Luis Bandolero Luis
Walter Ventosilla
Paloma Ediciones
En Luis Bandolero Luis, el dramaturgo, cuentista, novelista y artista plástico peruano, Walter Ventosilla narra una historia propia de la literatura romántica, extraída de la tradición oral de las serranías de Perú, con rasgos costumbristas y basada en la vida real.

El personaje principal como el título del libro lo manifiesta se llamó Luis, nombre completo: Telmo Luis Pardo Novoa dicen mis fuentes, pero pasó a la historia como Luis Pardo, un héroe, anti-héroe convertido en leyenda. Nacido en Chiquián, provincia de Bolognesi en el Departamento de Ancash al norte de Lima, el 19 de agosto de 1874 y muriendo el 9 de enero de 1909, a los 34 años de edad.

Luis Pardo es el Zorro, o si se quiere el Robin Hood de Chiquián en la serranía peruana sobre quien han escrito poemas, himnos, canciones, dramas y semblanzas escritores como José Diez Canseco, Alberto Ramírez y Oscar Colchado Lucio.

Ventosilla, en esta época sin héroes reales rescata a Luis Pardo como a una figura de carne y hueso que se sublevó ante al abuso de los terratenientes de su época y quien, a pesar de ser uno de ellos, optó por la justicia comezando por casa, dando así un ejemplo a seguir en contra del abuso de los gamonales para con los peones.

En ese sentido la novela trata un tema actual, tanto en materia de justicia social como en la importancia de volver la mirada hacia las raíces y cultivar a personajes históricos, por lo tanto imperfectos y vulnerables, hombres que se sublevaron ayudando con su vida y sus actos a denunciar el abuso a los más desposeídos, y a la vez legando con su muerte la consumación de una historia que no debía repetirse.

El aspecto humano del personaje aparece en sus debilidades de hombre: mujeriego (medio misógino) y bebedor, las que no son disimuladas, por el contrario, incomodan y ocasionan al protagonista una tragedia irremediable de la que extraer una lección, para que al final quede la leyenda de un hombre imperfecto que intentó hacer algo bien.

La narración de la historia va en dos tiempos, uno en el presente y el otro retrospectivo. La cuentan dos personajes: uno que vivió al lado del bandolero los momentos más importantes de su vida, hombre de la sierra que se expresa con el lenguaje propio de su calidad de peón, y quién se la cuenta al misterioso alter ego del narrador, cuya identidad (aunque quizás sospechada en algún punto de la narración ) se descubrirá totalmente al final de la novela para rematar el desenlace.

Así como los medios y los juegos de video venden, especialmente a las generaciones actuales, héroes ficticios, Ventosilla encuentra a través de este trabajo el modo de reavivar la memoria perdida en una sociedad de globalizado consumo dónde las nuevas generaciones aprenden sobre héroes virtuales con capacidades sobre humanas; esta novela, por el contrario, trae al presente un mundo real en un espacio y tiempos aún vigentes en la historia.

Walter Ventosilla con su novela Luis bandolero Luis rescata a un personaje a través del cual los lectores de esta generación, o sea los jóvenes en particular, dentro y fuera de Latinoamérica, pueden conocer a un héroe de carne y hueso, y no sólo consumir a los “bandoleros” “justicieros” que Hollywood inventa y hace famosos para vendernos una realidad ficticia.

