause but rather as effect. What so many take to be a sign of backbone, or principle-

Antigone's inflexibility-may be a sign of melancholic stuckness, an effect of her inability, given Creon's prohibition, to mourn Polynices properly, ritually. What Antigone may point us to, in other words, is not only the importance of mourning, and justice, but also their insufficiency. She may point us beyond that pairing to ritual burial. Burial is named as the second of the pair of acts forbidden by Creon: Recall Antigone says early in the play, that it has been decreed that Polynices must be left "unwept, unburied." Unwept, unburied is the condition as well of Sophie's children, whose mourning is not forbidden by a sovereign ruler but is rather disabled by the circumstances of genocide and by Sophie's own quest for some sort of life after the crime of infanticide in which she is horribly implicated. Both characters, deprived of the rituals ofdeath, are stuck in melancholy and live out a death-identified existence. Neither really belongs among the living. Antigone's name, which means against generation, makes the point, as does her identification with the gods of the underworld. After Auschwitz, Sophie walks the line between life and death. Seduced into the English language by Dickenson's thanato-erotic poetry, Sophie does not care about living; she just does not want Nathan to die alone: "I don't care that I'll die. I'm afraid that he'll die without me" (as her children did).

Alongside the decree ofjustice and the edict against mourning, next to truth and reconciliation, rights and loss, lies-burial: those rites and rituals by way of which we inter the dead. Inter? The word comes from Middle English meaning, to put into the ground-in terra. For the nineteenth-century philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, however, the function of burial, is not just to inter but also to inter-rupt the processes whereby the interred dead might become merely part of the mere organicism of nature. We, the living, put ourselves in the way, to interrupt the mere decomposition ofdeath. With the word and deed of ritual, we insert ourselves into nature's processes and claim even the dead for the human community. In so doing, we, humans, (specifically the sister in the family unit who is obligated in Hegel's ideal state to bury the brother), in so doing we, (though Hegel does not note it), take on the role of the gods in Homeric Greece, who were said to have warded off the decomposition and disfigurement of Greek heroes by way of active intervention. As Jean-Pierre Vernant explains, drawing on three episodes reported in the Iliad and elsewhere,

In all three cases, the scenario is about the same. The gods miraculously save the hero from the shame of abuse that-by disfiguring,

denaturing his body until it is no longer recognizable as his own, or even as a human body, or even as a body at all-would reduce him to a state of nonbeing. To preserve him as he was, the gods perform the human rituals of cleansing and beautification but use divine unguents: these elixirs of immortality preserve "intact," despite all the abuse, that youth and beauty which can only fade on the body of a living man [because, as this statement implies but does not aver, not only death but also life itself involves decomposition]. [D]eath in battle fixes forever on the hero's form [his youth and beauty]' just as a stele remains erect forever to mark a tomb.l"

What was then true for Greek heroes, that they would not be allowed to die like dogs, is true in Hegel's ideal state for all humans, and it generates an obligation to grant to all the right to have rites. We do not let humans die like dogs. (Of course, we ought not to let dogs do so, either.) We, the community, interrupt the decomposition of nature, (if not literally, with embalming, then figuratively with funerary practice), inserting the community into nature's process to mark the end of a life.19

The service we provide to the dead when we oblige their right to have rites is always also self-serving. Beth Knox, founder of a non-profit resource center for after-death care alternatives, says that "During a time of mourning, especially after a sudden, unexpected death, people want to feel useful. But all too often, the expression of condolence-'Is there anything I can do?'-has no response. In this country, where 99 percent of all deaths are handled by funeral directors, there's rarely anything of substance for friends and family to do. But giving people a taskpicking up the death certificate, buying more dry ice, building the coffin or digging the grave - provides a physical way to work throughgrief."2o Service to the dead provides survivors with the work needed to work through the death. This gives a literal and insightful cast to the current favored expression for grief: working through.

Burial, cremation, tending to the body, the rites of death are, as Antigone must have in some sense known, a way to work through, by working through (with physical labor), the loss of the other and the otherness ofloss. IfAntigone is stuck in melancholic mourning, that may be not because she is mourning a transgressive relation to her mother or the forbidden feminine (though these suppositions generate sharp readings of the text from Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler)." If Antigone is melancholic, stuck in her bereavement, that may be because the work that would allow her to work (physically) through grief is specifically denied to her.

The work of mourning and burial is increasingly the subject of various, sometimes conflicting political struggles in the u.s. and Europe. Some (consumer groups or advocates of green burial, for example) seek to resist the takeover of death rites by funeral homes and state institutions; others call on state institutions to enable death rituals to occur (as when family members demand that the government seek the return of lost soldiers' bodies from the battlefield). As the historian of Ancient Greece, Robert Garland, notes, dying practices have changed over the last one hundred years, from home deaths to hospitals, from death, in "the presence of one's closest kin [clustered] around a death-bed [which was] general in all ranks of society" to mid-twentieth century practices in which "the majority of people die alone in a hospital bed with only medical attendants for company."22 Garland also notes that death rites are "the one ceremony in a person's passage through life invariably attended by a minister [and this] indicates that scruples and uncertainties continue to exist regarding death itself." It may. Or it may signal the existence of monopoly power in the death market.

When Garland concludes "I know of no popular reform movement to challenge the church's undisputed authority in this area," he unwittingly issues an invitation for further research. As it turns out, the politics of which he was unaware (in 1985, the year of the first edition ofhis book) has come into existence, albeit directed more toward the state than the church. Whether for reasons having to do with ignorance, indifference, or the power of the undertakers' lobby, misinformation about burial rites is rife, and some groups have arisen to address the problem. u.s. activists publicize the little known permissibility in most states of burying the dead on private property and keeping the body at home before burial. Some seek to educate "the family to act as funeral directorlegal in almost all states in the United States.,,23 The Funeral Consumers Alliance warns that state officials routinely give out false information. In Vermont, for example, families are erroneously told that they may not transport their own dead for burial, that caskets are required for burial, (an "unsupported interpretation of Vermont statutes"), and that bodies crossing the Vermont border must be embalmed.i" The errors regarding caskets and embalming are particularly egregious because they conflict with the religious tenets of Muslims and Jews who often bury their dead in direct contact with the earth and without ernbalming.P Proponents of green burial advocate similar practices for environmental rather than religious reasons.

Focusing on the body and burial can also be a way to avoid political

engagement rather than stage it, however. This is the argument made by Thomas Hawley who analyzes the political consequences of demands of U.S. families that Vietnam war casualties, the bodies of their dead or missing family members, U.S soldiers and personnel, be accounted for and returned to the U.S. by the U.S. and Vietnamese governments after 1975. The focus on burial and the victorious retrieval of the body from (previously) enemy soil was, Hawley argues, a displaced way to experience victory in that already lost conflict. Moreover, it enabled the U.S. to avoid confrontation with the political aftermath of that war and its losses.26 Hawley is right to ask after the effects of the national focus on repatriation, but that focus sometimes leads him to sound like he fails to appreciate the importance of the body to survivors. A political analysis of the nationalist and nationalizing effects of the POW/MIA movement can also at the same time affirm rather than undermine familial demands for the return of loved ones. Or better, such familial demands can be made otherwise.

In the realm of tragedy, Dickens and Dickinson meet in the aftermath of human cruelty, betrayal and genocide; it is the realm in which Sophie and Antigone dwell as living dead, in which Nathan and Creon cry out for justice but no one responds. At its best, mourning-work does not just retrench existing boundaries ofself, community, and nation and condemn us to repeat our current traumas, as Hawley suggests is the case with the U.S. focus on repatriation after Vietnam. At its best, mourningwork also points us beyond ourselves. At its best, mourning-work asks us to extend ourselves in a kind of self-overcoming toward an other and toward a future, beyond the divide of nature and culture, the human and non-human, because in burial (as in life) all such distinctions slide and we are left not with the gladness of a new day but with a rather murky river. What lies beyond Stingo's mo[u]rning, beyond Antigone's revenge-seeking love for Polynices as philos, even though he is also an ekhthros to Thebes, beyond Laqueur's incommensurably coupled mourning and justice? Perhaps a different kind of mourning-work, not a working through but rather a loving letting go, such as that imagined by Whitman in Reconciliation, where the sharedness of death itself, that ultimate other, and the power of the word, work some sort of a magic and draw the living to the dead in the moment ofritual burial. The encounter is intimate. The body here is neither a corpus delecti nor the basis of shared memory. Instead forgetting is invoked and the evanescence of time affirmed. There is here no Antigonean call for vengeance, no declaration of the satisfactions of justice, no triumphalism-just a sense of shared

vulnerability and mortality, with a nod to literariness and its abundant powers:

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world: For my enemy is dead-a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin-I draw near; I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Notes

I. The corpus delecti is a witness to the crime that "can be made to speak the truth by providing evidence about how it came to die," a status attributable to a corpse since 1941 and which originates, ironically, in the Nazis' exposure of Russian crimes at Katyn. Thomas Laqueur, "The Dead Body and Human Rights," in The Body, eds. Sean Sweeney and Ian Hooder (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 92.

2. When there is no one left to testify, and even when there is, the speaking body is an important part of the apparatus of human rights protection, prosecution and public mourning. However, the public in question may be far from that to which the dead body might best have spoken, as is clear in the case of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

3. Upon hearing that Nathan has threatened to kill her and Stingo, Sophie says "I don't care that I'll die. I'm afraid that he'll die without me" (as her children did). On thanatoeroticism and Greek tragedy, see Taxidou.

4. On the conjoining of wedding and burial rites in Ancient Greece, see Taxidou and Rush Rehm.

5. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "William Styron's Sophie's Choice: Poland, the South, and the Tragedy of Suicide," Southern Literary ]oumaI34.1 (2001) 56-67.

6. In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Whitman says, "Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refreshed."

7. Is Creon not impotent? His first act of would-be power is to issue an edict which, though announced is at first not heard by everyone - Ismene is not aware of it until Antigone tells her-and is then grumbled about by the people and is finally disobeyed, not once but twice. Antigone, who melancholically mourns her irreplaceable brother, but calls children replaceable while knowing she will never have any of her own, mirrors Sophie, but also inverts her.

B. On the significance of Antigone's call for vengeance, see my "Antigone's Laments,

Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Institution of Exception," in Political Theary, Feb. 2009.

9. "Athens and Thebes in myth and tragedy have an interdependent relationship, Thebes usually standing in for the other of Athens, for all the things of which the democratic state wants to rid itself' Taxidou, p. 127. Louis Gernet suggests (in Michelle Gellrich's parsing) that tragedy's "orientation toward the social context is interrogative and even adversarial, for it holds us in the grip of conflicts that various mechanisms of the culture aim to neutralize and dissipate" (Gellrich [68], parsing Gernet, Droit et Societe dans la Grece Ancienne, 1955: 61-81).

10. I was reminded of this line of Vernant when I attended a talk by Viv Soni at Northwestern in January 07. This paper owes a debt to our conversation after the talk, in which we argued for very different readings of the play. Much of my exposition of the play here is a continuation of that useful and enjoyable argument.

II. As Butler points out, the fact that Creon's edict is circulated orally (and imperfectly) makes it especially hard to sustain the notion that Creon stands for written law and Antigone for the unwritten (as Hegel claims).

12. Haemon does speak of the people's support for Antigone (690-700) but Antigone sees herself as friendless and alone (876-82, 916-20). Moreover, the death she gets, hidden, in a cave, is not the public glorious one she imagines for herself, when she says "I will suffer nothing, So bad as to deny me a death with honor" [114-5]).

13. Since violations of these rules were by this time not uncommon (and were soon to become even more common, during the Peloponnesian Wars), it may have been Sophocles' intent to call attention to this issue as well. On the increasing violation of rules of war after the Peloponnesian Wars and the ensuing controversies, see Jill Frank, "Wages ofWar: Judgment in Plato's Republic" in Political Theary, Vol. 35, NO·4, 443-467 (20°7).

14. Indeed, as Jill Frank points out in a comment on Nonet's Antigone, Tiresias will later say that Creon was a good ruler (994). Frank nicely observes that this suggests Ismene was not cowardly but astute when, early in the play, she chose to wait rather than to challenge Creon's edict. At the beginning of the play, it is not yet clear that Creon's edict is unjust, nor that he is a tyrant. He isn't, yet.

IS. On the uniqueness of Polynices, about which a great deal needs to be said, see my "From Lamentation to Logos: Antigone's Offensive Speech."

16. This phrasing leads some commentators (Irigaray, Butler) to suggest that the real object of Antigone's affection is not Polynices, but rather the forbidden feminine, or the mother, [ocasta, for whom Antigone yearns and with whom she could only have an attenuated relationship (mediated by a male figure, a brother) in this increasingly patriarchal society.

17· On this point, see Goldhill (89, n. 18) Reading Greek Tragedy.

18. Mortals and Immortals, 74; Achilles' disfigurement ofHektor is discussed on p. 70, (citing Iliad 22. 401-3). The idea that decomposition begins in life (with aging) and is a source of anxiety, (as it obviously is in our culture and as it surely was in Homeric Greece, a fact to which Priam, Hektor's father, is all too alert) suggests that in concerns about the decomposition of the dead, there may be a certain displacement (and vice versa).

19· Not all cultures seek to interrupt nature's processes in the same way. In Judaism and Islam, embalming is forbidden because it slows the processes of decomposition. For

others, embalming is valued for that very reason, as in ancient Egypt and Homeric Greece. Notably, Thebes, the mythic Greek city, had been the capital of Egypt, thousands of years earlier, marking a point of contact in mythic and theatrical terms for a historical supposition (ventured by Vernant and noted above): that the Greeks may well have been familiar with Egyptian practices of embalming. The reference to oils and unguents as ingredients of physical restoration in Homer certainly suggests it.

20. Emphasis added. Ken Picard, "Dead Wrong: Are Vermonters getting stiffed on the facts about home funerals?" in Seven Days, or/31/o7, available at: http://www.seven daysvt.com/features/2007/dead-wrong.html (accessed 03/rB/07). Beth Knox says, "It's amazing the amnesia we have as a society," she says. "In every room I lecture in there's someone who says, 'We cared for my great aunt that way,' or whatever. In two generations, this information has been lost to us."

2 I. See Butler, Antigone's Claim and Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman.

22. Garland, The Greek Way ofDeath, p 16-17.

23. Crossings also describes itself as "A home funeral and green burial resource center" (Crossings.net). See also Rachel S. Cox, "A Movement to Bring Grief Back Home: Many Bereaved Opting to Bypass Funeral Industry," The Washington Post, Sunday, June 5, 2005, P A01; Vince Darcangelo, "Taking care of our own: Beth Knox educates the public on home death-care options," Boulder Weekly, available at http://www.boulder weekly.corn/archive/r I0603/buzzlead.html (accessed 03/IB/07). See also Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love (Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access Books, r9B7), a state-bystate compendium of laws governing the handling of the dead without an undertaker, authored by Lisa Carlson, founder of the Funeral Ethics Organization, Hinesburg, VT. On the power of the undertakers' lobby and state interests in the matter, see Judith Chevalier and Fiona M. Scott Morton, "State Casket Sales and Restrictions: A Pointless Undertaking?" (February 2006). NBER Working Paper No. WI20I2 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=B8r246 (accessed 03/rB/07).

24. Specifically, Slocum traces misinformation to Vital Statistics Director Richard McCoy and Chief Medical Examiner Stephen Shapiro. Slocum's documentations were in a seven-page letter to Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell and Vermont Commissioner of Health Sharon Moffatt. Picard, "Dead Wrong", available at http://www.seven daysvt.com/features/2007/dead-wrong.html

25. In fact, Vermont law explicitly prohibits such conflicts between state and religious law in matters of burial. The statute reads: "A bylaw or regulation shall not be adopted to restrain a person in the free exercise ofhis religious sentiments as to the burial ofthe dead."

26.The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia (Politics, History, and Culture) by Thomas M. Hawley. I was first alerted to this book by an excellent review of it. See Joan Cocks in Political Theory, April 2007.

Bibliography

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E. Patrick]ohnson

Stranger Blues: Otherness, Pedagogy, and a Sense of "Home"

Hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more

Ray Charles

There's no place like home.

Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ

Historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension. Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one's homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist.

bell hooks!

In his 1961 hit, "Hit the Road Jack," Ray Charles sings of a relationship 11 h" d" ("J k") "hi h d" gone sour as a woman te s er no goo man ac to it t e roa and never to return. Because this ditty is steeped in the blues tradition, listeners familiar with the blues aesthetic know two things for sure about

the characters in this song: namely, that it's not the first time the woman has thrown the man out of the house and secondly, that she will most likely forgive him and eventually take him back. This is the life of a blues couple playing out the ritual blues love narrative-breach of trust and/or indiscretion; heartache, emotional and sometimes physical conflict, followed by a physical separation; and, reconciliation or permanent love loss. While the everyman "Jack" of Charles' song is thrown out of his home by a scorned lover, Dorothy of Wizard ofOz is transplanted by a tornado and literally "hits the road"-a yellow brick one at that. Dorothy's adventures while away from home are meant to teach her the value of friendship, loyalty, and most of all, that "home" is more of a state of mind than a physical place.

Moving from an individual relationship to a more communal one, bell hooks constructs home as a site where the collective oppression of a people forges an epistemology of resistance. Her "homeplace" is more rooted to a physical space than Dorothy's "home," but it, too, relies on the development of a particular consciousness about, in this case, racial oppression. hooks' homeplace is also a site of safety, a haven from the pressures of living in a racist and sexist society.

In this essay, I wish to employ these three figurations of home-ritual return, state of mind, and site of resistance-as meta-critical tools to rethink our notion of the Other. What happens, for instance, when we recast the Other in phenomenological terms rather than anthropological ones? In other words, what happens when we confront the self as the Other? When we tum the imperial gaze back on ourselves? This move is not meant to reinscribe a solipsistic focus on the self in relation to the subjugated Other, as witnessed in recent self-reflexive and auto/ethnographic accounts'; rather, it is offered as a re-imagining of how we conceptualize the Other-not as always the "not-me," but sometimes as the "not notme."3 In other words, thinking about how the self becomes Other in specific contexts may encourage us to disavow the imperialism that is implicit in our gaze upon those who are other to us in favor of a more performative and dialogic way of indexing our and others' humanity.

In order to engage the question of how the self becomes Other, I begin at home--quite literally: the home where I grew up, my temporary homes in graduate school, and my institutional homes. As I demonstrated above with Ray Charles, Dorothy, and bell hooks, place and space, history, local knowledge, and familial and social ties always vex one's relationship to his/her home. And whether one is forced to leave home, leaves of his/her own volition, or leaves and returns on a daily,

monthly, or yearly basis, one can never return home the same person. Something occurs in the temporal and spatial interstices outside and within the "home" that affects how one relates to self and to others. My interest here, therefore, is the extent to which this temporal and spatial betwixt and between alters one's consciousness about who one thinks one is in the world and what one does with that newfound knowledge. To be sure, race, class, gender, and sexuality inform this process and it is these identity markers that I believe fuel the tension between the self as Same and the self as Other. This is the case, I believe, in relation to all three of my "homes."

I also want to employ performance as a way to understand this process. As a teacher and scholar of performance studies, I believe that performance as a critical trope has much to offer in theorizing notions of the Other. Indeed, Wallace Bacon (1914-2001), who founded and served as chair of the Department of Interpretation (now Performance Studies) at Northwestern from 1947 to 1979, is widely credited with being one of the first to theorize performance as offering a "sense of the Other."! A "sense of the other" is the concept that grants conceptual coherence and intellectual radiance to his expansive scholarly career. The film documentary celebrating his years of teaching and research at Northwestern was titled significantly "A Sense of the Other." Moreover, his deep and abiding interest in "the otherness of others" prefigured the explosion of interest in "difference" and "the Other" that characterizes contemporary cultural studies. Following on the heels of Bacon was Dwight Conquergood (1949-20°4), also former chair of Performance Studies at Northwestern and student of Bacon's, who forever changed the landscape of the field by employing Bacon's work on the Other and performance to think about ethnographic research as performance and as a way to engage the Other in what he termed "dialogic performance." Conquergood writes: "The aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another. It is a kind ofperformance that resists conclusions; it is intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between performer and text open and ongoing.:" While Conquergood is still referring to an ethnographic Other here, it is his theorization of self-reflexivity that is particularly appealing to me as I think about how an encounter with an Other vis-a-vis performance might be a site to encounter the self as Other as well.

What follows is a personal meditation about my "homes" and their impact on how I became a stranger to myself in relation to my familial, social, and professional Others. I try to demonstrate how, in each con-

text, my race, class, gender, and sexual orientation confounded my subject position with relation to those around me, such that my consciousness about my identity in relation to others was forever altered. Ultimately, this process taught me that going "home" is never as simple as traveling to a place. Rather, going home has the potential to unravel the tightly woven narratives we often tell ourselves about our families, our friends, our colleagues-ourselves. Indeed, with regard to self and other, I argue, as Wallace Bacon does, that "The two become one and yet remain two. At the heart of the metaphor, always, lies the paradox."?

Project Epistemology: A Theory in the Flesh

In their path breaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back, Chicana lesbian theorists Cherne Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua coined the phrase "theory in the flesh" to intervene in the predominance of western thought to the exclusion of theories produced by people ofcolor. Alternatively, Moraga and Anzaldua define a theory in the flesh as "one where the physical realities of our lives-our skin color, the land or concrete where we grew up, our sexual longings-all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity" (23). Their reconceptualization of "theory" as located in one's life experiences speaks directly to how those who may lack "book learning"-particularly working-class people of colorlocate their epistemologies of self and other within the context of being disenfranchised and on the margins of society. This metaphor aptly shows how I came to know myself and my world. This realization came from accompanying my mother to work as a domestic for a wealthy white family.

I was born in 1967, the youngest of seven children raised by a single mother. From 1949 to 1974 my family lived in a one-bedroom apartment. My five brothers and sister slept in three beds crammed into the bedroom. My mother and I slept on a pullout sofa bed in the living room. Next, we lived for twelve years in public housing. During my formative years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my mother could not afford childcare, so she took me with her to the Olsens', the white family for whom she worked as a domestic. On the salary she earned from that job, she fed, clothed, and nurtured all seven children. While Christmases were lean, she still managed to buy us gifts and we always had a tree-however sparsely decorated. The image of the Olsens' posh threebedroom home across the railroad tracks-filled, as it was, with "things"

I was forbidden to touch--contrasted starkly with our one bedroom apartment in Ridgeview, the all-black neighborhood in the foothills of western North Carolina where I grew up. The concept of "rich" and "poor," however, were foreign to me. My mother never discussed the Olsens or our family in those terms. All I knew was our home, our car, and the other things we had were "different" from the Olsens'. Many times the Olsens gave us things they no longer wanted-televisions, clothes, kitchen appliances, toys. Only later did I realize the Olsens were wealthy and they were giving my family their "hand-me-downs." Even after realizing our class status, I never felt materially deprived because of how my family and community created a vibrant and "wealthy" cultural and creative environment. The community where I grew up prided itself in considering everyone "family." If someone were in need, it was a community and not a personal issue.

This sense of community counteracted any angst I might have had about not owning many material objects. My feeling of community also gave me a foundation for understanding how race is integral to the epistemology of class. In other words, the black community of my youth taught me that being black in a racist society limited one's access to material wealth. But it would not necessarily prevent me from producing cultural and intellectual wealth. During my early years, my community taught me survival skills I have often deployed in the academy. The housing projects we lived in were not as hard as those in large northern cities such as New York and Chicago. Still, we had to develop street smarts to survive our deleterious conditions. Indeed, we developed our own theories in the flesh. This meant finding creative ways to get the material goods and knowledge we needed to survive or even rise above our lot in life.

This also meant asking my mother questions about everything (much to her chagrin). Meanwhile, I was readily absorbing knowledge the community folk shared at the dinner table, at the local barbershop, or at church. These social and cultural settings and institutions helped us learn about politics, social etiquette, the "man," and (black) history. These were the spaces and places where the wealth of cultural knowledge eclipsed material poverty.

These safe spaces neutralized the racism and classism we experienced elsewhere, such as at school. As I suggested above, class, race, gender and sexuality are often key signifiers of difference in higher education. Thus, it was in first grade that I learned I was "colored." A classmate and I were fighting over a record and we ended up breaking

it in two pieces. Our teacher, Mrs. White, ran to us, snatched the two pieces from our hands and yelled, "You two little colored boys!" Con, fused and traumatized, I went home and told my mother what had hap' pened. I asked her why Mrs. White had called me "colored." My mother replied, "Because you are." My mother then said "colored" was one of many names I would be called, but those names had nothing to do with my ability or the fact I had a family that loved me. On that day in 1973 I learned what it meant to be a racial Other-a lesson I learned through a reprimand. The lesson was undergirded by the fact I was a poor black boy who was part of the first class of children to integrate the Hickory City school system.

Ironically, Mrs. White eventually became my patron. She paid for my first piano lessons, bought me a clarinet for band, and sent me money throughout college. Despite my being "colored," she felt compelled to encourage the drive and creativity she saw in me in my early years. Con, versely, her benevolent racism helped me develop a "reading" strategy discerning the motivations behind the good deeds of white folk. I car, ried this reading strategy down the yellow brick road to the ivory tower.

The community center was another place to learn. In her essay, "Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition," bell hooks says there are two modes of black performance. One is ritualistic as a part of culture building. The second is manipulative and comes from the necessity to survive in an oppressive world (210). She suggests these two modes are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they are interrelated given how the skills implicit in black expressive culture are both required and deployed for ritual play and for resistive action. Offering her own personal narrative about the importance of "live arts" in her childhood, hooks suggests that in her community performance was a vehicle for black people to communicate alternative forms of expression that expanded the bound, aries of what was deemed acceptable to "the dominant white culture, and to the decorum of African-American cultural mores."? Indeed, black performance is at the intersection of black political life and art, providing the lynchpin that sustains and galvanizes arts and acts of resistance.

I, like hooks, recall how black women in my community staged black plays and encouraged us children to memorize and recite the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. The women encouraged us to do this to instill race pride and to counter the lack of exposure to black writers and artists we were getting in the public schools. This was grassroots organizing that used one of the

community's most valuable resources: the spoken word. These community leaders lacked the political clout to change the city school's curriculum. So they devised their own ways to counteract the white, bourgeois, culturally sanctioned protocols of reading. They made us memorize-and thereby personally experience-the literature black culture deemed fundamentally important.

This emphasis on black literature helped us overcome the overreliance on white writers the white teachers gave us in our newly desegregated schools. Our access and exposure to an alternative tradition provided us a way to counter the one-sided pedagogy our teachers offered in school. Therefore, I could easily contradict my teachers' suggestion that Shakespeare's "Sonnet 16" is the pinnacle of literature by reciting Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel." Had not Mrs. Flossie Saddler, Mrs. Z. Ann Hoyle, and Mrs. Bonnie Rice-the women in my community who were black literary oracles-given me this insight, the trajectory of my educational career might have been drastically different.

While my homeplace provided fecund ground for me to learn new ways of thinking about my racial and class self, there were not too many models for me to learn about my gendered and sexual self. The otherness of my gender and sexuality, then, began to emerge, as I grew older. Therefore, when I left home to attend the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill, I began to mis-perform masculinity. Because of the ways in which effeminacy in men is linked to gayness, my bad performance only intensified growing suspicions about my sexual identity. At the time, I did not realize how bad my performance was, in part because effeminacy was not necessarily a signifier of gayness back home. Or if it was, one's performance of femininity had to be so hyperbolic that there was no question that the man in question was clearly a "sissy." Because my "flame" didn't burn as bright, at home I was able to camouflage my budding homosexuality. But not at UNe. I could run, but I certainly could not hide. Still, I continued to date women--one woman in particular-and perform heterosexuality. Ironically, it took moving deeper into the South for me to fully come to terms with my sexuality. I say ironically because it was also this move that exposed me to some of the most blatant forms of racism I had experienced in my life. It was the first instance in which I simultaneously experienced the self as same and the self as Other.

In 1991, I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in the Department of Speech Communication at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was the only school that offered me a scholarship.

I attended LSU hoping to leave graduate school debt free and knowing more about the "Deep South." Unfortunately, I left graduate school in greater debt and my experience in Louisiana was more a test of endurance than anything remotely productively pedagogical. The "lessons" I learned while living in Baton Rouge reminded me that desegregation in some parts of the South is true in law but not in practice. It was the first time in my life I experienced blatant racism-a racism that other blacks in Louisiana expected and accepted. Everyone, black and white, knew his or her place.

I knew from my welcome to Baton Rouge that it was not going to be a pleasant time in my life. I rented an apartment near campus sight unseen. My landlord was surprised when she saw I was black. It was a sixteen-hour drive from Durham, North Carolina to Baton Rouge. I made the trip in a fourteen-foot U-Haul truck with my mother and grandmother. I was towing a Honda Civic. I expected a "professional" greeting when I walked into the rental office. Instead, Crystal, the property manager, a plump white woman with blond and greasy hair greeted me with, "Oh, my God. You're not Patrick Johnson! I just wasn't prepared for you to be black. You didn't sound black over the phone. You know, I can usually pick 'em out over the phone based on the stereotype, but you didn't have that drawl like most of 'em have."

After my initial shock, I considered Crystal what many folks in my community would call "po' white trash." In that moment in the rental office, her racism tapped into my class prejudice-a class prejudice both the schooling I had and the schooling I had come seeking undergirded. Still I felt this po' white trash had the power to keep me from offering a rebuttal to her comments. She might have the power to prevent me from living in that apartment complex. Thus, I politely smiled and replied, "Well, I'm here to get the keys and move in." My response was a performance of deference that black folk have employed since being brought to this country; my class status was not going to alter that deferential dance in this instance. I had watched my mother and grandmother perform the same dance on their jobs as domestic workers. So I had lots of practice. The difference this time, I would later learn, was that my "Miss Ann'" hadn't finished high school, had four "doorstep" children (ages two, three, four, and six) and one on the way, and was barely making ends meet despite not having to pay to live on the property. My landlord knew that in Baton Rouge she still had power over me notwithstanding her lower class status. Her white skin trumped all my identity cards.

I, on the other hand, knew Crystal's life was going nowhere compared to mine. Which was worse, her racism or my bourgeois condescension; her plight as a single mother living in a sexist society or my being a young black gay man in the Deep South? We were both victims of a white supremacist, patriarchal, heterosexist, classist society whose relationship to that status was mitigated by our race, gender and sexual orientation. While my racial difference was an impediment in certain contexts, my upbringing instilled in me a drive to overachieve. Crystal's racial difference was never an impediment as much as her status as working class. Although one could argue that her class background "caused" her racial prejudice, I would venture to say that her class background did not provide her with the culturally sanctioned skills of being racist. In other words, had Crystal been a middle class white woman, she might have treated me very differently-not because she was less racist, but because she would have been taught {vis-a-vis her social class} to be more subtle in her racism. In my hometown in North Carolina, the more blatant racism was preferred because, according to the older generation, when white folks were blatantly racist, you knew what you were up against and could react accordingly. The more subtle forms of racism were much more difficult to name and to fight against. Crystal's explicit racism, therefore, prepared me for what was to come.

One of the first things I encountered in Baton Rouge was the campaign for governor among three candidates. They were: Buddy Roemer, the incumbent Harvard law graduate, Edwin Edwards, the former threeterm governor who was indicted for embezzlement, and David Duke, a self-identified white supremacist. Edwards and Duke made it to the runoffs and Edwards eventually won. I was stunned Louisianans chose a crook and a racist over a scandal free lawyer from Harvard. Still, it was in keeping with everything else I was learning about Louisiana. The signs of the past were embroidered across the LSU campus. The first luncheon the graduate students in my department invited me to, was in the Plantation Room, an upscale cafeteria in the student union. For several weeks the student newspaper, the Daily Reveille, ran letters to the editor whose titles ranged from "Reader Fears Black Power," to "Reader Responds to Hot Rebel Flag Flying Issue," to "Reader Supports Duke, Slams Voter Drive," to "Homosexuality Has Raped Our Nation; Jesus Is the Answer," to "Women's Battle for Equal Rights Already Won." Discourse, an ultra-conservative campus paper backed by several faculty, mostly from the English department, began circulating on campus. Besides a regular column awarding a professor the "PC Faculty of the

Month," the newspaper often included a section called "PC Parlance," in which it satirized "leftist politically correct" speech. Terms and definitions making the list included "Menopuase, a Capitalist Plot"; "Ferninist, a Female Chauvinist Piglet"; "Homosexuality, Solipsism in a Mirror"; "Bigotry, a Rejection of Leftist Idolatry"; "Racism, Escapism through History"; "Welfare, the Idolization of Idleness"; and, "Compassion, an Emotional Substitute for Principle."? Other incidents included a cross burning, a "March for Equality" by white students protesting against part of their student fees funding a black cultural center, and countless debates about the "unfairness" of affirmative action.

Such events made being an LSU teaching assistant even more in, teresting. Daily, my white students, mostly native Louisianans, challenged the authenticity of my southerness. They said North Carolina is not really in the South. They would instruct me on the meaning of being a "proud" southerner. They did this by giving speeches in class on the beauty of the Confederate flag and one's right to fly it. Some days a few students would come to class inebriated, smuggling beer into the class' room. Their "southerness" lessons also included saying I would never make them forget their "heritage" by suggesting they pronounce the "ing" endings of words when giving speeches in my public speaking course. "There's no way you're gonna learn [sic] me to forget my her, itage. There's just no motherfuckin' way!" one student exclaimed.

A young white woman still in high school took one of my freshman courses. When her father learned she had a black male instructor, he hired another student to "follow" (i.e., stalk) me so he, the father, knew his daughter was safe.

In sum, the uppity Negro from up North was reminded over and over again there was definitely someone behind the curtain in Oz and this person was definitely not black, not queer, and not poor.

