East Village Chimurenga

Posted on September 2, 2005 by Tony

mapfumo

Sunday August 28

St. Mark’s Place is packed solid with traffic, hardly moving, which is all the more frustrating since we’ve been driving for three hours, hungry, from upstate New York, where Gabe had been at a swords-and-sorcery day camp. The sight of familiar faces from our old East Village neighborhood leading their children clad in kimonos down the street tells us that the blockage up ahead is caused by the fact that a whole block is closed off for the annual Japan festival. (Come to think of it, we’d gotten an email a day or two earlier from Gabe’s samurai swords teacher that he’d be performing…) Later, walking around, I realize that the crush is all the greater because the Japan festival intersects, at Avenue A, with the “Howl” festival, an annual tribute to the late Beat poet Allen Ginsburg, complete with portly bearded lookalikes clad in vaguely “Buddhist” garb reading poems out loud in a kind of high-brow version of Elvis impersonators. (A shave, a white leather pants suit and a pair of Black Flys, and some of these guys could easily have done Fat Elvis.)

Right now, however, I’m stuck, not moving, as my car radio plays the incantations of a Trinidadian DJ pronouncing on matters of religion over a lively jump-up soca beat (reminding us that Labor Day, and with it the great Brooklyn West Indian carnival, the biggest annual street parade in the U.S. is just days away). “Salaam Aleikum to all my Muslim friends,” the DJ shouts. “And to my Jewish friends, Shalom Aleichem. Peace be upon you, Christians and others. Remember, there are many routes to the same place, and in the end what we’re all about is to treat your neighbor as yourself.”

I look up at my neighbor, a guy who I guess is from Africa, driving a yellow cab. Just as he’s about to edge forward, a large black Hummer pulls in front of him, jumping ahead in the line which is hardly moving. He looks at me with an exasperated shrug. I smile back, and we start chatting. After a few comments on the traffic, I tell him I’m from South Africa, thinking this is a better starting point than the more invasive “Where are you from?”

“South Africa?!” he chortles, “Hey, I’m from Zimbabwe.”

Summoning up one of the only bits of Shona I know (I speak few languages, but I can sloganize in a lot more), I answer: “Pamberi Ne Chimurenga!”

Forward with the struggle, it means, an old slogan from the liberation war that ended white minority rule. But I know its back in popular use now among a Zimbabwean population being slowly strangled by the tyrant Mugabe — only three weeks ago, I’d gone to hear the legendary Thomas Mapfumo perform in Prospect Park, and he’d made clear the implications of the Chimurenga spirit for today.

The cab driver’s face lit up.

“That’s right, baby!” he yelled, grinning, flashing me a V for victory as a traffic cop finally waved us through onto First Avenue.

Posted in New York Moments | 4 Comments

Dakar on the Hudson

Posted on September 2, 2005 by Tony

murid

Published in the South African magazine Leadership in 1995 — so it’s very dated, but these were some of my earliest explorations of New York’s wondrous secrets

Take a close look at New York, and it will reveal itself as a city more African in character than any metropolis on the African continent–nowhere else in the world is there a comparable concentration of diverse African experience.

At first glance, the city has a feel familiar to anyone who has lived in an African city. In most of it, the overwhelming majority on the bustling streets are people of colour. Rap, reggae and salsa–all music rooted, originally, in Africa–blare out from every direction, and the sidewalks are jammed with tables on which incense burns and Jamaicans, Senegalese, Malians, Ivoirians and Ghanaians sell everything from religious adornments to cheap sunglasses. Homeless people wander by, transporting the means of their improvised urban existence in supermarket trolleys, while sidewalk hustlers and dagga dealers work their angles. The wealthier (and mostly white) elite spend their days in a few upmarket business and residential enclaves, while poorer people of colour survive in ghettos wracked by drugs, despair and violent crime. Besides the few who live downtown, New Yorkers tend to reside tribally, in neighbourhoods that correspond to specific ethnicities–the city is less a melting pot than a salad bowl. But in this urban chaos in which rules and boundaries are constantly defied and redrawn, something beautiful is created by the simple everyday coexistence–in the fractious world of the late 20th century, New York’s very existence is something of a miracle.

Nowhere is the African family more in conversation with itself than in New York City. That dialogue encompasses the full extended family, incorporating long-lost cousins and even branches who might, at first glance, appear to belong to other families. Sometimes their conversation is raucous and celebratory; other times it is mute, reflective and even cryptic. Sometimes it is imbued with the love and solidarity inherent in any family; at other times it is inflected with the squabbles and feuds common to most families. But the conversation never ceases.

In a city whose character has always been shaped by successive waves of immigrants, that intra-African conversation has become the loudest component of New York’s urban hum.

The 1990 population census (the most recent available offering a racial breakdown) puts the city’s white population at 3.1 million, it’s Asian population at 500 000, it’s “Black” population at 2.1 million and it’s “Hispanic” population at 1.8 million. Of course these figures are dated, and the proportion of black and Latino residents is substantially higher, by all accounts. The terms “Black” and “Hispanic” however, are a little confusing: The overwhelming majority of those New Yorkers termed “Hispanic” are from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. And here, of course, is one of the best-kept secrets of the African diaspora–Caribbean Latino cultures have maintained their deep roots in Africa. Demographically and culturally then, New York reveals itself as a substantially African metropolis.

The Africa of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean has long camouflaged its essence in order to survive in the New World. But that African essence is visible to the curious eye. For example, a pumpkin floating in the East River or a slaughtered chicken left by a crossroads could be dismissed as random urban detritus. But they might also be signs that the gods of the Yoruba make their presence felt in Brooklyn.

botanica
A neighborhood “botanica”
sells Santeria supplies

The horror of slavery created an African diaspora which, today, consists of over 100 million people. The descendants of those first New World Africans know no African language, instead speaking Spanish, Portuguese, French or English. They live throughout the Americas, from Brazil to Canada–in most of the Caribbean, they are the overwhelming majority. Their skin colour may vary in hue and their customs and traditions may have little surface resemblance to Africa, but Africa is the dominant influence on Caribbean Latino cultures.