Es difícil abarcar una novela como The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (algo así como La corta y fantástica vida de Oscar Wao) de Junot Diaz merecedora del Premio Pulitzer a la mejor novela de 2007.
El trabajo contiene muchos ingredientes literarios que derivan en géneros y subgéneros los cuales hacen que la narración se vaya abriendo como una caja de Pandora que disparará su contenido en todas las direcciones hasta hacer blanco en el lector.
Describir la historia se hace complejo ya que, aparte de lo antes mencionado, el argumento se basa en gran parte en el conocimiento de los comics y la ciencia ficción (no es requisito pero si un buen referente para no perder la gracia de la que sólo participan los conocedores) Díaz, también, saca buen provecho de la curiosidad del anglo-sajón para quien las culturas que pueblan gran parte de sus ciudades son aún un misterio por descubrir.
La presencia del lenguaje contemporáneo invita al lector joven, y la fascinación ante la extrañeza de un protagonista de ghetto que no encaja en los estereotipos desarma la expectativa del lector.
Díaz lleva, especialmente al norteamericano, a tratar de comprender a los nuevos inmigrantes, en este caso dominicanos, jóvenes de los 80´s  a través de la sorpresa que produce un héroe, o mejor un antihéroe dominicano nada convencional quien ni siquiera sueña con jugar al baseball.
La realidad que nos cuenta Díaz está cercada por la familiar extrañeza de un Nueva Jersey dominicano insertado en un barrio hispano y dónde, muy probablemente, la mayoría de sus lectores nunca ha incursionado en persona. Es decir, Díaz nos cuenta la historia de unos seres contemporáneos pero que a la vez representan un grupo misterioso para la mayoría de los habitantes de este país.
Creo que éste es uno de los grandes aciertos de la novela, llevar puertas adentro, historia adentro a los lectores, sumergirlos en las razones por las cuales los personajes y a la vez la sociedad que él retrata, es y actúa como lo hace. La novela nos ilustra un mundo visto desde dentro y fuera de la Republica Dominicana, nos habla de los traumas heredados por estos inmigrantes, y por lo tanto, nos aclara el por qué de ciertas actitudes antisociales, rebeldes, indiferentes o nerds de los personajes y hasta cierto punto de una nacionalidad que a pesar del tiempo transcurrido todavía arrastra el fantasma de la época del trujillato, más presente aún en aquellos que se sienten presos por esa maldición hereditaria llamada “fukú” como la familia Cabral a la que pertenece Oscar.
¿Podríamos, tal vez, agrupar todo este mundo, ya posterior al Realismo Mágico y decir que con Díaz llegamos a la ciencia ficción dominicana? De alguna manera esa realidad de la novela trasmitida a través de demasiados géneros y subgéneros para encasillarla, me produce la sensación de extrañeza que me da la ciencia ficción, y aunque no se trate de una novela Sci-fi, la realidad en ella parece tener algo de ese género porque en el vive el desconcertante protagonista y su mundo.
Como en la ciencia ficción esta realidad es inasible, ya que es de una dimensión desconocida para casi todos los lectores, la que a la vez que nos integra nos aleja de la cotidianeidad. Quizás por esta razón o tal vez, por que la realidad siempre supera la ficción: rompe estereotipos, toca verla con otros ojos, aceptar otras perspectivas, nuevas posibilidades y teorías aunque no siempre sea cómodo romper los clichés.
¿Pero que más tiene de especial la novela de Díaz? ¿Qué es lo que ha llamado tanto la atención del público y la crítica?  Quizás como dijo él mismo en una entrevista otorgada a Authors@Goolge, es que en la cultura americana siempre están buscando quien les explique lo que no entienden de una comunidad en vez de sumergirse en ésta y entender su riqueza.
Díaz nos presenta la realidad dominicana desde la interpretación de unos personajes que se encuentran entre dos culturas siendo por lo mismo únicos; y como dice también en la entrevista antes citada: el público (léase anglo) suele ver a través de un escritor de “color” (como se denomina a sí mismo el autor) al colectivo de la etnia a la que pertenece, añadiendo que para representar la nacionalidad dominicana habría que escribir 10 millones de novelas y aún así esa sólo sería el primer pasado de la realidad de su país, desvinculándose así de ser vocero de su comunidad sin dejar de pertenecer a ella.
Al respecto de la comunidad a la que pertenece y al individualismo de los seres humanos Díaz utiliza la novela para ejemplificar esto, para romper estereotipos. Oscar Wao (Wao siendo un sobre nombre de una pronunciación dominicana de Wilde) es un ser único (como lo somos todos) pero este es único y raro, es dominicano, pero no es conversador y dicharachero, tampoco un macho de gran actividad sexual, sin dejar de ser enamoradizo. Oscar es único porque es un “nerd”. Oscar es también un excelente retrato de alguien como Junot Díaz su creador, escritor dominicano que sorprende quizás especialmente porque rompe con los clichés que pesan sobre su comunidad ya que éstos borran al individuo y su individualidad, su originalidad, lo cual no está en contra de que ese individuo sea a su vez parte de un colectivo. Según Díaz en la misma entrevista antes mencionada todos somos individuos pertenecientes a un contexto sin el cual no podríamos ser los individuos que somos.
Pero para lanzar un poco de luz a la asimilación de la novela quisiera mencionar que el libro, linguisticamente hablando, está escrito en inglés coloquial con frases en un español de modismos dominicanos, el que irrumpe de golpe porque no hay otra forma mejor de decir lo que se dice en ese momento, esa voz es propia del personaje y en inglés no tendría sentido. No recuerdo haber encontrado una sola palabra de lo que personalmente entiendo por Spanglish: una suerte de híbrido de una palabra inglesa españolizada, en The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao lo que leemos, como dije antes, es el español local irrumpiendo en el inglés del narrador en una historia es bilingüe por naturaleza.
Por otro lado cada personaje tiene una voz muy propia y por lo tanto identificable consigo mismo y con el lector. Por ejemplo, podemos identificarnos con la maternal La Inca; o con la rebelde y socialmente comprometida adolescente y hermana de Oscar: Lola; tal vez con el mujeriego narrador que además fue protagonista de Drown (el trabajo anterior de Díaz) y aún otros se identificarán con Belicia y su orgullo hermético, casi inhumano, legado de un pasado inmencionable.
Oscar, el protagonista hará uso del lenguaje de manera fantástica casi críptica, a la manera de los comics, libros, series o películas de ciencia ficción, los mismos que ocupan la mayor parte de su tiempo útil ya sea leyendo, viendo (en series, juegos y videos) o escribiendo historias interminables en un lenguaje codificado que  lo lleva a creer que algún día podrá ser el equivalente a un Tolkien dominicano. Sin embargo dicho lenguaje parece ser la expresión de lo que no puede expresarse y lo restringe a su mundo, es parte de su cárcel, tanto como lo es su cuerpo obeso. Además, Oscar es también enamoradizo y para complicar más las cosas su falta de belleza física y su calidad de “nerd” lo hacen patético, con poquísimas relaciones sociales, proclive a la depresión y suicida en potencia.
El final tal vez podríamos leerlo como Oscar volviendo a las raíces y por lo tanto volviendo a caer en la maldición del pasado en un presente no menos brutal y por lo tanto mucho más fácil de identificar y hacer convergir con los lectores acostumbrados a la realidad de noticiero que toman los hechos para el protagonista.
La obra también cuenta con curiosas notas a pie de página que casi siempre ensanchan la narrativa guiándonos a través un pasado que incluye todo tipo de información, tanto anecdótica como histórica: la invasión norteamericana a la República Dominicana,  el playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, la actriz María Montez, notas personales del narrador y por su puesto la tristemente legendaria y brutal dictadura de Trujillo, y dónde a veces los datos de la tradición oral son tanto o más importantes que lo que conocemos de los libros de historia. Parte de esa tradición oral es la creencia en el fukú y el zafa para protección de calamidades, lista a la que podemos añadir al mágico personaje sin rostro que anuncia la muerte muy propio de las tradiciones orales de los pueblos latinoamericanos y que tanto alimentaron al Realismo Mágico.
La religiosidad, el amor y el sexo tienen un lugar preponderante en la historia. Yo hubiera dicho que lo que mueve a Oscar Wao es el amor, pero su autor dice que es la soledad y habrá que tomarlo en cuenta. El trato desinhibido que da Díaz al sexo, la desenvoltura con que trata el tema, el lenguaje insolente con el que naturalmente se expresa son muy propios de la cultura a la que pertenece. ¿Será que como dice el autor que todos alimentamos los estereotipos al creer en ellos? Pienso que hay “maneras de ser” que no necesariamente aplican al individuo pero que siempre estarán ligadas a una nacionalidad o etnia a menos que con la globalización lleguemos todos a ser muy parecidos y ya no haya nada que nos identifique. Creo también que la individualidad hay que ganársela y que además tiene un precio que no todos están dispuestos a pagar.
Respecto al tema del sexo sorprende la exactitud de los puntos de vista femenino y masculino que parecen haber sido escritos por personas del sexo de quien habla.
Como buen latino (y he aquí otro cliché) Díaz hace gala de un contagioso sentido del humor y a pesar de la tristeza que debiera desolarnos, alcanza un balance a través de toda la novela que es también un positivo hilo conductor para nuestras emociones, a propósito de que en la antes citada entrevista, el escritor dice que: el equilibrio, es lo más difícil de lograr.
Por el revuelo que ha causado en los medios anglosajones es de esperar que Junot Díaz vuelva con un próximo trabajo quizás antes de lo esperado ya que entre éste y el anterior hubo un lapso de 11 años. No veo inconveniente en demorar lo necesario para lograr el fin deseado. Mientras tanto espero la versión al castellano que permita a otros opinar desde otras perspectivas. ¡En hora buena!