Although I99I to I993 were spiteful years, my LSU experiences taught me race and class must be considered in context. Like me, most of my white students were working-class, first,generation college stu, dents and were trying to make something of themselves. They too were reared in communities that afforded them cultural knowledge to frame their world. In the Deep South, however, our class similarities gave way to much older and longer,practiced racial traditions that said blacks, no matter how well educated-and often because of their education-were second,class citizens. My "sounding white" in Crystal's eyes, for in' stance, belied her conception of all blacks. She had simply learned to as' sume all blacks are incapable of speaking Standard English, even if she

and my motherfuckin' student don't speak Standard English (or do not wish to) either-although, ironically, they do not know it. Perhaps more revealing is how the black community women in my poor neighborhood taught me to speak proper English, despite the fact some of these women never finished high school. While their own experiences of being black and poor limited how far they succeeded in school, they still valued knowledge. "You might have been born in the projects, but the projects weren't born in you," Mrs. Barnhill, the Ridgeview librarian, and Jessie Jackson used to say.

Moving on Up to the East Side: Amherst College

In fall I993, Amherst College in Massachusetts, where I later became a faculty member, gave me a Five College Minority Dissertation Fellowship. My days at Amherst were the best of times and the worst of times. Amherst, where pedigree, region, and class make or break you, brought to the fore all the various aspects of my identity: blackness, queerness, maleness, lower classness, southerness, and so on. Nonetheless, when I arrived there I thought I had gone to Oz. Baton Rouge had been a living hell and Amherst College seemed an idyllic place to recover from the tragic drama of LSU. The Amherst English department had its own half million-dollar endowment; long distance phone calls and postage were limitless. Gone were the days of running copies on a mimeograph machine whose fumes sailed you to the moon; the "fairest" college as Amherst is called, also provided subsidized housing for its faculty and a budget to "entertain" students in faculty homes. I was in the land ofmilk and honey. I temporarily forgot the man behind the curtain.

Of almost one hundred and sixty professors, I was one of only seven African American faculty at Amherst. Moreover, I was one of four faculty in my department (one'was a black woman) who had attended public institutions of higher learning; most of my English Department colleagues attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. I was the only Southerner. Most students were second, third, and sometimes fourth generation college students whose parents and grandparents attended Amherst. While the student body was the most racially diverse among the consortium that made up the Five Colleges, sixty-five percent needed no financial aid despite paying $35,000 in tuition. Many students drove sport-utility vehicles, BMWs, Mercedes, and Volvos. I sported a I987 Toyota Corolla FX hatchback my brother bought me

when I moved to Massachusetts. I was often flabbergasted when overhearing students discussing their winter break plans, which, for example, included trips to Switzerland, London, Germany, Tokyo, or some exotic place in the Caribbean where they would spend time at their family's summer home.

Being surrounded by all of this wealth was foreign to me. My understanding of class included: the one bedroom apartment and the public housing of my childhood; the high-rise dorm of my undergraduate years; the modest LSU apartment Crystal managed; and the Department of Speech Communication, where paper clips were at a premium. I wasn't prepared for the lushness ofAmherst. I nonetheless got caught up in the veneer of Amherst-that's what it was, a shell of a place with no real soul under the surface-and bought the lie that I too could be happy at "this fine place so far from home.l"? The abundance of wealth and resources could not hide the fact that notwithstanding its professed liberalism, Amherst was a country club of good old boys with no interest in allowing undesirables (i.e., black, southern, working class, queer men) to join. As one black administrator warned me when I arrived on campus, "First they [Amherst faculty] seduce you. Then they feed you. And then they eat you." Eventually, when I was a candidate for a tenure-track position in the department I understood what she meant. The members of the department tolerated my "non-traditional" pedagogy (teaching literature through performance); "quaint" Southern ways (cooking for students); and "unsophisticated" research (performance studies and black gay vernacular), while I was a dissertation fellow and then lecturer. They figured some temporary exoticism at the college could be exciting. Nonetheless, they could never allow such leftfield things or a person like me to be a permanent part of the fabric of the fairest college. For instance, when the College authorized the English Department to conduct a search for a tenure-track faculty member to teach African American literature (at the time I was filling this position as a lecturer), I was encouraged to apply and was given a courtesy interview. Twice they offered the position to other candidates. Both candidates came to campus and left screaming. Rather than scrap the search, they reluctantly offered me-their last resort-the job. It was the beginning of a tortuous journey that would take its toll on my psychological, emotional, and professional well-being. Some mornings the thought of walking through the doors ofJohnson Chapel, where the department was housed, paralyzed me. To muster the courage to go to campus, I sat in the middle of my living room floor and sang Negro spirituals

trying to find some comfort, something to shield me from my colleagues' voices, which had become cancerous to my body.

I felt like Ellison's Invisible Man, who dreamed of finding an envelope with "an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold" reading: "To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."!' This line recurs to Invisible Man when he discovers the "letter of recommendation" from Dr. Bledsoe, president of his former college, contains a similar sentiment. After delivering the letter to several prospective employers without reading it himself, Invisible Man reads the note and realizes it has been a cruel joke meant to keep him in his place-to maintain the status quo. While there was no such let, ter in my case, I believe Amherst tried to stall my growth as a teacher and as a scholar by constantly saying I was not good enough to be among them. They wanted to keep this nigger-boy running. I had to do a men' tal flip to exorcise the running nigger image and translate it to the song we sang in my church back home: "Running for Jesus." The song is about survival and says no matter what trials or tribulations you go through, Jesus will help you "run and not get weary, walk and not faint."

Despite being in a department of hostile colleagues, teaching at Amherst was one of the highest moments of my professional career. The student population was quite diverse for a school of its size and the stu' dents were eager to be challenged. Teaching literature through performance was especially rewarding because it was new to the students and once they were introduced to this creative and intellectually stimulating approach to literature, they took it and ran with it. Performing also provided a vehicle through which the students could work through is, sues of race, class, gender, and sexuality because they were forced to embody identities of characters in literature that were often far from their own. These performances occasioned rich and difficult discussions about cultural appropriation, assumptions, and difference in ways that traditional literary criticism did not facilitate. Years after graduation, students wrote to me to say how my performance classes opened up the world to them that helped them see themselves and others differently. While, for the most part, the students at Amherst were intellectually engaged and politically progressive, among them were a group of conservatives that made the lives of some faculty-Le., its faculty of color-a living hell. Indeed, it would be these particular students who would bring into clear focus the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality as they have been historically intertwined when mapping racist and homophobic signs onto the black male body. If my colleagues didn't

view me as the lurking, animalistic sex machine, some of the students sure did.

One example came in the form of a backlash to an article that ran in one of the progressive student magazines, Capitol Pages. A student editor of this magazine asked me to give an interview for a special issue on sexual identity. He asked me to talk about the intersection of race and sexuality. I was quite candid in the interview about my experience with interracial dating in the gay community and how racism affects that coupling. Little did I know that the cover of the magazine would include a picture of me from a different context (doing warm up exercises in my performance class) and include a caption that read, "Not Exactly Straight: Sexual Identity at Amherst." But I figured that it was harmless enough. I figured wrong.

The conservative student magazine, the Amherst Spectator, latched on to one quote in particular from that interview: "I find that I'm suspect of any white man who is interested in me. I want to know why. Why are you interested? Is it because you think I have a big dick? Is it because you just love black skin?" The magazine took this as an opportunity to ridicule me in a very public way by repeating the quote and answering the rhetorical questions I posed: "No, Dr. Johnson, the answer is none of the above. We're interested in you because of your intentional crudeness, but more importantly, your supreme ignorance." The editors ended the article by attacking another quote from the interview: "Later in the article, Johnson mentions, 'White privilege is going to be present in any context where I'm automatically going to be discriminated against because of my skin color.' We would expect that kind of jaded, extremist sentiment from some factions of the student body, but a professor should know better." It's true. I should have known better than to be candid in a student magazine, for there are many ways that candor can come back to haunt you. Still, I was astonished by the audaciousness of the students' attack on me. Then again, I should not have been surprised given the level ofprivilege and entitlement these mostly white male students felt empowered to enact-whether their racism was directed toward a faculty member or not.

But they didn't stop with this one attack. One year later this same student magazine spoofed several students and professors by giving them "awards" that poked fun at their liberal ideas. In this issue of the magazine, the editors awarded me their "Bone Thugs-N-Harrnonvl- Award." The issue included a picture of a statue that resembled an Oscar, except the profile of this statue simulated a man holding his penis. The caption

under the image read: "Professor Johnson wins this award for all of his 'hard' work on yet another left-wing political cause." The plaque reads: The Macho Man Johnson knows all the tools of his trade. His equipment, we hear, is not only big, but also very powerful. And he's not afraid to flaunt it. But, we'll take his word for it. Here's to the chocophile in us all."

Some of my colleagues were outraged and the President of the College sent me a handwritten note stating that this kind of thing is not tolerated at Amherst and that these kids would get a "strong talking to." Needless to say, nothing happened to the students and things remained the same at Amherst. It finally dawned on me that there was indeed no wizard, but just another (white) man behind the curtain.

No Place Like Home

I discovered there was "no place like home" and took a leave of absence from Amherst after receiving a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, my undergraduate alma mater. The move "home" saved my life. The voices of my mother, grandmother, Mrs. Flossie Saddler, Mrs. Z. Ann Hoyle and Mrs. Bonnie Rice telling me to "run on" helped me keep my eyes on the prize.

Yes, this "nigger-boy" kept running until he escaped the lynch mob at Amherst. He kept running until, in 1998, he met and fell in love with his partner, who happens to be a white man. It's funny how the pedagogy of love brought us-two queer southern boys from opposite sides of North Carolina and from working class backgrounds-together. Unlike Crystal in Baton Rouge, my partner transcended his po' white trash background in order to open up the possibility of forging a romantic relationship across racial lines that does not exploit his white skin privilege. This is not to say that in the ten years that we have been together that we haven't had to be schooled in the ways ofhow to love across the color line. What it does mean, however, is that we both entered this "love academy" with an earnestness to exploit the possibilities of what the human spirit has to offer in spite of racial difference.

In 2000, we moved to Chicago together after I accepted a position in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Being offered a job in performance studies at Northwestern was a dream come true. All of my professors had graduated from that department, including my dissertation advisor, and it is one of only two performance

studies departments in the country. I was also excited about teaching graduate students for the first time.

At Northwestern, I can finally say that I have arrived "home." The students, while not as diverse as Amherst, LSU, or UNC, are smart and engaged. The graduate students in particular feed me intellectually and are some of the most committed people I know. Surrounded by supportive colleagues, Northwestern helped me run on to publish my books, obtain tenure, and be promoted to full professor. So, although I'm still running, this time, it's own my own terms, as I have become chair of the department. Like Dorothy, I had to discover that "home" is what you carry inside you.

I began this essay with the charge of rethinking how we conceptualize the Other, by recasting the self as Other. I trust that the foregoing personal narrative-my stranger blues, if you will-has offered an example of this reconfiguration. As a black, gay, southern, feminist, revolutionary, my presence in the academy already marks me as Other, but the process through which that othering occurs is not always obvious. Hopefully, these snapshots of my life experiences provide some examples of how one poor, queer, "colored" boy entered the process and managed to survive. While I'm not so naive as to think I'll soon see the end of being an Other, I am fierce enough to know that the "schooling" I received in the projects, for which lowe my Ph.D. in how to read and write, is the only weapon this little colored boy needs to "run on."

Notes

I. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 199°),42.

2. For more on the potential pitfalls of self-reflexive anthropology and auto/ethnography, see Deborah E. Reed-Danahay, ed. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford: Berg, 1997) and D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005).

3. Richard Schechner distinguishes between these two conceptualizations of self in performance in his book Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

4· See Wallace Bacon, The Art of Interpretation 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979).

5· Dwight Conquergood, "Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance" Literature in Performance 5.2 (1985): 9.

6. Wallace Bacon, "A Sense of Being: Interpretation and the Humanities" Southern Speech CommunicationloumaI4I.2, (Winter 1976): 139.

7· bell hooks, "Performance Practice As a Site of Opposition," in Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995),212.

8. "Miss Ann" is an African American vernacular term to refer to any white woman. Black domestic workers typically used it to refer to their white female employers.

9. "Paladin's PC Parlance Update." Discourse [Baton Rouge] 24 Feb. 1992: 6.

10. This phrase is the title of c.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law's This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995).

I I. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994), 26.

12. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is a rap group known for their sexual lyrics and rapid style of rap.

Photographs by Fazal Sheikh

Jada Maiwand, Kabul, one month before Taliban conquest of the city, August, 1996.

Sudanese mountains in the distance, dawn at Lokichoggio, loading trucks for resettlement to the Sudanese refugee camp at Kakuma, Kenya, 1992.

In 1992 I received a Fulbright fellowship to document the Swahili communities along the Kenyan coast. I traveled from my home in New York City to Kenya, my father's birthplace, and began preparations for the trip. However, in the year since my last visit, nearly five hundred thousand refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia had flooded into northern Kenya in search of a safe haven from the civil wars in their homelands. On arrival in Nairobi, I found the government trying to deal with this massive influx of refugees. Fearing the damage that news of a refugee crisis would do to their tourist economy, the government had directed the flood of people to a series of camps that had been hastily set up across the desert in northern Kenya.

I decided to make one trip to the refugee community on the border with Sudan before heading to the coast and received permission from the United Nations High Commissionfor Refugees (UNHCR) to visit the Sudanese refugee camp at Lokichoggio, a small village in the northern desert where more than twenty-five thousand refugees had gathered.

On the appointed morning I arrived at the airport for a preflight briefing by the United Nations spokesman. In the course of his description of what we would encounter, he told us about the twelve thousand "unaccompanied minors" who had arrived from southern Sudan. These were boys between the ages of eight and eighteen who had been abducted from their homes in Sudan and taken to Ethiopia, where they were trained to fight in the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against the Islamic-governed northern Sudan. After the Ethiopian government fell in 199 I, the boys had returned to Sudan, where the SPLA was losing ground and they had eventually made their way across the border into Kenya on foot. Many had walked more than one thousand kilometers through the desert in search of sanctuary in Kenya.

As we boarded the plane and it soared away from Nairobi over the desert, the words of the spokesman resounded in my ears. We were headed to a region of the country that I knew from my childhood and it was difficult to conjure how the region had been transformed. In an hour we were circling over the camp in our descent toward the border.

On landing the others with whom I traveled immediately began their work. They seemed to know exactly what they wanted: the best means by which to illustrate a story conceived thousands of miles away. I remember watching them work and feeling a sense of unease, an inability to follow along and take the expected photographs. The spokesman's description ofhow I should meet this place and the throng of people in the camp seemed to banish thought and I experienced a kind of paralysis, having no idea how to begin to work in the midst of such turmoil.

"Unaccompanied minors" group number two on the morning of their transfer from the Sudanese refugee camp at Lokichoggio to the new site at Kakuma, further within the borders of Kenya, 1992.

I decided to stay on in the village, giving myself time to sift through the initial impressions. During the first few days, I wandered throughout the camp without photographing. As the days passed, the preconceptions that had been foisted on me in the initial briefing and the shock of the first encounter began to fade away, allowing a broader sense of the refugees and their situation to emerge. Eventually, I approached Deng Dau, the elder of the community. He greeted me generously, and we sat together in his home. During the course of our conversation I asked his permission to begin working in his village. He turned to me and said, "Why do you ask me? I am only a refugee."

The meaning of the words was clear-"If I am a refugee, you may do as you like, and it is not my place to give, or withhold, consent." But the tone of his voice laid bare the irony of those words. It had been a trespass for people to storm through the camp without consulting those they wished to photograph. Eventually, he agreed to the collaboration, and we began a work of documentation, which continued for two years.

In the years since that time, while working on other projects, the process of documentation has allowed me to engage with facets of my heritage-a father born in Kenya and a grandfather born in northern India, near the Afghan border in a region which would become part of modem-day Pakistan. I imagine that I was forging a bridge between the two strains within me; the one, born and raised in New York City, and the other, connected to lands, peoples, and religions that have often been at odds with the country of my birth.

While working with refugee populations from Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan I wondered how best to make their voices intelligible to people viewing them in the U.S. Looking through these portraits I find that they raise more questions than offer solutions. What does it mean for a teenager like Peter Deng to return to his village from tending his herd only to find that his family has been killed and the village abandoned? To walk for weeks through a desert in the company of boys who have had a similar experience and with whom he will be trained to fight in a war that has raged since he was born? And what does it mean for Shahria to be born in exile just a few kilometers from her homeland of Afghanistan and to weave an image of that land from the threads of stories her parents offer her each day? What kind of resolve does it take to maintain the hope that someday peace will return to their country and they can go home?

In the years following 2001, my name and my appearance having rendered me a suspect in the city of my birth, I begin to realize just how essential it is to begin to foster an I understanding across nations, religions and cultures, in the hopes of forestalling future aggression.

Ajoh Achot and Achol Manyen, Sudanese refugee camp, Lokichoggio, Kenya, 1992.

Miriam Mac and Agot Anyang playing "bao," Sudanese refugee camp, Lokichoggio, Kenya, 1992•

Akuot Nyibol {pregnant at center} with Riak Warabek and Akuot's daughter, Athok Duom, who is recovering from malaria, Sudanese refugee camp, Lokichoggio, Kenya, I992.

William Gai and Peter Deng, "unaccompanied minors," Sudanese refugee camp, Lokichoggio, Kenya, 1992.

From the water tower at Liboi, looking east, across the borderlands to Somalia, Somali refugee camp, Liboi, Kenya, 1992.

Hadija and her father, Badel Addan Gadel, Somali refugee camp, Mandera, Kenya, 1992.

Shamsa Moka Abdi and her sister Shahil, Somali refugee camp, Mandera, Kenya, 1992.

[amaa Abdullai and her brother Adan, Somali refugee camp, Mandera, Kenya, 1992.

Halima Abdullai Hassan and her grandson Mohammed, eight years after he was treated in the Medecin Sans Frontieres feeding center at Mandera, Somali refugee camp, Dagahaley, Kenya, 2000.

Salado Hassan Aden and her son Ahmed, eight years after he was treated in the Medecin Sans Frontieres feeding center at Mandera, Somali refugee camp, Dagahaley, Kenya, 2000.

Abshiro Aden Mohammed, Women's Leader, Somali refugee camp, Dagahaley, Kenya, 2000.

Saladho Hassan Ali, whose daughter, Markaba, fought off an attacker near Hagadera camp in early 2000, Somali refugee camp, Hagadera, 2000.

Women's Committee, Somali refugee camp, Liboi, Kenya, 1994.

Sima and Shahima, Afghan refugee village, Nasirbagh, North Western Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1997.

Rohgul, Afghan refugee village, Nasirbagh, North Western Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1997.

Qurban Gul, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, northern Pakistan, 1998.

Salim, Afghan refugee village, Badabare, North Western Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1997.

Osman and Farid, blind qari ("one who knows the Koran by heart") brothers, Afghan refugee village, Nasirbagh, North Western Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1997·

Doctor Jan's son and friend, Afghan refugee village Nasirbagh, North Western Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1997.

Sharia, Afghan refugee village, Urghuch, northern Pakistan, 1998.

Afghan girl born in exile, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, northern Pakistan, 1998.

Afghan boy born in exile, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, northern Pakistan, 1998.

Afghan boy born in exile, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, northern Pakistan, 1998.

Afghan boy born in exile, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, northern Pakistan, 1998.

Lawrence]oseph

Notions of the Other

Clifford Geertz opens with the observation that diversity raises "moral, aesthetic, and cognitive" issues "at once" (in his Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan, "The Uses of Diversity," delivered on November 8, 1985, published the following winter in Volume 25 of the Michigan Quarterly Review). Universal consensus"transnational, trans-cultural, even trans-class-s-on normative matters," Geertz says, is no longer in the offing. "Everyone-Sikhs, Socialist, Positivists, Irishmen-is not going to come around to a common opinion concerning what is decent and what is not, what is just and what is not, not soon, perhaps not ever Foreignness does not start at the water's edge but at the skin

The social world does not divide at its joints into perspicuous we's with whom we can empathize, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical they's with whom we cannot, however much we defend to death their right to differ from us. The wogs begin long before Calais."

In "Ethnic Archetypes and Arab Imagination," an essay in The Development of Arab-American Identity, edited by Ernest McCarus, published in 1994 by the University of Michigan Press, Ronald Stockton writes: "In 1989 a national monthly on Middle East affairs published a cartoon on 'The Arab Mind.' The similarity with a cartoon ninety years earlier on 'The Jewish Mind' is striking. 'Reading the Arab Mind' shows a generic cartoon Arab-prominent nose, thick lips, heavy eyebrows, shifty eyes. Inside the mind are predictably simplistic ways of thinking: fanaticism, vengeance, double talk, fratricidal hatreds. The parallel with

the generic 'Jewish Mind' is striking. In the Jewish mind are worship of money, propensity to theft, and unwillingness to serve one's country. The common physical features of Arab and Jew include a curved nose and facial hair. Both minds center upon socially hostile orientations to the world and rigid mental compartmentalization with thought processes alien to normal humans."

Steven Erlanger, in the New York Times, Saturday, August 1 1,2007, in an article, "A Segregated Road in an Already Divided Land: A Lack of Exits will Keep Palestinians Out of Jerusalem," writes: "Israel is constructing a road through the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, that will allow both Israelis and Palestinians to travel along it-separately. There are two pairs of lanes, one for each tribe, separated by a tall wall of concrete patterned to look like Jerusalem stones, an effort at beautification indicating that the road is meant to be permanent. The Israeli side has various exits; the Palestinian side has few. The point of the road, according to those who planned it under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is to permit Israel to build more settlements around East Jerusalem, cutting the city off from the West Bank, but allowing Palestinians to travel unimpeded north and south through Israeli-held land. 'The Americans demanded from Sharon contiguity for a Palestinian state,' said Shaul Arieli, a reserve colonel in the army who participated in the 2000 Camp David negotiations and specializes in maps. This road was Sharon's answer, to build a road for Palestinians between Ramallah and Bethlehem but not to Jerusalem. This was how to connect the West Bank while keeping Jerusalem united and not giving Palestinians any blanket permission to enter East Jerusalem."

Max Rodenbeck, in his essay "Lebanon's Agony," in the May 31, 2007 the New York Review of Books, writes: "It is easy enough to counterpoint the opulence and squalor, hope and despair that remains such close bedfellows here. It is far harder to untangle the network ofshifting allegiances that make up the spider's-web-in-a-kaleidoscope ofLebanese politics. Differences between the eighteen sects that are formally recognized in the Lebanese constitution, which reserves political offices proportionally for representatives of different religious communities, form only part of the puzzle. Other elements include clan loyalties, class, historic alliances, ideological currents, the grievances of refugees from throughout the region, money interests, guns, and foreign intrigue involving everyone from the Vatican to the CIA and Mossad to the rival Shiite seminaries at Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran. Scholarly attempts to clear this thicket are fraught with risks, starting with the fact that

there is scarcely an overarching narrative on which Lebanese can agree to establish commonly accepted truths. Rather like in modem Italy, but more so, this is a place where achieving any sort of closure on important national traumas, such as the 'Events' of I 975-199o-known to the rest of the world as the civil war-has proved dismayingly elusive. Historical happenings that elsewhere would be simple signposts on a recognized road become instead prisms, used to construct mutually negating paths."

Geertz: "Meaning in the form of interpretable signs-sounds, images, feeling, artifacts, gestures-comes to exist only within language games, communities of discourse, intersubjective systems of reference, ways of world making within the frame of concrete social interaction in which something is a something for a you and a me, and not in some secret grotto in the head." Meaning is "through and through historical, hammered out in the flow of events." Geertz quotes a famous sentence from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world"-which, Geertz says, implies "that the reach of our minds, the range of signs we can imagine somehow to interpret, is what defines the intellectual, emotional and moral space within which we live."

In the Guardian, October 15, 2004, in an elegaic tribute to Jacques Derrida, "Don't Deride Derrida," Terry Eagleton writes that "Derrida once remarked that he wanted to 'write like a woman.'" Derrida was "one of a lineage of anti-philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Wittgen� stein, who invented a new style of philosophical writing. He understood that official thought turns on rigorously exclusive oppositions; inside/outside, man/woman, good/evil. He loosened up such paranoid antithesis by the flair and brio of his writing, and in doing so spoke up for the voiceless, from whose ranks he had emerged Deconstruction, the philosophical method he promoted, means not destroying ideas, but pushing them to the point where they begin to come apart and expose their latent contradictions. It meant reading against the grain of supposedly self-evident truths, rather than taking them for granted Derrida's "first great works appeared in Paris on the eve of the political explosion of May 1968, at a time when he was close to, but critical of, the French Communist party. Since the party had cravenly supported the French repression of Algeria, and since Derrida was an Algerian Jewish colonial, his oblique relations to official Marxism were understandable."

In Criticism in Society (Methuen, 1987), Imra Salusinszky interviews Barbara Johnson, who says: "Within feminism, there have always been

arguments about whether there really is a difference between the sexes or not I think that what deconstruction can help with in this is how to deal with a situation in which you need to articulate the relation between equality and difference, or between disregarding difference and rearticulating it: a system in which things both are different and are not different. That sort of logic is one that Derrida develops. The non/ either/or kind of logic is very useful." If, on the one hand, you simply adopt "a deconstruction of a binary opposition in which you end up showing that in fact the postulate of sexual difference doesn't hold," you then "don't have access to some of the questions that are really urgent." If, on the other hand, you "try to analyze what is happening when questions of urgency are associated with a postulate of difference, you get into a much more complex logic, and deconstruction can really be helpful."

Geertz: "The trouble with enthnocentrism is that it impedes us from discovering at what sort of angle, like Forster's Cavafy, we stand to the world My purpose," Geertz says, "is to suggest that we have corne to such a point in the moral history of the world (a history itself of course anything but moral) that we are obliged to think about such diversity rather differently than we have been used to thinking about it." Rather than being sorted into framed units, "seriously disparate approaches to life are becoming scrambled together in ill-defined expanses, social spaces whose edges are unfixed, irregular, and difficult to locate." The question of "how to deal with the puzzles of judgment to which such disparities give rise takes on a rather different aspect. Confronting landscapes and still lifes is one thing; panoramas and collages quite another. That it is the latter we these days confront, that we are living more and more in the midst of an enormous collage, seems everywhere apparent To live in a collage one must in the first place render oneself capable of sorting out its elements, determining what they are (which usually involves determining where they come from and what they amounted to when they were there) and how, practically, they relate to one another, without at the same time blurring one's own sense of one's own location and one's own identity within it."

In an essay on Lois Gordon's book The Lives of Others: Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (Columbia University Press, 2007), in the Nation, August 13/202007, Carla Kaplan reminds us that "the arguments over identity that roiled the I920S continue to reverberate today-when does empathy become appropriation? is speaking for others unethical? What links 'love and theft?'"

W. E. B. Du Bois's Dusk ofDawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography

of a Race Concept was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1940. Ou Bois begins Chapter 7, "The Colored World Within": "Not only do white men but also colored men forget the facts of the Negro's double environment. The Negro American has for his environment not only the white surrounding world, but also, and touching him usually much more nearly and compellingly, is the environment furnished by his own colored group. There are exceptions, of course, but this is the rule. The American Negro, therefore, is surrounded and conditioned by the concept which he has of white people and he is treated in accordance with the concept they have of him. On the other hand, so far as his own people are concerned, he is in direct contact with individuals and facts. He fits into this environment more or less willingly. It gives him a social world and mental peace. On the other hand and especially if in education and ambition and income he is above the average culture of his group, he is often resentful of its environing power; partly because he does not recognize its power and partly because he is determined to consider himself part of the white group from which, in fact, he is excluded. This weaving of words does not make the situation entirely clear and yet it does point toward its complications."

Geertz's reference to "Forster's Cavafy" is a reference to E. M. Forster's "The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy," in Pharos and Pharillon, published in 1923. "Modem Alexandria is scarcely a city of the soul," Forster writes. "Founded upon cotton with the concurrence of onions and eggs, ill built, ill planned, ill drained-many hard things can be said against it, and most are said by its inhabitants. Yet to some, as they transverse the streets, a delightful experience can occur. They hear their own name proclaimed in firm yet meditative accents-accents that seem not so much to expect an answer as to pay homage to the fact of individuality. They tum and see a Greek gentlemen in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms extended, possibly. 'Oh, Cavafy !' Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence-an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behavior of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives,

their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured clarity of its judgments one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet."

The final stanza of Wallace Stevens's poem "Esthetique de Mal" (written in 1944):

"One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?

Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound. And out of what one sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur,

Merely in living as and where we live."

Frank Lentricchia, in his interview with Imra Salusinszky in Criti� cism in Society, asks: "Whose self? Where is this self? The reader's self? My self? Where did this self come from?" He is interested, Lentricchia says of his work then, "in moving through the biographical individual into social structure. I'm interested in starting with the fundamental sexual, economic, social and familial givens about the writer, and moving from these, as unavoidable, to the larger structure-without making the mistake of thinking that the structure stands outside the subject, but recognizing that different subjects move into history through their bodies, through their families, through their social locale and so forth. We mustn't elide these differences."

In a letter dated October 9, 1923 to Alfred Steiglitz, Marsden Hartley, referring to William Carlos Williams, writes: "Williams certainly has made a splendid struggle to plasticize all his various selves and he is perhaps more people at once than anyone I've ever known-not vague persons but he's a small town of serious citizens in himself. I never saw so many defined human beings in one being. That's because he's latin and anglo-saxon in several divisions and he being an artist has to give them all a chance."

InJulia Kristeva: Interviews (Columbia University Press, 1996), in an interview with Rosa Mitchell Guberman, "Julia Kristeva Speaks Out"

(the translation from the French Guberman's own), Kristeva says that to "discourage people from focusing on the nationalist sense of the word 'foreigner,' I would say that I am a migrant. I like to think that since humanity speaks, it is in a state of transit: between biology and meaning, the past and the future, pleasure and the absurd A woman is perhaps closer to this basic transivity because of motherhood, her bond with childhood, and her ambiguous feelings toward the social bond and toward the sacrifice it imposes."

In his front page article "In a World on the Move" in the New York Times, Sunday, June 24, 2007, Jason de Parle notes that an "estimated 200 million people live outside the country of their birth, and they help support a swath of the developing world as big if not bigger."

"The margin is not simply a metaphor," David Harvey writes in [ustice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell, 1996). "The margin is not something imaginary; it has," Harvey says, "real under" pmnmgs.

Harvey quotes bell hooks: "I am waiting for them to stop talking about the 'other,' to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about differences Often this speech about the 'other' is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps [it] annihilates, erases: 'No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own, Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.'

Harvey quotes Mikhail Bakhtin: "When I contemplate a whole human being who is situated outside and over against me, our concrete, actually represented horizons do not coincide. For at each moment, regardless of the position and the proximity to me of this other human being whom I am contemplating, I shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against me, cannot see himself; parts ofhis body that are inaccessible to his own gaze (his head, his face, his expression), the world behind his back, and a whole series of objects and relations, which in any of our mutual relations are accessible to me but not to him. As we gaze at each other, two different worlds are refleeted in the pupils of our eyes but in order to annihilate this difference completely, it would be necessary to merge into one, to become one and the same person."

"'Difference' and 'otherness,'" Harvey says, "are produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment, a proliferating geographical division of labor, an increasing segmentation of reproductive activities and the rise of spatially ordered (often segregated) social distinctions The 'epistemology that can tell the difference' between significant and insignificant differences of 'othernesses' is one which can understand the social process of construction and situatedness, place, otherness, difference, political identity, and the like."

In "Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable," in his book Five Moral Pieces (Harcourt, 1997), translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan, Umberto Eco writes: "Intolerance comes before any doctrine. In this sense intolerance has biological roots, it manifests itself among animals as territoriality, it is based on emotional reactions that are often superficial-we cannot bear those who are different from us, because their skin is a different color; because they speak a language we do not understand; because they eat frogs, dogs, monkeys, pigs, or garlic; because they tattoo themselves Academics often deal with the doctrines of difference, but devote insufficient attention to uncontrolled intolerance, because it eludes all definition and critical consideration Intellectuals cannot fight uncontrolled intolerance, because when faced with pure unthinking animality, thought finds itself defenseless Yet it is here that the challenge lies. To inculcate tolerance in adults who shoot at one another for ethnic and religious reasons is a waste of time. Too late. Therefore uncontrolled intolerance has to be beaten at the roots, through constant education that starts from earliest infancy, before it is written down in a book, and before it becomes a behavioral 'skin' that is too thick and too tough."

Octavio Paz, in The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane, published by Harcourt Brace in 1993, writes that a dialogue is "the highest form of communication we know, is always a confrontation of irreducibly different viewpoints." The contradictory nature of a dialogue "lies in the fact that it is an exchange of concrete, unique pieces of information for the person who voices them, and of abstract, general ones for the person who hears them. I say green," Paz continues, "referring to a particular sensation, unique and inseparable from a specific instant, place, and psychological-physical state: the light falling on green ivy on this rather chilly spring afternoon." His partner in the dialogue "hears a series of sounds and conjures up a vague idea of green. Are there possibilities of genuine communication? Yes." Paz says, "despite the fact that the fuzziness never entirely disappears.

We are human beings, not angels. The senses connect us to their world and simultaneously shut us up inside ourselves: sensations are subjective and inexpressible. Thought and language are bridges, but, precisely because they are bridges, they do not erase the distance between ourselves and outer reality."