Madam Eva, a petite Puerto Rican woman with honey coloured hair and caramel skin, sits behind the counter of her tiny Botanica (stores selling religious artifacts found in all Latino neighbourhoods) on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant area. The shelves of her store are lined with figurines and candles, as well as potions, amulets and oils. All of the artifacts appear to venerate various Catholic saints.

It was that appearance which allowed Yoruba slaves from West Africa to maintain their religion in the new world. Slaves to the Catholic colonies were forced, at gunpoint, to adopt their masters’ religion and forbidden from practicing their own. But the slaves belief system was flexible enough to appear to embrace Catholicism, while actually simply incorporating its symbols into an African cosmology and ritual. The slaves masked their religious practices by choosing a Catholic saint to represent each of the Yoruba gods. So, Shango, the god of thunder and lightning became represented by Santa Barbara; Elegua, the trickster and child god of the path and crossroads became represented (variously) by the Child of Atocha, the Child of Prague and St. Anthony of Padua, Ogun the god of iron became represented by St. Peter and so on. This was not simply a clever subterfuge.

Within the Yoruba belief, the deities of the spirit world manifest themselves on occasion by entering the body (or “riding”) of a believer — this usually occurs during ceremonies involving hours of drumming, chanting and ecstatic dance. Although banned from observing their own religion, the slaves were free to worship the Catholic saints in their own way — with drumming, dance, chanting, singing and other activities designed to maintain the link to the Orishas (Yoruba deities). Raul Canizares, a noted Cuban-American Santeria priest writes: “The Spanish authorities in Cuba tolerated the use of drumming and singing by the slaves without realizing that what the slaves were doing was not entertainment but an extremely powerful religious ritual. Had the Catholic authorities suspected the religious function of the slaves music, they would have forbidden its use and Santeria would never have developed in Cuba.”

Thus the survival of African religion, the heartbeat of African culture, in the Caribbean new world. The practice of Yoruba beliefs under the guise of the veneration of Catholic saints became known as Santeria in Cuba, Voudou in Haiti and Candomble in Brazil.

The drumming of which Canizares writes can still be heard in New York’s parks over weekends–casual passersby may take the drumming for simple revelry by Latinos and Haitians, but it serves as the same channel of communication with the African deities as it did for the first slaves in the New World. Santeria is more than simply a monument to the psychological triumph of the slaves over the brutal arrogance and folly of European “civilization”. It is also the fastest growing religion in the United States today, with New York and Miami its epicentres. A landmark US Supreme Court judgment two years ago confirmed the right of Santeros to practice ritual animal sacrifice, allowing the religion to come out into the open to a greater extent than ever. Salsa music, for example, has always been intimately (but secretly) rooted in the practices of Santeria, but today its lyrics openly celebrate the Orishas. While the numbers of initiated Santeros and Babalawos in New York may number in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of others engage with the system in times of need, visiting the Babalawo for advice and divination of the future, or simply going to the Botanica to buy the candles and potions needed to achieve particular ends.

Madam Eva counts among her customers all strata of the community, from criminals to FBI agents, all seeking the protection and assistance of the Orishas. Her store is in one of the city’s notorious crime neighbourhoods, in which crack addicts desperate for money are constantly engaging in petty thieving. Madam Eva knocks on her wooden counter, and kisses an amulet: “I’ve never been robbed.” It seems that even the most desperate in this pan-African neighbourhood are unwilling to tempt fate.

Madam Eva is a “child” of Ochun, the Yoruba love goddess who, according to Yoruba folklore, lived in the Niger River. Her children wear golden yellow costumes, and make her offerings of various fruits and vegetables. “Sometime I go to the East River and leave a pumpkin for Ochun”, she explains. “If I want to make an offering to Yemaya (the fertility goddess of the sea), I go to the beach. If I must make an offering to Shango, I go to Prospect Park, because for Shango it must be left under a tree…”

Perhaps, 300 years ago, her ancestors were forced from their homes in West Africa, survived the horrors of the middle passage and endured the brutality of slavery in Puerto Rico or Cuba. Though their blood might have mixed with the Boricua Indians native to Puerto Rico or with Spanish slavers, they were sustained through the worst by their links to their culture, by the power they were able to access through their spiritual lives. Today in Brooklyn, Madam Eva speaks Spanish and a little English, eats rice and beans and goat and plantains, watches the cheesy game shows on the Spanish-language Telemundo TV network, dances to salsa and merengue… But, in a quiet moment, this Latina woman reveals her heart: “I want to go to Africa, to go to the river of Ochun”, she sighs.

$$$

israelites
Lost tribe

Every night, amid the swirling neon bustle of Times Square–a truly Blade Runner-esque scenario in which giant neon billboards advertise Suntory whisky (Japan’s finest) and five-story TV plays music videos, while down below steam escapes from under manhole covers and thousands of tourists troop by– the Israeli Church of Universal Practical Knowledge sets up some tables and a makeshift stage, and begins haranguing whoever will listen. Majestically attired in what might pass for courtly-garb in a Cecil B DeMille biblical epic– headscarves and tunics matching trousers tucked into boots, wide leather wristbands adorned with bronze stars of David–they berate white people for the centuries of oppression suffered by black people. Their premise is that black people are the Jews of the bible, the white Jews are impostors who “stole” the religion only 900 years ago. All white people (“white devils”, actually) are the biblical race of Edomites, who will suffer fearsome retribution in the looming apocalypse.

Laced with an Old Testament sensibility, they preach straightforward racial vengeance, and they do it entertainingly (if not always entirely convincingly). “Are white people going to go to heaven? Yes. As slaves. Where they’ll be beaten, and their women will be raped..,” a preacher is telling a crowd.
While the white passersby who stop to listen tend to look uncomfortable, black people in the audience shake their heads and giggle, enjoying the spectacle of white people getting a tongue-lashing, even if they can’t buy into the idea that they’re the lost tribe of Israel and that if they repent and live clean they might be part of the pious one third of the Jews who will be “beamed up” into the UFOs sent by God in the year 2000 to annihilate the armies of man.