Junot Diaz (the picture is from wordpress)

July 23rd was another historic day in New Orleans. At 3am, a barge driven by an unlicensed pilot collided with a tanker, spilling the barge’s load: over 400,000 gallons of oil. The spill was the largest on the Mississippi in ten years.

That morning’s newspaper reported that G.O.P. presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, had cancelled his visit with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a possible VP-pick.

Later that morning, President Bush promised to sign a housing bill that included $500 million in funding for low cost housing for the Gulf Coast.

And that same morning, the members of the National Conference of State Legislators awoke for the second day of their meeting in New Orleans. That morning and throughout a week filled with speeches by the likes of Mike Bloomberg and Ed Rendell, with parties at the D-Day Museum and bicycle rides through the city’s neighborhoods, the visitors from the nation’s state capitols were greeted by the scent of spilt oil.

I woke to that smell on Wednesday and continue to smell it when the wind blows or when I walk along the river. It burns your nose, a little like passing by a newly applied hot tar roof. I didn’t get a look at the water until Sunday, when swirls of oil were still visible on the surface of the muddy water. Booms and nets were set up to stop the slick from reaching the shore, but we know wildlife was affected and you can bet we’ll never get a straight answer on just how much oil reached the delta.

So how does it all add up? History, the sum record of fractured intentions and moments, will it tell much about this spill? About the various characters onshore who maneuvered through the landscape reeking—literally and spiritually—of wasted oil and opportunity? Well, let’s add up a few of the details beneath the above “major” events, as maybe, oh, I don’t know, we can get a sense of city and nation as they wobbly stood for a week.

Re: McCain: there’s a debate down here about the motivations for his cancellation, which was blamed officially on the minor hurricane in Texas. Speculation about Jindal’s chances continues, but the idea of a very, very young looking Indian-American with only 2 years experience in the House as a national resume and a decidedly weird Catholicism on his sleeve appears suspect to me. McCain and Jindal on TV is not a pretty sight to imagine.

Yet, what’s more striking about the timing is the possible response McCain might’ve offered to the spill. See, now that he’s latched on to the Drill Here movement, McCain will tell you that offshore drilling is safer than vitamins. After all, he’ll say, not a drop spilled during Hurricane Katrina. This is a boldfaced lie currently spreading into the debate over the oil crisis. When it reaches your shore, remember this: on land, approximately 8 million gallons of oil were spilled during the storm, from damaged pipelines, refineries and storage tanks. In the Gulf, some 741,000 gallons were lost. If you consider this a “safe” solution to the current crisis, you’re likely willing to believe that drilling anywhere will help you at the gas tank. And therefore you are very lost individual. One could say the same about McCain, but that he probably has the facts stored somewhere on the USS Straight Talk, along with his spine and a photo of GW handing him a birthday cake on August 29, 2005.

My point: these phony solutions for a very serious energy crisis are too weak to stand in the very place where that oil enters the bowels of the nation. In New Orleans, we can smell that bullshit.