From Gertrude Stein's "Orta or One Dancing" (written in 1 9 1 a or 1911), in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932 (The Library of America, 1998, the contents selected and the notes for the volume written by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman):

"She, Orta Davray, was one being of a kind of a one. That is to say she was one looking like some. She was changing. In the beginning she was one and then she was one having the same look as some other one and that one is a kind of a one. Then she was changing and she was looking as another one was looking and that one was a kind of a one. Then she was changing and she was looking as another one was looking and that one was of a kind of one. Then she was changing and she was looking like another one who was of a kind of a one. All four of them were quite different kinds of ones all four whom she was resembling. All four were in a way of a kind of a one. All four could be ones being ones needing believing that meaning is existing. All four could be ones expecting something from such thing. All four of them could be ones expecting something in meaning being existing. They were quite different ones these four of them."

From Gertrude Stein's "Geography" (written in 1923):

"Any many many any any many many any any many many any any many many any. Anyone."

From Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" (written in 1 927 ):

"One two one one or two one one one one one one one one one or two. Are to."

From Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory: "When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity-that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination."

From 1966 to 1968, Thomas Merton wrote seven essays on Albert Camus. The essays appear in New Directions's 1981 The Literary Essays

of Thomas Merton (edited by Brother Patrick Hart). In "Three Saviors in Camus: Lucidity and the Absurd," Merton writes: "The struggle to achieve human solidarity in a world of confusion and conflict may at times appear hopeless. Man is fatally attracted to nihilism and violence. His peace is constantly threatened by his incapacity to 'recognize' his fellow man as his other self and to enter into frank, simple communication with him. In the past, Camus reflects, man hoped that a message would come from heaven, a Savior would enter the world to be received and understood by men: they would accept his Gospel of peace and would understand and love one another. Instead, thinks Camus, the message was perverted into an ideology of power and authority seeking to control the course of history for the advantage of the powerful, at the expense of the weak. To be a 'believer' meant, in effect, to seek reassurance for oneself in persecuting 'unbelievers.' In other words, one must be willing to prove his fidelity to God by preferring God to man, by sacrificing man to God, not by loving one's neighbor but by burning him at the stake. And this led inevitably to secular mystiques of history and power like Marxism and Fascism. For Camus, then, Saviors and Messiahs are all discredited. Man, himself, like Sisyphus, must take up his absurd task-his stone, or, if you prefer, his Cross. In the context of contemporary life, the white European, the South American mulatto, and the black African must roll the stone of Sisyphus together even though their labor seems futile. It is their common effort that they will arrive at some sort of simple, rudimentary, but valid understanding. But in order to achieve this the European or American must learn to abandon his position of imagined superiority, come down from his eminence, and admit his own need of his underprivileged brother."

Merton writes in another essay, "The Stranger: Poverty of an Antihero": "The Arab is not seen as a person. Mersault does not kill out of personal hate. Nor is it a question of racial animosity. The violence which drives the Arab and Mersault together is the same symbolic violence which accounted for all the hundreds of crimes in Algeria at that time It is not the hatred of the colon for the Arab or vice versa, but the more elemental collision of lower-class atoms in the symbiosis of alienation. The mindlessness of Mersault, a poor French Algerian, is radically the same as that of the poor Arab. Mersault's indifference, his 'fatalism,' have something of the same quality which colonial cliche assumed was purely Islamic or African The poverty ofMersault is the product of a social system which needs people to be as he is and therefore manufactures them in quantity-and condemns them for being what

they are. Camus portrayed in Mersault not the physical misery of starvation, deprivation, and disease, but the psychic misery of alienation. He also portrayed the awakening of Mersault to identity through a quasiaccidental crime. But Mersault remained in his poverty, his absurd, solipsistic loneliness. He was not able to find and integrate himselfcompletely by compassion and solidarity with others who, like himself, were poor."

Among Alex Kotlowtiz's observations in his cover story in the New York Times Magazine, August 5,2007, "All Immigration Politics is Local: (And Complicated, Nasty and Personal}": "Moreover, Humpfer and Sigwalt said that constituents had expressed dismay at the number of businesses in which the proprietors spoke only Spanish. 'I've gone into the Polish deli and the German deli, and they're so friendly,' Sigwalt said. 'When I go into the Hispanic grocery store, I feel like an intruder; I feel unwelcome.' Humpfer added, 'It's gotten to a level where the number of illegals is so big, these stores can cater to only one culture .' The June gathering was particularly well attended-standing room onlybecause Humpfer and Sigwalt planned to introduce their ordinance, which would require village employees to use only English for official business. There were three television crews present and reports from the local papers as well as from the Chicago Tribune. Police officers stood in the back of the room, a common sight at these gatherings. The town's trustees sat beneath the town's slogan: 'Building a Better Tomorrow Today' "; and: "Carpentersville is very much a small town, and so the proceedings began with the promotion of two police officers, whom to the applause of everyone there, received their new badges. It was the only civil part of the evening. Adam Ruiz was the first to speak, and it quickly became clear that the rhetoric on both sides would be ratcheted up a notch. 'They have made this about race,' he said of Sigwalt and Humpfner, and then asked them to publicly denounce the flier that so agitated him and others. (The man next to me mumbled, 'This is the United States of America, not a foreign country')"; and: "One trustee, Kay Teeter, a soft-spoken Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman, appeared agitated by the suggestions by Ruiz and others that supporting the proposed ordinance was the equivalent of dismissing Hispanics. 'I am not a racist,' she said. 'We're a blue-collar people. My grandparents worked so hard to assimilate and become Americans. What we're trying to do here is unite the community with a common language.' Things quickly spiraled out of control. Two Hispanic women who had come with the contingent from Chicago rose from their seats and began chanting: 'Viva la Raza. Viva la Raza.' 'Speak English,' someone hollered. Two

older men in the back row waved American Flags. The women were ejected."

From "A Spot of Firm Government," Terry Eagleton's August 23, 2001 review of Claude Rawson's God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination I492-I945, in the London Review of Books: "Much of this fascination with otherness involves the liberal assumption that there are no real aliens, just ways of seeing others as aliens. For conservatives, aliens are other people; for liberals, they are the fruit of false consciousness; for radicals, they are ourselves. There is indeed a monstrosity, an enigma resistant to understanding The Yahoos, as Gulliver begins chillingly to realize, are as close to the bone as you can get. What we share with the allegedly impenetrable other is just this overlapping of strangeness; and it is this, rather than some mutual mirror-imaging of egos, which has to become the basis of a genuine encounter. Always seeing the other as others is partly a way of avoiding this unnerving recognition, just as attending consistently to the margins is usually a way of implying that there are no conflicts or subversions to be found at the center."

Terry Eagleton, "The Roots of Terror, in Red Pepper, September 2005: "Being alone with oneself for all eternity is a traditional image of hell, like being stuck forever with a bar-room bore. Yet it is this hellish condition, astonishingly, that the neo-conservative thugs and fanatics in the White House are most entranced by There is one problem, however, that they are unable to resolve. If you end up crushing and subjugating all the resistance around you, who will be left to tell you who you are? For you cannot work this out in isolation. Identity involves otherness. And if you find that otherness intolerable, your own sense of yourself will gradually begin to implode. You will be left knowing nothing whatsoever, least of all of yourself."

Dwight A. McBride

Race, Faith, and Sexuality Or a Snapshot Genealogy of the Grateful Negro

A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

The KingJames Bible, Mark 6.4

When asked to reflect on the notion of the foreigner and the idea offoreignness in my work, the task appeared at once stimulating and overwhelming. Stimulating because my mind did not turn first to the predictable geopolitical notions of the citizen versus the foreigner (which seem to be pervasive in the U.S. at the present time), but rather to concerns with what notions of foreignness must be operable for the very idea of a "community" to be in effect. Overwhelming because once we embark down that road, we must also confront, as Bonnie Honig suggests in Democracy and the Foreigner, the degree to which the figure of the foreigner is constitutive to our very notions of democracy.

Toni Morrison once pointed out to me in a discussion of the program she was invited to host at the Louvre in Paris (titled "The Foreigner's Home"), how curious she found it that there is no word for "home" in the French language. Domicile or house, yes, but not "home" in the sense that we mean when we say, "You can never go home again."

Home as place, yes, but never home as a complex web of memory and emotion. On a related note, there is a phrase in French that is extremely evocative on this idea of foreignness-"etrange etranger," or strange stranger (Favrod). I've always been captivated by the nuance of this phrasing, as it seems to allow for the simultaneous possibility ofstrangers or foreigners who are, indeed, strange or unknown to us, as well as those who might be all too familiar. The phrase leaves room for the fact that the familiar can also be strange and foreign in the way that the Negro/Black/African American has been in the history of the U.S. and in much of the West. This is what Richard Wright meant when he declared, "The Negro is America's Metaphor" (White Man, Listen!), and what another writer intended when he said, "If the African Negro did not exist, then white men would have had to invent him" (Curtis 397).

Much of my recent work has attempted to look closely at the nexus of race and sexuality in U.S. culture and political rhetoric. I have been particularly interested in representations, or the lack thereof, of black gays and lesbians or of black gay and lesbian sexuality in the context of black anti-racist discourses. To my mind the metaphor of the "Negro" represents an apt way of characterizing the historic and present relationship of black queers to the hegemonic concept or construct of the black community. Put simply, black queers have been a staple organizing principle against which black anti-racist discourse works to legitimate black lives under a regime of white supremacy. That is to say that black queers are the black community's "Negro." Still, even as dominant conceptions of the black community have tried to erase black queers and black queer identity, it has needed and celebrated the work and cultural production of black queers.

A colleague of mine once remarked that were we to extract all of the gays and lesbians from the black literary canon, there would be no Harlem Renaissance. Though a bit hyperbolic, he was not far off the mark in his commentary. It is this complex tension between the desire of "the black community" to exclude black queers and differentiate themselves from the same, and its desire to claim the incredible work and cultural products of black queers that first drew me to the epigraph that opens this paper: "A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house." While I am no prophet, as a black gay man, I not only bear witness to the subtle and not so subtle forms of exclusion occasioned in the name of "black community" and dominant forms of black anti-racist politics, but also stand as an emblem-a metaphor-in those discourses of the historic and

present exclusions occasioned in the name of racial respectability.' This essay represents my attempt to account in a somewhat historical vein for that exclusion.

Part I: From the Summit

In the fall of 2005, I attended a national summit-called by the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC)-in Washington, DC of one hundred and fifty black gay and lesbian leaders. NBJC was formed in 2003 when a handful of leaders from the LGBT African American community banded together to challenge support from African American religious and civil rights leaders for Republican-led efforts to amend the Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. The group began raising funds to place ads promoting marriage equality in the African American media. The leadership of the organization includes: board president Keith Boykin (a former White House aide to President Clinton, a New York Times bestselling author, lawyer, and activist); board Vice President Donna Payne (senior constituency organizer for the Human Rights Campaign) and Executive Director H. Alexander Robinson.

The summit was the first of its kind and scope bringing black LGBT activist, policy makers, politicians, scholars, and leaders of non-profits together in DC. We also had time in the program where the leadership of the mainstream national gay organizations (HRC, GLADD, PFLAG, Lambda Legal, etc.) came to talk with all of us as well. The conversations were very fruitful. But there were two things that were most interesting about the meeting for me: First, the Congressional Black Caucus was holding its annual meeting at the same time that our summit was taking place, and there was no formal interaction between the two groups. Indeed, Alexander Robinson, NBJC's executive director, points to this as a problem in an interview with the Metro Weekly (a DC based LGBT news magazine) when he states the following:

We've made efforts in the past to build relationships with the Congressional Black Caucus. But it's like any other caucus: It's made up of individual members who have very different political agendas.

1. I discuss this idea of racial respectability more fully later in the essay. Put briefly, it is a black antiracist strategy, dating back at least to the tum of the nineteenth century, which views adherence to a cultural code of moral/racial respectability as the best means of resisting white racism. The idea is that you use only the best to represent the race. Those attributes which are not considered moral and respectable are excluded.

We have relationships that are good, bad, better. Dealing directly with gay and lesbian issues has been a challenge. Generally, the caucus has been very good on being willing to address HIV and AIDS. They have been supportive when it comes to their voting records [addressing issues of HIVjAIDS]. But addressing homophobia outside of the AIDS context has been a challenge.

It's true that there are some scheduling conflicts [he said explaining why summit and caucus members were not going to interact formally], but it's also true that I've been to the CBC legislative weekend for the past five years, and there are halfdozen openly gay people who attend. It's not as if the 130 people who have signed up so far [for the summit] were going to be over at the CBC. They just weren't going to be present. (Robinson)

The next thing that struck me occurred on the second day of the summit during a discussion of the Minister Louis Farrakhan's Millions More March. Some of the summit members were advocating and advertising a protest rally that was being staged at 8:00 on the morning of the Millions More March (October 15, 2005), where black LGBTs would meet to protest the exclusion of gay and lesbian participation in the march. The plan was to join the larger Millions More March en masse in protest of our exclusion. To be even more specific, Minister Louis Farrakhan had taken a meeting via conference call with a delegation from the NBJC {likely an historic event in itself) regarding their participation in the planning body of the event and their request for an openly gay and an openly lesbian speaker on the main stage at the event. The minister spoke in terms of inclusion of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but did not commit during that meeting to either of their formal requests. At a later meeting, in person, with Farrakhan and Rev. Willie Wilson (a virulently homophobic DC-based minister and executive director of the March), NBJC leadership maintains that an agreement for NBJC president Boykin to speak was worked out between the two sides. Indeed, the Washington Post reported that "the meeting ended with hugs from Farrakhan and what [NBJC] said was an offer to Boykin to speak during the Unity Tapestry section of the program" (Weiss). Still, on the day of the event, Boykin was denied admission to the dais by Wilson, who denied that Boykin was guaranteed a speaking slot, telling the Post that "[Boykin] straightout lied. There were certain conditions that he had to meet in order

to speak, and he did not" (Weiss). Wilson refused to elaborate on exactly what those conditions were.

When all of this came up at the summit and the leadership began to discuss plans for a protest rally that would end in attending the march to show our disenfranchisement, I rose to address the summit for the first time and related the following:

A few years ago, I was at the University ofCalifornia San Diego delivering a lecture about the homophobia inherent in much African Americanist critical discourse. That presentation was the germ of what became an article for which I have become fairly well known in some circles, "Can the Queen Speak?: Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority."

After the lecture over dinner with a few of my colleagues, one of them asked me a question that would haunt me for some time to come: "Why," he asked, "do you feel the need to argue about the homophobia ofthe black community, as if you need its inclusion or approval? Why not create your own community or just speak to your specific community of black gays and lesbians? Should you fight so hard to be included in something where you are not wanted?"

I told my colleague something that day that I still believe. It is not their community. It never has been theirs only. They've just been taught to believe that it is. We have the unfortunate task of having now to do the knowledge corrective work of showing them that black history is also black gay and lesbian history; black literature is also black gay and lesbian literature.

But today-I continued addressing my colleagues at the summit-I must admit that as we sit here in this room and talk once again about how we must strategize to shame our heterosexist brothers and sisters into a place at the table of black inclusiveness, I am not down for it. I will not be attending the Millions More March. I will not be attending a protest taking issue with our exclusion. I am not in the mood to beg for a place at the table I grew up eating at; the table my money from my labor helped to buy when the old one was worn from use; the table where I learned to play spades and biz wiz; the same table where I mourned with family when loved ones had passed on. I would not be silenced (as Locke and Hughes were); or shamed (as Rustin or Baldwin were); or kept in the closet (as Vandross and Cleveland were). I would not march. I would not show up and give any power or credence to

their gesture of exclusion over me. What I would do is what I am called to do. I would stand on the outside and talk about, teach about, and write about how fucked up their homophobia is and what an absolute shame it is that we are wasting precious time and resources (in the face of the enormous economic and social privation and devastation being visited on black people in this nation and throughout the diaspora) arguing still about the lines of inclusion for black identity. We all have roles to play in this struggle. Some have to meet with Farrakhan. I don't have the temperament for that but great respect for those who do. Some have to organize protests to highlight our exclusion by the black political establishment. Some have to be critics, truth-tellers, seers. Those who call upon the angels of our better natures. Those that help us to dream what we might yet become, sometimes well before we are ready or able to imagine that future. That is the way ofwriter, the artist, and sometimes the scholar.

And with that, I once again took my seat at the summit.

Many white folk (usually gays and lesbians) have said to me, "Who would ever have thought that blacks and gays would be at odds over the issue of same-sex marriage?" While the naivete of the question settles on me on each occasion, my thoughts tum to history and what (other than the most obvious structural similarities) they could possibly be presuming was ever a natural alliance between blacks and gays. This kind of facile liberal reasoning is likely part and parcel with what has gotten us into the fine political mess we find ourselves embroiled in today around the question of marriage equality. Anti-gay conservatives-and perhaps in this one case better students ofhistorv=-did not presume any such alliance. Indeed, they counted on this very issue to drive a wedge between blacks and gays over marriage equality.

But none of this is new. It has always been this way. Despite the fact that in the march of black anti-racist discourse, one has always been able to hear the distant patter of "lighter loafers." Despite the fact that the winds of change for black America have always carried with them the echoes of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Or despite the fact that the fervor and famed political commitment of the black church has always relied on the labor of gays and lesbians so long as they served in silence; and we know all too well about the hushing, the "quiet-asit's-kept" acceptance of some of our most celebrated black artists, writers, and culture producers. The difference this time is that black LGBTs

are coming out, speaking out, and demanding (in a variety of ways and on differing terms) a place at the black community's proverbial welcome table. The breaking of the tacit bond of silence is what marks this as a substantively different moment (more on this later).

II. Bad Days & Ugly Ways: Remarks on Black History Month 2005

When a Chicago African American minister, the Rev. Gregory Daniels, declared in February 2004 that "If the KKK opposes gay marriage then I'd ride with them" (qtd. in Clemetson; Mitchell), I knew that we were facing a new, dangerous era in the civil rights struggle. This was not an isolated incident. Rather, it was a sign of the times. So it was hardly surprising when the Bush administration used marriage to drive a wedge between traditional (though perhaps always a bit uneasy) progressive allies-the LGBT community and the African American community.

Like many black religious leaders, Daniels believes that his authority and authenticity as a spokesman for African Americans require adherence to the homophobia proffered by the religious right. To be strong men and women of the ilk of Daniels and, more recently, Bernice King+-c-the anti-gay daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.-they believe they must carve away at the civil rights of others. When black leaders, religious or otherwise, start to sound like the darker cousins ofJerry Falwell, it gives an entirely new twist to the old adage about politics and strange bedfellows.

African-American leaders and clerics alike must stop pretending that the black community they so fervently represent contains only heterosexuals. They need to understand that homophobia-especially in the service of black civil rights-is always wrong. We can't morally sacrifice the rights of one vulnerable minority for another. And we must stop treating black oppression as if it were sacred turf. What do we gain by using the lessons and legacy of black oppression this way? If my story as a black man can be useful in helping another oppressed person to gain her freedom, I would gladly share it.

As a black gay man, I recognize that I cannot trust my freedom to be fully achieved through what is the current black civil rights movement

2. Bernice King helped organize a march in December 2004 with Bishop Eddie Long in Atlanta calling for black churches to become more vocal on issues including banning same-sex marriage, reforming the education and health care systems and creating economic opportunities for minorities.

or the current gay rights movement. For now, I work and struggle at the margins of both, hoping to make each more inclusive, more responsible and more effective.

There is certainly much to be said about the racism found in the gay and lesbian community. There is much to be said about the overwhelming use ofwhite faces to represent that community in mainstream media, and the notable absence of people of color from those representations. But whatever our .feelings about the whiteness of mainstream representations of the gay and lesbian community, we have to own up to the fact that we black folk also practice exclusion in representations of our community: We exclude black gays and lesbians.

The national debate currently being waged over same-sex marriage strikes a deep chord in the American psyche. It brings strong political convictions alongside religious and moral ones. The stakes become deeply personal in such cases, bringing together odd bedfellows. Any initiative with the potential to unite Jesse Jackson and Jesse Helms is one that makes me deeply suspicious of people's motives.

Remember that what is at issue here is civil marriage, not religious practices. Churches would still retain the right-precisely because of the separation ofchurch and state that we hold so dear in this countryto marry, or not to marry, whomever they please. But just as churches and clerics would reserve that right, they do not have the right to dictate their religious beliefs to the rest of the nation. Religious marriage is, finally, not the question before our government in this national debate.

The gay rights movement must become more responsible for the racism that exists in our midst. We see this in the way that an African American man could not possibly be viewed in queer media as representing the universal gay male experience in the way that a white man could and does. (A quick perusal through the ads and photographs in any of the national gay tabloids-Out, Genre, The Advocate, Instinctwill bear this out.) We see this when, for example, the story of Matthew Shepard becomes monumental and representative in the gay community, while the story ofAfrican American lesbian, Sakia Gunn.' is barely remembered or reported.

Black folk need to be responsible for our homophobia. This homophobia is, in part, what feeds the resistance of the black community to

3. See http;/Ien.wikipedia.orgJwiki/Sakia_Gunn for more information on Gunn's 2003 murder. Using the Lexis-Nexis database, Kim Pearson, a professor at The College of New Jersey found there were 659 stories in major newspapers about Shepard's murder, compared to only 21 articles about Gunn's murder in the seven month period after their respective attacks.

have its struggle compared to that of the gay rights movement. Some black folk believe that such a comparison sullies the history of African American struggle, so we forget all our black gay brothers and sistersthe teachers and preachers, choir directors and musicians, activists and community organizers, parents and co-workers and friends-who populate our daily lives and help make them possible. Black gays and lesbians are a part of the black community. What, we might ask, do we gain from excising gays and lesbians from the community? And for whom and toward what purpose would we be doing that work?

As long as the government is in the business of recognizing civil marriage, to deny that right to some citizens while conferring it on others rises to the very height of the great historic civil rights breaches. This is the modern three-fifths compromise-our very own version of Jim Crow segregation.

III. Are We Still Talking about Black Homophobia?:

Toward a Genealogy

In his recent book, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, my colleague Alex Weheliye reminds us that although there are many theories of modernity, "three moments are commonly taken to be the grounds upon which this longue dun�e is erected":

First, the beginning of secularization in the Renaissance; second, the Enlightenment, as well as the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; and third, the proliferation of information technologies such as the phonograph, telegraph, telephone, and cinematograph at the end of the nineteenth century. All these prostheses of modern origins emphasize the ascent and proliferation of reason, secularization, progress, humanism, individualism, rationalism, industrialization, and so on. (4)

Weheliye's book concerns primarily the third of these grand narratives of modernity. For our purposes today, however, I want to borrow these first two ideas about modernity to speculate on how the operationalizing of the idea of modernity as a "progress" (conventionally associated with secularization and the proliferation of reason) takes on some rather unique characteristics in African American cultural politics.

When we think back to the time of the New Negro or the Harlem

Renaissance-a period in which black men and women (writers, artists, and scholars), only a generation or two out ofslavery-first had the space in which to begin imagining, thinking, and theorizing about the possibilities, character and nature, political function, and so on of black art, one can only-even now-glimpse the awesome, overwhelming, and wildly liberating sense of mission they had to confront. It comes through most clearly in their proclamations, speculations, and theorizations about "Negro art" and the "Negro artist." They were convinced that the day of the New Negro had arrived. And his was a story of progress if there ever was one-ugly, fraught, complicated, back-breaking. But a story of progress, nonetheless. A story, that if it was not to be centered in our academic narratives about modernity, would certainly be a ghost in its machinery with which it would some day have to reckon.

But now I am getting ahead of myself. So, let's come to the question. What is it that caused this "New Negro," in his particular version of modernity as progress, and specifically as racial progress, to eschew secularism rather than embrace it; and to cling fervently to an admixture of moral and racial respectability as his entree to the modem, his calling card to humanity, his salvation from the dark ages of oppression?

Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, in her oft-cited book Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, I880-I920, writes the following illuminating words about the women's movement in the black Baptist church:

Between 1900 and 1920 the women's movement in the black Baptist church contested the racial-exclusivist image ofAmerica as it was understood and promoted by the dominant white society. In fact, black Baptist women envisioned themselves as sorely needed missionaries to America. For the sake of America's soul, they reasoned, the nation must put an end to "lines of color, of blood and of birth." Their religious-political message was drawn from biblical teachings, the philosophy of racial self-help, Victorian ideology, and the democratic principles of the Constitution of the United States. Black Baptist women appropriated all these discourses as they infused concepts such as equality, self-respect, professionalism, and American identity with their own intentions and interpretations. In the dialogic sense of multiple and conflicting meanings these concepts became new, resistant pronouncements against white public opinion While adherence to respectability enabled black women to counter racist images and structures, their discursive contestation

was not directed solely at white Americans; the black Baptist women condemned what they perceived to be negative practices and attitudes among their own people

The politics ofrespectability emphasized reform ofindividual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itselfand as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations (186-87).

This case, among others, presents strong evidence that black anti-racist strategy at the tum of the century viewed adherence to a cultural code ofmoral/racial respectability as the best means to resist white racism and for the Negro to progress as an equal partner in the project of modernity. It is important to note-thought it perhaps goes without saying-that blacks developed such reasoning under the perception-be it real or imagined---of the white hegemonic eyes whose gaze was fixed firmly upon them. Indeed, I don't think it overstates the case to say that white racism-and its pursuant logics-was a key factor in the production of this particular brand of racial/moral respectability. And once we begin to recognize this particular narrative that characterizes black's relationship to modernity as progress, which tells the story of our unflagging commitment to respectability, then we come a long way toward appreciating the echoes, the elliptical rhetoric, and the intensity of intraracial critique that characterizes a good deal of African American literary criticism at the tum of the century.

IV. "Aladdin's Lamp": Echoes of Sexuality in the Discourse of the New Negro

The Negro intellectual is still largely in psychological bondage not only "to the laws and customs of the local (Southern) culture," but to the fear ofbreaking the tabus of Puritanism, Philistinism and falsely conceived conventions of "race respectability." Consciously and subconsciously, these repressions work great artistic harm, especially the fear of being accused of group disloyalty and "misrepresentation" in portraying the full gamut of Negro type, character and thinking. We are still in the throes of counter-stereotypes. The releasing formula is to realize that in all human things are basically and inevitably human, and that even the special racial complexities and overtones are only interesting variants. Why, then, this protective silence about the ambivalences of the Negro

upper classes, about the dilemmas of intra-group prejudice and rivalry, about the dramatic inner paradoxes of mixed heritage or the tragic breach between the Negro elite and the Negro masses, or the conflict between integration and vested-interest separatism in the present-day life of the Negro? These, among others, are the great themes, but they moulder in closed closets like family skeletons rather than shine brightly as the Aladdin's lamps that they really are. (393-4 my emphasis)

Alain Locke, "Self Criticism: The Third Dimension" (1950)

The Alain Locke who authored the 1950 essay from which this epigraph is taken was more open-eyed about the Negro Renaissance and what it was actually able to accomplish. He strikes a notably different tone from the Locke of twenty-five years before who edited and authored the introduction to The New Negro. That Locke spoke urgently of the New Negro's-not so much arrival as-perceptibility at last in terms such as a "changeling," "a metamorphosis," and "the promise and warrant of a new leadership" ("New Negro" 3-5). Whereas, the Locke of 1950 began this essay by describing the Harlem Renaissance in a somewhat less laudatory register with such phrases as: "the so-called Negro Renaissance," "a certain lingering immaturity," and "the admitted shortcomings of our literary and artistic output in the Nineteen-twenties, thirties, and forties," he admits in the essay that:

All of us probably expected too much of the Negro Renaissance, but its new vitality of independence, pride and self-respect, its scoff and defiance of prejudice and limitations were so welcome and heartening.

Like the adolescence it was, the New Negro era was gawky and pimply, indiscreet, and over-confident, vainglorious and irresponsible; but its testy dynamic gave the Negro new spiritual stature and an added dimension of self-reliance. ("Self Criticism" 391)

While Locke's solemnity here is evident, it would be wrong to say that Locke had abandoned the ideas he had espoused in 1925 about the Negro Renaissance and its possibilities. He had, however, come face to face with the formidable foes of American racism coupled with black racial/moral respectability, and their incredibly deforming properties and potentials, as they concern the work of the writer and artist. Whatever the differences in tone between the two essays, the one striking similarity that I would briefly like to call attention to today lies

in the clear references and non-references to sexuality that haunt the racial text-with its commitments to and at times defiance of {in Locke's case} black moral/racial respectability. As we listen to Locke's sometimes excited stridency, we can hear-if we pay attention-the echoes of the silent brother in his quiet critique of the hegemony of dominant anti-racist discourses and strategies. In one of many diasporic moments in the 1925 essay, Locke's comments about the diversity {and I am suggesting that term in all its complexity for Locke} of Harlem {and by extension of the black community} reads thus:

It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own special motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another ("New Negro" 6).

There are many things to say about this passage, but I want to call attention to the list here. Locke is rhetorically a man of lists and metaphor. Both are always fruitful places to linger in his work. He gives us cultural diversity, regional diversity and class diversity. All the occupations he lists up to preacher are reputable. There is no shame in being a peasant or a worker and the rest of these are for the most part clear prestige occupations. It is at preacher, however, the symbolic purveyor of morality and religion, that the list takes a decided tum to the "criminal, exploiter and social outcast." Black same gender loving folk in such a listcertainly any who were open about their sexuality-would have belonged to the last listed category of "social outcast." But here Locke's tone has a ring of the "can't we all just get along" motif to it. This changes by the time we get to his lists in the 1950 essay. His tone is far more critical. In the 1950 essay, he is not celebrating diversity and the solace ofthe "finding of one another." Rather here is concerned deeply with the ways in which "consciously and subconsciously, these repressions [associated with "race respectability"] work great artistic harm" ("Self Criticism" 393). He decries the "protective silence" about the long list of items I referred to earlier in the epigraph to this section of the essay. "These," he reminds us, "among others, are the great themes, but they moulder in closed closets like family skeletons rather than shine brightly as the AI� addin's lamps that they really are" ("Self Criticism" 394). The reference

to "closed closets," though not a term likely used in the way it is in our post "coming out" era, may be read as prescient by Locke. In this context, the "closed closets" certainly retains the connotation of secrecy, especially when compared in a simile with "family skeletons" which might certainly be read as encompassing the silenced sexuality of so many ofthe writers of the Harlem Renaissance including Locke himself. Indeed, in the sentence that I just quoted, it is the elliptical nature of the phrase that follows his long list that I find most telling; the phrase that comes just before this reference to closed closets. Locke says, "These, among others, are the great themes That little dependent clause, that names the thing or things that he could not name, is the space in which Locke enacts the very tyranny he is wrestling against in this essay and which he was hopeful in the earlier essay that the Negro Renaissance might help to defeat. The closing paragraph of the essay is so remarkable in demonstrating further my point here that I quote it in its entirety:

To break such tabus is the crucial artistic question of the moment, the wrath of Negro Rotarians, preachers, college presidents, and journalist [a respectable list if ever there was one] notwithstanding. It is this inner tyranny that must next be conquered I am far from suggesting that even a considerable part of this revelation will be morally risque or socially explosive; some of it will be, of course. But I do sense a strange and widely diffused feeling that many of these situations are Masonic secrets-things to be talked about, but not written or officially disclosed. Maybe, now that a few Negro authors have demonstrated the possibility of financial independence and success as writers, some of our younger talents can shake free of the white-collar servitudes of job dependency on the one hand and conventional 'race loyalty' on the other. If so, we may confidently anticipate an era of fuller and more objective presentation by Negro authors of their versions of contemporary living in general and Negro life and experience. ("Self Criticism" 394)

With very few emendations, I could use (indeed, likely have used) similar rhetoric to describe the homophobia and heterosexism that animates much of race politics and African-Americanist critical discourse today. This same phenomenon of "race loyalty" is one that complicates the issue of marriage equality for many African Americans. I don't defend the position-even though marriage is not an institution I am particularly enamored with-but I do think it is important to understand in somewhat historical and political terms what we are up against. Locke

could not call it by its name. Today we can, and I suppose that represents a new kind of racial progress.

By the time DuBois, like Locke, was forecasting it in the 1920S as a new literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance had in fact already begun. Spanning roughly the years from the First World War in 1918 to at least the mid, I 930S of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance represents a significant era of African American artistic productivity. In this respect, DuBois was prescient in foretelling the significance of this period in terms of art, culture, and politics. Still his notion of the Tal, ented Tenth, though not an unreasonable response to severe racial backlash following the war, deprived him of the foresight necessary to understand that a literary renaissance of such breadth would resist es, sentialist notions of racial uplift. For the ideological orientation of the Harlem Renaissance fundamentally challenged (with varying degrees of success) the idea that a privileged minority of intellectuals could, or should, represent African Americans en masse.

Forecasting predictions of his own in 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Langston Hughes places his hope for the future of black art in the African-American majority-particularly the "low-down folks," as he referred to the remaining ninety percent declaring, "And they are the majority-may the Lord be praised!" (1537). Hughes opines that "perhaps these common people will give the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself' (1538). Hughes's thinking was that "whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our own individual dark,skinned selves without fear or shame" (1538-40).

Hughes takes a romantic view that he might find some sense of sal, vation or refuge from respectability and its artistic and social limitations in the "low-down folks." He knew all too well the restrictions on the Negro artist of which Locke speaks. And if that Negro artist also hap' pens to be different in some way (gay or lesbian) or perhaps too folksy or vernacular in the execution of her art, she might suffer the imputation of race disloyalty.

v. Conclusion

I have been trying to argue that African Americans' view of modernity as progress differs as a result of the regime of white racism in the u.S.

That difference manifests itself in the form of an adherence to a code of racial/moral respectability as a primary anti-racist strategy; and antiracism has for African Americans been most clearly identified with the narrative of progress and modernity. But there are ramifications to this discursive history. One of those ramifications is the idea of the black community as bounded, policeable, and finite. Much of the adopting of the politics of racial respectability was done to demonstrate to whites how "like them" we could be as a way of proving our humanity. Hence, this paper's sub-titular reference to the "grateful Negro"-a figure who represents the hegemony of assimilationist politics and logic in black anti-racist struggle. The earliest literary reference to the "grateful Negro" that I am aware of is that of Maria Edgeworth's 1802 short story of the same title. In that tale, Caesar-the so-called grateful Negro-out of loyalty to his white master, betrays his friend Hector by exposing Hector's plan for a slave revolt. This seems an appropriate and productive genesis to an idea with such a long and vexed history.

