Mistaken Identities - It had to happen sometime Pt.2

Prance – a frivolous mode not reflected in our times; Switzarland – a superior misnomer; Unite Kingdom of Britain – unlikely, at least not any time soon. What’s in a name? The country names pictured above appear on a globe of extraordinary origin, as explained in an earlier post: http://lifebeforenews.blogspot.com/2007/11/global-local-something-like-this-pt1.html

A recent dinner-party conversation peaked when two people seeing each other for the first time in years confessed to remembering neither the other’s name nor details of the previous occasion. The pair spontaneously began to consider the option of creating new identities at each social gathering, not out of devious motive, but for the purpose of generating conversational surprise and more profound enjoyment.

The idea was hatched out of necessity. They couldn’t think of anything else to talk about, and they subsequently discovered common ground in their shared view of weekend social gatherings as a frenzied plundering of thoughts from weeks past. After thanking each other for the empathy displayed in this brief exchange, they categorized the content as a potential new thread of friendship, and acted accordingly. They also shared the opinion that identity as a concept was all worn out and should be allowed to rest for a while.

The significance of names has been considered in previous posts, including It had to happen sometime Pt.1: http://lifebeforenews.blogspot.com/2007/12/it-had-to-happen-sometime-pt1.html, written at the time when a British school teacher in Khartoum (Sudan) had been jailed for soliciting and adhering to the advice of her six-year old students: the teacher had asked the students to come up with suggestions for the most beautiful name for the Teddy Bear she had brought into the classroom for teaching purposes. One happy little boy chimed in with his opinion that Muhammad was the best name ever for the toy/learning prop. Word got out. Some citizens of Khartoum were outraged and took to the streets in protest. The British woman was arrested. The case spawned a new name: the Teddybear Taliban.
A teacher can’t be too careful these days. Mobs appear in different forms. They can take to the digital street.

The origin of the name Teddy Bear (see reference above to It had to happen sometime Pt.1)

is all the more remarkable when considering Teddy Roosevelt’s M.O. at the time. Roosevelt’s profile rose in an age when ideas about masculinity were under undergoing radical rewording. The posture struck by a reasonable leader, a rational man of character, was no longer convincing enough – and not far enough away from girlish sentiment. The new male model was a competitive man of action.

The British school teacher was eventually released by Sudanese authorities and deported back to the UK. As much as her detention may have been more a matter of political expediency than judicial procedure, she was better off having a few walls and metal bars between her and dynamic local males.

RTS Can Mean Different Things

Censorship of books in the USA works in fascinating ways. It’s grassroots - no official 'Office of Censor' decree in use here. Citizens can approach libraries and schools and challenge specific titles. If the challenge is successful, the work in question could be either restricted or banned. "Banned Books Week" was recently celebrated throughout the land - in support of freedom of speech, not censorship. Events happened thanks to librarians, teachers, journalists, authors and book-sellers, who want pages to turn across the land, not disappear from shelves. The list of endangered books, with details on who challenges what and where, is a story in itself: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/index.cfm

While reading from my computer screen, I glanced over at the black seal of the Egyptian censor, in protective custody on my office shelves since 2001, when I produced a radio program on censorship in Egypt and subsequently sent CD copies to all of the speakers. One of them was the Director of a human rights organization in Cairo, another an outspoken government critic. Their copies never arrived. Instead the censor apprehended my envelope, opened it and read the personal thank-you notes. The censor then - with or without listening to the CD, I'll never know - put the CD back into the envelopes, secured the envelopes with the censor's wax seal, wrapped them together meticulously with white string, and marked them as 'RTS' - return to sender (me). Somewhere along the way the paper envelopes had become shredded and torn, and a transparent plastic bag had become the protective carrier for what remained of the contents.

The censored parcel arrived back on my desk in the period following 9/11 and the start of the War in Afghanistan. Although of course this was the most appropriate end to a discussion of censorship that I could imagine, I remember that my heart was pounding as I examined the evidence, linked to grim circumstances elsewhere. In Egypt itself, the government had been clamping down on the whole spectrum of opposition, from right to left, for some time. Progressive Islamic scholars had been forced into exile for their modern ideas; secular scholars were punished for critical thoughts and fundamentalists had been driven out of the country and into radical training camps in the mountains of Central Asia. On the streets of Cairo, once the publishing center of the Arab world, conservative students burned piles of 'anti-Islamic' books. At the same time, the Library of Alexandria, the largest in the ancient world, was under re-construction. This contradiction had drawn me to Egypt in the first place.