Re: the Housing legislation: three days later, the Senate passed a version of the bill that included the $500 million for low-cost housing. However, instead of dedicating the funding to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the program has inexplicably become national, meaning that the money could be pulled by regions across the country. Nobody’s talking in the Senate, but it should be noted that this money’s original source was Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae profits.

Obviously those profits are gone; the bill is essentially a bailout of the mortgage giants. The economy is fucked all over, so the original sufferer is now but one in a crowd. Faulty levees and FEMA, subprime mortgages and loan sharks, what’s the difference? We’re all Americans and we’re all getting screwed, so goes the Wisdom. I’m all for affordable housing for every American, but here is another instance where the nation’s faltering leaves New Orleans at the back of the line, with no answers as to why or how long it must stand there, shivering in the stench of the oil and bullshit.

(It should be noted that the housing bill includes tax relief to Louisiana homeowners who suffered through the Road Home program, the bizarre effort managed by a very expensive, very inept private firm from North Carolina. That is another story, and you should really sit in a bar sometime and hear it.)

Re: the legislators: what do they have to do with it? They do the best they can from their roosts in Harrisburg or Sacramento. They slurp some drinks in the Quarter, listen to Big Ed, and deal with the cancellation of a riverboat cruise or two. They’re conventioneers.

I know. I just wonder what they think. I wonder if they go home and tell their office about the smell of New Orleans, about the way that place is really on a bad run of luck. I wonder if they wonder, about what will happen down here, about who exactly is in charge, and about why they—even as connected as they are—rarely get any news out of that place.

I would like to think that, as Republican and Democratic Party members, the state reps might suggest to their superiors a few words from the two candidates about the city and the Gulf Coast. I would like to think that I’ll turn on the television someday in the next 3 months and hear one of those two men dare to talk about us, the oil huffers downriver.

Because it seems weird to me, this silence. After all the talk 3 years ago, all the piling on that pushed Bush into permanent residence in the low approval ratings, why is this place not an issue in this race? It is an issue, you might say. After all, McCain has to avoid you people. Well, that’s true, but not much solace. And what about Obama? When is he coming for a visit? When will he smell the oil with us? What will he promise us? All the good people who rally behind him, why aren’t they demanding a few notes on Katrina, that racial and environmental and Republican-driven horror show the nation watched on CNN? Perhaps the backbeat funk of this oily city doesn’t fit in the harmonious chorus.

I am all for making history and the potential of a great change. But standing here amidst a decidedly less golden series of “our moments,” I’d like to know how much longer the people down here need to bear through the stink of history while listening to talk and doubletalk. We are left to draw our own conclusions, do our own math with these events that, pungent and minute as they are, add up to real history in this disfigured nation of ours.

You smell me?

Brian Boyles

“No Lease on Life”
Lynne Tillman

“Diary of an Emotional Idiot”
Maggie Estep

“The Fuck-Up”
Arthur Nersesian

“Totem of the Depraved”
Nick Zedd
“Distorture”
Rob Hardin

“Two bags of vomit are walking around the neighborhood. One bag of vomit starts to cry. The other bag of vomit asks, What’s the matter? The first bag of vomit says, I was brought up around here.”

– from No Lease on Life, by Lynne Tillman

Downtown Distopias: Or Learning to Leave the Lower East Side
by Sara Ferguson

It’s been the nature of Lower East Side writers to boast of their down and out origins. Enduring the filth, lousy living conditions, and perpetual social upheaval is the writer’s badge of honor — though one which grows increasingly cliche with every condo conversion and T-1 hookup that reconfigures the nabe. There used to be a romance to the Lower East Side’s squalor. Into this village of broken immigrant dreams came the crosscurrents of youth, transients, artists, and the terminally hip. A potent cocktail. When the drug gangs and real estate wars hit, you could rock in the depravity, stay high off the kinetics of shootouts and artworld hypocrisy — which is what the writers ranting in zines like the East Village Eye, Between C and D, Avenue E, and Red Tape during the 1980s generally did.

The squalor gave legitimacy to downtown writers’ rage and alienation, but it’s a stance that’s come to seem indulgent, if not quaint, under the staunch gaze of the Giuliani era. There is, as yet, no novel which traces the neighborhood’s evolution from a low-rent haven of multicultural diversity and social permissiveness in the 60s and 70s to a punkrock playground of political and artistic dissent in the early 80s; much less an account of its present-day transformation into a kind of overpoliced Venice Beach East scripted by film crews, theme bars, and professional sex freaks. What we have in the recent works of downtown veterans Lynne Tillman, Maggie Estep, Arthur Nersesian, Nick Zedd, and Rob Hardin are snapshots of a counterculture in retreat.

In Tillman’s No Lease On Life we find a wizened Lower East Side, one which has lost patience with the 24-hour freakshow hanging out on its doorstep. The novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth Hall, is a part-time proofreader who spends her insomniac nights plotting revenge against the “morons” and “crusties” who disrupt her sleep, while obsessing about the junkies and filth in her hallways, which her landlord and incompetent super refuse to clean. With minimal plot, the narrative is carried by Elizabeth’s voyeuristic neurosis, by her compulsion to collect minutia from the lives of those around her like the super, Hector who can’t stop dragging things in off the street.