At one time the grateful Negro was standing outside a literary movement he/she helped to create begging permission to be himself; today's grateful Negro is standing at the "welcome table" of symbolic black inclusion in the form of the Millions More March, once again asking permission to belong and to participate. And the most frightening grateful Negro of all is the one who really believes in the lessons learned by this particular brand of racial progress represented by respectability. He/she is grateful to be washed, scrubbed, and cleaned for the pleasure of his oppressor in hopes that the same oppressor will let him share in some fantasy of true democracy.

In American racial logic, what the u.s. has long thought it wanted is a grateful Negro-willing to see his liberation in terms established by his oppressor; imagining his progress, his move into modernity as concomitant with the moral policing and whitewashing of his racial identity. The truth that we are finally beginning to see now, however slowly and painfully, is that the last thing this country needs for the evolution of democracy is another instantiation of the grateful Negro.

Works Cited

Clemetson, Lynette. "Both Sides Court Black Churches in the Battle Over Gay Marriage." New York Times. 1 March 2004, Lat Ed., National Desk: I.

Curtis, LP. [r "Review Essay of Philip D. Curtain's The Image ofAfrica: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850." History and Theory. 4· 3 (1965): 387-397.

Favrod, Charles-Henri, Etranges Etrangers: Photographie Et Exotisme, 1850-1910. Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1997.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The Heath Anthology ofAmerican Literature. Vol. D., Ed. Paul Lauter. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 1537-1540.

Locke, Alain. "The New Negro." The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Alain Locke. New York: Touchstone, 1999.

"Self Criticism: The Third Dimension." Phylon. II. 4 (1950): 391-394.

Mitchell, Mary. "Gay Marriage Stance Puts Some Pastors in Unholy Union." Chicago Sun Times. 14 March 2004: 14.

Robinson, Alexander. "Reaching the Summit." Interview with Will O'Bryan. Metro Weekly. 22 Sept. 2005.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005.

Weiss, Eric M. "Gays Protest Rejection of Speaker at Gathering." Washington Post. 16 Oct. 2005, Sec. A: AI6+.

Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen!. New York: Doubleday, 1957.

Paul Muldoon

A Mayfly

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein would blunder into Deichtine's mouth to become Cu Chulainn, Cu Chulainn who had it within him to steer clear of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear, his own spear from which he managed to augur the fate of that part-time cataloguer, that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush as its own tumult transcends the thrush, the thrush that's known to have tipped off avalanches from the larch's lowest branches, the lowest branches of the larch that model themselves after a triumphal arch, a triumphal arch made of the femora of a woman who's even now filed under Ephemera.

Joyce Carol Oates

Tetanus

Diaz, Cesar. Like an upright bat, quivering wings folded over to hide its wizened face, the boy was sitting hunched over the table beneath glaring fluorescent lights, shaved head bowed, rocking back and forth and humming frantically to himself. Arresting officers had banged him a lit, tle, tom his filthy T,shirt at the collar, bloodied his nose and upper lip. His eyes, wetly glassy, frightened and furtive, lurched in their sockets. He was breathing hard, panting. He'd been crying. He'd sweated through his Tshirt that was several sizes too large for his scrawny body. He was talking to himself now, whispering and laughing. Why was he laughing? Something seemed to be funny. Spittle shone at the boy's red, fleshy lips and the nostrils of his broad stubby nose were edged with bloody mucus. He took no notice of the door to the windowless room opening, a brief conversation between two individuals, adults, male, Caucasian, figures of authority of no more apparent interest to him than the table top before him. He was eleven years old, he'd been taken into Trenton police custody on a complaint by his mother for threatening her and his younger brother with a fork.

"Cesar? Hello. My name is

Zwilich spoke with practiced warmth, calm. Pulling out a chair at the counseling table, at his usual place: back to the door. Outside were Mer, cer County guards. Mercer County Family Services shared cramped quarters with the Mercer County Department of Parole and Probation and was adjacent to the Mercer County Youth Detention Center, which was an aggressively ugly three-story building made of a stony gray material

that looked as if it had been pissed on over a period of many years, in jagged, whimsical streaks. You came away thinking that these walls were covered in graffiti though they were not.

Early evening, a Friday in late June. Parole and Probation had shut for the weekend, but Family Services was open for business, and busy. One of those days that, beginning early, swerve and rumble forward through the hours with the numbing, slightly jeering repetition of an endless stream of freight cars. Even as Zwilich's life was falling into pieces he was speaking in his friendly-seeming and up-beat voice to Diaz, Cesar whose latest arrest sheet lay before him on the table, beside a folder stamped Mercer County Family Services: Confidential. and I'm here just to ask you a few questions, Cesar. You've been in counseling with Family Services before, I think. This time we need to clear up some problems before you can go home. Can you hear me?"

The bat-like boy sneered, smirked. You had to think that he was very frightened, yet his manner was hostile, insolent. He was rocking from side to side, gripping his scraped elbows. He was muttering to himself and laughing and Zwilich, an adult male in his mid-thirties, old enough to be Cesar Diaz's father and wishing to project a fatherly or older-brotherly manner, wishing to convey to Cesar Diaz that he sympathized with him, respected him, he was on his side and not on the side of the enemy, had no doubt that, if he could hear the obscene words the boy was muttering, a hot flash would color Zwilich's cheeks above his patch of whiskers and his heart would kick in revulsion for the boy, but luckily Zwilich couldn't hear.

He would tell Sofia, it's been one of those days. Which? Which days?

A day of temptation. Terrible temptations.

And did you succumb?

Goddamn he was not going to succumb. He'd had a few drinks at late lunch to buoy his spirits, and the prospect of a few drinks this evening, alone or with another, somewhere improvised, filled him now with a gassy sort of elation, like a partly deflated balloon someone has decided, out of whimsy or pity, to inflate.

Zwilich spoke. Kindly, with patience. Such evil in him, his secret little cesspool glittering deep inside the well of his soul, it was his task, a sacred task, to keep the lid on. Yet the boy resisted. Staring stubborn and unyielding at a bloody smear on the table before him, where he'd wiped the edge of his hand after having wiped a skein of bloody mucus from his nose. Zwilich was thinking that Cesar Diaz, exposed in pitiless

fluorescent lighting, might have been drawn, with finicky, maniacal exactitude, by Durer or Goya. No mere photograph could capture his essence. His forehead was low and furrowed in an adult expression of anguish indistinguishable from rage. His bony boy's-head had been shaved as if to expose its vulnerability, breakable layers of skull bone upon which a scalp, reddened with rashes and bumps, seemed to have fitted tight as the skin of a drum. A very ugly head, an aborigine-head, crudely sculpted in stone and unearthed from the soil of centuries. The arresting officers had pegged Cesar Diaz as possibly gang-affiliated, but Zwilich thought that wasn't likely, the kid was too young and too scrawny, no gang would want him for a few years. The shaved head was more likely Mrs. Diaz's precaution against lice.

Zwilich suppressed a shudder. Itchy-scurrying sensation at the nape ofhis neck, his jaws beneath the whiskers. He'd caught lice from clients, in early years. But not for years.

According to Cesar Diaz's mother, he'd been sniffing glue with other boys earlier that day and coming home he'd caused a "ruckus" in their building, he'd been "violent"-"uncontrollable"-"threatening." Glue sniffing! It was an epidemic among boys Cesar's age, in certain Trenton neighborhoods. If Zwilich hadn't been assured that Cesar had been examined by a doctor, passed back into police custody, and delivered to Family Services for evaluation, he'd have thought the boy was still high, or deranged. Sniffing airplane glue was the cheapest, crudest high, scorned by serious junkies (rneth, heroin) for causing the quickest brain damage. The boy's bloodshot eyes shone with an unnatural intensity as if about to explode and a powerful odor of unwashed flesh, sweat, grime, misery, wafted to Zwilich's nostrils.

It would be traumatic for Cesar to be kept overnight in detention but there, at least, he'd be made to take a shower. A real shower. As in a slow-motion dream sequence Zwilich could imagine the bat-boy cringing beneath hot rushing water, layers of filth gradually washing off his skinny body, in swirls at the drain beneath the boy's bare feet. The darkish-Hispanic pallor emerging, a startling beauty, out of encrusted dirt.

He felt a sudden pang of tenderness for the boy. As if he'd glimpsed the boy naked and vulnerable and begging for love.

"Cesar? Will you look at me? Your mother has said Now Cesar looked up sharply. "Mama? She here?"

"Not just yet, Cesar. Your mother is very upset with you, and worried about you, she's hoping that we can-"

"Mama comin to take me home? Where's she?"

The bloodshot eyes widened, excited. The bony shoulders twitched like broken wings.

"Your mother might-possibly-be coming to take you home tonight. Or it might be better for you to stay overnight at the-" "Mama here! Mama! God damn fuck Mama!"

"Cesar, hey: calm down. Sit still. If the guards hear you and come in, our interview is over."

Zwilich frequently saw young offenders, as they were called, not only handcuffed but their cuffs chained to waist-shackles; not infrequently, since adolescents were the most desperate of all offenders and their ankles were shackled, too. Trooping in and out of the detention center next door, kids in neon-orange jumpsuits, cuffed and shackled and it was an unnatural and obscene vision that passed over by degrees into being a familiar vision, one that induced a sensation of extreme fatigue in the observer like, simply, wanting to give up: die.

As if reading Zwilich's wayward thoughts Cesar bared his yellow teeth in a taunting smile. "Hey man? You be cool? I gain home. Mama come? Mama sorry now?"

"Maybe. We'll see."

"Mama sorry. Yes."

The boy spoke with such vehemence, Zwilich didn't doubt, yes Mama was very sorry.

The wan, stale odor of sorrow blown through air vents in the old State Street building. Some smells, in first floor men's lavatories, feculent, sulfurous, a prefiguring of the farthest-from-daylight pit of hell.

Six years on the staff at Family Services, Zwilich would have been promoted to supervisor by now except for budget cuts through festering New Jersey, and departmental resentments. Inevitable he'd provoke resentment being over-qualified for his job and inclined, beneath his courteous manner, to exasperated patience, irony. Most days he wore black jeans and a white cotton dress shirt and sometimes a necktie; sometimes a lead-colored necktie. He wore expensive silver-threaded Nikes, in cool weather a black leather bomber jacket to align himself with, not his colleagues, still less his superiors, but his clients. His bristly sand-colored whiskers were trimmed into a goatee, his still-thick hair, receding at his temples, was trimmed in a crew-cut that gave him, in these uncertain years approaching forty, an air of youthful vitality and waywardness that at times, Zwilich still felt. He hadn't quit his job as Sofia had quit hers, in disgust, dismay. He had plans, still. Environmental law, a Ph.D. in so-

cial psychology. He wasn't old. He wasn't broken. Maybe inclined to sarcasm, can't be helped. He didn't want to think that, without a clear future, a vision of some sort ofhappiness, the present becomes unendurable in a very short time.

He asked Cesar: how'd you like some pizza? a Coke? and Cesar shrugged OK cautiously as if suspecting a trick, it's a world in which, if you're eleven years old, some older guy, or could be a girl, holds out a pizza slice for you, a can of Coke, and, when you reach for it, slaps your hand away, laughs in your face. Zwilich made a quick call on his cell phone, the pizzeria across the street where sometimes he ordered take-outs. Poor kid was probably starving. The least Zwilich could do, feed him.

It was Zwilich's task to interview the detained juvenile and make a recommendation to his supervisor who, in the flurry of late Friday, and in his trust in Zwilich's judgment, would no more than glance at the report and pass it on: whether to release Cesar Diaz into an adult relative's custody or keep him overnight, or longer, in the juvenile detention facility. Zwilich disapproved of keeping kids as young as Cesar Diaz even overnight in detention where the oldest boys were sixteen. Inmates were segregated according to age and size but still, a boy like Cesar would be abused.

Probably, something like that had already happened to Cesar. Not once but many times.

On Monday, a Family Court judge would rule on Cesar's case. Probation and outpatient therapy was most likely unless, if Family Services recommended it, incarceration in a juvenile facility. A kid's life in Zwilich's hands, like dice to be tossed. A wild thought came to him: take Cesar Diaz home.

A call to Sofia to come back, see what I've done.

Except Sofia wasn't answering her phone messages to him. Where was she staying, with whom, in Trenton or possibly in Philadelphia, Zwilich had suspicions, but no clear knowledge love you but frankly I'm afraid of you, terrified of going under with you, drowning.

He'd been shocked: Drown? With him?

As if Zwilich was a depressed man, was that it? Sofia was fearful of the contagion?

He'd hated her, in that moment. He'd wanted to slap her beautiful, selfish face.

If they'd had a child. By now, children. When two adults cohabiting fail to have children, they remain perpetual children themselves. "Well, Cesar. See you've been busy."

Zwilich whistled through his teeth looking through the boy's file. He'd been taken into police custody five times, twice within the past three months. Vandalism, petty thefts, disturbances at school and at home, glue-sniffing. A previous caseworker had noted that one of the vandalism episodes including "desecration of a cemetery" and another the torture of a stray dog. It was noted that an older neighborhood boy had tied a rope around Cesar's neck and yanked him around causing him to faint when he'd been nine; another time, Cesar had fashioned a noose a stuck his own head into it; yet another time, more recently, he'd forced a noose over his six-year-old brother's head. He'd been picked up with two older boys for stealing from a 7-Eleven store and not long afterward he'd been arrested for vandalism in the rear lot of the 7-Eleven store. He'd been several times suspended from school. Following these incidents he'd been assessed by Family Services psychologists and counselors and given sentences of "supervised probation" with required therapy from Family Court judges who hadn't wanted to incarcerate so young a child. But Zwilich thought the next judge isn't going to look kindly on all this.

The prosecutor for the case had told Zwilich that he intended to ask the judge to incarcerate the boy in juvenile detention for thirty days minimum. Cesar Diaz required psychiatric observation as well as treatment for the glue-sniffing and it was "high time" for the boy to learn that the law is serious. Sour, prim as a TV scold Zwilich's colleague said how're kids going to respect the law if there aren't any consequences to their behavior?

Zwilich sneered: who respects the law? whose behavior has consequences? Politicians, mega-corporations?

He'd said, "Hell, this is a child who's been arrested. Look at him, he's so small."

Now in the counseling room, Zwilich wasn't so sure. Fury quivered in Cesar's tight-coiled little body, halfway you expected him to spring up at you, like a snake baring its fangs.

want to hurt your mother, Cesar? Your little brother? You love them, don't you? Tell me."

"Din't hurt nobody! Shit what Mamma says."

"I think you love them. Sure you do. Why'd you want to scare them, Cesar? Tell me."

Cesar shrugged, sniggered. You tell me.

In Cesar's file it was noted that his father Hector Diaz was deceased. Zwilich said, in a confiding voice, "My father died when I was a little boy, Cesar. I was just six, I know what it's like."

Cesar looked interested, briefly. His eyes shifted with caution, a kind of adult shyness, wariness. As if, like the offer of pizza, this might be some sort of trick.

Zwilich said, "I still miss my father, Cesar. But I talk to him, in a way. Every day, I talk with him." Zwilich paused, wondering if this might be true. He certainly talked with someone, in a continuous tape loop of improvised, pleading speech; but that someone seemed not to be listening. "Do you-with your father-too?"

Cesar shrugged, evasive now, downlooking, wiping at his leaking nose. Zwilich had several times offered him tissues but the boy disdained them preferring to wipe bloody snot on his fingers and his fingers on the table. Zwilich tried another father question but the boy wasn't responding. You had to suppose that this was a misguided tactic: probably the kid hadn't even known his father, or, if he'd been told that somewhere he had a father, that the father was dead.

Father deceased. One problem out of the way.

When Zwilich proceeded to ask Cesar about the thefts from the 7-Eleven store the boy became animated, agitated. Now he began to chatter incoherently in an aggrieved voice. The 7-Eleven clerk must have been an Indian, Cesar muttered a racist slur. There was indignation in his little body and he eyed Zwilich insolently as if to say: So what, man?

The boy was mimicking older boys he admired, neighborhood punks, dope-dealers, the slatted rat-eyes, jeering laugh, junior-macho swagger. In a boy so young the effect was comical as a cartoon that, upon closer inspection, is pornographic.

Zwilich knew these kids. Some were "juvies," others were adolescents, "youths." Their souls' deepest utterances were rap lyrics.

He pitied them. He was sympathetic with them. He detested them. He feared them. He was grateful for them: they were his "work."

You would wish to think that Cesar Diaz, so young, could be saved from them. Removed from his neighborhood, that was poisoning his soul, and placed-where?-in a juvenile facility? But the youth facilities were overcrowded, understaffed. Zwilich admired some of the administrators of these facilities for he knew of their idealism-their initial idealism, at least-but these places were, in effect, urban slum streets with walls around them.

Cesar continued to chatter, agitated and aggrieved. Zwilich glanced at his watch, worn with the dim digital clock face on the inside of his wrist as if the exact time was a secret Zwilich didn't wish to share: 6:55 A.M. The date was June 30,2006.

Each day, each hour. Equal to all others. If God is in one of these, God is in all of these.

He believed this! He wanted to believe.

Yet: IfGod is absent fromjust one ofthese, God is absentfrom aU ofthese.

The pizza would be arriving soon, the Cokes, these would help. One of the guards would rap on the door; "Mr. Zwilich? Delivery." Cesar would observe the counselor paying for the meal, bills removed from Zwilich's wallet in a gesture of easy generosity. Sharing a meal with a client, in these cramped quarters, was a technique of Zwilich's, a friendly maneuver, intimate, yet not overly familiar. You felt the urge to feed, to nurture, a kid like Cesar, who had to be famished.

At the thought of pizza, Zwilich felt a mild stirring of nausea. Beer fat, whiskey fat, in flaccid flesh at his waist, a secret fat, for Zwilich was a lean, lanky, still-young-looking man, five feet ten inches, one hundred seventy pounds, given to small gestures ofvanity-smoothing the bristly hairs of his beard, running his fingers through his brush like hair, checking to see if-yes?-was it evident?-the deep bruised indentations beneath his eyes suggested insomniac nights, or late-drinking-nights, restlessly surfing TV. The first mouthful of gummy pizza cheese, greasy Italian sausage and scorched-but-doughy bread would repel him and his thirst wasn't for syrupy-sweet Coke.

She loved him, she'd said. But didn't want to go down with him and he'd said but I thought you loved me in the most piteous voice and she'd said backing away so he couldn't touch her, pull her off-balance toward him as in a clumsy dance I love you! but Goddamn don't intend to drown with you. Alcohol, addictions of any kind including nicotine, the most common painkillers, more difficult for women to overcome than for men, must be biochemical, genetic. Zwilich hated it, that his wife feared him when, first time he'd met her, at a bar in New Brunswick, in a gathering of medical students, Sofia had been drinking whiskey, straight. He'd been stunned by her beauty, her strong sensual mouth and vivid physical presence. The sight of a woman drinking whiskey aroused Zwilich for it was rare in his experience and often the prelude to a sexual encounter, as it would prove with this woman after she'd become his wife.

Nine years! Since he'd first met her. Of these nine years they'd been married seven.

If they'd had a baby. Babies. What then? Zwilich had no idea but couldn't think that having babies was the solution to a riddle that taunted you every time you looked into a mirror: you? why?

Here was Cesar Diaz: a young woman's baby. It had to have seemed, little Cesar was someone's answer, a temporary answer, to the riddle why?

Freely, Cesar was speaking, boasting of his friends. Lots of friends, Cesar's friends, to look out for him. If he went "inside"-if he was "kept here." No clear transition then to a story about someone who'd fired a gun into the air, they be drinkin' this guy brother home from "Ee-rock" he in the army he have this gun shoot this gun, bullet go high in the air then fall, hit some old guy, poor-old guy next-door back yard he hit, poor-old guy he have bad luck the bullet hit him neck, he don't get to the hospital he die in ambulance you see on TV?-everybody talkin' about it but nobody know who shoot the gun. Cesar grinned, laughed. He'd been tapping his neck to indicate a bullet entering, shaking his head, laughing. Nobody know.

Zwilich was listening now. He knew of this incident, which had been widely reported in the Trenton area: a random bullet fired into the air, that had fallen, and killed an elderly man in the Straube Street project back in April, and the shooter had never been identified. Zwilich tried to interrupt the chattering boy to ask who the shooter was?-an Iraqi war veteran?-but Cesar laughed saying it wouldna happen ifGod din't want it that way, nobody damn fault how the gun go off, how you blame it?

"Cesar, did you tell your mother about this?"

Cesar sniggered, vastly amused. Had to be Mr. Zwilich was a real asshole to ask that.

"An elderly man dies, nobody cares? What if this man was your grandfather, Cesar?"

"Hey man, he not."

Zwilich felt a throb of dislike for the boy. The mimicry of older boys, men, in his voice, his vocabulary, his mannerisms, the contortions of his small body. Zwilich would be meeting with Cesar's mother, not the next day, nor the next, but sometime on Monday, at which time Cesar would appear before a Family Court judge, in the company of a court-appointed public defender. He saw in Cesar's file that Gladys Diaz, twenty-eight, had moved to Trenton four years before from Camden, New Jersey; she was a diabetic who received Mercer County welfare payments for her sons and for herself; in Camden, she'd been arrested for trying to cash forged checks and had been sentenced to two years' probation. At 3:30 A.M. ofJune 30, 2006, Mrs. Diaz had called 9I I reporting her son Cesar for "threatening" her with a fork-not an eating-fork but a long, two-pronged fork like you use for turning meat-screaming he was going to kill her and his six-yearold brother. He'd been sniffing glue, Mrs. Diaz couldn't control him. But

when Trenton police officers arrived at the Straube Street apartment, and Cesar ran away panicked, crawling to hide beneath a bed, Mrs. Diaz relented saying maybe they shouldn't take her son away, then she'd relented again saying yes! they should! this time she wasn't going to come with him to the precinct, Cesar is on his own this time though again changing her mind as the officers hauled the boy shrieking and stumbling to the street, to the waiting patrol car, wrists cuffed behind his back and the officers would note on their reports a strong smell of red wine on Mrs. Diaz's breath. Cesar was speaking excitedly of Mama as if Zwilich must know her. Cesar was furious with Mama but Cesar was desperate for Marna. Cesar was saying Mama been wantin to scare him, now Mama sorry. Callin the damn police, Mama done that before, sayin she gonna call them to scare him, and his brother, too, lots oftimes, to scare them, Marna afraid to beat him now, he too big, damn police come for him at school too but he'd never been "kept in" this place he'd be let go now, Marna comin to take him home. Why this was funny, Zwilich didn't know. The boy's laughter was sharp like shattering glass and getting on his nerves. If the boy was made to spend a single night in the juvenile facility he'd be punished for that shriek of a laugh. He'd be punished for his runny nose, and for his smell, and for being a runt, a loser.

Cesar was demanding to know where's Mama? was Mama here yet? and Zwilich said his Mama wasn't here, and Cesar said, his voice rising, where's Mama? I want Mama to take me home, and he wasn't laughing now, tears of indignation shone in his eyes, and Zwilich said, "Cesar: your Mama told us to take you and keep you here as long as we want to, your Mama said, 'I don't want Cesar in the house anymore, I'm done with Cesar, you keep him.'"

Zwilich was a perfect mimic of Mama's furious voice. Fixing his somber-counselor's eyes on Cesar's face.

In fact, Mrs. Diaz had said something like this. The mothers of kids brought into juvenile custody invariably said something like this or more extravagant despairing things, but Mrs. Diaz had also said she hoped her son could come back home that night, she wanted to take him to stay with a relative in New Brunswick, get him out of the neighborhood for a while, and Zwilich who'd spoken to the distraught woman on the phone said yes, that sounded like a good idea.

Cesar stared at Zwilich now in stunned silence, his mouth quivering. Cesar couldn't be more respectful than if Zwilich had slapped him on both cheeks, hard. You didn't tell an eleven-year-old that his Marna didn't want him, not in Zwilich's profession you didn't, but the impulse

had come to him, not for the first time in circumstances like these, but for the first time with a child so young, an impulse as strong as sex, overpowering irresistible, a wish to create something-even misery, even self-disgust-out of nothing. Zwilich felt a sick thrill. Zwilich smiled. Zwilich was overcome by shame. Luckily the interview wasn't being taped, no surveillance camera in this airless cubbyhole and outside in the corridor the Mercer County guards stupefied with their own boredom hadn't the slightest interest in what transpired in the room unless there'd been a call for help, an adult's cry for intervention and restraint.

Zwilich relented: "Cesar, hey." Stood and approached the stricken boy. Cesar's eyes shone with tears that gave him the look of a fierce little dog. When Zwilich touched him, to comfort him, the boy cringed. "Cesar, your Mama didn't mean it. She called us-just a while ago, she called and left a message for me-'I love my-'"

So swiftly it happened then, Zwilich would live and relive the assault and never quite comprehend how Cesar grabbed his right hand and bit his forefinger, before Zwilich could shove him away. Bit down hard, tendons taut in his grimy neck, in an instant he'd become a deranged animal. Zwilich struck him with his free hand, his fist, on the side of the head, knocked the boy from his chair and onto the floor yet he wasn't able to pry the boy's jaws open to free his finger, Zwilich was shouting, screaming in pain, oh God the pain was terrible, the mad boy had bitten Zwilich's forefinger to the bone, at the first joint, only when the guards rushed at him did the boy release his pit-bull jaws and Zwilich staggered away. The guards cursed the boy trying to crawl beneath the table, he was lifted, thrown down, scrambling frantic and crab-like on the floor, shrieking as if he were being murdered. Quickly now the guards subdued him, cursing him, laughing at the size of him, couldn't weigh more than seventy-five pounds, they had him on his belly on the linoleum floor, on his face, wrists behind his back and cuffed and lifted for maximum pain, wouldn't cease struggling so the guards cuffed his ankles too, marveling Jesus!-the size of the little bastard. Zwilich showed the guards his wounded finger, which was bleeding thinly down his hand, down his arm to his elbow, and seemed somehow to have become smeared on the front of his white shirt. He hadn't known he'd been shouting for help. Trying to laugh it off, the kid was quick as a snake, Zwilich hadn't seen the attack coming. He was white-faced, dazed. In a state ofshock and his heart pounding crazily. The panic-rush, the adrenaline-rush, had to be as powerful as any heroin rush Zwilich had had, years ago when he and Sofia had experimented injecting heroin into their veins, not seriously but just

to see what it was like, and they'd backed offfrom it almost immediately, at least Zwilich had, and never tried it again. Zwilich was stammering at the guards telling them to take Cesar Diaz away, he couldn't bear the sight of the boy any longer. The evaluation would note the abrupt termination assault on a Family Services counselor.

In the skirmish Zwilich had nearly lost control of his bladder, Jesus! the guards would've been witnesses, he'd never have outlived such a professional humiliation.

Now you're fucked, little cocksucker for life.

Not for life, surely: only just remanded to juvenile detention for thirty days.

Pitiless glaring lights of the medical center where in a cubicle screened off from more serious traumas Zwilich's wounded forefinger was given a thorough cleansing, disinfecting. The young Korean resident doctor examined the finger as if it he'd never seen anything so curious. "You can see teeth marks all around. These are human teeth?"

Human teeth had the ring of a joke punch line. Zwilich laughed, a hot flush in his face. He was still shaky, edgy. But yes, he had to concede: human teeth.

"Small, though? A child? 'Child teeth'?"

"Not so small, the child is eleven."

Zwilich waited for the young doctor to inquire if the child was Zwilich's own child, it seemed a natural question, Zwilich was a normal man yet might be the father of a crazed demon-child, but already the doctor was deftly bandaging the finger. Strangely, for all the pain, that still throbbed like flashing neon, the wounded finger hadn't bled much.

In a staff lavatory at Family Services he'd run cold water on the wound, washing away the blood and numbing the finger. He'd have improvised a clumsy gauze-bandage for the finger out a near-depleted first aid kid in the office but his supervisor insisted that Zwilich go to the medical center immediately, to get professional medical attention for the bite. For insurance reasons, Zwilich supposed: if such a wound became infected, -if for instance the finger had to be amputated, Family Services would be liable for a large settlement.

Before Zwilich left the clinic holding his thick-bandaged finger at chest-level to minimize the throbbing, the young Korean doctor insisted that he have a tetanus shot.

Zwilich laughed irritably: he was fine, he didn't need a tetanus shot, he was sure. Or rabies.

The doctor said, somberly, "Yes, but the inside of a human mouth can be dangerous as an animal's mouth. Teeth caries contain infectious microorganisms, you'd be surprised."

Zwilich thought: Would I! In his dazed state, nothing could surprise him.

The needle bearing the transparent tetanus vaccine entered Zwilich's left bicep cleanly with little pain but shortly afterward as he left the clinic it began to throb. And the clumsy bandaged forefinger throbbed with pain. A jeering sort of pain it seemed to Zwilich, recalling the demon-child's look of feral hatred. If he'd been able, Cesar Diaz would have tom out Zwilich's throat with his teeth. Zwilich shuddered, stumbling as if he'd been drinking, badly needed a drink and so stopped by the Dorsey Hotel, the romantic-seedy bar like the interior of a cave Sofia had said and that cave undersea and muted where frequently he'd met up with her after work. For a while, Sofia had been a therapist at the hospital a half-block away, her specialization was pediatric oncology. Wistfully she'd said, If we're going to start a family, and her voice had trailed off and he'd said quickly, We can. Soon. We will. When things are more in control. He'd meant to say (hadn't he?) under control. When things are more under control. His father had often used the expression, to placate Zwilich's mother. When things are more under control.

In this way months pass. Years.

At the bar, in perpetual twilight, a ghost-figure barely visible in the mirror behind rows of glittering bottles, Zwilich drank a beer, and a second beer with a shot-glass of whiskey, drinking with calculated slowness telling himself that he was early, Sofia wasn't late, he was waiting for her to appear, this pleasant interim of merely waiting, Sofia would be breathless from having hurried, a smell of rain in her loose hair. Sofia's hand on his shoulder, a light claiming touch: "Hey." And the pressure of her wide, warm mouth against his that quickened his heart, that was shriveled to the size of a peach pit, with hope. "Hey. Where've you been?" Already he'd forgotten the interview, the assault, the evaluation, abhorrent to him, he would not remember, an aberration in Zwilich's life not to be shared with Sofia, not ever. Half-consciously counting four men at the bar beside himself and there was the bartender and it's a law enforcement officer's habit, you see that their hands are in sight, and you see where the entrance, exits are, where you might need to take cover,

in an emergency. For such things can happen, you can't foresee. One of the older drinkers at the bar had the large gravely heraldic head of Zwilich's father who'd been a rich Hartford, Connecticut stock broker who'd died not when Zwilich had been six but when he'd been twentysix and so long estranged from his father and in so undefined a phase of his life, geographically as well as otherwise, Zwilich hadn't known that his father had had a massive stroke and had died pleading to see his son until several days after the death when Zwilich's distraught mother had finally been able to locate him in an outlying district of Brooklyn where he'd been, temporarily, "living with friends." Zwilich must have been staring at this man unlike Zwilich's late father unkempt, unshaven, for at last the man squinted over at Zwilich, with a faint frowning smile as if trying to determine who Zwilich was and a sensation of cold terror washed over Zwilich, I am not one of you, I don't belong here. Hurriedly Zwilich paid the bartender what he owed him and fled.

Another Trenton bar, on lower State Street, Zwilich looked into: but Sofia wasn't there. Nor was Sofia at the Bridge House where the bar was crowded, the air dense and combative and Zwilich called the bartender, "Has Sofia been in here tonight?" and the bartender cupped his hand to his ear amid the din and Zwilich raised his voice, "I'm looking for my wife, has my wife been in here tonight," and there was a momentary hush, the Bridge House was a tavern in which there is a moment of respect when a man in a blood-spattered white shirt and with a bandaged finger announces in a raw uplifted voice that he's looking for his wife yet still the bartender said no, hadn't seen Sofia that night, in fact hadn't seen Sophia for some time. Zwilich thanked him and departed and now at sunset crossing the Delaware River to Morrisville, Pennsylvania, hot rain splashing against the windshield of his car, Zwilich is possessed by the thought that he will drive to Philadelphia, he's convinced that he knows where Sofia might be staying, and with whom. Driving across the familiar bridge he's made to notice the strangeness of the fading sky, below the bridge there is mostly darkness but much of the sky remains in patches of light, the sun melting into the horizon like a broken egg yolk, the effect has to be the result of chemical pollution yet it's luridly beautiful. Below are the old shuttered mills, warehouses, the decaying Trenton waterfront but at the Pennsylvania shore a string, as far as Zwilich can see upriver, ofglittering house-lights. His heart beats with a forlorn eager hope: sun spilling its light onto the bridge, onto the river like a slow-motion detonation in which, though many thousands are destroyed in a fiery holocaust, no one feels any pain.

Alicia Ostriker

Two Poems

I. Dawn Flight: The Pilot

It is the blue-rose time before the sun the meditative emptiness I love as well as the reassuring engine

It is not rational and yet I feel I am kept aloft by mysterious yet favorable forces, obsidian ocean crawls beneath me

Shoreline approaches then passes under my belly, now come terraced fields, the blazing S of a river, a small city. I sight my target.

2. Afterward: The Parents

We've got you, little burned one, and not them. Come on home, it's getting dark, don't fuss. This is the end of your adventures, tomorrow's earth will be cool for you, for you, little burned one, little ash.