In those troubled times, I was not surprised to receive the package. Various explanations of its journey came to mind:

The careful return was an overt show of power, a manifestation of government skill in blocking communications between its critics and the outside world;

A lone renegade employee in the Censor's office had salvaged the CD's from stacks doomed to destruction and smuggled them back into the 'outgoing mail' pile so that we would know what was going on in his/her country;
My handwriting was illegible on the stained envelopes, and the careful return was an act of great courtesy by a postal services worker;
The title 'Censor' did not actually appear, in so many words, on the envelopes and seals. I had imagined this into being while listening to the interpretation offered by a trusted Arabic-speaker of my acquaintance, who unfortunately was no longer available for consultations when I turned my gaze to an 11th-century text of a Customs Official in Alexandria, part of the cover design on plastic bank statement files distributed for customer use. Now I remember: the Bank blocked my use of that image.

Please see the post from May 25, 2007:

http://lifebeforenews.blogspot.com/2007/05/not-allowed-to-show-you.html

Both intended recipients of the CD are overseas at the moment; perhaps I should resend.

Both Sides Now: Muoslak Muo?

Should this be your first encounter with the person of Oum Kalsoum (that's her at the mic in the above picture), you may want to look her up, and for that purpose you have numerous options, including : Umm Kulthum, Om Kalthoum, Oum Kalthum, Omm Kolsoum, Umm Kolthoum, Um Kalthoom) (Arabic: أم كلثوم ). Egypt’s most celebrated singer crossed the river in 1975 at the age of approximately seventy-five, give or take a few years, interrupting the workings of government in Cairo during three days of national mourning.

Certain elements are not what they first appear to be in the person of Oum Kalsoum. That’s how she got started: her father, an Imam at the mosque in their small village, dressed his pre-adolescent daughter as a boy so that she could mingle freely and practice with males instructed in religious song. Dad thought she was better than her brothers, and the deception paid off: she went on to become the greatest female vocalist of her time in the Arab World.

Amsterdam’s Royal Tropical Institute used to stage a monthly open-mic talent night. On one such evening, I watched a gifted Oum Kalsoum impersonator whip a crowd of men of Middle-Eastern origin into a clapping, cheering frenzy. The applause trickled off to a confused, out-of-sync splatter as the audience gradually realized that the impersonator was a man. After a few tense moments, the singer struck another great note, and the audience, either convinced by the talent or just determined to prolong this good night out, rose up to the occasion and began to sing along and sway in rhythm again.

With this idea in mind (the idea that initially comes to mind is ‘opposites which attract’ as a relative concept, subject to amendment as circumstances change), I was charmed by the image of Oum Kalsoum lyrics floating in two languages across a screen in illustration of her improvisational virtuosity and unparalleled ability to sustain notes. The original Arabic lyrics move from right to left, the English lyrics from left to right (okay, backwards, but the impressive timing is the same).

The screen occupied a small rectangle of space in an exhibition in a European capital devoted to Oum Kalsoum. As reflected above, the display/audiovisual array was complex: photographs, recordings, film and print documentation, clothing items, current fashion from the Middle East inspired by her look and, touchingly, even the vintage microphone and radios that carried her sound live to millions back in the day – it was all there. And all off-limits for photographers. Somehow this clandestine still from the video for musicologists reached my files. She was, by the way, born as Fatima Ibrahim al-Sayed al-Betagui. What happened after that is the stuff of musical magic, cultural cooperation and rivalry, intrigues, geopolitics and global wars, all on a large but also small, intimate scale.

He never knew how much this meant to me

I waited, but when the Friday evening paper was hours overdue, I finally called the customer service desk. Promises were made about passing on the information to the local distribution point in Amsterdam. Monday came, and the paper fell through the mail slot early, folded around a hand-written note on scrap-paper which read (in French, rather than in Dutch or English, the de facto second language in Holland): I apologize for not having delivered the paper on Friday, The message ended with a comma. Time probably ran out before inclination. I was astounded by the courtesy displayed, and curious about his choice of language, assuming that he was from a former French colony in (North) Africa.

Soon afterwards I saw the delivery man at work as he approached my house on a bicycle with protective carrier baskets over the rear wheel. He lowered the kick-stand, pulled out one newspaper and stepped up to my front door with a serious limp. One hip was higher, one leg twisted in what appeared to be a polio survivor’s stance. I opened the door and thanked him for the note. He beamed, repeated his apology and explained that he had been educated in his homeland Morocco in French.

My subscription ran out, I didn’t renew and I never saw him again until our paths crossed much later at a post office in another neighbourhood. We smiled in recognition and had a chat. He reported having been promoted to delivery supervisor and moving house with his wife and new baby. The limp has not improved, so he'll be easy to spot from a distance as time goes on.