The optimism of the Civil Rights era is long-past, and the appearance of apocalyptic religious cults like the Israelites are a symptom of the deep sense of powerlessness and despair prevailing in African American communities — they seek reassurance and comfort by reordering the elements of the reality around them into a narrative which offers them some form of deliverance. Their location in Times Square, their costumes and the bank of video cameras which they take everywhere to record their sermons for the five public access cable television programs they run indicate that they are well aware of themselves as post-modern media icons, almost cartoonish in their representation of themselves and their message. After all, if its not on television, it doesn’t really exist in American public life.

While the Israelites are one of a number of organizations blending apocalyptic theology with conspiracy theory to create a militant paranoia, other African Americans have sought to recover their suppressed African identity by promoting “Afrocentricity”, a highly self-conscious identification with an idealized version of the African past and a geographic sweep so broad as to encompass elements like Swahili and Zulu which were completely bypassed by slavery. This too is a little sad, particularly because it is so open to commercial exploitation — the Ghanaian Kente cloth which a few years ago became the unofficial colors of the Afrocentrism movement has today become something of a mainstream barcode to indicate niche-marketing aimed at African Americans (it is incorporated into the advertising of such worthy purveyors of African identity as MacDonalds and Coca Cola, Disney and Time Warner); the annual “Kwanzaa” festival invented here to promote African values at Christmas has become an opportunity for Hallmark to promote a new line of greeting cards.

It might be particularly paradoxical that African roots seem to run much deeper and stronger in Latino communities than among African Americans, but there are reasons for this: Although well over half a million slaves were brought to the US during the19th century, their experience was quite different from those shipped to the Caribbean–unlike the Cuban and Haitian slaves who were drawn from particular regions in Africa and could reconstitute their communities in the diaspora, the slaves shipped to the US came from all over West and Central Africa and were of diverse language and culture.

The Protestant slave-owners of the US were a lot more thorough and systematic in stripping their slaves of their African culture than those in the Caribbean, with the result that the conscious and ongoing link to African traditions was often broken.

Nonetheless, there are deep rooted African traditions in African American culture: The black churches with their call and response litanies and their “working the spirit” tradition of worship with the body in ecstatic music and movement rituals, or rap music in which the West African griot tradition finds a contemporary incarnation are but two examples.

$$$

The original African diaspora was created by force, but the more recent, post-independence influx of Africans to the city has been entirely voluntary. The most notable community within this most recent influx of Africans to New York are the Senegalese Sufi Muslims of the Murid cult.

bamba
The legendary Sheikh
Ahmadou Bamba
Inspired by Ahmadou Bamba, a twice-exiled Muslim revolutionary who fought French colonialism in Senegal, the Murids have incorporated New York into an African culture, making it work to reinforce their community in Senegal. The Murids have spent millions of dollars building the small city of Touba in the Sahel (the birthplace of Bamba) into a holy city, creating the largest mosque in Africa, a mausoleum, museum and archives, and they are presently building a university. Murids have created communities in New York (as well as a number of European capitals) in which they work, earning money to send home to Touba.

Why New York?

“Because New York is the capital of the world,” Abibou Beck, a Murid craft merchant, tells me. “In New York, any group of people and come and show the world what we are doing. Here if you work hard, you can get money. We need that money to build houses and services in Touba. Senegal is a poor country, so to get money we have to go and work wherever we can.”

After listing in detail the things that have been built in Touba by the Murids, Beck concludes: “It was all built with money from poor people like ourselves. So, we are showing the world that even poor people like us can do something.”

Bamba’s followers observe a simple regime of labour, discipline and prayer, even amid the temptations of the big city. They are warm, humble and pious people, who work hard and send money home to family and community. “You have to work hard, be clean, have a clean heart, not steal and not have affairs with other women,” Beck explains. “Of course there are some bad Murids who don’t follow the rules. They smoke or take a drink. But a Murid has to be an example to the world.” Generally they stay for a few years, and then return to their holy city. Beck is nearing the end of his third two-year stint here over the since he first arrived in 1983.

These commuting patriots have accomplished a kind of reverse colonization, turning the citadels of the post-industrial west into cash-cows for a small city in the Sahel. Rather than coming to New York imbued with the “American dream” illusions of traditional immigrants, the Murids have appropriated New York as a means to realise their African dreams: “I can’t stay here forever, I have to go back to pray. Ahmadou Bamba teaches you to love your country. By being here, I am building Toubah, like Bamba was doing his work from exile.”

While on good terms with the black Muslims of America, Beck takes a dim view of the spiritual practices of his Haitian and Latino neighbours in East Harlem: “I don’t have to kill a chicken to get God’s attention,” he scoffs. And yet, being Sufi Muslim, they have more in common than he might care to admit: Sufi are mystics, engaging in meditation and trance ceremonies driven by the drumming and singing of the music called Tabala Wolof in order to “find the spirit”. “When the spirit enters a person,” Beck explains, “whatever you say, God agrees.”

Whether in Harlem’s black churches, among the Latino Santeros and Haitian Voudouisants or even the Sufi Muslim Murids, there is a common, subtle thread running through much of New York’s Africa–acts of worship based on rhythm, chanting, singing, and ecstatic movement to bridge the gap between the body and the spirit. It is a tradition deeply rooted in the Yoruba and Bakongo traditions of West and Central Africa.

The political borders of modern Africa (most of them preposterous) were created, originally, by white men sitting around a conference table with maps and rulers in Berlin in the late 19th century. One hundred years later, in New York, those borders don’t exist: Not only is the city is fast becoming an African outpost in the post-industrial west, it is also offering the African extended family a new look at itself. Africa should watch with interest.

Posted in The Whole World's Africa | 8 Comments

Of CLR James and Sammy Sosa

Posted on September 1, 2005 by Tony

beisbol

Written as a column for my home town morning daily, the Cape Times, in September 1998

The essential choice before America, as summer turns to fall and political scandal suddenly seems like last year’s news, is simple: McGwire or Sosa. By last week both sluggers had taken major league baseball’s record for home runs scored in a single season up to 65. This may be simply a sports contest, but as the great Trinidadian historian and activist C.L.R. James has written, nothing can focus the passions and crystallize the aspirations of an entire city or nation as much as a sporting event can.