Annuals

In part we resemble you: when the time comes and something violent thrusts us from tender sleep, first we sob then we suck,

we suck like demons, growing all the time flinging ourselves forth, upward, with all our might, taking what we can get, beginning to open.

Then comes the long moment of conversation, Revelry, rivalry, these summer days of cloudless pleasure in the nick of time.

We party and thrive, and then it is time to wither. We are both proud and humble since we know in our damp capillaries that life is food and feeding. Not that our time exceeds yours but that we feast on it-this is what you see in usthis is what you envy.

Laundry

Just finished folding laundry. There's the news. A slender prisoner, ankles shackled, nude back and legs striped by a brown substance you might take for blood but which probably is shit, hair long, arms extended at shoulder level like a dancer or like Jesus, walks toward a soldier with rolled-up pants and a gun, posed legs akimbo in the tiled corridor. I cannot tell from the image if the soldier is smiling. The prisoner's elegant feet barely touch the floor. In another nude photograph a prisoner with shorter hair cowers against a wall while two dogs whose leashes are held by soldiers examine him. I cannot tell from the photograph if the dogs are snarling or drooling. And in this one a girl soldier holds the leash, which leads to the neck of a prisoner lying on the floor.

Oil oozes a mile or two underground. Like sand, it was once alive.

In another photo the nude prisoners have been formed into a pyramid. They look like something in the back of a butcher shop. A stack of calves' livers. In another a girl soldier leaning over a bleeding prisonerare those dog bites-gives the thumbs-up sign and smiles as radiantly as a cover model for a 1950's Good Housekeeping. A June Allyson smile, white-toothed, pageboy Homecoming Queen blond. Oil oozes a mile or so underground. Atop it stands a palace of air conditioning. Somewhere in the Green Zone would be a swimming pool for the officers. Joyfully clean aqua water. Stagnant waters are also a joy-to the flies. As is blood. A fly's life there would be prosperous. I put away the laundry. I put my nose in the laundry, it smells warm and well. My husband's underpants and undershirts I lay in his dresser drawer. In my dresser drawer go my underpants and T-shirts.

Artemis to Aphrodite

In a drop of cool dew on a grassblade I find the entire green world

I run through it I love to be naked and hunt with my friends did you ever watch just at sunset a mighty stag with an arrow in his heart drop to his knees and die sister you have not lived until you have gutted a deer and thrown its guts to the dogs

Gaia

Ingratitude after all I have done for them ingratitude is the term that springs to mind

when I smell foul garbage ringing every city or when another moist forest is splintered chopped paved

yet I continue to generate abundance which they continue to waste

they expect me to go on giving forever they don't believe anything I say with my wet green windy hot mouth

Elie Rekhess

In the Shadow of National Conflict:

Inter-group Attitudes and Images of Arab and Jews in Israel

Introduction

This article examines the changing nature of mutual images ofArabs and Jews in IsraeL The relationship between Jews (over 80 percent of the population) and Arabs (who, together with Druze, comprise 19 percent ofthe population) in Israel have undergone significant changes since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, in response to internal socioeconomic developments within Israel, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and armed confrontations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

The paper suggests that historic events systematically challenge existing perceptions, images and stereotypes, and trigger their modification and adaptation. However, the breadth of potential change of perceptions and images is bounded, we argue, by a defined set of themes that constitute a narrative against which Jews and Arab Israelis calibrate their outlooks.

Part One presents a brief historical survey of the status of Arab minority in Israel, focusing on government policies, the national identity dilemma, the process of "Israelization" and "Palestinization," and internal politics and ideological changes within the Arab community in IsraeL This historical context serves as the framework for the analysis of mutual jewish-Arab perceptions in IsraeL

Part Two presents theoretical remarks on the issue of "Otherness" and "the Other," including a review of the [ewish-Israeli national ethos, including its conceptualization of the Arab,Israeli conflict. In this paper this ethos is considered a foundation for Jewish,Israeli perceptions of Arabs in Israel.

Part Three introduces a historic review of cultural products-works of literature, film, and textbooks-which reflect the interplay between the Israeli-jewish national ethos and historic events, and the resulting changes in [ewish-Israeli perceptions of Arabs in Israel.

Part Four presents findings of public opinion polls conducted among Jews and Arabs from the late 1960s to date, which similarly illustrate the impact of historic events on changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Arabs in Israel.

In the conclusion, we summarize how Jewish Israeli perceptions of Arab Israelis and vice versa, grounded in the national Israeli ethos, reflect internal and external historical turning points in the Israeli, Palestinian conflict.

Arab Minority in A Jewish State-A Historical Perspective"

The 1948 War created a unique situation of an Arab minority in the Jewish State of Israel. Israel was thus established as a Jewish State, but not exclusively so. In 1948 the Arab population was 150,000, and grew to approximately 1.4 million in 2006, including Arab residents of East Jerusalem.

The 150,000 Arabs who chose to stay in their homes and become Israeli citizens, remained, at the same time, emotionally, nationally, culturally, and religiously bound to the outside Arab world. This necessarily resulted in a sharp crisis ofnational identity, due to split loyalties, the Arabs being torn between Israel and the Arab world.

Israel, for its part, was also faced with a difficult dilemma: how to synthesize between, first and foremost, the needs of the jewish-Zionist

1. This section is based on the author's following articles: Elie Rekhess, "Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of the West Bank: Political Affinity and National Solidarity," Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 23, no. 2-3 (1989), pp. 119-154; Elie Rekhess, "The Arabs of Israel after Oslo: Localization of the National Struggle," Israel Studies, vol. 7. no. 3 (2002), pp. 175-198 (Henceforth: Rekhess, Localization); Arik Rudnitzky and Elie Rekhess, "Israel, State of: Arab Population," Encyclopaedia Judaica, znd Edition, vol. 10 (2006), pp. 728-737; Elie Rekhess, "The Evolvement of an ArabPalestinian National Minority in Israel," Israel Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (2007), pp. 1-28.

State of Israel, on the one hand, and the concept of liberal democracy which implied equal status to all state's citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, on the other. In practical terms, Israel adopted a dual policy, underlined by two contradictory, perhaps even diametrically opposed, considerations. One was reflecting the "Jewishness" of the state. It was securityoriented and viewed the Arabs as a potentially "enemy-affiliated minority." The security consideration manifested itself in the institution of a military government regime in areas densely populated by Arabs, which lasted for eighteen years (1948-1966), and vast expropriation of Arab lands.

The second consideration drew upon liberal and democratic principles. The Declaration of Independence promised that Israel will uphold "full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex [ ] guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture." Israel had thus embarked on an integrative process, which came to be known as "Israelization." All Arabs remaining in the country were granted full Israeli citizenship, including the right to vote and be elected. Israel opted for integration, but not assimilation: Arabic was virtually given the status of an official language; a semi-autonomous Arab school system was maintained. The integrative process was, nevertheless, extremely slow during Israel's first two decades. It was seriously impeded by years of military rule, wide expropriation of Arab lands, discrimination, and inequality.

As for the national affiliation of the Arab minority, the conditions that prevailed until the Six-Day War allowed the vast majority of the Arab minority to maintain a delicate balance between the Israeli and the Arab components of their identity. They were physically detached and isolated from the rest of the Arab world. The 1967 War, however, changed the scene dramatically, launching a return to Palestinian roots. The war resulted in the reunification ofthe Israeli Arabs with their Palestinian brethren in the territories. As contacts deepened, a strengthening of their Palestinian consciousness became increasingly evident.

One of the expressions of this new process, which came to be known as "Palestinization," was the growing involvement of Israeli Arabs in terror acts, of "armed struggle," as it was termed by the PLO. The ascendance of the PLO since the early 1970S had further accelerated the process of Palestinization. Yassir Arafat's speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974 and the PLO's achievements in the UN enhanced its image in the

eyes of the Arab minority. Increasingly, Israeli Arabs expressed support for the PLO and Palestinian self-determination.

Palestinization was not a mutually exclusive process, in the sense that it categorically outweighed Israelization. On the contrary, parallel to the reformulation of national identities and political affiliations, the Arab minority underwent an intensive process of socio-economic change, modernization, and westernization.

The economic progress ofthe Israeli Arabs led to a substantial rise in living standards, accompanied by a parallel rise in the level of expectations, especially among the younger generation brought up and educated in Israel. The Arab sector's almost exclusive model for evaluating its situation was the level of development of the neighboring Jewish populations. Comparisons revealed sizable gaps in almost every socio-economic sphere: industrialization, housing, land, education, local infrastructure, employment, etc. The increasing socioeconomic stress and the process of Palestinization profoundly modified the Israeli Arabs' political behavior. Political activism replaced a more passive, "quietist" approach.

Since the 1970S we have been witnessing a much more militant approach which has manifested itself in the organization of full-scale mass protests, rallies, demonstrations and strikes, campaigning against the government, the establishment of countrywide action-oriented organizations such as the Arab Mayors' Forum and the occasional blurring of the line separating a struggle for civil equality from a struggle for national rights, as was the case in March 1976, when thousands of demonstrators clashed with security forces over a government's decision to expropriate land in the Galilee. In the course of the confrontation, which came to be known as "Land Day," six Arab citizens were killed.

When President Sadat's dramatic visit to Israeli in November 1977 launched the process of Egyptian-Israeli negotiations, leading to a peace process, reactions among the Arab population in Israeli quickly crystallized into two main trends. One camp believed that the Arabs in Israeli would now, at long last, be able to serve as a bridge linking the Jewish population with the Arab world. Senior Arab figures identified as "moderates," suggested that the breakthrough would lead to the final removal of the psychological and security barriers, which had prevented the full integration of the Arab population in Israel.i

.I.. Cited in Elie Rekhess, "The Arabs in Israel." In Middle East Contemporary Survey: 1977-1978, volume 2, ed. Colin Legum and Haim Shaked (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979),567.

Despite manifestations of protest, it seems that the accommodative view had wider support. Generally speaking, the Arabs in Israel warmly welcomed the peace with Egypt. It enabled them to visit the central Arab state freely and reconstruct their cultural ties to Arab world, and in some aspects, also establish economic ties with Egyptian counterparts.

The Intifada (popular uprising), which broke out in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1987, gave an added impetus to the growth of Israeli Arabs fellow-feeling with the Palestinians in the territories. They shared with the people of the West Bank and Gaza in their pride over the very outbreak of the uprising and over its successes; in their pain over the killed and the wounded; in their fury at Israel's "iron fist" policy; and in the great upsurge of national sentiment. However, despite the noted rise in violent incidents in 1988, a full-scale transformation of the Intifada's means ofstruggle into the Green Line has not yet occurred.

The peace process of the 1990S made a far-reaching impact on the political and ideological orientation of the Arabs in Israel. The absent reference to the Arabs in Israel in the Oslo Accords created in them an acute sense of exclusion as Israeli Arab intellectuals and political elites realized that a future Palestinian state would not necessarily fulfill the national aspirations of the Arabs in Israel. This understanding, and the swift developments in the international arena, compelled the Arabs to urgently focus on their own status within Israel. From this point, the national resources of the Arab population were directed inward in a process, which was named "the localization of the national struggle" of the Arab citizens of Israel;'

The reality of a universally recognized Jewish state of Israel, with pronounced privileges of the Jewish majority, created intentional exclusion and inherent discrimination against its Arab citizens. Socioeconomic gaps between Jews and Arabs widened over the years. In the early 1990S, Israeli governments declared their commitment to enhancing Jewish-Arab equality, yet their declarations remained no more than political slogans and were not backed by significant action.

In this period, political-ideological discourse in Arab society focused on what Arabs in Israel perceived to be a built-in contradiction between the nature of Israel as a Jewish state, and its definition as a liberal democracy committed to the equality of all its citizens. For the first

3· Rekhess, Localization, p. 33·

time since 1948, Arab academics and politicians across the political spectrum addressed the inherent weakness of the model of "a Jewish and democratic state." They spoke openly of the acute dilemma of Arab citizens who were tom between loyalty to the state, and identification with its Jewish symbols, the flag, anthem, and ethnocentric worldview. Only a framework based on civil equality, they declared, would rectify their sense of exclusion.

Debates by the Arab elites on the desirable nature of the State of Israel generated alternative models that would respond to and reflect the national needs of the Arab minority more equitably, and resolve the inherent conflict between Israel's Jewish nature and democracy. Public discourse was dominated by the following three models: "A State for All Its Citizens," "Autonomy," and "Binational State."

These alternative models underscore the major ideological transformation ofArabs in Israel in the 1990S in relation to their self-perception as a national minority. They began to reject the term "minorities" typically used by Israeli authorities to relate to the non-Jewish population, which the Arabs viewed as a symbol of Israel's intention to sow internal disunity along religious-ethnic lines between Muslim, Druze, Christian, Circassian, and Bedouin communities. Instead, the Arabs began to conceptualize themselves as a national collective that deserved distinct collective rights. A central pillar in the new self-concept was the reference to the Arabs in Israel as an "indigenous minority"-also referred to as "homeland minority"-a term generally used in contrast to an "immigrant minority." The practical evidence of this change is the demand not only for their due civil rights as individuals, but also for the associative or collective rights due them as a national minority.

One of the most impressive aspects of this process, which acquired the name "the reopening of the 1948 files," is the restoration of the collective historic memory of the Nakba-the perceived catastrophic loss of Palestine in the 1948 war. This changed reality was molded by three major factors: (I) the emergence of a new generation of Arabs who, unlike their predecessors, chose to highlight their national identity rather than water it down; (2) the implications of the Oslo process and the start of discussions about a permanent settlement, the refugee question, and the right of return; (3) the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the State of Israel in 1998, which served as a powerful spur to the process.

Perceiving a threat in MK Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount on the eve of the Jewish New Year, September 28,2000, the Arabs of Israel

expressed solidarity with their brethren in the territories. Ostensibly many adopted the Islamic movement's call to protect the al-Aqsa Mosque, claiming that Israel was trying to exert its authority over the third holiest site in Islam.

The swift response of the Arabs in Israel reflected their sense of identification with the Palestinian cause. Yet, the major cause for the outburst of violence was largely attributable to domestic factors. Signs of rising tension in the Arab sector were already evident during the first half of 2000. Spokespersons of the Arab population pointed out that most of the Arab local councils contended with paralyzing budgetary deficits, the Arab villages had become foci of unemployment, and the problem of the unrecognized villages, especially in the Negev, had worsened. The October 2000 riots reflected the disappointment of the Arabs in Israel with Prime Minister Ehud Barak personally and with his government's policies toward the Arab sector generally. While 95 percent of the Arab electorate had voted for Barak in the personal 1999 elections, many felt betrayed when he declined to invite Arab parties to join his coalition and did little to address the longstanding socioeconomic needs of the Arab sector. The uprising represented the culmination of a process of growing alienation and discontent over unfulfilled expectations to attain equality, especially by the younger generation.

Following sustained harsh criticism on the part of the Arab leadership over the killing of the thirteen Arab citizens by the police, Prime Minister Barak announced the establishment of a state commission of inquiry to investigate the October 2000 riots, headed by Supreme Court Justice Theodor Or, with a mandate to examine the behavior of the security forces, inciters, and organizers of the clashes. The decision was welcomed by the Arab leadership. On September I, 2003, the Or Commission published its findings and recommendation. The commission's report identified the following as the root causes of the events: government discrimination, police behavior, and radicalization of the Arab sector."

The Second Lebanon War, which erupted in the summer of 2006, aggravated national tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel even further. Katyusha rockets exacted a heavy toll from the Arab population

4. Theodor Or, A Year to the State Investigative Commission on the Ocwber 2000 Events (Tel-Aviv University: The Konrad Adenauer Program for [ewish-Arab Cooperation, 2004), pp. 13-24'

in the Galilee, which suffered eighteen of the thirty-nine fatalities. Despite some expectations in the Jewish sector that the shared fate would generate solidarity and partnership between Jews and Arabs, the opposite occurred. In fact, the loss of life and grief aggravated the national identity dilemma ofArabs in Israel and the acute conflict between their Palestinian and Arab identity and their Israeli citizenship, and led to an unmistakable regression in the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Four position papers concerning the civic and national status of the Arabs in Israel were published between December 2006 and May 2007. The papers, which came to be known as the "Future Vision Documents," marked yet another milestone in the developing national consciousness of Israel's Arab community since 1948. The documents represented the viewpoint of Arab intellectual and political elites in Israel regarding their future status and the desired nature of the State of Israel. They called for the recognition of the Arabs in Israel as an indigenous national minority and for the replacement of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with a "consociational democracy" regime or a "democratic bilingual and multicultural state."

The general Jewish response was militant and defensive, responding to what they understood as the authors' separatist intentions. Some columnists interpreted the "Future Vision" document as "a declaration of war" against the Jewish majority and branded the Arabs as "enemies of the state." The call for a binational state that excluded recognition of Israel as the State of the Jewish people was perceived as a provocative attempt to de-legitimize the Jewish people's right of self-determination.

Mutual Images: Theoretical Remarks and the Israeli-Arab Context

National Stereotypes

The study of stereotypes has dominated anthropology, sociology, and social psychology research for many decades. Anthropologists have long noted that the differentiation between in-groups and out-groups is a mixture of self-definition and of rejection of the other that is instrumental in creating structure to our world. Such differential is achieved through stereotype formation, a perceptual process that overlooks a group's universal characteristics and accentuates its distinctive qualities.

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Until the 1950S, social psychological research mainly focused on issues of stereotype content, including the rigidity of ethnic stereotypes.! However, in the late 1950S, following work by Allport and Brunerj stereotype research redirected its attention to stereotyping processes and how stereotypes shape social perception." However, the study of content has not been abandoned in entirety as researchers acknowledge that stereotypes may be modified by the situations in which both the perceivers and the perceived find themselves," and stereotype content may also conform to systematic principles. In their search to identify common dimensions of stereotype content, Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, and Xu9 look to interpersonal and inter-group interactions from a functional perspective as the antecedents of stereotypes. They summarize research on inter-group and interpersonal perceptions to support their argument that two dimensions of stereotypes capture the functional idea underlying interactions: people want to learn (a) others' intents and (b) others' capability to pursue these intents.

According to social-identity theory (SIT), people have two deep-seated motivations: to define themselves and to enjoy positive self-esteem. The pursuit of self-definition pushes the individual to compare and contrast his in-group with out-groups while the pursuit of self-esteem seeks to guarantee that this comparison is flattering. 10 This basic tendency for ingroup favoritism at the expense of out-groups leads to the projection of negative or less favorable motives, evaluation of qualities, and distribution of goods to the out-group. 11

5. R.B. Clarke and D.T. Campbell, "A Demonstration of Bias in Estimates of Negro Ability,"Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 51, no. 3 (1955), pp. 585-588; D. Katz and K. Braly, "Racial Stereotypes of One Hundred College Students," Jourrurl ofAbnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 29 (1933), pp. 280-290; Richard T. Lapierre, "Social Forces Type-Rationalization of Group Antipathy," Social Forces, vol. IS, no. 2 (1936), pp. 232-237.

6. Gordon Willard Allport, The Nature of Prejudice: 25th Anniversary (Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley, 1954); J.S. Bruner, "Going Beyond the Information Given," in Contemporary Approaches to Cognition, eds. J.S. Bruner, E. Brunswik, L. Festinger, E Heider, K.E Muenzinger, e.E. Osgood, and D. Rapaport (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 41-69.

7. S.T. Fiske, A.J.e. Cuddy, P.Glick and J. Xu, "A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Flow from Perceived Status and Competition," Journal of PersonaUty and Social Psychology, vol. 82 (2002), pp. 878-902.

8. Yochanan Peres and Zipporah Levy, "Jews and Arabs: Ethnic Group Stereotypes in Israel," Race & Class, vol. 10, no. 4 (1969), pp. 479-480. (Henceforth: Peres and Levi, Jews and Arabs)

9· See footnote 7·

10. Jacques E.e. Hymans, "Applying Social Identity Theory to the Study of International Politics: A Caution and an Agenda," Paper originally prepared for presentation at the International Studies Association convention (Louisiana: New Orleans, 24-27 March 2002).

11. Roger Brown, Social Psychology, znd Ed. (NY: The Free Press, 1986)

This in-group-out-group division is seen as the psychological foundations for realism in international relations, as J. Mercer 12 claims. R. Toscano notes that when applied within a realist or zero' sum context, Otherness becomes a viable "instrument for sustaining a social and political order.,,13 A stereotype may also express the out' group's role in the collective history of the perceivers, which explains how fateful historical events have contributed to the formation of national stereotypes.!"

Referring specifically to the Israel-Arab conflict, political scientist I. Peleg describes "otherness" as a process that "begins with differentiating between people on the basis of ethnic origin, religion, language, culture, race, or any other attribute assumed to be of social significance."15 However Al Haj states that this "differentiation," is frequently set in place by the dominant group, as a means to assert its superiority over another group. 16 Political and social relations are thus redefined in terms of in-groups and out-groups, and at the extreme, "political actors may choose to harass, persecute, expel, and even an' nihilate 'the Other' so that at the end of this process of differentiation one group eventually finds itself in a 'condition of alienation and estrangement.' "17

Empirical research on the image of "the Other" employs different samples and research methods.l'' Studies also differ with regard to the psychological inter'group repertoire examined: some study stereotypes, others are interested in social distance, emotions, or behavioral intentions and several studies combine these variables simultaneously. As Bar,Tal noted, the most frequently used method to examine stereotypes is by pre' senting a list of characteristics and asking the respondent to evaluate the extent to which each attribute characterizes a target group, although the

12. Jonathan Mercer, "Anarchy and Identity," International Organization, vol. 49, no. 2 (1995), pp. 229-252; see also: Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)

13. Han Peleg, "Otherness and Israel's Arab Population", in: Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (Eds.), The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions ofJewish Culture and Identity (NY, 1994), P.263. (Henceforth: Peleg, Otherness).

14· Peres and Levy, Jews and Arabs, pp. 479-480.

15. Peleg, Otherness, p.262.

16. For a detailed theoretical introduction to multiculturalism see Majid AI Haj, "Multiculturalism in Deeply Divided Societies: The Israeli Case," International Journal of Intercultural Relations, vol. 26, no. 2 (2002): PP.r69-183.

17. Peleg, Otherness, pp.260, 264.

18. For a detailed discussion see Daniel Bar-Tal and Yona Teichman, Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: Representation of Arabs in Israeli Jewish Society (N.Y: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 7, pp. 208-209.( Henceforth: Bar-Tal and Teichman, Stereotypes and Prejudice)

semantic differential ofbipolar traits developed by Osgood et a119 is often used. Expanding the repertoire of research instruments in the study of stereotypes and perceptions, Bogardus/? developed the empirical conception of the instrument to study social distance, by developing a scale that follows analysis of degree of readiness for social relations. 21

National Ethos

National ethos can be defined as the fundamental character or spirit of a nation, the disposition of beliefs, values and aspirations peculiar to a society, a people or a nation. The Israeli ethos, writes Gelber, was shaped by "collective existential experiences, first and foremost sense of survival and the national resurgence of the Jewish people."22 Smooha considers ethnocentrism as one of the central pillars in the Israeli ethos,23 Among the elements which constitute the Israeli ethos he enumerates security, sacrifice and bereavement, cohesive solidarity, victimization, peace, democratic values, and pioneering.i" Adding to this list, Zuckerman elaborates on the Israeli "victim mythos" which is rooted in the experience of the Holocaust.f while Beillin discusss themes such as the denial of the Diaspora, the ethos of defense, the notion of "people under siege," unity, and equality.26 Bar-Tal identified eight themes in the Jewish-Israeli national ethos, which became the prism through which the Arab-Israeli conflict was perceived, and which are particularly relevant to our case. The first theme is the justness of the goals, specifically the realization of the paramount goal of the Zionist vision, grounded in historical, religious, and nationalistic claims: the return of the Jewish People to its historical homeland and the establishment of an independent Jewish state.

19. C.E. Osgood, G.). Suci and P.H. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).

20. Emory S. Bogardus, "Measuring Social Distance," Journal ofApplied Sociology, vol. 9 (1925), pp. 299-308; Emory S. Bogardus, "A Social Distance Scale", Sociology and Social Research, vol. 22 (1933), PP.265-271; Emory S. Bogardus, A Forty-Year Racial Distance Study (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1967).

2 r. See footnote 18.

22. Yoav Gelber, "For the Change in the Face of Israeli Society", Nauv, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 2003) (in Hebrew).

23. Sammy Srnooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel: Conflicting and Shared Attitudes in a Divided Society (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), p. 130.

24. Yoav Gelber, "Transforming Israeli Society," in: Shlomo Sharan (Ed.) Israel and the PostZionistst: A Nation at Risk (Brighton and Portland, 2003), pp. 12-25.

25. Moshe Zuckerman, On the Fabrication of Israeusm: Myth and Ideology in a Society at Conflict (TelAviv, Resling Publishing, 2001), p.80. (in Hebrew).

26. Yossi Beillin, Israel 40 Plus- A Political Profile of Israeli Society in the 90S (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 1994) (in Hebrew).

The second theme pertains to security. It is based on the belief that the Jewish people in Israel faces a security threat to its very existence, on both an individual and a collective level. The security of the State of Israel calls for the mobilization of all society's resources to protect its existence.27 The sense of a security threat has persisted with heightened intensity throughout Israel's existence. Israel's decisive victory in the Six Day War, and to a further extent after the signing of the peace agree, ment with Egypt diminished these tensions somewhat, yet the uprising in the Territories and the waves of Palestinian terror since the mid, 1990S have considerably exacerbated the sense of danger among the Jewish public.

At the same time, the supreme status of security issues in the national ethos eroded as the limitations of military force and a need for a political solution to the Palestinian issue gained recognition. The return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt following the peace treaty with Egypt, and the in' troduction of the "territories in return for peace" principle were salient manifestations of this change. Shifting national beliefs also found expression in the establishment of peace movements in Israel, such as Peace Now, the increasing endorsement of the inevitable need for two states, acceptance of the Palestinian nationhood and a more favorable attitude towards the legitimate rights of the Arab and Palestinian People.

The third theme focuses on deligitimization of the enemy and its negative image. The growing demonization of the Arabs has fostered and perpetuated negative stereotypes. On the one hand, the Arabs were labeled as primitive, devoid of culture, cruel murderers striving "to drive the Jews into the sea." This theme also points to the use of the demonic instruments of the enemy, specifically the use of anti-Semitic motifs in Arab propaganda and categorization of Zionism as a colonialist project designed to dispossess the Arabs of their lands.28

In the late 1970s, the sweeping categorization of the Arabs as a neg, ative collective also changed. After the peace process with Egypt was initiated, the delegitimization of the enemy became increasingly differentiated, reflecting different degrees of animosity toward Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians, with the collective attitude towards the Egyptians being a more positive one. A similar modification in delegitimization was reflected in the changing attitudes towards the Palestinians

27. Daniel Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict: A Socio-Psychological Analysis ofJewish Society in Israel (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2000), pp. 168-171. (in Hebrew) (Henceforth: Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict).

28. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, pp. 172-173.

in the wake of the Oslo process in 1993 and the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO.

The fourth theme is characterized by a positive collective image and is based on the attribution ofpositive characteristics, values and behaviors to the Jews.29 The fifth theme, the group as a victim, deals with the portrayal of the Jews as the victims of the conflict. This theme highlights the Arabs as persecutors of the Jews who are returning to their homeland, seeking to realize their historical right to a national home, after having been persecuted for thousands of years in the Diaspora, and specifically during the Holocaust.l? Patriotism and the need to preserve inner unity are the sixth and seventh themes, while the eighth theme deals with the yearningfor peace on the part of Israeli society, which has been forced into a violent conflict by circumstances not under its control.l'

Bar-Tal emphasizes that the elements of an ethos are not fixed or static. The dynamics of the Jewish-Israeli ethos is dictated primarily by the historic events in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and ensuing political, social, and cultural changes. In this context, two types of historic events or periods may be identified. The first category comprises the points in time at which the conflict was exacerbated, either by a war that broke out between Israel and Arab countries (the War of Independence in 1948, Six Day War in 1967, October War of 1973, First Lebanon War in 1982, Second Lebanon War in 2006), or as a result of national uprising in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 (the First Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip 1987-1993, and the Second Intifada 2000-2005), or violent outbursts between Arab citizens of Israel and security forces (the October 2000 riots). The second category comprises periods of conciliation, pacification, and negotiations, such as the peace process between Israel and Egypt in 1977, or the Oslo Accords of 1993·

The emergence in the 1980s of what became known in Israeli society as "the new historians" or the "post-Zionists" stimulated the above changes in the Jewish-Israeli national ethos. The "new historians," a group of Israeli historians, sociologists, and journalists challenged the traditional Jewish-Israeli (or Zionist) narrative of the roots and history of Jewish State. They staunchly criticized the conventional Israeli version of history in an attempt to demythologize what they identified as the central narratives underlying the historical events prior to and after

29. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, pp. 173-175.

30. lbid., pp. 176-178. 31. Ibid., pp. 178-185.

1948,32 including the conception of early Jewish settlers in Palestine as idealistic pioneers who arrived with every intention of living in peace and improving the lives of the local inhabitants; the willful evacuation of local Palestinian Arab villages; the War of Independence as an unbalanced struggle between Jewish David and an Arab Goliath in a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. This new de-constructivist approach was accelerated by Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a war that had divided Israeli public opinion and incited a widespread wave of protest.

The alternative interpretations to the dominant narratives of Israeli history, culture and identity, offered by the "new historians" sought to redress the imbalance through a focus on the "Other"-the perspective of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Their work induced heated debates in the public sphere and in the academia in Israel, and although criticized for one-sidedness and misrepresentation of historicized records, stimulated changes in the central themes of the [ewish-Israeli national ethos.

Cultural Products and the Reproduction and Subversion of Images and Perceptions

The image of Arabs as "the Other" has been treated extensively in what Bar�Tal terms "[ewish-Israeli cultural products," a genre which includes belle letters (adult and children's literature), poetry, drama, films, textbooks, and the media (print press, television and radio). Cultural products produce, reproduce, and/or legitimize forms of thought and feeling in society. Society, in tum, is affected and shaped by cultural products. Content analysis of these categories illuminates the formation process and antecedents of images and stereotypes as well as, their development and subversion over time.

A review of literature on this issue shows that Jewish-Israeli cultural products clearly reflect the [ewish-Israeli ethos, on one hand, and the

32. See: Rochelle Furstenberg, Post Zionism: The Challenge to Israel (The American Jewish Committee and the Argov Center of the Study of Israel and the Jewish People, Bar Ilan University, 2000); Ilan Pappe, "Transjordan and the 1948 War: Myth, Historiography and Reality," Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 28, nO.4 (1992); Efraim Karsh, Falnicating Israeli History: The 'New Historians' (Routledge, 2000); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the}ordan: King Abdulah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and Laurence J. Silberstein, Post-Zionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (Routledge, 1995).

developments and shifts in the nature of the Arab,Israeli conflict and Israel,Arab relations over the twentieth century. On this timescale, four periods are evident. The first period extends from the beginning ofJewish immigration to Palestine and ends with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 (this period also includes the British mandate); the second period extends from 1948 to the late 1960s; the third period encompasses the 1970S and 1980s, while the final period begins with the 1990S and continues to the present. The following discussion explores the changing reflections of images of Arabs as "the Other" in these four periods, in literature, films and elementary and high school textbooks.

In the formative period of the [ewish-Israeli national ethos, begin, ning with the first waves of immigration to pre-state Israel and continuing through the British Mandate period, paternalistic motifs appeared in literature and film praising the Jewish settlers' intention of bringing progress and prosperity to all the country's inhabitants. The Jewish immigrants were typically depicted as representatives of a superior culture.

Despite the sense of superiority, Jewish attitudes toward Arabs were characterized by duality and dichotomy. On the one hand, the romantic admiration of certain attributes of the Arabs in pre,state Israel is prominent, especially in the literature of the tum ofthe nineteenth century, which also stresses the shared Semitic origin of both groups.f Ben Ezer illustrates this romantic attitude as he points to a lifestyle that is worthy of emulation. This motif is also discussed by Domb, with an added distinction between the Jewish newcomers' attitudes towards the Bedouin and their attitudes towards the peasants (fellahin). In the liter' ature of this period, the Arab peasants are derided as uncivilized creatures, while the Bedouin are often depicted as representatives of the "exotic Orient," "noble savages" and the embodiment of a Biblical cultural ideal.

Expanding on the complex Jewish attitudes, Shaked states that through its attitude towards the Arabs in pre-State Israel, the Hebrew literature of the period conveys the dualistic attitude to "gentiles" traditionally held by Jews in the Diaspora {"the stereotype of the gentile"}: In the context of a world conceived as a competition between the weak and the strong, the Arab is an object of admiration, but also a constant threat'" ("Repulsion and attraction coexist in such literary confrontations with the stranger, creating frightful multivalence").

33. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, p. 218.

34. Gershon Shaked, "The Arab in Israeli Fiction," Modern Hebrew Literature, vol. 3: pp. 17-20•

During this period, literature, film and textbooks convey an ethnocentric, paternalistic attitude and an image of the Arabs as a backward band of inferior nativesj35 "robbers, vandals, primitives and easily agitated."36 In the film Sabra, for example, the avaricious and evil Arab leader provokes the Arab farmers to violence against the pioneers who purchased the land from him. The country is described as a wasteland due to the Arabs' backwardness and primitiveness. No distinction is made between "Palestinians" and "Arabs."