Tillman’s portrait of the Lower East Side as an overpriced slum stripped bare of its social ideals might have its truth in today’s hardened political climate. Still, one can’t help wishing the scope of the book weren’t so ultimately mundane. Through Elizabeth, she creates a relentless catalogue of the everyday indignities suffered by city dwellers: “It was grotesque being enclosed by four shabby walls and not being able to afford it, or even finding yourself considering renting it. It was tenement despair.” But Tillman never really plumbs the spiritual dislocation that keeps us honeycombed in these states of manic isolation. Nor does she convey much sense of the cultural vitality that has been lost from the neighborhood. One wishes Elizabeth’s character had been taken on with a clearer sense of irony, or that she at least had more sex.

Instead, we have the story of a woman yearning for middle class norms which her neighbors stubbornly reject. Only when Elizabeth resorts to her own childish prank — tossing eggs at the “morons” outside her window — does she achieve some agency over what is otherwise an all-too pedestrian life of defeat.

By contrast, Maggie Estep’s Diary of an Emotional Idiot, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up, and Nick Zedd’s Totem of the Depraved are all coming of age tales, evoking the 1980s East Village in all its messy, adolescent clamor. Estep’s tranparently autobiographical plot follows a young malcontent, Zoe, from her disfunctional childhood in the burbs of France and various East Coast states, to her days as a dopefiending punkrocker and “fuckbook” writer on the Lower East Side. The best scenes involve her rescue from the clutches of a pretentious dope dealer by a couple who strongly resemble Between C & D editors Joel Rose and Catherine Texier, followed by an amorous episode in detox with a girl who reeks of cheese doodles.This is not a great novel, more an extended version of one of Estep’s performance rants. Estep makes little effort to document the political or social landcape around her. Still, anyone who lived in the neighborhood can vouch for the politically incorrect cast of cartoon characters who inhabit Zoe’s walkup tenement. There is Lonette, the foul-mouthed welfare queen who gives blowjobs, Daisy the fading stripper, the Hefty Lesbian downstairs, a bug-eyed speed-freak dubbed The Eye Guy, and the seemingly ubiquitous, Heavy Metal Guitarist Upstairs.

Nersesian treads similar turf in The Fuck-Up, but with a more wistful sense of youth gone awry. A former managing editor of the literary magazine Portable Lower East Side, Nersesian self-published the novel in 1991. Reisssued by Akashic Books, the book captures the jaded innocense of early 80s Lower East Side, before the St. Mark’s Cinema morphed into The Gap and The Ritz migrated uptown, before the Bowery bums became nefarious squeegeemen, when screwing up was simply a rite of passage.

The narrator is a young, Midwestern would-be poet who is suddenly orphaned, and finds himself proceeding through a series of hapless jobs and failed love affairs, becoming ever more savaged by the absurd, only-in-New-York misfortunes that befall him. In the space of a few months, his bibliophile best friend jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, and he gets booted from the swank Soho loft he’s housesitting for sleeping with the famous film director owner’s art-world nymphet. Feigning to be gay, he lands a job as a manager of an East Village porn theater, only to be chased out by the mafioso owner for cooking the books. He shacks up with a divorcé stock broker that he meets in a shootout at Blimpies, and winds up getting gored by her son and a pack of prep-school kids. From there its a swift descent through alcohol to the delirium of the streets.

Unlike Estep’s Zoe, Nersesian’s Fuck-Up does not wallow in self- induced torment. He blames his fate on the “mechanism of the East Village,” and anyone who’s bottomed out here can tell you how easy it is to slip. It’s significant that the Fuck Up only succeeds in getting his shit together when he moves to Brooklyn. The Lower East Side is a fallout zone that breeds dissolution.

Of course, few have embraced dissolution so thoroughly as underground filmmaker Nick Zedd. His recent autobiography, Totem of the Depraved, is much like his transgressive flicks — so weirdly bad it’s good. Despite Zedd’s runaway ego, his endless, unapologetically sexist boasts about his sadistic exploits with Lydia Lunch and other punk doyennes, there is something deadpan hilarious about this book’s self-mocking take on punk downtown: “Every penny I raise driving a cab goes to pay Baby Jane Holzer, ex-Warhol superstar turned greedy slumlord. My rent is three times what it should be.” There’s also hefty declarations like: “In a thousand years, like any civilization, ours will be judged by the ideas found in the subterranean artifacts being produced by the impovershed and the marginalized, and it is for this reason that I continue to make films, whether or not anyone comes to see them, because they speak to me and to future generations who will one day dispose of this monolith of greed that oppresses us all.”

Zedd’s no Levi-Strauss, but he manages to dredge up a lively, and surprisingly authentic portrait of one New York’s most inane and deranged subcultures, chock full of cokehead satanists, acid casualties, and skeezy guys pimping off strung-out go-go dancing girlfriends (Zedd included). Exactly the kind of morons that Tillman has come to hate. Admittedly, such lifestyles were never meant to be sustainable; Zedd, too, winds up in Brooklyn licking his wounds. But the book recaptures the fuck-it-all zeal of being an underground artist at a time when such pursuits seem impossible, if not pointless.

While Zedd’s, Estep’s and Nersesian’s books are all period pieces, Rob Hardin’s Distorture comes closest to conjuring the late Romantic sensibility of downtown New York as it exists now — depoliticized, shorn of all but its most selfish ideals, caught up in a goth/S&M fantasy of hyper-intellectualized, cyberpunk noir.