The six-foot-five son of a California dentist, McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals represents the traditional face of America’s national pastime: the white male achiever, who despite his flaws – he holds himself responsible for the breakup of his marriage – embodies the values that made America great: gritty and determined in the face of all adversity, he has taken responsibility for his personal failures by seeking psychological counseling and has donated $1 million to a foundation for children from broken homes. Edward Said, the internationally acclaimed Columbia University-based Palestinian literary theorist sees a signficance in McGwire’s occupying the opposite side of the daily front page to President Clinton, his achievements “symbolically making up for Clinton’s shortcomings and sins.” And offering relief to a nation badly in need of someone to believe in at a time when its capital is held hostage to petty nastiness and partisan cynicism.

Sammy Sosa, a Spanish-speaking black man born in the Dominican Republic and raised in poverty by his widowed mother, shining shoes for a living in his teens, represents something altogether different. Of course there’s a classic American tale here too, of the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who fashioned his first baseball mitt out of an old milk carton rising through talent and determination to command a $4.5 million contract in the major leagues. If Sosa makes the record his own, this is the narrative that will guide his plaudits. But there’s more to it, and the beery white guys and Latinos who confront eachother warily in the bleachers rooting for their particular champion know it. Sosa’s charge after the hallowed record once owned by Babe Ruth is but the latest sign of a trend that white male America can no longer ignore – baseball is fast becoming dominated by Latinos in the way that basketball is by African-Americans.

The first racial breakthrough in baseball came back in 1947, of course, when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson and made him the first black player in the major leagues. Black players such as Ken Griffey Junior have been among the sport’s most recognizable stars for some time, but African-Americans have remained a minority in baseball. Latinos, on the other hand, are starting to prevail. Last year, it was Cuban rookie Livan Hernandez who pitched the Florida Marlins to victory in the World Series. But more telling, perhaps, was the fact that his teammates included another Cuban, a Dominican, a Puerto Rican, a Colombian and a Venezuelan. And that’s not just because it was a team based in Miami, a Caribbean Latino city. The star player on their opponents’ team, the very Midwestern Cleveland Indians, was Cuban-American Sandy Alomar.

Such observations, of course, are about a lot more than demographics. Statues to Sosa are already going up all over the Dominican Republic, the tiny Caribbean nation that shares an island with Haiti, and he has become a lightning rod for Latino pride in all of America’s major cities. Sammy Sosa’s cultural significance far outweighs the specific statistics he leaves in the 1998 baseball yearbook. To understand that significance, C.L.R. James’s cricket writing is indispensible (indeed it should be prescribed reading for those South African cricket officials shocked by Brian Lara’s dressing room exhortation to his teammates three years ago that they couldn’t allow themselves to be beaten by white men).

Cricket, of course, was the game of the British colonizer, but by learning and then mastering the sport, the colonial subjects of India, Pakistan and the West Indies were able to transform it into a weapon with which to assert national identity and pride – and by beating Britain at a game designed to emphasize the virtues of its culture, allowed them to subvert the racist claims of British cultural superiority that underpinned the colonial enterprise. There should be little surprise that Trinidad’s most accomplished cricketer of the pre-war era, Sir Learie Constantine, also became one of the earliest campaigners for the island’s independence from Britain – after all, Constantine spent many of his years proving himself the better of the Englishmen who claimed the right of sovereignty over him.

So what does all of this have to do with baseball? Well, the parallel is plain to see: For more than 100 years, the United States has treated Latin America and the Caribbean as its colonial possessions, intervening with impunity when Latinos had the temerity to choose political leaders disliked by Washington. Indeed, in Sammy Sosa’s native Dominican Republic, the U.S. Marines invaded in 1964 when an elected government seemed to be veering too far left for President Johnson’s liking. From Cuba down to Nicaragua and beyond, Latinos have lived under the shadow of Washington’s agenda for much of the century. And they too took up the game of their foreign masters with a passion – Fidel Castro himself was a talented left-arm pitcher in his youth, and apocraphyl stories have him trying out for various major league U.S. teams before sailing off on the Granma to overthrow Batista. Baltimore Orioles pitcher Dennis Martinez was urged to return home to Nicaragua in 1996 in order to stand for President, but indicated that he’d like to wait at least until his playing days were over. Cuba’s national baseball team was the pride of the nation, its victories over the U.S. at the Olympics were considered national achievements of epic proportions. Cuba has been fiercely reluctant to allow its players to seek their fortune in the U.S. major leagues, despite the fact that they could make millions of dollars in precious foreign exchange if they legalized the process (instead of forcing the likes of the Hernandez brothers to flee on rafts) – some things are more important than money to cash-strapped Havana, it seems, and beisbol is definitely one of them.

Even though the rivalry between Sosa and McGwire is extremely affable, the Dominican outfielder’s quest for the homerun record has been transformed into a passionate crusade by Latino fans everywhere. Californians won’t share a collective moment if the record goes to McGwire, but the significance of a Sammy Sosa triumph at the pinnacle of America’s national pastime cannot be understated.

Posted in From Tony's Archive | 3 Comments

A Plan B for Iraq?

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Tony

rummy
Rumsfeld and Saddam in happier times: Washington
backed the Baathists to stem Iranian influence

It must be hard for anyone reading the daily media in the U.S. to comprehend the political catastrophe that has befallen the Bush administration’s Iraq plans. Most of the reporting occurs within the frame — or is it a vacuum? — of a carefully designed constitutional process aimed at achieving consensus and the necessary ethnic, religious and political balances to create a stable democracy. And so, we’re told, “some Sunnis” oppose the new draft constitution, but that they’ll express their opposition at the hustings in October’s constitutional referendum, and perhaps in December’s parliamentary election. In other words, the comforting assumption is being generated (by a machine that has generated all the comforting assumptions and Iraq “turning points” that have proved so fallacious until now) that at least we now have a political process. And, as any NGO democracy worker will tell you, the process is even more important than the outcome. So the reporting focuses on questions like will the Sunnis muster a majority no-vote in the three provinces in October’s referendum that would veto the constitution, or will the limited time to register voters mean they wait till December to vote their own representatives into the National Assembly after boycotting last time.