Colonial Origins of the Non-Acquisitive Lifestyle - Global Local Pt.2

The first time I met a Zimbabwean was so long ago that he was in fact still a Rhodesian, the chief tenant in an apartment nestled, not far from my new job, into one of colonial Hong Kong’s residential neighbourhoods on the mainland, extending between dense, coastal commerce and farmland running north to the People’s Republic of China. The Rhodesian was a short, slight figure, a young white man with dark blonde hair and fierce eyes. He never set out to kill me, but his actions could have done just that.

The three-bedroom apartment in question included a shared living room and kitchen, which was almost never in use. If I ever met or even saw the third tenant, I don’t recall the event. There are two aspects of that home which I do remember well: the view out of the window from a horizontal position on my bed (the image was that of huge wing-tips of jets landing at the nearby airport - the audio was equally unforgettable), and the Rhodesian’s many Chinese girlfriends. One of those women provided the image recalled in greatest detail, a scene which confirmed my doubts about the wisdom of prolonging this living arrangement. The sights that day were followed by my final departure from the apartment the next morning.

When I went to view the apartment, I flashed my employment contract and spoke with just the slightest bit of exaggeration of my extensive connections in the local business community. In fact in those early days I knew only two people, but I referred to them and their community as my own secure circle, where people were watching. The chief tenant mentioned working at a bank - but the deal-clincher for me was the proximity to work. I moved in and began a hectic routine which included a bit of time (almost every day) at the apartment, where I rarely met another living soul. It didn’t last long.

After a weekend away, I returned home one Sunday afternoon to an apartment filled not with people, but with gas fumes. The purple curtains in the living room were drawn shut, and green candles were lit on the coffee table. While staring at the bizarre scene I became aware of the hiss, which I traced to the kitchen, where I found the gas on full force. At some point between that moment and my final departure I stood looking at the Rhodesian, seated on the sofa nursing a beer, explaining that while ‘all Chinese are dogs,’ he had never expected this particular Chinese girlfriend to be so vindictive as to set a death trap for him in his own home, only because he left her waiting for him all night long.

I also remember that packing was a simple affair: clothes and books into the backpack, one garbage bag for the overflow and another bag for the items going into the garbage. I left so quickly that by mistake I moved the rubbish with me and threw out the overflow, thus reinforcing an early adherence to the non-acquisitive lifestyle.

For the story of this globe, please see LBN post on November 26, 2007.

Unable to Exclude: Papyrus Store on Pyramids Street

Nothing about my physical appearance suggests that I am Egyptian. Nevertheless, while in Egypt, I passed as a resident foreigner. My clothing evidently created that impression: loose-fitting garments covered all limbs. More importantly, I was unaccompanied on the streets, heading for specific work-related destinations, except for the final day, when I visited the Great Pyramids and bought papyrus at a souvenir store.

A protective cardboard envelope for this fragile product was supplied by “New Pharaohs Papyrus,” a shop near Cairo selling papyrus to tourists. We were released into the store’s cool interior from a mini-bus with airco. The store was quiet, the personnel solemn in countenance, particularly so when the non-Egyptian visitors opted to purchase the least expensive papyrus on offer, a single sheet bearing colorful hieroglyphs.

We glanced at the hieroglyphs before they were slotted into the cardboard sheath. The personnel stepped back from the counter: the envelopes carried an image which appeared to study the buyers even before the cash transaction had been completed. Thanks to Dr. Maarten J. Raven, Curator for the Egyptian Department of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, in the Netherlands, I now understand more about the packaging placed in my hands that day.

The design on the envelope has no immediately available exact parallel in antiquity, but Dr. Raven was ‘unable to exclude’ that the motif had been copied from a coffin or papyrus writing from 3,000 years ago. This could mean that the “New Pharaohs Papyrus” design was drawn from a rare sample as yet unavailable to scholars, or, that the design was a somewhat incompetent replica of what is a ‘well-known combination:’ the Eye (Sun or Moon) of Horus, who was the Falcon God of Heaven, the Cobra, who warded off evil, and the Wing, a sign of Horus’ status as a deity.

Horus’ eye represents ‘wellbeing and survival,’ as the waning and waxing of the moon are said to represent harm caused to his moon eye and subsequent return to full ocular health thanks to intervention by other deities. The image on the cardboard envelope also contains the hieroglyph for life, the Ankh Cross, dangling from the Cobra’s body. All in all, an encouraging logo.

The text underneath the image includes hieroglyphs which, according to Dr. Raven, are not written in orthodox fashion. The word for ‘eternity’ emerges clearly, but again, he cannot exclude that ‘even this detail was faithfully copied from an original.’