“At vision’s limit, he discerned a phalanx of tenements that swayed like sick bums leaning. Above it, the sky looked so polluted that the noon glare offered no more light than smudged neon. But the stratosphere’s gun- metal gray felt deeper than the screen he saw when he tried to rest his eyes.”

A sound engineer and studio musician, Hardin won a Firecracker Award for this arched collection of shorts, rants, and essays. Though not ostensibly about the Lower East Side, many of the stories take place in its fictive space of perpetual demise. They are like holographs, flickering between premillennial tension and 19th century malaise. In “Knives for Narcoleptics,” a couple of young degenerates struggle to wake a narcoleptic woman passed out in an abandoned tenement, her body ritualistically scarred. “Cadaver-Scan,” moves from the claustrophobic squalor of a Lower East Side apartment to a futuristic identity rape inside a recording studio; and the rant “BlowHo” skewers downtown’s faux-chic: “NYC became the real estate spittoon of stage set ambiance, white-washed local color, and all species of scum that passed for picturesque to people who’d just moved there from Binghampton. Week-old rat corpses and phlegm flecked with Body Bag masquerading as Lucky Seven (’In my day, they had real heroin’) glittered under the gazes of suburban college backwash and moneyed runaways….”

The text is disjointed, at times pretentious, and one wishes Hardin would develop his grotesque plots into a full-length novel. Still, at least Hardin’s experimental approach offers an escape hatch for repression — fantasy and horror — where Tillman finds only despair. \work{Distorture} is dedicated, in part, to Susan Walsh, a former Village Voice writer and go go dancer who disappeared mysteriously. Her specter and those of other fallen angels haunt Hardin’s baroque imagination. In a sense, they are a metaphor for the exquisitely depraved Loisaida we lost, the one we’ve been forcedto grow out of by a patriarch mayor and a relentless real estate economy that leaves no margin for self-destructive dreamers and gloriously non-conformist fools: “I could only relive those polluted nights in memoriam; could only commemorate the times I last saw her alive; when passion swam, submerged in the past — which is of course, the only thing that lasts.”

When this review was written, I was not aware of the rerelease of Yuri Karpalov’s classic memoir, It Takes a Village, by Akashic Books.

Diane Burns, 1993

Photo courtesy of John Ranard

Slowly people drifted in to the parish room at St. Marks Church on January 27 to celebrate the life of Native American poet, mother, and longtime Lower East Side resident Diane Burns. Reluctant it seems to remember the light that burned inside Diane was gone, and that she’d drank herself at age 50, leaving behind a beautiful 15-year-old daughter with shy almond eyes and a scattering of poems so fierce they continue to churn up in literary anthologies two decades later.

Maybe the light inside Diane burned too brightly?

Consider the opening lines of her first and only book of poetry, Riding the One-Eyed Ford, published in 1981:

Our people

slit open the badger

to see the tomorrows

in its blood.

Now

look at me

and see what our

tomorrows hold

Illustrated with her own fine pen-and-ink drawings, that slim collection established Burns as a formidable presence in the New York poetry scene and beyond. Though she didn’t publish much more than that, her witty, sardonic takes on Native stereotypes are still cutting enough to be taught alongside more famous contemporaries like Sherman Alexie:

I am Tequila Mockingbird. Yes, I am related to Isaiah Mockingbird, and yes, I am that face in the moon on the cover of the Carson’s record album. And the Marshmallow beer girl, and that’s me on every stick of Land O’Lakes butter … I can trace my lineage back to the beginning of time when the world was nothing but a scrap of mud on the tip of a loon’s nose.

–from her 1993 essay, “Tequila Mockingbird”

Born in 1956 in Lawrence, Kansas to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mom, Burns was raised with her two brothers in Riverside, California, where her parents got work teaching at a Native American boarding school. When she was about 10 years old, the family moved to the Lac Corte Oreilles reservation in Hayward, Wisconsin, then on to Wahpeton, North Dakota when her parents began teaching at another boarding school there.

“Even in grade school, she was always writing and drawing,” recalls Diane’s mother, Rose Burns. “In 3rd grade she won the first place prize for her poem, ‘A Pencil Can Travel.’”

Evidently, Diane discovered early on that writing can be a ticket to elsewhere. She spent her senior year of high school at the American Indian Art Indian Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, then got a scholarship from Barnard College, with the aim of becoming a lawyer.

She dropped out of Barnard her senior year, no one remembers why. Perhaps the life of a poet seemed more enthralling. In an videotaped interview with Emilio Murillo for his Manhattan cable show, Earth Bird, Burns described how she came into her profession somewhat by accident, when the American Indian Community House called up looking to book a Native poet for an event they were hosting.

“I didn’t have anything, so I stayed up all night scribbling and ended up onstage with Audre Lorde,” Burns recalled. “I actually got paid $50. I’m the only poet I know who got into the field for money,” she joked.

Burns moved to the East Village in the late 70s and quickly became enmeshed in the downtown arts scene. “I used to run into Diane all the time on Avenue B back in the day when I could see, and she was a very attractive lady,” recalls Steve Cannon, the now blind publisher of \work{A Gathering of the Tribes} magazine.

Beyond her striking features, which got Burns work as a model, people were immediately impressed by the force of her words. “She was like a fresh wind, the clarity of her work was so beautiful,” says Josh Gosciak, founder of the multicultural poetry journal, \work{Contact}, who was one of the first to publish Burns’ work. “A lot of young Native Americans were coming on the scene in New York and also breaking into film and publishing. It was an exciting period. We haven’t seen anything like it since.”