In the second period, which extended from the 1 950S to the late 1960s, the images of Arabs did not undergo any significant changes. Several more years were required for the repercussions of the 1967 war to leave their mark on Jewish attitudes toward Arabs. Textbooks com, posed in this period described the War of Independence as a war of "a few against many" that erupted in response to Arab-instigated attacks. The exodus of Arab refugees is described as a response to incitement by their leaders, despite Jewish attempts to persuade them to remain in their homes.F Moreover, as Firer has shown, the textbooks of this period also reflect the trauma of the Holocaust: terms used for describing Arab violence-such as pogroms, riots, massacres-correspond to terms used to describe acts of anti-Semitism in Europe.l''

The Israeli film industry also cultivated the "David versus Goliath" motif, stressing that the ultimate decisive factor in the battle (of the War of Independence) was quality rather than quantiry.t" Reverence for Jewish acts of heroism in 1948 and the inferiority of the Arabs are stressed.t? carrying the heroic, moral Zionist narrative from the previous period into the context of the State of Israel.f Arabs are described in stereotypes, referring to a nebulous community of anonymous individuals, devoid of any individual or humane characteristics.

Nonetheless, some seeds of change are already evident in local film

35. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, p. 227-233; Amy Kronish, "Arabs on Israeli Screens." http://www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/Film/lsraeliFilm/ArabIsraeliFilm.htm (accessed 3 March 2008).

36. Ruth Firer, Agents of Zionist Education (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985) p. 128 (in Hebrew), cited in: Bar-Tal and Teichman, Stereotypes and Prejudice, p.160.

37. Bar-Tal and Teichman, Stereotypes and Prejudice, pp. 157-176.

38. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, p. 222.

39. Han Pappe, "Science and Fiction in the Service ofNationalism: Historiography and Cinema in the Arab-Israeli Conflict," in: Nurith Gerts, Orly Lubin, [add Ne'eman (Eds.) Fictive Aspects of Israeli Movies (Tel-Aviv: Open University, 1998), pp. 92-119 (in Hebrew).

40. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989) (Henceforth: Shohat, Israeli Cinema).

41. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, p. 226.

productions, including an emerging distinction between "good Arabs" and "bad Arabs."42 The number of authors who express empathy towards the Arab "Other" increases as the moral dilemmas surrounding the roots of the war featured more prominently in the works of Israeli writers. A salient example of this trend is A. B. Yehoshua's book, Opposite the Forests, in which he describes the moral reservations concerning the dispossession of the Arabs, and does so with considerable intensity. According to Ben-Ezer.f" this was a period in which the Jewish-Israeli ethos incorporated its own sense of guilt and blame.

The third period, covering the 1970S and the 1980s, is foreshadowed by the October 1973 War, the peace treaty with Egypt and the First Lebanon War. These developments created a genuine change in attitudes and images that is clearly reflected in the literature, films, and textbooks of the period, creating what Bar-Tal described as "an alternative culture whose messages run counter to the [traditional] ethos of the conflict.t'i" The Israeli-Egyptian reconciliation indirectly led to a more individualized and less stereotypical depiction of Arabs in film, as more humane, complex, and multidimensional figures. The "Palestinian wave" in Israeli film, as defined by Shochat, sheds light on the experience of discrimination, and elucidates the needs and concerns of the Palestinians as human beings. The characters are removed from traditional stereotypes, and these works reflect an ever-increasing tendency to recognize the Palestinians as victims and to display empathy towards their struggle.P The books written in this period stressed the roles of Jews and Arabs caught between inter-group and intra-group conflicts. Books by A. B. Yehoshua (The Lover) and Sami Michael (A Trumpet in the Wadi) clearly exemplify this trend.

Schoolbooks also reflected the changing images in this period. Although the negative stereotypes of the Arabs persisted.i" the textbooks of this period contain fewer expressions of delegitimization.f In the 1970s, the Ministry of Education initiated an overall curriculum reevaluation program, which led to changes in many textbooks. The new policy reduced the emphasis on national goals, and stressed pedagogi-

42. Shohat, Israeli Cinema.

43. Ehud Ben-Eeer, "Introduction" to In the Homeland of Lost Longings: A Collection of Stories (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1992), 7-55·

44. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, pp. 230-231.

45. Bar-Tal, Ibid.

46. Hertzel Benjamin, Representation ofJews-Arabs Relations in History Textbooks in the Context ofIsraeli-Arab Conflict (Tel Aviv University: master's thesis, 1987) (in Hebrew).

47. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict, p. 223·

cal tools and scholastic goals. Although the theme of Palestinian rejection of peace initiatives remained as strong as ever, Pode has shown that the number of references to Palestinian nationalism increased, and a discussion of the roots of the refugee problem began to appear in history books composed in this period.t''

The fourth period, from the 1990S to the present, is marked by the first Intifada, the Oslo Accords, the breakdown of the peace process, and the outbreak of the second Intifada in the year 2000. The Israeli film industry drew extensively on the complexity of Jewish-Arab relations, granting both sides to the conflict equal footing in terms of narrative and morality. Works in this period depict Palestinians, who include intellectuals with a solid national identity, while the character of the "Israeli hero" is replaced by the pacifist who keeps a low profile in the national conflict. Graetz demonstrates how films from the 1990S shatter traditional dichotomous stereotypes and disregard the traditional Zionist narrative.i?

The most significant change is found in textbooks. Pode illustrates how textbooks published in this period portray the Jewish-Arab conflict in a more balanced fashion, clearly reflecting a new mindset that promotes greater openness, pluralism, and self-criticism. In these books, the Arabs are portrayed "not merely as onlookers or as attackers, but as victims of the conflict as well." The textbooks discuss controversial issues, such as the refugee problem and the viability of a Palestinian state.50 Many of the books discuss the Palestinian nation, recognize the role that Palestinian nationalism has played in the history of the conflict, and present a balanced description of the wars and the acts of violence that were perpetrated by the Arabs against the Jews during the conflict. Thus, for example, a civics textbook published in 200151 devotes an entire chapter to the ideological-political schism in Israeli society. The chapter identifies the outcome of the Six Day War, the concept of Greater Israel, and the idea of a territorial compromise as the roots of the ideological debate. The chapter also reviews the peace agreement with Egypt, and the 1993 peace arrangements with the Palestinians. Notwithstanding these changes in attitudes and images, Israeli

48. Bar-Tal, Ibid.

49. Nurith Gertz, "The Medium That Mistook Itself for War: 'Cherry Season' in Comparison with 'Ricochets' and 'Cup Final," in: Fictive Aspects, pp. 67---91

50. Bar-Tal, Uving with the Conflict, pp. 168-I7 I

51. Hannah Aden, Being Citizens in Israel, in a Jewish and Democratic State (Ministry of Education, Pedagogical Administration, Curriculum Division, Jerusalem 2001) (Henceforth: Aden, Being Citizens).

society's openness appears to be limited. In March 2000 the then Minister of Education, Yosi Sarid, wished to include two poems by Palestinian "national poet" Mahmoud Darwish in the list of ten poems from which teachers at Jewish schools would be permitted to choose to teach in their classrooms. The decision ignited a public outcry and significant opposition. The then Prime Minister Ehud Barak objected on the grounds that the conditions for teaching Darwish in schools were "not yet ripe."52

The turning point in Israel Ministry of Education official policy towards matters related to the country's Arab citizens occurred in 2001. That year, the Ministry of Education's Curriculum Division published a civics textbook for high school students at state schools and state religious schools, entitled: Being Citizens in Israel, in a Jewish and Democratic State. The book discusses the identity of Israel's Arab citizens, and includes opinions of Arab intellectuals on the subject.P A large portion of the book, written by Dr. As'ad Ghanem, a lecturer at the University of Haifa, is devoted to Arab society in Israel, including the historical background of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel since 1948, the demographic, geographical, religious, economic, and political characteristics of the Arab minority, the municipal regime, social change, the practical manifestations of the national schism, discrimination, and the socioeconomic gaps between Jews and Arabs.r'

The brief review of reflections of the images and perceptions of Arabs in works of literature, film, and textbooks, clearly reveals the impact of the Jewish-Israeli national ethos on cultural products and the dynamics of these images in response to changes in the nature of the bilateral conflict.

Notably, two of the genres selected to represent cultural products in this analysis, literature and film, present the individual perspectives of their authors and creators. Their works bring to light a gradual change in public zeitgeist, yet remain the products of individual perspectives and beliefs. In contrast, textbooks illustrate a development in governmentofficial thinking and point to changes in the official state perspective of the conflict and the image of "the Other." Below we explore the issue of whether and to what degree these changes are reflected in Jewish and Arab public opinion.

52. Yossi Werter, "Barak versus Sarid: He Objects to the Teaching of Darwish's Poems," Haaretz (March 6,2000).

53. Aden, Being Citizens, pp. 37-38, 42. 54. Aden, Being Citizens, pp. 297-298. 224

Through the Prism of the Conflict:

Inter-group Perceptions of Arabs and Jews in Israel

This section presents a review of the research findings on inter,group perceptions of Jews and Arabs in Israel, with an emphasis on Jewish, Israeli perceptions of Arabs in Israel. The five decades extending to the present are discussed separately. The discussion of the most recent period, from October 2000 to the present, is extended, due to the relative availability of surveys, and the dramatic developments in [ewish-Arab relations in this period.

The 19605

As the second section of this essay has shown, in the 1950S and 1960s, attitudes and perceptions were strongly foreshadowed by the traumas of the War of Independence. Israeli policy toward its Arab citizens was grounded in two opposing considerations-a democratic,liberal guide, line, which strove for integration, and a security,based orientation, which reflected one of the foundational elements of the [ewish-Israeli national ethos, and conceptualized Arab Israelis as an "enemy,affiliated minority." The military government in the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev created a physical division between Jews and Arabs in the state, and one that was dissolved only in late 1966 on the eve of the Six Day War.

The following analysis is based primarily on findings by Yochanan Peres, among the first pioneers who conducted surveys amongst Jews and Arabs in Israel in the 1960s.55 Peres's first study, conducted prior to the Six Day War, pointed to the antagonistic attitudes that Jews and Arabs in Israel held toward each other, indicating that the hostile Jewish attitudes towards Arabs predated the Six Day War. Social distance between Jews and Arabs was significant, with minimal Jewish readiness for con, tact with Arabs, as potential neighbors, friends, or marital partners.

By Peres's second study, conducted in the winter of 1968, several

55. Peres conducted three studies, based on three samples, on mutual perceptions ofJews and Arabs in Israel before and after the Six Day War (1967). The first sample included 675 Jewish secondary school students and 51 of their parents. The second sample included 450 Jewish adult residents of Tel-Aviv. The third sample included 500 Arab secondary school students and adults. See: Yochanan Peres, "Ethnic Relations in Israel." The AmericanJournal ofSociology, vol. 76, no. 6 (May, 1971), pp. 1021-1047 (Henceforth: Peres, Ethnic Relations); Yochanan Peres, "Modernization and Nationalism in the Identity of the Israeli Arab." The Middle East Journal, vol. 24 (Autumn 1970), pp. 479-492; Peres and Levy, Jews and Arabs, pp. 479-492; Yochanan Peres and Nira Yuval-Davis, "Attitudes of Arab secondary school students towards Jewish individuals and the State of Israel," Megamot, vol. 17, no. 3 (November 1970), pp. 254-264 (in Hebrew).

months after the Six Day War, perceived social distance between Jewish and Arab Israelis and Jewish hostility toward Arabs increased further, corresponding to the Jewish public conception of the Six Day War as an attempt by Arabs to annihilate the State of Israel and "throw the Jews into the sea." While 80 percent of the Jewish participants of the first study agreed with the statement "It would be better if there were fewer Arabs," this proportion rose to 91 percent of the participants in the second study.

Changes in stereotypes were also evident after the war, reflecting the humiliating military defeat of the Arab nations. Israeli Jews increasingly believed that "Arabs will never reach the level of progress ofJews" (from 62 percent in 1967 to 76 percent in 1968); that "all Arabs hate Jews" (73 percent in 1967 to 80 percent in 1968). The vast majority of [ewish-Israelis polled (86 percent in 1968, up from 80 percent in 1967)) would refuse to rent a room to an Arab.56 Peres concluded that Jewish hostility resulted from the overall political situation rather than specific actions of or personal contact with Israeli Arabs before, during, and after the 1967 war.57

Israeli Arabs' hostility toward Israel was apparent following the Six Day war, according to Peres. Only 31 percent of the Arab student's sample fully accepted Israel's right to exist, and an additional 49 percent accepted Israel's right to exist with reservations, including repatriation of Palestinian refugees or granting full first-class citizenship to the Arabs in Israel. Only 16 percent denied Israel's right to exist.58

In his study following the Six Day War, Peres found that 73 percent of the Arab participants stated that the war increased their hatred ofthe State of Israel, 52 percent said that it increased their sense of despair of Israel; 40 percent stated that their respect of Israel diminished after the war.59 Peres concluded that "Jewish-Arab relations are developing in an unfavorable direction. Both the external conflict and internal processes seem to intensify mutual hostility and mistrust."6o

While Arab rejection of social contact with Jews was considerable during the 1960s, it was significantly lower than the Jews' rejection of Arabs. Peres attributed the asymmetry in readiness for social relations to the differential status of the dominant Jewish majority and the Arab mi-

56. Peres, Ethnic Relations, p. I04I.

57. Ibid.

58. Peres, Ethnic Relations, pp. 1042-1043.

59· Ibid., pp. I044-I045·

60. Ibid, p. 1021.

nority: Minority members believe that interaction with the majority generates benefits, while majority members tend to exclude outsiders."

The 19705

Peres' prediction and findings were confirmed by findings of public opinion polls conducted in the 197os. Findings from studies by Jacob conducted between 1967 and 1971 indicate that between 35 percent and 47 percent ofIsraeli Jews were unwilling to befriend an Israeli Arab under any circumstances.V Mutual perceptions of the considerable social distance dividing Arab and Jewish Israelis were confirmed by findings of Hofman's spring 1971 study.63 However, the proportion ofArabs who encouraged contact (69 percent) or did not avoid contact (84 percent) with Jews was significantly higher then that of the Jews towards Arabs (40 percent and 49 percent, respectivelyl.P" Hofman concluded that this asymmetry may have reflected Arabs' recognition of Israel as a fait accompli, and their relatively stronger motivation as a minority group to establish and promote relations with the Jewish majority group in power.

Israeli Arabs' attitudes toward Israeli Jews, however, shifted after the October War of 1973, as Hofman's studies, conducted in 1972 and 1975, indicate. In the second study conducted after the war, Jews were less frequently characterized by Israeli Arabs as "stable," "practical," "cultured," "optimistic," and "smart," and more frequently perceived as "selfish," "sly," and "stubborn," compared to findings of the 1972 study. Hofman attributed these changes to the October War.65

Mark Tessler's 1974-1975 study further illustrated the change that had occurred in Arab perceptions, as well as the dualism in IsraeliArab attitudes. His major conclusion was that Israel's Arabs entered a new phase of political awareness in the wake of the 1967 June War and especially after the 1973 October War. These developments were

61. Ibid, p. 1°41-1°42.

62. A. Jacob, "Trends in Israel's Public Opinion on Issues Related to the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1967-1972," The JewishJournal ofSociology, vol. 16 {December 1974}, pp. 187-208. Cited by BarTal and Teichman, Stereotypes and PrejuJice, p. 221.

63. The study included 451 high school seniors from four all-Arab high schools, three all-Jewish high schools, and one mixed Arab-Jewish high school, all in the northern part of Israel {Haifa and the Galilee}. See: John E. Hofman, "Readiness for Social Relation between Arabs and Jews in Israel," Journal ofConflict Resolution, vol. 6, no. 2 {1972}, p. 242 (Henceforth: Hofman, Readiness).

64· Hofman, Readiness, p. 245·

65. Participants in both studies were 84 Christian and Moslem Arab pupils from three high schools in the north of Israel. See: John E. Hoffman, Images and Identity of the Arab Youth in Israel (Haifa University: The Center ofArab Education Research and It's Developing, 1977), pp. 13-14,22-23.

reflected in the process of Palestinization, extensively discussed in section B of this essay, above.P" Although acceptance for Israel's right to exist increased from 3 I percent in the I960s to 40 percent, the proportion of Arab-Israelis who opposed Israel's right of existence also increased, from I6 percent in the I960s to 25 percent.f" Tessler's study also found that 67 percent of Arab Israelis would definitely or possibly move to a Palestinian State, had one existed.P'' Thus, after the October War of I973, Arab attitudes showed a mixture of increased resignation to the fact of Israel's existence, together with increased rejection of its legitimacy.

In a summary of the surveys conducted in I979, Seligson and Caspi highlight Tessler's finding on the high proportion of Arab Israelis willing to translocate to a Palestinian state, to explain the fears of the Israeli public and suspicions regarding Arabs' true intentions.F'

The 19805

In I980, Mina Tsemah70 and Sammy Smooha each conducted a largescale opinion poll of Israeli Jews and Arabs." The general impression arising from the findings of both surveys is one of mutual alienation, distrust, and strong inter-group stereotypes, especially stereotypes of Arabs expressed by Jews.

The divide between Jews and Arabs, which had grown wider after the October War of I973 and the Land Day events of March I976, remained considerable and showed no evidence of the positive imprint of the peace treaty with Egypt, signed one year earlier. Nonetheless, several positive findings emerged from these studies. According to Smooha's survey, 67.7 percent of the Arab participants stated that they completely or almost completely resigned themselves to the existence of the State of Israel. This was a significant increase compared to Peres'

66. The survey was conducted among 348 Arab residents in the northern part of Israel (Haifa and the Galilee) during I974-I975. See: Mark Tessler, "Israel's Arabs and the Palestinian Problem," The Middle East [oumal, vol. 3I (I977), pp. 3I5-3I6. (Henceforth: Tessler, Israel's Arabs).

67. Tessler, Israel's Arabs, p. 3I8.

68. Ibid., p. 325.

69. Mitchell A. Seligson and Dan Caspi, "Threat, Ethnicity and Education: Tolerance toward the Civil Liberties of the Arab Minority in Israel," Megamot, vol. I5 (I982), p. 40 (in Hebrew); See also: Mitchell A. Seligson and Dan Caspi, "Arabs in Israel: Political Tolerance and Ethnic Conflict," The Journal ofApplied Behavioral Science, vol. I9, no. I (I983), pp. 55-66.

70. Zemah's sample comprised of 1,223 Jews who were interviewed on their attitudes toward Arabs in Israel.

71. Smooha's sample comprised of I,267 Jews and 1,140 Arabs in Israel.

findings (31 percent) in the 1970S,72 and Tessler's findings (40 percent) in the 1970s.73 This result may be explained by manifestations ofIsrael's military superiority at the end of the October War, and perhaps the positive impact of the peace treaty with Egypt.

Readiness to establish contact of the Arab side was also considerable: in Smooha's study, 69.4 percent of the Arab participants expressed their willingness to have Jews as friends, and 47.4 percent of them expressed their willingness to live in a mixed neighborhood together with Jews.74

While Arab Israelis expressed resignation to the idea of the State of Israel, and readiness for social contact with Israeli Jews, the general impression created by inter-group stereotypes was unfavorable. According to Smooha's survey, 75.2 percent of Israeli Arabs believed that most Jews do not value self-respect and family honor, 69.5 percent believed that most Jews are scheming and manipulative, and 69. I percent agree that most Jews are racists.T' Almost one half (43.6 percent) of the [ewish public believed that most Arabs in Israel will never reach the level of development attained by Jews; 38.2 percent of the Jews agreed that most Arabs in Israel are primitive.i'' Tsemah's survey demonstrated similar stereotypes: 43.8 percent of the Jews believed that Israeli Arabs are primitive; 38.7 percent believed that they are violent; and 3 1.7 percent of the Jews believed that Israeli Arabs are dirty.77

Finally, Israeli-jewish attitudes toward Arabs were closely bound to a sense of mistrust. According to Smooha's survey, 82.5 percent of the Jews believed that Israeli Arabs posed a moderate to high danger to nationaI security; 66.0 percent of the Jews believed that most Arabs in Israel could not be trusted; 65-4 percent of the Jews favored increased surveillance over most Arabs in Israel; 67.6 percent of the Jews supported the imposition of security restrictions on Arabs in Israel as long as the Israeli-Arab conflict persists; and 46.5 percent of the Jews favored a strong-arm policy toward the Arabs in Israel." Almost one half (47.0 percent) of the Arabs but only one fifth (16.2 percent) of the Jews believed that most or all Arabs were loyal to Israel; 17.6 percent of the

72. Peres, Ethnic Relations, pp. 1°42-1°43.

73· Tessler, Israel's Arabs, p. 318.

74. Sammy Smooha, "Jewish and Arab Ethnocentrism in Israel," Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 10, no. I (January 1987), p. II. (Henceforth: Smooha, Jewish and Arab).

75. Smooha, Jewish and Arab, p. 4·

76. Ibid., p. 5.

77. Cited in: Smooha, Jewish and Arab, p. 5·

78. Smooha, Jewish and Arab, p. 7-8.

Jews thought that most or all Israeli Arabs were engaged in spying against Israel.79

The 19905

In Israel, the final decade of the twentieth century was marked by the Israel-Palestinian peace process, the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, events which inspired optimism in the Jewish and Arab public and resulted in a growing readiness for social contact in both groups.

In a study conducted by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research in March 1995, a very high proportion (between 91 percent and 97·5 percent) of Israeli Arabs expressed readiness for social contact, adjacent residence, proximity in the workplace and in schools.f" Readiness among Israeli Jews was considerably smaller (between 45.3 percent and 56.4 percent), and although readiness for contact with Arab Israelis rose to 62.5 percent in 1997,81 this asymmetry recalled findings of earlier studies.

Findings also point to greater inter-group empathy. In 1997, more than one half (54.4 percent) of the Israeli Jewish public acknowledged the contribution of Arab Israelis to the state and a similar proportion (56.7 percent) acknowledged inequality toward Arab Israelis.82 A 1998 survey conducted by the Gallup Institute indicated that 74 percent of the Israeli public recognized that discrimination against Arabs in Israel existed.P

Nonetheless, dualism in inter-group attitudes remained. The extent ofJewish mistrust ofArabs persisted. According to the 1995 study by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research survey, 67.8 percent believed that most Arabs were not resigned to the existence of the State of Israel, 5°.7 percent believed that Arab citizens of Israel would be more loyal to a Palestinian state, if one is established. Slightly over one half of Israeli Jews believed that Arab Israelis should move to a Palestinian state when one is established.t"

79· Ibid., p. 9·

80. The Steinmetz Center's survey used a sample of 1221 Jews and 438 Arabs.

81. Public opinion poll conducted by Shvakim-Panorarna institute in June 1997, using a sample of 500 Jews. See: Haaretz, August 21, 1997.

82. Haaretz, August 21, 1997.

83. The survey was based on a sample of 500 Jews. See: Maariv, 1998 (find exact datel). 84. See footnote 80 above.

23°

October 2000-Present

The Al-Aqsa Intifada, coupled with the uprisings that took place among Arab Israelis in the Galilee and the Triangle Area ("The October 2000 Events"), stimulated increasingly negative attitudes towards Palestinians in general, and Israeli Arabs in particular. In early 2000, prior to the outbreak of the disturbances in the Galilee, 62 percent of the Jews felt that the Arabs in Israel were disloyal to the state. In 2001, this percentage rose to 73 percent and to 75 percent in 2002.85 Compared to 1988 (the First Intifada), when 40 percent of the Jewish respondents said that their "assessment of Israeli Arabs became more negative," 55 percent agreed with this statement in 2001.86

Smooha also found that inter-group relations in this period were characterized by distrust, suspicion and fear. In his 2006 poll, 69.3 percent of the Jews experienced a sense of remoteness from Arabs, and 63.3 percent avoided entering Arab towns in Israel; 64.4 percent of the Jews stated that the high birthrate of Arabs endangers the state; 71.3 percent were concerned about an Arab attempt to change the Jewish character of the state, and 68.4 percent expressed concern over a possible popular Arab rebellion; 83.1 percent feared that the Arabs would support the struggle of the Palestinian people.

Fear of Arabs was also evident on a daily level. According to a 2006 survey by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism, which examined Jews' feelings about hearing a conversation in Arab on a public street, 43.6 percent responded that they felt uncomfortable; 49.9 percent responded that they feel afraid; 30.7 percent stated that it evoked their hatred. This survey also indicated that 56.2 percent of the Jews agreed with the arguments that the Arab citizens of Israel constitute a demographic and security threat to the state.8?

These attitudes spawned the public expression of Arab delegitimization. Advocates of a government policy to encourage Arabs to emigrate from Israel grew in number. In the 2006 Democracy Index survey, 62 percent of the Jews agreed that "the government should encourage emigration of Arabs." Similar results were obtained in previous

85. Asher Arian, IsraeU Public Opinion on National Security 2003, Memorandum no. 67 (Tel-Aviv University, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, October 2003), p. 34.

86. Asher Arian, Israeli Public Opinion on National Security, 200I, Memorandum no. 60 (Tel-Aviv University: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, August 2001), p. 18.

87. Baker Awada and Alaa Khaider, Racism Index for 2006: Racism against the Palestinian Arab Citizens of the State of Israel (Haifa: The Center for the Struggle Against Racism, April 2007), pp. 58--69. (Henceforth: Awada and Khaider, Racism Index for 2006).

Democracy Index surveys (57 percent in 2003, 59 in 2004, 50 in 2oo5},88 and confirmed by a study by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism, which found that 50.9 percent of the Jews believed that the State should encourage its Arab citizens to cmigrate.s?

Different studies showed that Jewish support increased for the revocation of basic civic rights for Arab citizens. According to the 2006 study by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism, 39.9 percent ofthe Jews (compared to 25.6 percent in zooy) agreed that Arabs should not be allowed to vote in Knesset elections. In his 2006 study, Smooha found that 55.6 percent of the Jews believe that the political party Hadash should be banned.

These attitudes were also accompanied by actions. Figures released by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism indicated a steep rise in acts of racism committed byJews against Arabs between 2005 and 2006. Racist acts perpetrated by Jewish Israelis against Arab Israelis accounted for the majority of all racist acts committed in 2005 and 2006. Of all categories, racist acts by civilians showed the greatest increase in the number and gravity of acts committed (other categories included acts by security forces, actions by government ministries, etc.}.90

As Shimon Shamir (2005) explains, Jews committed racist acts against Arabs on two levels. On the popular level, racist acts include taunts on soccer fields and at sites of terrorist attacks such as "Death to Arabs," or graffiti such as "No Arabs-No Terrorist Attacks." On a more official level, racism was reflected in statements by politicians or rabbis who refer to a "genetic defect" of Arabs, or describe Arabs as "swarming like ants." Verbal racism occasionally combined with acts of violence, mugging or beating Arabs by Jewish youngsters. Occasionally Arabs were barred from public parks, nightclubs, or beaches.?'

Although surveys conducted after the October 2000 events indicated a continued readiness of Israeli Arabs for social contact with Jews,92 the

88. Asher Arian, Nir Atmor and Yael Hadar (Eds.), Auditing Israeli Democracy 2006 (Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute, 2006), p. 87.

89. Awada and Khaider, Racism Index for 2006, p. 68.

90. See: Awada and Khaider, Racism Index for 2006, p. 8; Baker Awada and Alaa Khaider, Racism Index for 2005: Racism against the Palestinian Arab Citizens of the State of Israel (Haifa: The Center for the Struggle Against Racism, January 2006), p. 24.

91. Shimon Shamir, The Arabs in Israel-Two Years after the Or Commission Report (Tel-Aviv University: The Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation, 2006), pp. 12-13.

92. See Smmoha's 2004 findings on readiness for mutual friendly relations, Arab-Jewish Relations Index 2004; and findings of a survey conducted by the Adenauer Program: Elie Rekhess (Ed.), Public Opinion Survey-The Arab Population in Israel (Tel-Aviv Universiry, The Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation, March 29, 2007) (Henceforth: Rekhess, Public Opinion Survey).

expanding pessimism of Arab citizens and their belief that the situation would only grow worse were striking. A survey conducted by Mada alCarmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in March 2004, reflected that over 60 percent believed that Arabs were currently worse off compared to their situation ten years ago, and almost 70 percent believed that their situation would become even worse in the next ten years. Similar proportions expected racism against Arabs, and socio-economic differences between Arabs and Jews, to increase; 62 percent believed that at least one Arab political party would be banned and declared illegal; 45 percent believed that Israel would become an apartheid state, and 32 percent anticipated that an increasing number of Arab citizens would elect to emigrate from Israel. 8 I percent were concerned by the intensification of Israel's Jewish character.f

Israeli Arabs also considered Jews a threat, and expressed their fears, primarily of a territorial exchange or "transfer," or the revocation of their civic rights. Arabs also fear public endorsement of a witch hunt to silence Arab leaders (such as MK Azami Bashara, Chairman of Baladthe National Democratic Alliance, who was accused of collaboration with the Hizbollah during the Second Lebanon War), or designs to ban the northern faction of the Islamic Movement.

These feelings were confirmed in Smooha's 2006 survey, and by findings of a survey conducted by the Adenauer Program, which pointed to. Arab citizens' fears that their civic liberties would be constricted became more palpable in view of the growing power of the right-wing parties in the seventeenth Knesset. According to this survey, the Arab public felt that their situation would be adversely affected by the addition to the government of the right-wing party Yisrael BeitenuNational Union, headed by Avigdor Lieberman: 87.3 percent feared that the extent of land expropriation would increase, 8 1.5 percent feared that their civic rights would be restricted; 82.8 percent feared a rise in the incidence of violence against Arabs; and 48.4 percent feared that the Triangle area would be transferred to Palestinian Authority sovereignty against the will of the local population.f"

The Adenauer Program survey, conducted in late 2006, specifically questioned Arab participants on the impact of the Second Lebanon War on the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Of the Arab

93. The sample included 845 Arab and Druze citizens. Mada al-Carrnel, Annual Survey 2004Abstract (Haifa, 2005), p. 3. http://www.mada-research.org/arabic/archive/Annuale.pdJ, accessed: September II, 2007.

94. Rekhess, Public Opinion Survey.

participants in this survey, 52.8 percent believed that the war did not create any sense of shared fate for Arabs and Jews, despite the fact that Arab and Jewish civilians alike were killed (eighteen Arab and twentyone Jewish civilians). Two thirds of the participants believed that the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel was unchanged by the war, while the remaining one third believed that the war had a negative affect on Arab-Jewish relationa"

Despite the overall negativity in attitudes expressed in this period, many Israeli Jews expressed liberal attitudes concerning the status and rights of Arabs in the State, in specific areas. According to a survey conducted by Smooha in 2004, 74.5 percent of the Jews supported full civic rights for Arabs, and 68 percent supported equality in budgets and equal opportunities in education and employrnenr." This trend is clearly supported by results of a series of polls conducted by Asher Arian and published periodically since the 1970S by the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies of Tel-Aviv University.

Conclusion

The image of Arab citizens of the State of Israel as "the Other" is multifaceted. These images, held by representatives of the Jewish majority in Israel, are neither monolithic nor homogeneous. They include nuances that reflect diverse, complex political and ideological attitudes and a multilateral, changing Jewish-Israeli worldview. The stereotypical attitudes and prejudices among the Jewish majority are rooted in two sources: the national ethos of the State of Israel and the developments in the relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Although it is undeniable that the major themes of the national ethos of Israel clearly continue to feed the manner in which the majority perceives Arab citizens in Israel, these themes have shown surprising flexibility over time, in response to challenges and changes in Israeli society and in the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Cultural products which put a human face on "the Arab Other"

95. Rekhess, Public Opinion Survey.

96. Data on sample etc. See: Sammy Smooha, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2004 (Haifa University, The Jewish-Arab Center, 2005), and compare to Smooha's 2006 survey, according to which 64-4 percent of the Jews agreed with the statement that the state should take action to resolve the differences, Haaretz, March 12, 2007; and survey of the Israeli Institute of Democracy of 2006, according to which 60% of the Jews strongly or very strongly supported full equality ofrights for Arabs and Jews.

offer additional insight into the complexity of inter-group attitudes. These cultural products, while anchored in the traditional Jewish-Israeli national ethos, reflect subversion of ethnic and cultural stereotypes and the "us-them" dichotomy.

Thus, political and socio-economic developments that alter groups' relative status and interdependence affect and modify expressions of prejudice and stereotypes. Over time the images of Arab Israelis have moved away from dichotomous distinctions between "good Arabs" and "bad Arabs." Even those who perceive Israel's Arabs as a security risk admit to admirable characteristics while liberals recognize the problematics of reconciling their own moral attitude with attitudes held by part of the Arab population towards the Jews and the state of Israel. Cultural products have increasingly challenged and softened stereotypical perspectives of Arab Israelis.

Nevertheless, the salient finding of this essay is the gradual polarization in Jewish-Israeli public opinion of Arabs in Israel. This steep slide toward extremism, which began in recent years is reflected in increasing alienation in the Jewish majority's attitude towards the Arabs, support for segregation bordering on racism, "population transfers" and the revocation or restriction of civil rights. Again, this attitude is not shared by all, and a significant portion of the Jewish public is opposed to it, but there is considerable support for these trends, which are on the upswing and constitute a cause for concern.

We find a clear correspondence between the level of tension in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel particular, and the extremism of attitudes toward the Arab Other. Thus, for example, there is a salient correlation between the trends toward a settlement in the conflict, including processes of reconciliation and peace, mainly in the wake of the Oslo accords in the mid- I990s, and the adoption of more moderate and accommodative attitudes towards Arabs on the part of the Jews.

Unfortunately, the trend towards relative tolerance displayed by the Jewish majority towards the Arab minority has diminished since the riots of October 2000. The violent uprising by the Arab public in the Galilee and the Triangle with the commencement of the AI-Aqsa Intifada, the blocking of the Wadi Ara road for a prolonged period, and the other displays of hostility on the part of Israel's Arabs-all caused the Jewish pub­ lic to revert to former inter-group perceptions that were characteristic of the Jewish position in the 1980s, especially during the first Intifada. Concurrently, Arab sense of insecurity also increased in view of the killing of thirteen Israeli Arabs by Israeli police officers during the riots. It is

important to note that the Intifada has also had a diametrically opposite impact on certain sections of the Israeli Jewish society. The heightened awareness of the gravity of the situation of Arab Israelis, led to the conclusion that the solution to these issues is not necessarily through force but rather through integration and equality.