But such questions assume the Sunnis accept the game as it’s currently defined. And they very clearly don’t. Moreover, the Bush administration is plainly aware of that fact, which is why you have the rather comical spectcale (Saturday Night Live’s “Rafsanjani” trick phone call to the first Bush White House in reverse?) of the President of the U.S. making a personal phonecall to the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Iraq’s most powerful elected politician and also Iran’s most powerful ally in Baghdad, in order to implore him to do more to bring the Sunnis on board. And clearly having no impact at all.

Of course if you were simply following events from within the narrative frame of the process as defined by the U.S.-bequeathed Transitional Administrative Law, you might be wondering why the administration is going so far out of its way to accomodate an element that accounts for no more than 20 percent of Iraq’s electorate. The answer, as we all know, is the insurgency, and the fact — admitted now by administration officials all the way up to Condi Rice — that it won’t be defeated or dimmed unless it is isolated from a broad base of Sunni support.

The administration also knows that as things stand, the constitution and the October 15 referendum are more likely to strengthen than to weaken the insurgency, and increase rather than diminish the possibility of a full-blown civil war.

The current process as defined by the TAL can’t resolve the deadlock: Even if the Sunnis turned out en masse to nix the constitution (and if they could muster three provinces, possibly with the support of Moqtada Sadr’s base in Baghdad, although that may be a long shot), the result would simply be new elections to an assembly that would draft a new constitution draft. But while Sunni participation would ensure more directly elected representatives, their 20 percent slice of the electorate means they wouldn’t rise above their current minority status, and the resulting constitution wouldn’t look much different from the current draft. Another roll of the electoral dice would, in all likelihood, produce the same impasse.

But like the administration officials who emphasise the centrality of Sunni participation in containing the insurgency which has crippled the transition in Iraq, the Sunnis themselves clearly understand quite well that their leverage far exceeds what electoral muscle they can bring to the polls. They run a very competent insurgency, led by well-trained Baathist military and intel personnel, which has proved more than capable of keeping both the Americans and the new government off balance, and demonstrated the potential to dramatically destabilize Iraq’s economy and society for the foreseeable future.

Even more important, though, is the Sunni awareness of their place in the geopolitical equation, and the support on which they can call from the wider Arab world. We’re not talking Zarqawi, here — the extremist jihadis are a small minority of the insurgency, by the most educated accounts, whose presence is certainly useful to the neo-Baathist leadership with which they share short-term tactical interests, but not long-term strategic goals. We’re talking about the neo-Baathists themselves, who understand exactly why they had U.S. support in their confrontation with Iran in the 1980s, and have held secret talks with U.S. officials in which they’ve emphasized their shared hostility to Tehran and its influence in Iraq as a basis for cooperation.

This element knows the U.S. must now be blanching at the outcome of a simple majoritarian democratic process in Iraq — the majority of Iraq’s electorate has put Iran in the driving seat in Baghdad. (Too late, perhaps, Bush may be recognizing the wisdom of those like Brent Scowcroft, General Anthony Zinni and Colin Powell who pretty much described the present scenario in warning him against Iraq at a time when the President preferred to heed the wild fantasies of the neocons and Cheney’s ideological incontinence.)

Whether via simple majoritarianism, or by federalising Iraq to the point that the Shiites of the south create their own mega autonomous region over the country’s most bounteous oil fields, outcomes that marginalize the Sunnis represent a dramatic geopolitical setback for the U.S. because they expand and consolidate Iran’s influence. (You don’t hear Tehran complaining about the new constitution; on the contrary they’re enthusing about its endorsement in October.)

The U.S. supported Saddam in the 1980s, in concert with most of the Arab world, to curb Iranian influence and what was perceived, in Arab capitals, as Persian encroachment. But Bush’s invasion of Iraq has done more than eight years of mass suicidal “human-wave” assaults by Iranian infantry to secure a foothold for Tehran in Baghdad. The insurgent leadership knows that Washington can’t be happy with that outcome; that’s why they’re offering cooperation against what they see as Iran’s proxies in Baghdad. But you may have noticed that the Shiite leadership aren’t remotely interested in accomodating the Sunnis, refusing to back down from their demands that Baathists not be allowed into government. (And much of the Sunni leadership served in the Baath party apparatus at some level.)

So, Bush is in a bind. You wouldn’t know that to listen to the increasingly idiotic rhetoric coming from administration officials in order to reassure the American public that progress is being made. Bush tells America that leaving Iraq would weaken American interests. He neglects to mention that going into Iraq has already done that, on almost every front around the world. I suspect the Iraq invasion will be studied years from now as a colossal strategic error that ended a sutained period of U.S. hegemony (and I use that word advisedly, in the sense of referring to a process by which a dominant power manages to articulate its own narrow interest as the general interest of everybody else — today the idea of “U.S. leadership” is just a wishful phrase tossed around by Bush speechwriters, in the real world where “leadership” implies a following of likeminded powers, it has ceased to exist.)

But, essentially, to resolve his Iraq dilemma — the war is costing more than $5 billion a month, and there’s no end in sight — Bush needs a deal with the Baathists. But he can’t get that without alienating the new Shiite and Kurdish ruling class he has created in Baghdad. In fact, his inability to influence the Shiites in the constitutional process suggests that he won’t get far without some back-channel compact with Iran over the shape of things in Iraq. Not something the Baathists would tolerate. But right now, there may be no way out of the Iraq quagmire without somehow managing to do both. (Maybe there’s simply no way out of the Iraq quagmire…)

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 4 Comments

Impostor #1: Tikka Goes to India

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Tony

tikka

Back in the heyday of the dearly departed Anglo-Japanese food culture magazine Eat, I wrote a regular monthly brief (among other things) identifying dishes that profess a false “nationality.” Herewith, the first entry, on Chicken Tikka Masala, Britain’s national dish:

Globalization has brought fried chicken, pizza and burgers to India, so it should come as no surprise that Chicken Tikka Masala has finally arrived there, too. Those tart chunks of chicken swimming in a fragrant pinkish sauce may be the mainstay of the “curry” that — according to a 1997 Gallup survey — is now the UK’s national cuisine but, like the 80 percent of Britain’s curry houses that are actually run by Bangladeshis, Chicken Tikka Marsala isn’t Indian at all. It originated in one such establishment some time in the late’60s or early ’70s, when an English customer sent an order of chicken tikka back to the kitchen, offended that the marinated, grilled cubes weren’t swimming in sauce. Thinking on his feet, the chef simply drenched them in Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, added a dash of fenugreek, and — voila! — a legend. But it’s really no more Indian than Vichyssoise is French.