“It was a total explosion,” says Bowery Poetry Club founder Bob Holman, remembering the first time he heard Burns read in 1980. “All of us down here thought we had everything in the world we needed to know in our scene. But Diane literally blew the lid off our little place and set it up as a whole new encampment.”

In those days, many poets in the hood were earning salaries with benefits under the federal CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) program, which Reagan immediately canned when he came into office. Former \work{Cover} magazine publisher Jeff Wright remembers traveling around with Burns as part of a state-funded CETA spin-off called POET (Poets’ Overland Expeditionary Troupe), staging readings at schools and community centers across New York.

I’m American royalty

Walking around with a hole in my knee

I’m a hopeful aborigine

Trying to find a place to be

Oh East Village, ai yi yi yi yi yi yi.

–from “Alphabet City Serenade”

“She was like an Indian princess living on the Lower East Side,” says Wright. “She was like the best bad girl that ever lived, and when she walked around she made everyone else wild. I fell in love with her immediately, like everyone else. But I was always afraid to get too close, because of the dark side.”

Besides a thirst for liquor, Burns landed a dope habit early on, and never really shook it. She didn’t seem to wrestle with her demons so much as accommodate them, though her 1981 poem “Booze ‘N’ Loozing Blues” hints at the pain she felt inside:

No one can tell you

ahead

of time

What

It’s like

To sweat & shake

& cold turkey

and be

Afraid

to stay awake

and

Afraid

to

sleep

and

Afraid

to not do

either.

‘Course back then it seemed like everyone was high on one thing or another, and for many years, Burns was the life of the party.

In 1988, she was among a rather illustrious group of writers — including Allen Ginsberg, Joy Harjo, and Pedro Pietri — invited to Nicaragua to take part in the Ruben Dario Poetry Festival, sponsored by the Sandinista government. (Poet Tom Savage remembers Burns pulling out an “enormous gun” on the plane. “It was just amazing to me; it was so bizarre.”)

The Sandinistas revered poetry and welcomed the group like foreign dignitaries, especially Burns, who Holman recalls was “sort of the star of our little troupe down there.”

“Little did they know what trouble they were getting into,” Holman laughs. Apparently Burns and Pietri got so soused at the presidential palace that Pietri interrupted a meeting between the Sandinista government and the Soviet ambassador to look for his shoes.

They then convinced Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal to marry them and took off honeymooning, much to the dismay of Pietri’s wife back in New York and members of the American Indian Movement, who called up Holman worried Diane had been kidnapped.

I don’t care if you’re married I still love you

I don’t care if you’re married

After the party’s over

I will take you home in my One-Eyed Ford

Way yah hi yo, Way yah hi yo!

–from “Big Fun,” 1981

Diane’s daughter Britta with her father, Steve Ruona, at Diane’s memorial at St. Marks Church

For many years, Burns carried on giving readings at the Nuyorican Poets Café and other venues and hanging out at local bars. “She was one of the smartest people I ever knew. We met at the Village Idiot,” says Steve Ruona, who lived with her Burns from 1991 to 2002 and fathered their daughter Britta.

Steve Cannon credits her with helping him launch Tribes magazine and gallery from his ramshackle brownstone on East 3rd Street.

“When my house burned down in 1990, I was half-blind and didn’t have the money to fix the damn thing up, so Diane got her husband Steve to put this house back in order,” says Cannon. “She would come over here through thick and thin, scrambling for money, calling people, helping me set things up. That’s what kept this place going all those years. The only reason \work{A Gathering of the Tribes} exists 15 years later is because of Diane Burns.”

Cannon also kept Burns going, paying her to keep the books even when others considered her a lost cause. In her latter years as her drinking worsened and she lost custody of Britta, Diane drifted from couch to couch, even berthing for a while with the Hare Krishnas on First Avenue. “They’ve taken me on as a project,” she joked to friends.

Burns kept her sense of humor and her pride through it all, and unlike most folks with bad habits, she never stole. “Kind,” “loving,” “modest,” “warm but not effusive,” “private,” “funny,” “not one to be captured” — these were some of the words people offered up at the memorial as folks struggled to reconcile Diane’s startling talent and her steadfast presence on the scene with the sorry place she ended up.

Though she’d complaining of excess fluids in recent weeks, friends say her collapse on November 29 was unexpected. She was taken to Bellvue Hospital, where she fell into a coma and died of kidney and liver failure on December 22.

Britta with Steve Cannon (left) and Bob Holman, at Diane’s memorial

If her daughter Britta is any measure, her life was far from hopeless. Britta is now studying acting and has a job performing skits as a teen advocate for Planned Parenthood three days a week.

Cannon says he’s hoping to collect Burns’ unpublished writings into a book — she was supposedly working on a satirical novel about a Native American beauty queen. You can find some of her film and poetry reviews on the Tribes website.

www.tribes.org

After she died, her family held a three-day funeral in a big log cabin on the res in Wisconsin, with a feast and prayers sung in her tribal tongue.

“You have to stay with the body for the whole time, so on the last night I played poker with her brothers till 5 a.m.,” laughs Steve Ruona, her longtime companion. “I lost $100, but I know Diane would have been happy to know we were playing poker. She always wanted people to have a good time.”