Although we did not discuss this directly, the interrelationship between the mutual attitudes of the Jews and Arabs should be addressed. In a vicious cycle, the aggravation of the images of one side towards the other feeds a corresponding process on the other side, and vice versa. Polarization of Jewish-Israeli attitudes towards Arab Israelis evokes a similar process among Arab Israelis and their attitudes toward JewishIsraelis.

This analysis may have a significant message for conflict resolution: images, stereotypes, and attitudes are constructs that are not static or fixed. As in other cases, in the case of Jewish-Arab relations, attitudes can and should be examined, deconstructed, and reassembled. We have seen such changes reflected in the components of the national ethos and reflection of these changes in the cultural products dealing with JewishArab relations; we have also seen such changes in the moderating or exacerbating effect of the developments in Israel-Palestinian relations on both the external and the internal levels.

Therefore, there is hope that as the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict subsides and progress is made towards a permanent settlement, improved conditions for eliminating the stereotypes held by both sides to the conflict will eventually surface.

To create conditions for new perceptions, three basic conditions are necessary: progress toward a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians; intensive governmental activity aimed at eliminating socioeconomic gaps between Jews and Arabs in Israel, including the integration of Arab citizens in the state; and, finally, concrete action on the part of Jews and Arabs alike to promote a common civic society based on the values of equality and tolerance, coexistence and mutual respect.

The alternative is a dangerous and worrisome path, and is liable to lead to a severe collision course between Jews and Arabs in Israel, as past events have proven.

Richard Sobel

Citizenship as Foundation

The Nature of Citizenship

Spilling over into the 2008 presidential campaign, the debates around immigration have extended to questions about the right to citizenship for American-born children of "illegal aliens." While the rhetoric of presidential candidates about restricting birthright citizenship echoes local governmental efforts to preempt federal immigration powers by, for instance, limiting housing or job prospects for unauthorized immigrants, both obscure a basic point: rescinding the rights of unpopular minorities undermines the foundations of our most fundamental freedoms.

The opening proclamation of The Adventures ofAugie March-"I am an American, Chicago bom"-explains the predominant character of U.S. citizenship. By its very nature, citizenship by birth embodies distinctive qualities that anchor citizens' and others' rights in fundamental protections. These extend to the rights of other natural born citizens, naturalized citizens, and, to some extent, even non-citizens.

What does it mean to be an American citizen, and what is special and distinctive about being a citizen, particularly by birth? What are the hallmarks of "the most basic institution of our public life, American citizenship" (Shklar, 199 I, 23)? Have the distinctions of American citizenship eroded or extended during current controversies over immigration or terrorism?

For the United States as a unique democratic political system, the fundamental natures both of a free polity and of basic rights require that

natural born, as well as validly naturalized, American citizenship and the rights deriving from it, be unassailable. As Saskia Sassen notes, there is a "formal bundle of rights at the heart of the institution of citizenship" (Sassen, 2003, 16). From citizenship flows the basic "political rights such as voting, jury service, militia service, and office holding" (Amar, 2005, 391). While the political are the most tightly-held "bundle of rights" that "standing as republican citizens" embodies (Shklar, 1991, 17), citizenship empowers other rights, too.

From the Founding to Reconstruction, the nature and definition ofcit, izenship were not explicit in either the Articles of Confederation of I781 or the Constitution of 1789. Since citizenship originally derived from state residency and the states were organic constituents of the unsunderable more perfect union, state citizenship encompassed national citizenship. Since the original U.S. Constitution "left the status of citizenship undefined," as Amar notes, "[l]acking any explicit definition of American citizenship, the Founders' Constitution was widely read in the antebellum era as making national citizenship derivative of state citizenship" (2005,381). When citizenship and naturalization were mainly on state foundations, they left many people out of the bedrock. Civil strife ensued.

ChiefJustice RogerTaney's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. 393) in 1857 reveals, yet restricts, the nature of membership in the polity.

The words "people of the United States" and "citizens" are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the govern, ment through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the "sovereign" people, and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty.

Contrary to Taney's seven to two opinion, "We the People" includes more than citizens. While, indeed, citizens play the central role in the political community and as national representatives, one may be part of the American community without being a citizen. Sovereignty as the locus of political authority and the right to representation resides in the people here, not, as in Britain, in the parliament.' Contrary to that in-

I. All persons in the American polity and society possess the right to representation, even if it is it is more attenuated for less embedded members. Passive representation, as embodied in the census counting, used to be the case for women, who were citizens before they could vote, and minors today. During the post-Revolution era, "free blacks, women and assimilated Native Americans" were second-class citizens (Smith, 1997, 162). Today, representation also extends to permanent residents and even illegal aliens as "Americans in waiting" (Motomara, 2006).

famous decision, too, Taney neglected that the states had the power to grant citizenship. When Taney declared blacks had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and were not and could not become citizens, he ignored the five Northern states the Scott dissents pointed out as granting citizen- and voting rights to blacks. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment overturned Dred Scott and fundamentally defined citizenship in ways the original Constitution had not clearly doner'

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The reason that citizenship and its rights must be so firmly anchored, and that the government may never take them away, resides in the Fourteenth Amendment protections of the rights of citizenship, particularly by birth. These protections are intrinsically intertwined with the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of both slavery and involuntary servitude. The pervasive rights of citizenship are bulwarks against government and state actors reimposing a status akin to enforced subservience. "It is only citizenship perceived as a natural right that bears a promise of equal political standing in a democracy" (Shklar, 199 I, 57).

Citizenship rests on an organic connection that constitutes the sinews of the body politic. "The body is the site for rights, rather than rights being granted by the national state" (Sassen, 2003, 17). Citizenship is fundamentally about belonging to a community, comprising part of a "membership sphere" (Bosniak, 2006, 49 after Walzer). It derives, in fact, from membership in the social community before membership in the political community (cf. Marshall, 1965, 79). Citizenship encompasses "an ensemble of rights enjoyed" by "formal members of the nation" (Bosniak, 2006, 82, 83).

2. During the debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the House Judiciary committee chair stated that the "provision defining citizenship is 'merely declaratory of what the law is now,'" citing the William Rawle's constitutional antebellum treatise (1829) that "every person born within the United States whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural-born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertain to that capacity" (Dellinger, 1995, 3). The only exceptions were children of foreign diplomats, those born on foreign ships, and to hostile occupying forces (or tribal Indians), deemed not within the sovereignty of the territory (p.a),

James Madison "contended that people acquire allegiances at birth primarily to the society in which they were born, and only secondarily to the sovereign it happened to have established" (Smith, 1997, 154). A citizen is inherently part of the community, particularly the political community. "Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community" (Marshall, 1965,92). It is "a binding relationship between the individual and the political community" (Bosniak, 2006, n. 27, 183, citing Harvard Law Review, 1989). Similarly, "[cjitizenship is a precondition of influencing these [political] processes and institutions" because "citizens without citizenship are not really free" (Thompson, 1970,3).

As Madison noted, "in Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power [while] in America charters of power [are] granted by liberty" (The National Gazette, January 19, 1792; cf. Breyer, 2005, 33). More recently, Sassen commented that here "the sovereign is the people and the people are sovereign" (Sassen, 2003, 2). Indeed, Lincoln's attorney general reminded him that "The Constitution itself does not make the citizens; it is, in fact, made of them [and] recognizes such of them as are natural-home born" (Bates, 1862).

Though all "persons" have civil rights under the Constitution, there are distinctions in the extent to which fundamental political rights, or full privileges and immunities, are anchored for citizens versus persons (Amar, 2005, 384). There is also a hierarchy of who most fully possess basic rights. The most completely grounded citizenship rights belong to native born citizens whose births to American parents occurred on u.s. soil, because it embodies both jus soli (place of birth) and jus sanguinis (descent). Also, constitutionally founded, if somewhat less secure politically, is citizenship by jus soli for those born here of parents who are aliens. Citizenship acquired by birth "ma[kes] infants 'natural-born citizens'" (Schuck and Smith, 1985,50). The children ofU.S. citizens born abroad are also native citizens (byjus sanguinis), ifproperly recorded, and were defined by the Naturalization Statute of 1790 as "naturally born" even on foreign shores. If a non-U.S. citizen was not born here and becomes eligible, s/he may join the union by naturalization. Naturalized citizens, if their naturalization was validly granted, have similar rights, except for presidential eligibility.' Less provided with rights are permanent residents, and finally other persons, including a variety of aliens. How and why should citizens' distinctiveness be maintained? Because

3. Sparrow (2006, 227) describes single ("second class"), one-and-a-half (national and electoral college), double (state and national) and treble citizenship (state, federal, and tribal nation), respectively, for persons born in the U.S. territories, District of Columbia, states, and Native Americans.

birthright citizenship exists separately from governmental action and because fundamental rights to be free and sovereign flow from citizenships, it is essential that natural born (and validly naturalized) citizenship not be removable by government. As one most fundamentally becomes an American citizen by birth, one cannot lose natural born citizenship by any governmental act, even for treason. Jefferson "insisted that neither treasons nor any other criminal act could be construed as a permissible indication of intent to relinquish citizenship" (Smith, 1997, 156).4 One may only lose naturalized citizenship if it were obtained illegally or by fraud (8 U.S.c. Section 1451). Citizens may only shed their standing by voluntary renunciation in expatriation.

It has not always been so. Just a century ago, the Expatriation Act of 1907 (P.L. 59-193, 34 Stat. 1228, 19°7-22) made citizenship for married American women dependent on the nationality of their husbands and removed birthright citizenship from women who married foreigners.5 The Married Women's (Cable) Act of 1922 (P.L. 67-136, 42 Stat. 1022, 1922) changed this practice, though women who had lost their citizenship then had to reapply through 1940.6 All of these exclusions were putatively unconstitutional since legislation may not undo constitutional principles (cf. Marbury v. Madison; Dickerson v. U.S.).7

For citizens, citizenship and its concomitant rights need to be indomitable, and they may not be challenged unless there is substantive evidence for doubt as to the individual's standing as citizen. For citizenship to be rock-solid, the rights must rest with the citizen while any questioning of citizenship must meet the burden of proof on the questioner, particularly the government.

4. Ellsworth maintained that "American citizenship, like British subjectship, could only be dissolved with the 'consent or the default of the community" (Smith, 158).

5· In Mackenzie II. Hare (239 US 299, 1915), an American woman who married a British subject and continued to live in the U.S., was denied the right to register to vote. The Supreme Court declared that the U.S. government may not remove citizenships, but that marrying a foreigner was "tantamount to expatriation" for an American citizen who thus voluntarily "elected" to give up her citizenship. My thanks to Heidi Kuehl of Northwestern Law Library for litigation research about the 1907 and 1922 immigration acts. See also Salyer (2006) on repatriation.

6. Afterwards, women who married aliens ineligible for citizenship (e.g. Asians) still lost their citizenship (Cable Act, Chap. 411, Section 3, Proviso).

7. The committee on Foreign Relations noted that "There is no other country in the world which deprives its women nationals of their citizenship for the sole reason that they marry aliens ineligible for naturalization" (Report, 2/16/31, p. 3). It held "there should be no distinction between men and women with regard to nationality rights" (p. 2) since "the citizenship of the American man has never been affected by marriage." Further legislation in 1934-6, ended the practice of women's losing citizenship by marriage. Since the Act of 1855 (10 Stat. 604), moreover, women had become citizens when they married American citizens or when their husbands were naturalized, but this practice was to end in the 1922 Cable Act (though it extended until clarification in the 1934 Act).

The Foundation of Birthright Citizenship

The most fundamental basis of citizenship is by birth. In "Defining American: Birthright Citizenship and the Original Understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment," James Ho proclaimed, "Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm" that citizenship is granted exactly as the [Fourteenth] amendment says, to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" (2006, 76). This construction was established to reverse the Dred Scott decision that all blacks, including their American born children, were not citizens.

As the 1789 provision that the president be a natural born citizen implies, the nature and force of birthright citizenship preceded the constitutionally-enhanced powers the Fourteenth Amendment subsequently recognized and granted in 1868. The authors of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, who created the definition of birthright citizenship, recognized that its enactment needed to be anchored in another constitutional amendment.f

Citizenship is appropriately ascribed to those born here. Birthright citizens bestride the colossal state because if the government granted citizenship to natives, it could take it away. In fact, the mere threat of governmental removal of birthright citizenship would weaken the foundation for rights, as it does marginally for those naturalized or born abroad of American parents. Hence, citizenship by birth must be immutable. Birthrights are the goal to which naturalized citizens and immigrants aspire.

Denying birthright citizenship would "mean that a society could freely denationalize citizens against their will perhaps even leaving them stateless" (Schuck and Smith, 1985,37). The consequences of stateless status become dramatically clearer in cashiered army lieutenant Philip Nolan's watery exile in The Man Without a Country (Hale, 1888,31) and common sailor Gerard Gales' demise ofcitizenship rights abroad from loss ofhis seaman's card on The Death Ship (Traven, 1940, 197,239). Similarly, the degraded situation appears in how the political and civil rights, including the liberty to practice their professions, ofJews were denied when the Nuremberg laws stripped away their citizenship and they were impelled into anomie as displaced persons after the Nazi overthrow.

The British and American common laws grant citizenship by birth as a fundamental right retained by the people against the limited enu-

8. "All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States." Act of April 9, 1866, 14 Stat. 27·

merated power of the government (Schuck and Smith, I985, 42,58; see also Dellinger, I 995, p. I). By necessity, birthright citizenship must remain an asymmetric relationship in which the right inheres in the citizen and the burdens fall on the government. While citizens may sever their political relationship, "the government could never do so" (Schuck and Smith, 87). The nation is denied the "power to denationalize those who are already members" (p. 125). Citizenship is of constitutional dimension, one not subject to the whims and prejudices of transient majorities. Sustaining birthright citizenship for all native-born as a constitutional guarantee safeguard[s] basic national values against temporary political aberrations, as is done for free speech and other basic rights" as it confers "irrevocable citizenship" (pp. 132-3).

The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment "wanted to put citizenship beyond the power of any governmental unit to destroy."? As Dellinger summarizes, "the text and legislative history of the citizenship clause as well as consistent judicial interpretation make clear that the amendment's purpose was to remove the right of citizenship by birth from transitory political pressures (I995, 5).10 What the government can give, it can take away. If the government were in any way involved in granting birthright citizenship as it is in naturalization and even recognition of citizenship for children of Americans born abroad, the state could threaten or actually remove native citizen standing. Naturalized citizenship is less secure because there could be some question about the validity of the process or documentation, which could lead to its removal. Because any precondition, such as requiring the provision of "proper papers," could constitute denial of fundemental rights, the government may not require citizens to prove their citizenship before exercising those basic rights.'!

"By establishing beyond peradventure that the American-born children of resident aliens were," as Schuck and Smith note, "United States citizens by birth, and subsequently enshrining that principle in the Cit-

9· US v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 US 649 (1898) as quoted in Gordon, fn. 99. See also Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 US 253 (1967).

10. See also Rogers v. Bellei, 401 US 815, that "Congress has no power, express or implied, to take away an American citizens' [birthright) citizenship with his assent."

I I. At most, government may ask a citizen for proof and must accept affirmation and attestation for constitutionally valid requirements. Interestingly, perhaps in recognition of the defect in asking citizens' for proof, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 requirements to prove citizenship "status" in order to work includes a Citizen Attestation Program in which one need only attest to citizenship in order to work. There are perjury penalties for falsely claiming citizenship by attestation. This somewhat parallels the 1968 Terry v. Ohio standard, while authorities may ask a suspect for identification, s/he need not answer. This right to silence is necessary to avoid the inversion of the proper role of citizens and state abetted by Hiibel v. Nevada (see Sobel and Fennel, 2007).

izenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Thirty-Ninth Congress used ascription to give expansive shape to the American political community" (1985, 79). Birthright must remain beyond peradventure lest adventure perish it.

Why natural born citizenship must be immovably foundational is revealed by the previous condition of black people in slavery. Birthright citizen protections are intrinsically intertwined with the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of both slavery and involuntary servitude by selection ofjus soli (place of birth) for citizenship (naturalization was part of the founding Constitution). "This is hardly surprising," Shklar notes, "since the fear of slavery had always been at the very core of this particular conception of citizenship" (I 991, 57). Without citizenship, slaves were chattel property.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation, wrought under the Commander-in-Chief powers during military necessity of Civil War, promised that liberated slaves would be "forever free," in fact, it required a constitutional amendment after the War to make slaves civilly "free." Indeed, the Thirteenth Amendment was not enough by itself to make Freedmen politically free. Although the amendment outlawed slavery and its second section authorized the Congress with new constitutional powers to "enforce" its provisions "by appropriate legislation," the 1866 Civil Rights Act's granting of citizenship to black people by birth was deemed beyond even the Congresses' enhanced Thirteenth Amendment powers.V Blacks had to become natural citizens under a further [Fourteenth] amendment lest their civil and political rights, in particular, voting rights under both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment.l ' be based on infirm grounds. Even after Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act, House and Senate "members were determined to prevent future Congresses and presidents from attempting to dilute the legal protection that the act had extended to the newly freed blacks" by constitutionalizing citizenship in an additional amendment (Schuck and Smith, 1985,75).

12. See note 8 above for the 1866 Civil Rights Act declaration that persons born in the United States are citizens. See also Buchanan v. Warley (245 U.S. 60, 1917) for an early decision prohibiting residential apartheid under the Fourteenth amendment.

13. Both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments protect freedmen's voting rights. Little recognized and never invoke were the fourteenth provision "But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors is denied to any [male] inhabitant of such state and citizen of the United States, or in any way abridged the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in proportion (see Amar, 2005, 394 and Cvber Privacy Project, 2007, pp. 37-8) in Crawford v. Marion County Election.

Moreover, even though black rights under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were undermined during the Jim Crow era, they could be resurrected because citizenship by birth undergirded them. If blacks had not become natural born citizens, their treatment would have been much worse and a peonage status and legal apartheid (Buchanan v. Warley, 1917) could easily have become perrnanently ingrained and irreversible. In short, the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the 1866 Act's granting of birthright citizenship to African-Americans; this solidified a foundation beyond what the president's "natural born citizenship" implied, state citizenship granted, and the Thirteenth Amendment could authorize.

The Fourteenth "amendment aimed to provide an unimpeachable legal foundation for the [Civil Rights] statute, making clear that everyone born under the American flag-black or white, rich or poor, male or female, Jew or Gentile-was a free and equal citizen" (Amar, 2005, 381). As Amar concludes, "Article IV [privileges and immunity clause] implicitly extended the promise of interstate citizenship to all state citizens rich and poor alike" (p. 251, emphasis in original).

The landmark case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (169 US 649, 1898) affirmed the "ancient and fundamental rule" of birthright citizens." "Congress understood itself," in Schuck and Smith's words, "to be extending birthright citizenship to the American-born children of Chinese and other resident aliens" (1985, 77-78), the then-despised minority of that era. From the first Naturalization Act of 1870 and Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, through the rnid-twentieth century in 1943, Asians, especially Japanese and Chinese laborers, could not become Americans. Even though resident Chinese were excluded from becoming naturalized as U.S. citizens in 1888, the Supreme Court ruled a decade later in Wong Kim Ark that the "Citizenship Clause had indeed extended birthright citizenship to an American-born son of permanent resident of California who happened to be Chinese" (Schuck and Smith, 1985,78).15

14. See also INS v. Rios-Pineda (child born in US was a citizen), 471 US 444 (198S); Plyler v. Doe, 457 US 202 (1982), (public education for children of illegal immigrants) Rogers v. Bellei, 401 US 815 (1971) (see note 9 above); Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez (372 US 144 1963) and Morrison v. California (291 US 82 (1934) (children of Asians ineligible to become citizens were citizens if born here).

15. Even a Taliban fighter arrested in Afghanistan as an enemy combatant in 2001, Yaser Hamdi, born in Louisiana in 1980, was a citizen, though his parents were aliens here on a temporary visa (cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/13/hamdi.hearing). See also the questions about the extent to which an American citizen can be treated as an "enemy combatant" in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested at O'Hare airport in Chicago. www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3208. See also Sidoti (2008) on the citizenship of John McCain as "natural born," of American parents living in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936.

Challenges to Birthright Citizenship

Yet, today some propose to erode natural citizenship by advocating its removal from children of unauthorized immigrants or a "public law" view of granting citizenship by "mutual consent" (Schuck and Smith, 68; Smith, 176). Yet the U.S. Justice Department's interpretation holds that birthright citizenship is unassailable.l'' The previous bill that purported "to deny citizenship by birth to persons born within the jurisdiction of this country [wa]s unconstitutional on its face" (Dellinger, 1995).

During the recent debates about illegal immigration, some congressmen and others propose denying natural born citizenship to children born here of illegal immigrants. The House Immigration Reform Caucus has advocated revoking "birthright citizenship" for children of illegal aliens" by attaching an amendment to an immigration bill. They hold the contradictory principle that "illegal immigrants are subject to criminal prosecution and are expected to abide by U.S. laws and regulation," but are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. in the "full sense" intended by the [Fourteenth] amendment's authors.l? Even some well-meaning advocates of keeping families united have proposed that children born here of illegals not become birthright citizens.

The idea that the children of illegal aliens born in the U.S.18 should lose their citizenship, even for the good intention of keeping deported families united, is constitutionally and morally defective. The "public law" view of mutual consent (Schuck and Smith, 68) as a supposed way to grant citizenship is actually a way to remove it.19 This is so because

16. See Walter Dellinger's testimony to Judiciary subcommittee, 12/13/95. www.usdoj.gOll/ olc/deny.tes.3 I .htm See a colloquy on this among Cass Sunstein, Sarah Cleveland and the author at the Dred Scott conference in April 2007; www.law.harvard.edu. www.cha.rlesha.miltonhouston.org/ Events/Event.aspx?id=I00027 See also Lisa Hoffman, "A move to deny citizenship to U.S.-born kids of illegal immigrants," Scripps Howard News Service, November 17, 2005, that "The last time the issue surfaced was in 1993, but efforts at reform were weakened when the Justice Department advised that it would take a constitutional amendment-with ratification by three-quarters of the states-to accomplish it.

17. See California Yankee, 2005 "It's up to the courts, not Congress, to interpret the Constitution. IfCongress does not like the courts' interpretation [it) should amend the Constitution." Rasmussen report found 49% in a national survey supported ending birthright citizenship and 41% opposed to ending it (Nov 2005).

18. Children born in the U.S. whose parents came to the U.S. illegally are sometimes called "anchor" babies since they anchor their families in America and birthright citizenship anchors other rights. But it does not give parents US citizenship, though at age 2 I, children may petition for parents' citizenship (Simmons, 2005).

19. Dellinger (1995, 5) calls Schuck and Smith (1985) the "only one statement of the contrary view that birthright citizenship may be modified by a simple act of legislation" as "not a plausible reinterpretation of the Constitution," with "no judicial precedent in support of their theory" (p, 5)·

the government, under political pressure, would withhold consent for citizenship from those of disfavored minorities born here. "By stressing the right of the existing community of citizens to 'consent' to newcorners, Schuck and Smith perversely tum Lockean consent from a device designed to limit state power into a device for its enhancement" (Honig, 2001, 160, n. 60). In any case, the people and states provided consent when the constitutionally required three-fourths of the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 (Amar, 367). As Walter Dellinger concluded before the U.S. Congress, "from our experience with Dred Scot, we have learned that our country should never again trust to judges or politicians the power to deprive from a class born on our soil the right of citizenship For us, for our nation, the simple, objective, brightline fact of birth on American soil is fundamental" (1995, 7).

The inverted approach of requiring government consent for birthright citizenship would literally throw out the baby with the bathwater. If certain unpopular people whose lives began here could be deprived of natural born citizenship, anyone could be. Indeed that was precisely what happened to Native Americans and interned [apaneseAmerican citizens.P Some clever legal arguments would be found by a government lawyer or think tank pundit that even the rights and affiliation of citizens could be removed. Claimants, for instance, that the offspring born here of illegals are not subject to the "jurisdiction" of the U.s.-meant to describe children of foreign diplomats and Indians as part of separate domestic nations-seek to unsettle birthright citizenship." But the very designation of "illegal" for these immigrants here

20. In 1942, Roosevelt Executive Order 9066 alleging "military necessity," interned I 10,000 west coast Japanese-Americans, two thirds citizens by birth (Nisei) in camps inside the U.S. "Citizenship was effectively taken away from the Nisei generation by Executive order 9066" (Asahina, 2006, 66). They "lost their constitutional protections," including "practically all freedom of movement and of engaging in private employment" (Asahina, 2006, p. 14). The roundup "went far beyond the accepted powers of the government to intern foreign nationals and resident aliens" in times of war (p. 264) because "most of the I 10,000 'evacuees' could not have been interned under any interpretation of U.S. law-because they were citizens" (264), and yet they were. The dissent in the Korematsu constitutional challenge to the displacement noted Nissei were convicted of the noncrime of "being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born." Chief justice Rehnquist (2000, 207) recognized that the Korematsu v. U.S. (1994) court relied on "previously existing law discriminating against Japanese immigrants [r870 Naturalization Act prohibited their naturalization) to conclude that still further disabilities should be imposed upon them because they had not been assimilated into the Caucasian majority."

21. American Indians as separate nations were originally not fully subject to U.S. jurisdiction; the Snyder Act of 1924 gave citizenship to them as natural born Americans. The issue is not to whom the US government may grant citizenship or naturalize under uniform rules, but that the government may not remove citizenship from birthright citizens or those validly naturalized.

unlawfully in itself notes that they are subject, on the "wrong side" of the laws, to the United States statutes. Opponents of birthright cannot have it both ways; either one is illegal under U.S. jurisdiction or one is not under U.S. jurisdiction and hence not illegal.

The discussion of citizenship by two prominent presidential politicians highlights the force ofbirthright citizenship and the temptation to limit it. In Between Worlds, The Making of an American Life, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico (2005), born in the U.S. of an American father and a Mexican mother who was sent to the U.S. for his birth proclaimed,

By 1947, my father, a loyal and patriotic American, had been living in Mexico nearly twenty years. When the time came for my mother, who is Mexican born and bred, to be delivered of her firstborn child, my father dispatched her to Pasadena, California, where his sister lived. So it was I was born on November 15 of that year [1947] safely within the Lower Forty-eight. My father insisted there would be no doubt of his children's citizenship. When my sister Vesta followed eight years later, she too was provided with a cast-iron American birthright."22

Similarly, at the end of the chapter on "Politics" in The Audacity of Hope, Land of Lincoln Senator Barack Obama noted, "I was reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis once said: that in a democracy the most important office is the office of citizen" (2006, p. 135; Boston Herald, 1904). Speaking to illegals and their advocates, Obama holds "that American citizenship is a privilege and not a right; that without meaningful borders and respect for law, the very thing that brought them to America, the opportunities and protections afforded those who live in this country, would surely erode " (p. 267).

For the American-born, the Senator is incorrect: citizenship is a

22. Richardson, 2005, p. II. Ironically, it is unclear whether presidential candidate Richardson advocated family unity over birthright citizenship? The Project Smart Vote website earlier in 2007 claimed he answered a campaign questionnaire affirmatively: "Children of illegal immigrants, born in the United States, should not automatically receive US citizenship." WWW.votesmart.arg/npat.php?can_id=26964 (attempts to confirm this with his campaign were unsuccessful), Recently the site stated, "Governor Richardson repeatedly refused to provide any responses to Citizens on issues through the 2006 National Political Awareness Test when asked to do so." He also supported a national 10 for employment purposes. Under "Realistic Immigration Reform," he claimed "We must crack down on employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and enforce the laws already on the books. After establishing a national ID system, employers will have no excuses." www.richardsonfarpresident.com/issues/page?id-ooo?

right. But he is right that without the strength of citizenship, those opportunities and protections drawing people to our shores would be degraded. Citizenship empowers their rights.

In the May 3,2007, Republican presidential debate, libertarian Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, called for an "end birthright citizenship," while Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, cosponsor of a bill to "deny 'birthright citizenship' to the children of illegal immigranr.Y' concurred. "Despite concerns that such a law [denying birthright citizenship] would violate the Fourteenth Amendment," Tancredo's view demonstrates how politics can trump principle.i" Some candidates want it both ways: they oppose a national ID as a violation of citizens' rights, yet do not respect birthright citizenship as the foundation of those freedoms.

It is essential to America as a free society that certain rights obtain from the presumption of citizenship because citizenship is "preservative" of other rights" (cf. Harper v. Board of Elections, I966). Citizens have fundamental political and economic rights among their privileges and immunities of citizenship (Amar, I999; I69-17I; Saenz v. Roe, 526 US 489). "The Constitution itself recognizes a basic difference between citizens and aliens," as future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in I973. "That distinction is constitutionally important in no less than I I instances in a political document noted for its brevity "25 Government provisions that require citizens to prove their citizenship in order to exercise fundamental rights undermine the principles that officials have to facilitate the exercise of basic rights and have the burden of proof on any questions. Otherwise, they devalue the meaning of citizenship and democracy while inverting the proper consenting relationship between citizen and the state.i?

23. Rep. Paul also opposes a national 10 card as "a total contradiction of what a free society is all about," and Rep. Tancredo opposes a national 10, except a tamper-proof Social Security card. While arguable having an national 10 might become a "right" of citizenship, national IDs per se, as in having the national government agree with birthright citizenship, invert the proper relationship of citizens to state by letting the government give or withhold consent from citizens to exercise of fundamental rights. This is especially detrimental for exercising rights like voting only after providing a governmental or national 10. See Sobel and Fennel, 2006.

24. U.S. Represenatives Ron Paul, and Tom Tancredo, and Sen. Sam Brownback opposed the national 10 proposal, while Senator John McCain, and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor Mitt Romney supported it. Yet, Giuliani ("for people who come into the U.S.") and Romney ("for aliens, not for citizens") said the worker IDs would only be required of noncitizens. Republican Debate, 5/3/07, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/1847898s/print/1/displaymode/r098/www.cfr.org/ publication/r2714/IssueTracker, "The Candidates on Immigration," May 22,2007.

25. Sugarman v. Dougall, 413 US 634 (1973), (Rehnquist, dissenting)

26. See Sobel and Fennel, 2006, "Trouble with Hiibel: How the Court Inverted the Proper Relationship of Citizens and State."

Political Citizenship

There are political activities, few in number but telling in potency, for which one must be a citizen. According to the United States Constitution, one must be a citizen in order to vote or serve as an elector, to run for national and most other governmental office, and to sue a citizen of another state (Amar, 2005, 385, 391). In Amar's formulation, political as opposed to civil rights include voting, running for office, jury services, and service in the militia (pp. 385, 391).27

The Constitution gives certain rights only to citizens. Most tellingly, in Article II, only "natural born" citizens may become president"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President "28

For other federal offices, in Madison's words, "any citizen may be elected" (Amar, 2005, 69). Article I requires that Members of the House of Representatives and Senate be citizens: "No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have been seven Years a Citizen ofthe United States Similarly, Senators have to be "nine Years a Citizen."29

Article 1 also requires citizenship to vote in national elections. "The House of Representatives shall be chosen and the Electors shall have the Qualifications [of citizenship and age] requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.P? State constitutions and laws require citizenship to vote.

Article IV mandates that the full privileges and immunities fall only to the citizens of the several states. "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States."31 Similarly, the Fourteenth Amendment holds, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."32

And under the Eleventh Amendment, modifying a provision ofArticle III about "controversies between citizens ofdifferent states, "no

27. In addition, among fundamental rights of citizens are that "may travel unconditionally into the country of citizenship" (Bosniak, 2006, III), are also not deportable (Schuck and Smith, 1985, 104), and are entitled to U.S. passports and US protection abroad (Immigration and Naturalization Committee, 2/16131). See also Corfield v, Coryell (6 Fed. Cas. 546, 1823) on privileges and immunities of citizens including the right to travel (see note 40 below).

28. Article II, Section I, Clause 5.

29. Article I, Section 2, Clause 2 and Section 3, Clause 3·

30. Article I, Section 2, Clause I.

31. Article IV, Section 2, Clause I. See note 36.

32. Amendment XIV, Section I.

suit may be brought against persons in another state except by citizens of one state against the other.33 This was the issue of "diversity jurisdiction" in the Dred Scott case about whether Scott could sue his master living in New York for freedom under the Somerset principle that once free always free (d. Amar, 2005, 258).

All the extensions of suffrage involve citizenship." The Fifteenth Amendment held that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition ofservitude." The Nineteenth Amendment held "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." The Twenty-fourth gave the vote to citizens eighteen years old. "The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."

The Twenty-third Amendment outlawed poll taxes and other taxes against citizens voting: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax." The demise of the poll tax, however, has not fully blunted the reincarnation of "other taxes" in the guises of identification requirements for voting (or travel) that burden fundamental rights, where the costs fall disproportionately on classes of poorer and minority citizens. In short, only citizens have certain political and related rights, which are often under attack.

The Citizen Right to Employment

What other rights inhere in citizenship? In Judith Shklar words, "the right to earn has a history parallel to that of the suffrage" (Shklar, 19). The right to take employment is an inalienable right of citizenship.

In the landmark Butcher's Union Co., v. Crescent City Co., the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed "occupation as a fundamental right of citizenship" (III U.S. 746, 756 (1884». The Court declared that

33. Article III, Section 2, Clause I and Amendment Xl.

34. The second sections of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-fourth Amendments states that "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." See appendix for full texts.

one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship is "the right to follow any of the common occupations of life [ajs an inalienable right."