Posted in Cuisine | 6 Comments

They Can’t Be Serious #2: Karen Hughes’s New Assignment

Posted on August 23, 2005 by Tony

So seriously does the Bush administration take the task of winning over Muslim public opinion that it has dragged the president’s top media flak, Karen Hughes, out of retirement and named her Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy — a job that her predecessor, former high powered ad exec Charlotte Beers, can testify is something of a fool’s errand.

But this time, according to the New York Times, the Bush administration is going into the task with eyes open. So, as Hughes confabs with Condi Rice at the Crawford Ranch, their discussions are premised on the reality that, as one of their consultants, Ed Djerejian, put it, 80 percent of the negative image of the U.S. in the Muslim world is a result of U.S. policies — and those policies, they insist, are not about to change. But get this: “Mr. Djerejian said that in talking with Ms. Hughes and Ms. Rice, it was clear that they understood that roughly 80 percent of the explanation for the poor American image stemmed from American policies, but that much could be done to improve the communication of those policies to affect the other 20 percent.”

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade or anything, but if the crucial battlefield in the U.S. struggle against al-Qaeda is Muslim public opinion, and U.S. officials freely concede that 80 percent of that battle is currently unwinnable because of the policies the U.S. is pursuing in the Middle East — but that instead of revising those policies, it’s planning to do a better job of coming a distant second with a mere 20 percent — you have to imagine that Osama bin Laden must believe that Allah has blessed him with some remarkably dull-witted adversaries.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 4 Comments

Who Wants to Go to Chelsea?

Posted on August 22, 2005 by Tony

Jose Mourinho said a funny thing last week. Asked to defend his 23 million pound acquisition of Michael Essien from Lyon, he said paying that kind of money was simply the new reality of the game. Unusually for a braggart as shameless as the self-styled “special one,” he neglected to mention his own part in bringing about this near reality of hyperinflated transfer values. The prime example, for me, has been Ricardo Carvalho, a very good center back, to be sure — in fact, he has been the subject of a 6 million pound offer by Real Madrid when Mourinho swooped for him. For some reason, Mourinho paid 20 million pounds for Carvalho – an amount so absurd I couldn’t help wondering whether it was some form of payback to his old club, Porto (to whom the fee was paid) or some ingenious money-laundering scheme by Roman Abramovich.

Funnier still was the fact that Carvalho, who — justifiably you’d think, given his price tag — wondered out loud why he was being left on the bench when fully fit, prompted Mourinho to publicly dress him down (“kill him” in the words of the special one), drop him from the squad altogether but also to warn that he wouldn’t be allowed to move to another club. Welcome to the Hotel California. Hardly surprising, Chelsea winger Arjen Robben promptly retracted similar comments about his own situation.

Something tells me, though, that these are signs of many more troubles to come in West Landon’s galacticos. Not only does he not have room in a fully-fit squad for too many players too good to be left on the bench (think Sean Wright Phillips vs. Robben; Carvalho vs. Gallas; Drogba vs. Crespo; Del Horno vs. Bridge; Gudjonsen vs. Essien or Lampard; etc.) but he has also drummed into them that, like their boss, they are the best in the world. Some have clearly started to believe that, which is where the special one’s troubles start this year.

Posted in Glancing Headers | 4 Comments

War in Context

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Tony

wic

Five reasons why you should read (and donate to!) Paul Woodward’s site War in Context.

1. Not simply becaus he regularly points to my stuff and sends this web site loads of smart, critical and in some cases influential readers.

2. Not simply because he provides the best annotated clipping service of the mainstream media for all things war, terror and Mideast related. (Paul and I long ago agreed that the predictable hosannahs of the “alternative” media often don’t make for particularly interesting or enlightening reading, and that there’s a lot more to be gained from an informed and critical reading of the mainstream media.)

3. Not simply because he gathers the essential reading everyday — not the wire service chaff, but the important, quality nuggets of information and analysis from a diverse range of sources — into an indispensable daily briefing book.

4. Not simply because he’s a wry Yorkshireman weaned on watching the likes of Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer from the terraces at Elland Road in the early 1970s who has, like David Bowie’s “Man Who Fell to Earth,” come to ground in a small town in the Carolinas.

5. The reason you have to support Paul is the depth of his commitment to independent journalism — he’s doing it all for free, spending hours every day to provide a service that helps keep the rest of us informed. Without him, the Internet would be a poorer place. He doesn’t deserve to be poor!

Posted in Shameless Cronyism | 5 Comments

Iraq: Be Careful of What You Wish For

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Tony

zalmay
Khalilzad gets his marching orders

1.

The Bush administration only has itself to blame for any sense of disappointment or setback that may follow the failure of Iraq’s parliament to approve a new constitution by the August 15 deadline. After all, it was the administration itself that created not only the deadline, and also worked hard to raise expectation that the delivery of a draft constitution on August 15 would signal “political momentum” that would — more than a little improbably pull the plug on the insurgency. Facing growing domestic doubts over the war, the administration needed to show the American people a light at the end of the tunnel, and the artificial deadline and associated expectations were designed to do just that. After all, if the insurgency were somehow defanged, the U.S. could supposedly start drawing down its troops and ending the slow but steady bleeding of its forces in Iraq. Now, Bush’s spin doctors are going to have to go out there and explain why everything is still on track despite the fact that the Iraqis simply balked on the deadline despite having been told, repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms by Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld and the President himself, that the August 15 deadline was sacrosanct. (Indeed, some members of the government were still insisting only hours before the postponement that the deadline would be met.)