Justice Stephen Field concurred that employment was a right of citizenship. "Among these inalienable rights, as proclaimed in that great document, is the right of men to pursue their happiness the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation, in any manner not inconsistent with the equal rights of others, which may increase their prosperity so as to give to them their highest enjoyment."

In short, citizens may take work unencumbered.

The common business and callings of life, the ordinary trades and pursuits must therefore be free in this country to all alike upon the same conditions. The right to pursue them, without let or hindrance is a distinguishing privilege of citizens of the United States, and an essential element of that freedom which they claim as their birthright 35

Justice Joseph Bradley also concurred that:

The right to follow any of the common occupations of life is an inalienable right under the phrase 'pursuit of happiness' in the declaration of independence that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness.' This right is a large ingredient in the civil liberty of the citizen

Most pointedly, Justice Bradley "deem[ed] a fundamental one, that the ordinary pursuits of life, forming the large mass of industrial avocations, are and ought to be free and open to all (I I I U.S. 746, 764). Bradley further concurred that "I hold that the liberty of pursuit-the right to follow any of the ordinary callings of life-is one of the privileges of a citizen of the United States" (p. 764).

The decade-earlier dissent in the Slaughterhouse cases strenuously prefigured the Butcher's Union finding of the fundamental nature of employment rights. Justice Bradley's Slaughterhouse dissent had raised these themes (p. 114): "the right of any citizen to follow whatever lawful em35. Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co, 11 US 746, 757. Quoting Adam Smith, the opinion continues: "It has been well said that 'the property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper'." Smith, Wealth Nations, book I, chapter 10.

ployment he chooses to adopt is one of his most valuable rights, and one which the legislature of a State cannot invade "

On that point, Bradley found Corfield v. Coryell,36 "very instructive" because Article IV of the Constitution declares that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." In Corfield v. Coryell, Justice Washington identified the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States as "those privileges and immunities which are, in their nature, fundamental, which belong, of right, to the citizens of all free governments." These included "protection by the government; the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and the right of a citizen of one State to pass through, or to reside in, any other State for purposes of trade, agriculture, professional pursuits," as well as the "elective franchise."

Since Butcher's Union, later Supreme Court decisions have affirmed the centrality of employment as a citizen right. In 1897, Allgeyer vs. Louisiana (165 US 589) repeated the holding "that the liberty of pursuit-the right to follow any of the ordinary callings of life-is one of the privileges of a citizen of the United States" (111 US 764).

In Coppage v. Kansas (236 U.S. 1) in 1915, the Court reiterated:

Included in the right of personal liberty and the right of private property-partaking of the nature of each-is the right to make contracts for the acquisition of property. Chief among such contracts is that of personal employment, by which labor and other services are exchanged for money and other forms of property.

That same year, in Truax v. Raich 239 US 33, 41, the Court maintained that

It requires no argument to show that the right to work for a living in the common occupation of the community is of the very essence of the personal freedom and opportunity that it was the purpose of the [Fourteenth] amendment to secure.

In the well-known decision, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 in 1923, the Court held that

The term [liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of 36. www.law.comell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0083_0036_ZD r .html#83_US_)6ast2 #83_US_)6ast2 (6 F. Cas 546. r823)· See Barnett, 2004, pp. 62-4.

the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life The established doctrine is that this liberty may not be interfered with under the guise of protecting public interest by legislative action

Continuing into the post-New Deal era, in AFL v. American Sash and Door (1949), the Supreme Court held that "the right to work is one of the essential freedoms of man without which citizenship would be but an empty name" (335 US 538, 1949).

In the Civil Rights era, Board ofRegents ofState Colleges vs. Roth (408 US 564) (1972) reprised Truax on the "right to work for a living in the common occupation ofthe community [a]s ofthe very essence ofthe personal freedom and opportunity the [Fourteenth] amendment secure]s]" (1915). It also repeated from Meyers (1923) that liberty denotes "the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life (p. 2707).

In discussing the quest for inclusion in citizenship, Shklar noted a "parallelism" between "what was unique about American citizenship: voting and earning" (1991, 67, 15). "This vision of economic independence, or self-directed 'earning' as the ethical basis of democratic citizenship took the place of an outmoded notion of public virtue and it has retained its powerful appeal. We are citizens only if we 'earn.''' (p. 67).37

Because "[n]ot to work is not to earn," as Shklar noted, "and without one's earnings one is 'nobody' (1991, 92), "[o]nly those who act on their own behalf can count as full citizens. If they lack the identifying marks of citizenship, they must fall into a proscribed category" (p. 99). "The Jacksonian faith," she reminds us, "creates a presumption of a right to work as an element of American citizenship" (p. 99). In short, Shklar maintains that the right to "earning is implicit in equal American citizenship" (p. 100).38 Absent the "right to earn," there is "the reduction of standing and demotion to second-class citizenship" (p. 100) or a form of "subjectship" (Schuck and Smith, 1985, 13).39 The "right to earn," even if it is not exercised, is a "right not to be deprived of one's

37. See Sobel, The White Collar Working Class: From Structure to Politics, especially Ch. 6, on the correspondence between work and politics as parallel authority systems.

38. James Nickel, "Is There a Human Right to Employment," Philosophical Forum, 10 (1978-9), 149-70.

39. The citizen right to take employment if offered is not the same as the right to have a job. Whether everyone has a right or guarantee to a job, as human rights advocates maintain, is decided by social policy.

standing as a citizen" (Shklar, 101 ).40 In sum, the right flowing from cit, izenship to take employment may not be abridged."

Why Citizenship, Voting, and Employment May Not Be Undermined

The foundational and unassailable qualities of citizenship and its closely held political and employment rights explain why requirements to prove citizenship in itself, or to prove citizenship in order to exercise fundamental rights in the franchise or in taking employment, are, in them, selves, so detrimental and subversive of constitutional rights. An Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship and government photo identification in order to vote is doubly devastating to fundamental rights: this is because, first, it removes citizenship and, then, it withholds the most potent political right by bureaucratic obstacles. Being forced to prove citizenship before voting undermines both the immunities of cit, izenship and the rights of franchise. Though the Supreme Court in Anzona v. Gonzales, 549 US _2006 permitted the use of ID requirement for 2006 voting, it reserved the right to consider its constitutionality. Similarly, the requirement that citizens prove citizenship under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 ORCA) constructively withdraws citizenship and degrades its concomitant rights by presuming one is an illegal immigrant until otherwise proven by the showing of government permission to work (as immigrants must). Because require' ments to prove citizenship take away sine die fundamental rights in, hering in citizen identity, and only return them when bureaucratic identification standards are met, these laws unconstitutionally under, mine the power of citizenship. Even if briefly, these disenfranchising transmogrifications instantly turn citizens into stateless persons without

40. Powell (2004, 996) holds voting and education as other citizen rights (997). See San Antonio Independent School District. Rodriquez, 41 I U.S. I (1973), about education as fundamental. See note 27 above about the right to travel unconditionally into one's country and not be deported. See also Shapiro v Thompson 394 US 618 (1969) and Saenz v. Roe about freedom to travel fundamentally based on privileges and immunities. Powell also notes that "personhood became a presumption bestowed to all citizens at birth" and "the rise the nation-states created a new political space for personhood (and membership) rooted in citizenship that had the effect "to limit personhood to citizens"( p. 987).

41. The citizen's right to employment is the right to take a job offered, without proof ofcitizenship. This "right to follow an occupation" (Bienen, 7/24/07) simply means that a citizen may take a job offered, without the hindrance of requirements for proof such as governmental IDs. It is not a rule to protect certain groups against discrimination or to guarantee a job to anyone.

plenary rights. Hence, prior requirements to prove citizenship in order to exercise fundamental rights undermine citizens' powers. The assertion of citizenship authorizes the rights to vote or take employment unless the state meets the burden to question it.42

Because the privileges and immunities of citizenship include the "elective franchise" (Corfield) and "the right to follow any of the common occupations of life [a]s an inalienable right" (Butchers Union), citizens have the rights to vote and to work. Voter 10 laws, IRCA 1-9 form requirements, and proposals to apply Electronic Employment Verification Systems to all employees de facto denationalize citizens by unconstitutionally infringing their privileges and immunities as U.S. citizens.

Concluding Conceptions

To be an American citizen is to be in a protected position in a world where such safe harbors are rare indeed. People aspire to become American citizens precisely to obtain these precious and invaluable rights and protections. Their and our aspirations would be unrealizable and their deferred dreams could ever remain unrealized if American citizenship were anything less than the absolute protection of the rights citizens enjoy.

The defense of citizenship cannot be confused with nativism or nationalistic patriotism. Because the rights of citizens "spill over" for other persons, "within the logic of constitutional citizenship theory itself, citizenship is not just for citizens" (Bosniak, 2006, 79). As Bosniak notes, citizens rights benefit others.

Constitutional citizenship as the conceptual anchor for individual rights need not leave aliens behind [because] a (relturn to citizenship as a basis for constitutional rights might well bring [aliens] along (p. 81) The revitalization of the idea of constitutional citizenship need not, in principle, result in a total diminution of rights of aliens {p. 100}.

42. The key right deriving from the joint nature of citizenship and employment (as former's concomitant) is that citizens need not prove citizenship to take a job. Non-citizens could be required to prove authorization to work. Identifying the principles of citizen concomitant rights and the presumptions of citizenship are the points of the essay; practical solutions are not the focus here. If citizens have the right to be presumed citizens and not have to prove citizenship, they can simply seek and take work or at most be asked to attest to their citizenship. At that point, the burden of any question about citizenship falls on the state to prove the person claiming to be a citizen is not one. There could be perjury penalties for false claims, however.

Moreover, she notes, as long as citizenship is fairly attainable, it creates the prospects for its wider pursuit and enjoyment.

So long as citizenship status is made available to noncitizens on liberal terms, granting what we often call citizenship rights to status noncitizens is not a constitutional wrong but instead gives appropriate expression to the Constitution's universalist commitments (p. 95)·

The constitutional requirements for citizenship in order to exercise fundamental political rights, moreover, differ from the statutory requisites that someone has to be a citizen to get certain governmental jobs, or to prove citizenship or permanent residency to receive some entitlements.P Whether non-citizens mayor may not receive social welfare benefits by law or constitutional right does not challenge the nature of the political and economic concomitants of citizenship. There is no discrimination in defending the foundational rights that citizenship represents and immigrants aspire to. Citizenship and its affiliated rights cast a glow, which in many, but not all, cases, emanates onto other less wellsituated persons here legally and illegally.

The defense of citizenship protects fundamental rights of all persons here. We would abandon our birthright for a mess of pottage if we gave up the citizenship gold standard to try to punish or privilege unauthorized immigration. The pursuit by aspirants of citizens' rights would prove as meaningless as seeking Citizen Kane's "Rosebud" if birthrights and naturalized rights were fungible. Government by the consent of the governed means that for citizens to exercise their basic rights, states and federal permission or proof may not first be required."

The simple yet powerful equation of citizenship with rights ironclad to American politics and vocations benefits us all as countrymen and women as well as those endeavoring to join the unions. The lesson that stripping citizens of rights under Nuremberg or immigration laws is profoundly detrimental to civil liberties and professions needs to be heeded here and now yet again.

In contrast, American citizen is a special public office. It is a right-

43. Graham v. Richardson (403 US 365, 1982) holds that state may not restrict social welfare benefits to legal residents and Plyler v. Doe (457 US 2020, 1982) that children who are illegal immigrants are eligible for public education. But Mathews v. Dim (426 US 84, 19821) and Cabell v. Chavez-Salida (454 US 432, 1982) distinguished benefits governments may restrict.

44. See Sobel and Fennel, 2007, and Sobel, 2002 (pp. 370-1) on identification regimes. See also Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer dissents in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (07-21, °7-25), April 2008 on the constitutional failings of voters 10 requirements.

fully powerful and impregnable place in a shaky world. Any attempt to reduce its surety must be rejected in the strongest terms because Americans fought a Revolution and Civil War to sustain and "secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The battles need to continue unabated to reverse and halt current degradations of citizenship, political franchise, and economic occupation under voter proof and employment rules.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, citizenship endows anyone born in Illinois, and others naturalized from abroad, with plenary rights and privileges. While Chicago birth anchors Augie March's authority, citizen standing protects both its members and naturalized allies, while inspiring those who aspire to its attainment. The full American dream and its promises are deeply rooted in natural and naturalized citizenship as groundings for both our bodies' privileged immunities and our body politics' most fundamental rights. Playing political games, whether presidential or parochial, with our constitutional foundations is a state better not borne by any Americans.

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Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Henry Bienen, Sarah Wald, Lesley Area, Anna Crane, Heidi Kuehl and Robert Boswell for cornments or research assistance on this paper.

Appendix

Texts about Citizenship in the U.S. Constitution and Amendments

Article I, Section 2, Clause 2

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Article I, Section 3, Clause 3

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

Article II, Section I, Clause 5

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Article IV, Section 2, Clause I

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

Amendment XI (1795)

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

Amendment XIII (1865)

Section I. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIV (1868)

Section I. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 5. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Amendment XV (1870)

Section I. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIX (1920)

Section I. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXIV (1964)

Section I. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXVI (1971)

Section I. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Andrew Wachtel

The New Balkan "Other"

In 2006 I published a book entitled Remaining Relevant after Communism. The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. Its central thesis was that in Eastern Europe, from the age of "national revivals" in the midnineteenth century through the collapse of communism, writers of serious literature and their works played an exceptionally important role in society but that conditions of post-communism had created an unprecedented threat to the writer's traditional position. The problem was described pithily by the Serbian critic and short story writer Mihailo Pantie: "from what had been an elite art form, which in a synthetic way recapitulated the general truths of people's experience and which deepened their understanding of reality artistic literature in the post-socialist cultural model has become socially unnecessary, an almost completely private affair which lacks any social importance and which is interesting only to narrow academic circles, to writers, and to rare dedicated readers who nurture their passion as other marginal groups nurture theirs. Some people belong to satanic cults, some to the Society for Lovers of Bulldogs, and others, amazingly, read Serbian poetry."!

Most of my book was taken up with an identification and analysis of six "strategies" that, pace Pantie, East European writers have adopted since I989 in an attempt to remain relevant to their societies. To a certain extent, the works considered here can be seen as a subset

I. Pantie, oral interview with Andrew Wachtel. The translation is mine.

of a problem that has received a fair amount of attention {writers and nationalism in the Balkans} and as an implicit response to a strategy I focused on in my book {the creation of a new cosmopolitanism in East European literature}. Nationalism can cover quite a large conceptual territory, and one should be careful not to limit a discussion of its pres� ence in literature to works of an overtly chauvinistic character. Instead, in my view one should examine the entire gamut of literary texts that attempt to define the essence of the nation, the national character, or to outline what could be identified as a national program. The novels considered in this essay, insofar as they criticize what their authors perceive as a kind of European neo-colonialism, project a covert nationalism, or at the very least assert that the Balkan peoples possess a valuable national culture that West Europeans fail to appre� ciate or even to notice. Nevertheless, as they do not attempt to define what the outlines of that culture are, they cannot be considered nationalist works per se.

These novels can, however, be seen as at least implicit responses to works expressing a new internationalism {cosmopolitanism}. The central features of this new internationalism are as follows:

I} The work's narrator, main character, or poetic "I" makes a journey from the home country to the West and back.!

2} The narrator interacts with European and American culture; he/she is not merely a passive observer reporting back what he/she sees to countrymen.

3} Western culture is seen as different, but it is neither blindly accepted as superior, nor is it simply rejected as vulgar, crass, consumerist, and so forth. The implication of the whole is that the narrator's/implied author's culture and that of the West can and should be complementary rather than identical. The particularity of the East European experience is seen as adding something to the European cultural mix.

2. Some important works that employ this strategy are the novel Mocking Desire by the Slovene Drago [ancar, the brilliant prose meditation called Tsink by the Serbian David Albahari, and the collection of lyric poetry Angel Riding a Beast by the Romanian Liliana Ursu. All three were published in English in the series "Writings from an Unbound Europe" at Northwestern University Press. Although most works with which I am familiar bring the hero/heroine to the West, other destinations are possible. See, for example, Iztok Osojnik's Melinda Podgomy, which transports Slovenians to Japan. There are also a series of mirror image novels that bring Americans to Eastern Europe and home again; perhaps the most notable of these is Gary Shteyngert's The Russian Debutante's Handbook.

4} A synthesis is achieved between the cultures, but it is a personal, provisional and hence inherently unstable, one which does not pretend to the level of a {modernist} universal model of cultural synthesis. 5} Although clearly fictional, such narratives are often written in the first person, and, even when they are not, the central character appears so closely connected to the implied author that the work is inevitably taken as autobiographical. Furthermore, the narrative is generally highly reflexive, and the main character often plays the role of author of the text in question.

The novels to be considered here {Sahib by the Bosnian Nenad Velickovic, A Novel with Internationals by the Albanian Ylljet Alicka, and The Watcher by the Macedonian Aleksandar Prokopiev} are to some extent mirror images of this paradigm. In each, a central role is played by one or more West Europeans who believe they have come to the Balkans in order to bring civilization to a savage world. Their "do-gooding" desire is, however, undercut by their attitude toward the local population {at best condescending}, by their obvious unwillingness to try to understand their surroundings, and by the reader's growing realization that their main motivating factor is selfishness.

Velickovic's Sahib was, to my knowledge the earliest Balkan novel to display this thematic. Published in 2002, this is an epistolary novel {though the reader only sees one side of the correspondence} between a young, gay Englishman and his lover in London. Although the locals do not get an opportunity to speak, except insofar as their thoughts and ideas are refracted in the prose of the letter writer, it does not take long to see that the author means us to recognize that the narrator understands nothing of his surroundings and is to be taken as a satiric portrait. Here is a typical passage from the opening letter of the book:

The main road into town is in a terrible state. The surface is all holes and bumps, with asphalt patches in between. There are lots of patched buildings as well, on both sides of the street. There are also a few that have been completely rebuilt. Unfortunately, the ones that have been absolutely mangled have been covered with billboards, which is a shame, because after all those images of war, you expect at least a few really good ruins. I feel cheated, like when you pay to see a sexy film, and then find when you get in that the explicit scenes have been cut. I get the impression here that the

city would have looked just as ruined and neglected even without the war.'

We can already see one of the central tropes of this type of novel here: the Western European as voyeur. The narrator has come to the Balkans to rebuild a war-torn country, and he wants to find things in disastrous shape, both because the ruined landscape justifies his very presence in the region and because it gives him scope for his activity. The analogy between the expected schadenfreude caused by destruction and the pleasure of watching pornography only serves to emphasize the perverse desire of the Western NGO worker.4

In the mind of the Western outsider (as depicted in these novels), the "exotic" Balkans contrast favorably with the monotony and boredom ofhome. The following inner monologue depicts the consciousness of the American Paul Dundroff, who has come to Macedonia as the director of the NGO "World Peace Building and Construction":

Skopje really is the most international of Balkan cities-a true melting pot! It has tolerated and incorporated cultures and languages from outside its borders for three thousand years without losing its aplomb and sense of humour-they are having their Saturday coffee in 'Makedonska Kuka' on Kale, and Mr. Dundroff has a habit of supporting the exclusivity of his mission with such statements. And later, while they are walking through the Old Town, he moves knowingly as if he were a long-time resident amongst the men in gaudy shirts yelling something conspiratorial over their mobile phones and the women in their uniform overcoats. Truly, Dundroff thinks, there is something exotic about this place at 30+ Celsius, something attractive about its irrationality, different from the monotony of his own hometown in Wyoming where live his beloved wife, Sylvia the housewife, and their three children.t

But insofar as a given country turns out not to be a complete disaster and the local people fail to be starving, ignorant, and begging for help, the European is depicted as disappointed. Thus, in Ylljet Alicka's novel, the

3. Nenad Velickovic, Sahib. Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2002, 5-6. The English translation, as yet unpublished, is by Celia Hawkesworth.

4. To be sure, Velickovic's novel is more than a satire on foreign others. It is also, perhaps more importantly, a commentary on post-Dayton Bosnia, particularly on local ethnopolitics and social changes since the end of the Bosnian wars.

5. Aleksandar Prokopiev, Sirkachot. Skopje: Magor, 2007, 75· The English translation was presented at the 2007 Balkanika literary festival. It is as yet unpublished and no translator is credited.

members of the "representation mission" (i.e., the EU mission to Albania) are nonplussed when the director of the Central Orphanage fails to appreciate their gift of Teddy bears on World Orphans' Day:

[I]t so happened that the Manager ofthe Orphanage was an ungrateful type when it came to gifts from internationals. She was quick to express her opinion and said that 'she didn't know what she was going to do with the thousands of teddy bears that had arrived that day, and that it would be better if they came up with a more fitting and serious contribution.' Just before ending her statement, she happened to mention that the internationals wouldn't go bankrupt if they were to give a sum of, shall we say, thirty thousand euros.

-These barbarians are laughing at the face of progress, the short-bodied but high-minded Spaniard said furiously as he left the Orphanage.P

From the examples cited, it would be easy to guess that the novels are little more than examples of anti-orientalist ressentiment. To be sure, these is a great deal of that on display in these works, which represent the disappointment of people who think of themselves as fully European, yet who suddenly discover that in the mental map of their European neighbors they occupy a place equivalent to the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, these authors attempt in a variety of ways to deepen their critique, most interestingly perhaps in examining the minds and motivations of those locals who work with and for these organizations.

But even the Mediterranean diplomat himself had the inclination to move as much as he could in and out the country, since he did not much like staying in the office, because his patience to stay for long periods in one place had run out.

For this reason he did not let any missions pass him by, where, apart from the merited subsidies, he also had the opportunity to administer as closely as he could his properties rented out in various European capitals.

The privilege ofgoing on missions abroad also belonged to one of his assistants of local nationality, but who possessed a western world and spirit and who preferred to communicate or to pass

6. No publication information is available on this novel. The English translation was presented at the 2007 Balkanika literary festival. It is as yet unpublished and no translator is credited.

information only to foreigners and nobody else. She carried out this job because of her sincere desire to fight evil and, in order for good to triumph in the international representation office.

Convinced that fate had forced her to live in a society where cultivated people were not valued at all, the local employee naturally attached herself to the internationals of the representation office, in their sublime efforts to give the locals a few basic examples of the contemporary civilization. 7

That is to say, the Western "gaze" has, apparently, been internalized by a fair number of educated locals, who are therefore complicit in the efforts ofNGO and governmental representatives to remake Balkan culture in their own image. Such a gaze has not, however, been internalized by the implied authors of the works, or by the main characters who are their alter egos. This is particularly clear in Sahib, which ends with the British NGO worker going native, seduced by his Bosnian driver, and A Novel with Internationals, which ends with the main character being fired for his inability to conform to the wishes and desires of his European masters.

Although none of the three novels considered here can be called a literary masterpiece, they are interesting in their overt attempts to construct a view of the "other" in the Balkan context at odds with understandings that have been prevalent in the region since the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the time that European notions of the nation appeared in this region, elites in the Balkans have constructed the image of the "other" by contrasting themselves either with interlopers from the East (primarily the Ottoman Empire) or with those who could be considered "more Balkan" than the group to which a given author or implied author belonged. This latter phenomenon has been dubbed "nesting orientalism," a condition in which Balkan writers assert their own Europeanness (seen as a positive feature) by tarring their neighbors (almost always those to the south and east) with the epithet "Balkan.I"

Perhaps the classic non-literary construction of the "external other from the East" can be found in the doctoral thesis of the celebrated Bosnian writer Ivo Andric. Describing the effects of the Ottoman conquest, he opines: "at the most critical juncture of its spiritual develop-

7. From A Novel with Internationals.

8. See "Nesting Orientalisms" by Milica Baklc-Hayden, Slavic Review, (54, 4), Winter, 1995, 917--93 I.

ment, with its spiritual powers in ferment, Bosnia was conquered by an Asiatic military people whose social institutions and customs spelled the negation of any and all Christian culture and whose religion-begotten under other skies and social circumstances and quite incapable of adaptation-shackled the life and spirit of the mind in Bosnia, disfiguring it and molding it into an exceptional case."? Andric's formulation (written in the I 920S when memories of Ottoman rule were still not completely historical), while perhaps starker than many, remains representative of Balkan historiographical understandings of the self and the other. Thus, in a more recent work, the Bulgarian historian Bojidar Dimitrov opens his chapter on the Ottoman period as follows: "The fall of the medieval Bulgarian states under the Ottoman rule interrupted the Bulgarian people's natural development within the framework of European civilization In the course of centuries, the Bulgarians were forced to live under a state and political system that was substantially different from and distinctly alien to the European civilization which had evolved on the basis of Christianity and the Christian economic, social and cultural patterns.t""

Given this view, the internal Balkan construction of "nesting orientalisms" is a logical development. Everything that is "natural" and "normal" is identified with Christian Europe and everything "alien" with Asia. Thus, I can assert my superiority to my immediate neighbors by referring to myself as "more European" and them as "more Asiatic," or, in the standard local parlance, "more Balkan." As Milica BakicHayden puts it:

The phenomenon of nesting orientalisms is evident in the former Yugoslavia and its successor states where the designation of "other" has been appropriated and manipulated by those who have themselves been designated as such in orientalist discourse. Thus, while Europe as a whole has disparaged not only the orient "proper" but also the parts of Europe that were under oriental Ottoman rule, Yugoslavs who reside in areas that were formerly the Habsburg monarchy distinguish themselves from those in areas formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, hence "improper." Within the latter area, eastern Orthodox peoples perceive themselves as more European than those who assumed identities of European Muslims and

9. Ivo Andric, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule. Trans. Zelimir JuriCic and John Loud. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. 17·

10. Bojidar Dimitrov, Bulgaria. IUustrated History.Sofia: Borina, 1994, 127.

who further distinguish themselves from the ultimate orientals, non-Europeans. I I

Thus, for example, the great Croatian writer Miroslav Krlesa, a European educated modernist, was said to have quipped: "the Balkans begins on the southern side of the terrace of the Hotel Esplanade [in Zagreb]."

In literature, the most fascinating traditional Balkan examples of the creation of "others" can be found in works that examine the relationship between Christians and co-ethnics who converted to Islam. A kind ofFreudian "narcissism ofsmall differences" makes the relationship between these groups particularly complex, but the basic Christian identity of the nation is ultimately affirmed through a plot that emphasizes the original Christian unity of the given group. In a work such as Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath, 1847) by the Montenegrin Petar Petrovic Njegos, the unity of the nation is affirmed through a bloody fratricidal battle in which Christian Montenegrins massacre the converts to Islam. Though this is portrayed as a tragic event, it is also seen as inevitable if the nation is to be preserved.V

A more recent novel by the Bulgarian Anton Donchev entitled Vreme Razdelno (A Time of Parting, 1964) cornplexifies this basic situation. This work focuses on the moment of conversion imagined to have occurred all at once at the time of the Ottoman invasion. It underscores the fact that for all the discord between Bulgarian Christians and Pomaks (Bulgarian speaking Muslims), they are one and the same people who were tragically divided by historical accident.P A similar problematic undergirds the novel Noz (The Knife, 1983) by the Serbian writer Vuk Draskovic. Set in the twentieth century, the novel features a massacre of Orthodox Christians by Muslims, but its central concern is with questions of identity, particularly the question of religion versus ethnic-

11. Bakic-Hayden, 922.

12. For more on Njegos and the way this work has been used to construct various versions of Yugoslav, Serbian, and Montenegrin identities, see my article "How to Use a Classic: Petar Petrovic Njegos in the zoth Century" Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth Century Southeastern Europe. eds. John Lampe and Mark Mazower (CEU Press, 2003), ]31-153. For more on fratricidal relations between co-ethnics in the Balkans, see Angelina Ilieva, Romulus's Nations: Myths of Brotherhood and Fratricide in Russian and South Slavic National Narratives. PhD diss. Northwestern Unversity, 2005.

13. Though one might imagine that a work of this sort would have led to greater understanding between the two groups, in fact this sort of thinking encouraged the Bulgarian communist authorities in the end of the 1980s to force ethnic Turks living in Bulgaria to give up their Turkish names and take on a Bulgarian Slavic identity or face deportation to Turkey.

ity which becomes apparent when the reader and the main character recognize that the victimizers and the victimized were all, originally members of the same (Christian) family.

In the context of Balkan novels, Europeans as such rarely make an appearance. Europe is the desired goal, the promised land toward which the Balkan peoples strive, but the actual "others" with whom they interact, at least in literary works, are most often Asians or "more Balkan" cousins. By the 1920S, when European-style states had been created throughout the Balkans, European or Europeanized characters became more frequent presences in literary work. Thus, in a number of novels and plays by the afore-mentioned Krlesa, including the celebrated "Glembay" dramas and the brilliant novels Powatak Filipa Latinovicza (The Return of Philip Latinovicz, 1932) and Na rubu pameti (On the Edge of Reason, 1938) we can find satirical portraits of pseudoEuropeanized Croatian elites. Deracinated but not yet fully imbued with European civilization, these "in betweens" are caricatured and pilloried. Nevertheless, with the exception of his prose on a World War I thematic, in which Austrian officers in Croatia are portrayed mercilessly, Krlesa rarely includes actual European characters in his work, and the same can be said for most of his modernist compatriots.

In conclusion, then, we can say that the active intervention ofWest European NGOs and the EU has opened the door for a new thematic in Balkan literary culture. Authors hoping to remain relevant to their societies have chosen to create works which satirically portray the actions and motives of European "helpers," counting on a readership which feels colonialized by these outsiders to appreciate the satire and, presumably, to assert the value of their own cultures. These works appear to be having some success; although they are not great literature, they have all sold quite well in their home countries. And in the case of Alicka's novel at least, there has been some external recognition as well, though perhaps not of the most welcome sort. According to the author, the EU sent an investigatory commission to determine whether he had slandered any of their employees, a number of whom had recognized themselves as the novel's "others" when it appeared in French translation.

Fouad Ajami, Professor and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and other journals and periodicals. He is a former research fellow at the Lehrman Institute and recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship in the arts and sciences in 1982. Henry S. Bienen was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University prior to his appointment as president at Northwestern University. Mr. Bienen is one of the first three university presidents awarded the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award for innovative leadership in higher education. Lan Samantha Chang was selected to become the director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in the University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2006. In addition to her novel, Inheriw.nce (Norton, 1990), and the fiction collection, Hunger (Penguin, 2000), her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. Stuart Dybek is a professor at Northwestern University and the author of two collections of poems: Brass Knuckles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979) and Streets in Their Own Ink (Farrar, 2004). His fiction includes

Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and most recently I Sailed With Magellan, (Picador, paperback, 2004), which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Dybek's work has won numerous awards, among them a McArthur Prize Fellowship, a Guggenheim, numerous O. Henry Prizes, and inclusions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry. Reginald Gibbons has published a novel, Sweetbitter (Louisiana State University Press, paperback, 2003), and seven books of poems, most recently Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press, 2008). [ana Harris's most recent books of poetry are Oh, How Can I Keep on Singing, Voices of Pioneer Women and We Never Speak of It, Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-90, both published by Ontario Review Press (Princeton). She teaches creative writing on-line at the University of Washington. Jeffrey Herbst is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Miami University, in Ohio, and a coauthor ofThe Future ofAfrica: A New Order in Sight? (Routledge, paperback, 2005). Bonnie Honig, Research Professor at ABF, is also Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science, at Northwestern, and appointed (by courtesy) at Northwestern Law School. She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement ofPolitics (Cornell, 1993; awarded 1994 Scripps Prize for Best First Book in Political Theory). Her current project is on Sophocles' Antigone. E. Patrick Johnson is Professor and Chair in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of ApprOpriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics ofAuthenticity (Duke

University Press, 2003) and co-editor (with Mae Henderson) of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, published by Duke University Press in 2005. Lawrence Joseph, who is the Reverend Joseph T. Tinnelly, C.M., Professor of Law at St. John's University, is the author of the novel Lawyerland, and several collections of poetry, including Into It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

Dwight A. McBride, Dean of the College ofLiberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of African American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at UIC, is author of Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York University Press. 2001), which was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York University Press, 2005). He is currently at work on two new book manuscripts tentatively titled: Poetics, Politics, and Phillis Wheatley and White Lies in the Republic: Race, Sexuality, and the Law. Paul Muldoon is Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, as well as poetry editor of the New Yorker. He has published several volumes of poetry, including The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay ( I 998), Horse Latitudes (2006), and May Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

Joyce Carol Oates's most recent books are My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008) and Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (2008), both from Ecco. Alicia Ostriker is a poet-critic, twice a finalist for a National Book Award, 274

author ofeleven volumes ofpoetry, most recently No Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Her most recent prose work is For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book (Rutgers University Press, 2006). Jeremiah Ostriker is professor of theoretical astrophysics in the department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He has authored or co-authored more than three hundred scientific articles.

Elie Rekhess is a visiting Professorial Fellow in Jewish Studies at Northwestern University. He also serves as Senior Research Fellow in the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies Tel Aviv University, as the head of its Program on Jewish-Arab Cooperation in Israel sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and on the faculty of its Department of Middle Eastern History. He is the author of, most recently, Islamic Fundamentalism in Israel. Fazal Sheikh's awards include the International Henri Cartier-Bresson Grand Prize, the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, the Prix d'Arles, and the Leica Medal of Excellence. In 2005, Sheikh was named a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Richard Sobel is a Political Scientist at Harvard University and Senior Research Associate of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy Since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus

(Oxford University Press, 2001), Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy Over Contra Aid, and numerous articles. Andrew Wachtel is Bertha and Max Dressler Professor of the Humanities; Dean of The Graduate School, and Director, Roberta Buffett Center for In-

ternational and Comparative Studies all at Northwestern University. His current projects include: The Balkans in World History (Oxford University Press) and A Cultural History or Russian Literature (with Ilya Vinitsky), commissioned by Polity Press.

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