Zalmay Khalilzad, the “super-ambassador” sent by Bush to intervene in the process and get a constitution delivered on time was in the hall at the time of the postponement vote, reportedly wearing a broad grin, apparently expecting to see his work completed. Instead, he was forced to brush off the failure with a technocratic shrug, telling AFP that the Iraqis had nearly sealed the deal, but needed another week to put the finishing touches on it. Condi Rice and Bush offered the predictable “great progress has been made, we are seeing democracy at work.” Indeed, and sometimes democracy needs another week. Sometimes, of course, it needs more. Not surprisingly, the New York Times quoted an unnamed administration official who was “not allowed to speak publicly” as saying there’s a lot of nervousness in the administration over the situation. Indeed, the constitution they couldn’t agree on was going to fudge the major points of disagreement anyway, leaving open such questions as federalism, autonomous regions, the status of Islam and the clergy and so on. Even then, agreement proved elusive.

2.

Although the Kurds and Shiites appear to be able to agree on the question of autonomy for separate Kurdish and Shiite entities, each with its own large oil economies, they can’t agree over the status of Islam and the Shiite clergy in the constitution. And the Sunni negotiators tend to back the Kurds on the question of Islam, but ferociously reject any idea of federation and autonomy. Just how any of this is going to supposedly weaken the insurgency is very difficult to divine: The insurgency is based on Sunni-Arab nationalism in a community that ruled Iraq from its very inception, and now sees that democracy will result in its traditional domain being dismembered into a Kurdish entity and either a Shiite entity, or a Shiite-dominated central government, both of which it views as a projections of the influence of Iran. The idea that the politics driving the insurgency will somehow be neutralized by a democratic constitution seems to miss the basis of the Sunni concerns. Frankly, the terms of the document as released to various media outlets in the past couple of days suggests that the constitution on offer may be more likely to fuel the insurgency than to neuter it.

3.

Not unaware of the need to address Sunni anxieties, the Bush administration has been insisting that the Kurds and Shiites refrain from using their overwhelming majority in the new parliament (the Sunnis boycotted the election, remember, and even if they’d participated, they make up less than 20 percent of the electorate) to push through a constitution that reflects their own interests and demands. “Getting the Sunnis on board” has become a mantra for U.S. officials concerned that the constitutional process defuse the insurgency. They’ve even managed to get a handful of Sunnis appointed to the committee debating the constitutional plans. Problem is, those Sunnis who are participating in these talks are not representative of the broader community — they haven’t been elected by anyone. (Even then, they’re resisting the federal proposals of the new constitution draft.) But if the process is, indeed, to have any impact on the insurgency, then presumably it would have to involve accomodating the political concerns of the mainstream Sunni nationalist community from which the insurgency draws. So the people they need to be negotiating with are currently outside of the constitutional process, and some are even in the leadership of the insurgency (with whom the U.S. has been talking discreetly, but not negotiating as such).

Unless a new constitution can accomodate the major concerns of a substantial section of the constituency from which the insurgency draws support, then it’s hard to see how it would have any negative impact on the continuing fight. To achieve the sort of Sunni accomodation necessary to isolate the hard-core Islamists among the insurgency, presumably the new constitutional arrangements would have to be negotiated directly with representatives of the Sunni nationalist community, including Baathists and indigenous Islamist groups such as the Muslim Scholars Association — none of whom are involved in the current constitutional process.

4.

The U.S. got a nasty shock even before the deadline was missed. With days to go, the most powerful Shiite politician in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, the Shiite religious party that got the single largest share of the vote in the governing coalition) declared after meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (and presumably getting his consent to make the call) that his party wanted the oil-rich Shiite south of Iraq to be turned into an autonomous Shiite region, just like the oil-rich north would be for the Kurds. If the Shiites can’t impose Sharia law on the rest of the country, they could certainly do it in their own fiefdom — SCIRI dominated local and regional elections there, with the Sadrist movement also making a strong showing. And by cutting a similar deal to the Kurds, they could ensure that a greater share of oil revenues remains exclusively in Shiite hands. And then there’s the power play: SCIRI has to share the spoils of central government power with the more moderate Shiite Islamist Dawa party of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, as well as with representatives of other ethnic factions, but in a Shiite polity in the south it would reign supreme.

Not only was Washington caught flat-footed by a proposal vehemently rejected by Sunni negotiators (and even Jaafari); U.S. officials read the move as consolidating the influence of Iran in Iraq (already substantial in the central government). While Jaafari is historically aligned with Iran and on friendly terms with the leadership in Tehran, he spent the greater part of his exile in London. SCIRI was actually created in Iran in the early 1980s at the behest of the Iranian leadership, and ties remain close. The central government already has a deal with Iran to refine oil pumped in southern Iraq, and an autonomous southern region would likely strengthen those ties. If China and the U.S. are set to engage, over the next few decades, in a new “great game” over increasingly scarce oil supplies, then the idea of southern Iraq’s oil making its way to world markets via Iran, whose oil reserves are largely committed to China, an unappetizing possibility, never mind the geopolitics of it. And the Saudis, whose own oil reserves are located largely in the north east of the country in areas heavily populated by the long-suffering Saudi Shiites, won’t be any more keen to see a flourishing Shiite polity on its doorstep than the Turks will be to see a Kurdish entity. Put it this way, the insurgency is unlikely to have much trouble fundraising in the Arab world for some time yet. So, as much as the extra week the Iraqis voted themselves to achieve a constitutional deal has splashed egg on Washington’s face, it may ironically have also bought them some time to rally opposition to Hakim’s proposal. Khalilzad will be a very busy chap in the next seven days.

5.

A constitution brokered on the basis of deferring the substantial differences via vague clauses that allow questions such as autonomy, federalism and the status of Islam and its clerics to be pursued later may be designed to hold Iraq together for now, but it also potentially sets the constitutional stage for civil war. The disastrous Balkan wars of the early 90s were not a negation of the Yugoslavian constitution, as much as they were the consequence of ethnic demagogues pursuing its opt-out clauses. And, of course, like Yugoslavia in the early 90s, there’s no “strongman” central authority holding Iraq together any longer, either.

Posted in Situation Report | 5 Comments

Chowhounding With Jim

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Tony

Originally published three years ago in the sadly now-defunct Japanese food-culture magazine Eat

Like the celestial creatures for which it is named, Angel’s Share is invisible even to the patrons of the unremarkable East Village sushi bar in which it is hidden behind an unmarked wooden door at the top of the stairs. And that’s just how the cognoscenti prefer it — a secret sanctum in which two extremely knowledgeable and skillful young Japanese barmen serve some of the most immaculate cocktails in New York City.

The novelty of Angel’s Share has long since worn off for Jim Leff, but he still uses it as a rendezvous point for some of the scores of journalists who have lately been seeking him out. Leff is the “Alpha Dog” of the growing cult of New York “chowhounds,” a dedicated band who make it their life’s work to know every culinary secret of the city’s streets. Leff is may be one of the city’s most acclaimed alternative food writers precisely because he eschews the hype, celebrity chefs and predictable appetites of the chattering classes to boldly go where no mainstream foodwriter would be seen dead. For the chowhound, greatness is defined by the passion, grace and finesse with which food is cooked and served. It is as likely to be found at Nobu as at a street cart under the 7 Train overpass on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

burek
Want to find the best Albanian
burek in NYC? Jim’s your man

“My favorite chef in all New York is a woman who fries Colombian arepas on the street in Jackson Heights (Queens) on weekend nights after 10pm,” Leff explains over Angel’s Share’s delicious litchi daquiris and deep-fried oysters. “Her arepas are so focused on what they’re doing that everyone I’ve ever taken there smiles the identical smile and thinks deep thoughts. If I brought Daniel Bolud there or Wolfgang Puck or any other chef worshiped by mindless foodies, they’d go ‘Jesus Christ, this is amazing.’ Because they understand better than anyone that while it’s possible to find truly great meals in a four-star restaurant, you’re not supposed to eat that way all of the time.”

The ‘foodie,’ of course, is the sworn enemy of the chowhound. “Foodies are mindless scavengers who read cookbooks by celebrity chefs and eat where food writers tell them to eat,” Leff proclaims. “They pride themselves on being up on the latest trends, and rarely go where Zagat hasn’t gone before. They’re part of the machine. We’re the ones combing unfashionable neighborhoods for hidden culinary treasure.”

Leff’s web site has become a must-click online destination for cultural critics and gastronomic anthropologists, or simply for those looking to compare notes with likeminded seekers on topics such as where to find the best Albanian burek in greater New York city.

But this is no populist or politically correct backlash. “Chowhounds,” says Leff, “can be spotted at Lespinasse insouciantly swirling their merlot. But, unlike foodies, we have not the slightest compunction about stopping for a really great slice of pizza on the way home. And I don’t believe that there’s anything that’s not ethnic. I come from the cultural wasteland of Long Island, so for me even a yuppie bistro is ethnic.” A chowhound’s passion centers simply on the quest for excellence, tempered by the recognition that it is usually found in some unheralded locales. “A chowhound may go to Daniel once a week if he can afford it,” Leff explains. “But when it’s time for lunch at the office, he doesn’t go to Blimpie. He’s the guy who’s 45 minutes late for his post-lunch meeting because he had to go all the way across town for a better sandwich.”

The quest never stops. Over a four-hour interview, we manage to eat fried oysters, chicken kari, samosas, dal, peppered chicken, pasta in a creamy tomato and prosciutto sauce and more, washed down with daquiris, spicy chai tea, dense German beers and two bottles of Italian red wine. The bacchanal only ended because the legendary Patsy’s pizza joint on 116th Street was closed by the time we arrived.

From Angel’s Share we had raced down to Lahore, a Pakistani cab driver takeout, and then hurtledd over to Zum Schneider, an unlikely German beerhouse on the Lower East Side that serves comfort food to the thousands of German hipsters who’ve set up shop in downtown Manhattan. Even before the waitress offers the day’s specials, Jim orders pancake soup. They’re all out. “Nothing then,” says Jim. “Just the beer.” Thus the chowhound way: Don’t settle for second best; eat only that which is excellent. And starve yourself till you find it.

He orders me a deliciously dense Aventinis, which sings a Wagnerian libretto in my mouth. And for himself, a Schlenkule Rauschbier, a smoky brew he swears tastes like pork chops and he’s right. We sip the beer and ponder the relative merits of various imported British breakfast cereals and chocolate malt balls.

A half hour later, we’re in Buona Sera restaurant, in a gastronomic desert up on York Avenue. Finding the pearl in such a dull oyster is precisely how Jim earned his Alpha Dog title. And the lesson we receive there is the real key to chowhounding — it’s not simply the food, but the people who cook and serve it that matter to Jim.

Merino is from Trieste, a handsome, endearing 40-something who is fashioning his own religion-cum-exercise regimen. And if you visit his establishment on Tuesday’s after 9pm he offers not only nourishment for the mind and soul, but a delicious five-course meal free of charge. The best course, incidentally, is the pasta. “Is it the best pasta in New York?” says Leff. “No. But it’s something special, and it has a personal touch.” Which we get from the disarmingly eccentric Triestean for the next two hours, culminating in his leading us through calisthenic stretch exercises. Merino is proof that Leff’s quest is ultimately about more than tastes per se. The food was good, but hardly memorable — it was the experience of eating it with Merino at the table, our far-reaching conversation and his emotional generosity that made it truly memorable. “I’m not a hedonist looking to lose my humanity in great wine and great food and the pleasures of taste,” says Jim. “I’m looking to find my humanity by eating great food cooked and served by people who have some character and personality — food is a human experience.”

For the Alpha Dog, it’s not only what you eat that defines your day’s chowhounding, but who you met and what you learned along the way.

Posted in Cuisine | 8 Comments