Maybe too good a time. In some ways, Burns chronicled her own demise in poems about broken rodeo girls in bars and crazy Indian drunks on the Bowery, howling at passersby in their torn up “ribbon shirts.” She didn’t pity or romance these misfits, she understood them:

I see those greasy ol’ ribbon shirts

& I get a lump

swelling in my throat

I know

there’s a wolf, a lugarou

inside me too.

There’s a voice

that scorches stars

and withers starlings on the wing

A voice that

sings ’49s on rooftops

and drives back demons and talks with spirits

One that blows like plutonium dust

over the rez.

If these poems are any indication, Diane’s spirit is still roaring around the universe, too.

——-

The Bowery Poetry Club is hosting a “Praise Day” for Diane Burns on February 21 at 6 pm, with readings by Joy Harjo and many others.

c. Sarah Ferguson, 2007

#INTRODUCTION — Twelve Reports from Lebanon

Report Number One from Lebanon:  Flowers in Bint Jbeil

September 17, 2006

By Samia A. Halaby

Introduction

As a result of the unprecedented hostility of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, many in the activist community, worldwide, traveled to Lebanon to examine and report, motivated by the lack of truthful reporting in the corporate media.  Samia Halaby led two fact-finding delegations, one from Amsterdam and one from New York.  They interviewed many key individuals and visited Dahye and the villages and towns of the south.  Dahye is a working class neighborhood of Beirut composed of high-rise apartment buildings.  During these visits, they interviewed residents and examined the extensive destruction of the Israeli bombing on civilian life.  Israel carpeted the south of Lebanon with single-fuse cluster bombs during the last three days of the war, and for this reason the delegation had to be mindful of where they walked

In the south of Lebanon, a popular revolution is taking place, and its chosen leadership is Hisbullah.  In speaking with people, their animation, their sense of community, their commitment to the collective of the community, their disregard of individualism, their complete moral and emotional assurance of what is good and right, their total disrespect of inequality animates them and all they do.  In Bint Jbeil we saw almost total destruction and this destruction encompassed all parts of life yet in the middle of this damage there were a few amazing Jewels of life bubbling open — an assertion of sumoud (persistence).

In the south of Lebanon the landscape is covered with the dust of missiles and destruction.  The trees, the weeds, and the cultivated plants have a sickening yellow dust that immediately impresses a sensation of poison and death.  Inside the villages, the dust and garbage spread through all parts of the town regardless of the damaged areas.  Areas of massive destruction looked like strange cliffs and fields shattered cement interspersed with bits of brightly colored cloth or plastic.  Children’s shoes, schoolbooks, clothing, shards of wooden furniture, and shiny bits of metals were all smashed flat and embedded in the rubble.

Of all the villages that we saw, Bint Jbeil was most completely ground-up by Israeli missiles sent with messages of racist hate.  The town seemed abandoned with some amazing exceptions.  Shop after small shop had its doors damaged, pockmarked, bent out of their frames, made inaccessible by mounds of broken cement.  Slabs of cement hung precariously askew from bent lines of steel reinforcements.  Yet in the middle of this general yellow-gray there were some precious flowers of life blooming from somewhere deep in the hearts of the people.

A brave woman wearing the traditional Muslim scarf ran over to us as we were interviewing a father, grandfather, and grandchild trio who were opening their shop to a street of destruction empty of people.  The father told us that this is his shop and this is his land and this is his village and nothing is going to remove him from it.   At the side of his shop door was a huge gash where cement and cinderblocks were absent, yet sandals, slippers, shoes, and shoe boxes were being arranged enticingly, colorfully like blooms of organized labor and beauty in the midst of the Israeli created destruction.

Across the street was the woman’s shop where beautiful scarves, folded and stacked, or hanging from their corners in bunches — waving in the air.   On either side of the shop were mounds of destruction, garbage, and closed shops all damaged and bent.  The shop looked like a pungent rare flower springing to life amidst the hostile rubble.  This is resistance, this is courage, this is determination, this is the flower of Sumoud (persistence), this is the revolutionary spirit that will bring an end to the Zionist and Imperialist enemy.

Down the street there was music and a few more open shops.  The magnetic enthusiasm of the songs drew us irresistibly.  We found a cart with tapes, CDs, and other Hisbullah paraphernalia all joyfully presented.

After spinning around to see as much as possible we began our drive to Aintura where our friend from the scarf store met us excitedly to tell us more about what she and her friends saw and heard during the attempted Israeli tank invasion of the south.  She said that she was there all the time and that on top the hill just outside Bint Jbeil, she and others watched as the Israelis bombarded Bint Jbeil and Aintura.  They cried to see the destruction but were determined to stay.  She proudly pointed to where several rows of olive tress curved along a mountain, and told us that the Israelis never got beyond that line and that the brave defenders were able to stop them and their tanks.

I think of how I did not buy a pair of slippers or some scarves.  They would have been both useful and beloved.  But the experience of revolutionary Sumoud remains, and its international nature is clear.  Our friend of the scarf was just like a worker in Yugoslavia, some years before the fall of working-class rule, who waited for me and a friend on the road knowing that we would be hours in a restaurant that she had directed us to.  On our way out we found each other and she took us home with her and gave us incredible in-depth details of the life of a worker in a working-class state.  She was enlivened by the same energy as our new friend in the south of Lebanon.

Always, the revolutionary spirit skips a few unfortunate ones.  As soon as we were away from the shoe and scarf shops, a little jeep came by and I asked if they would let us interview them; and the old man near the door and his son behind the driver’s wheel immediately began to apologize saying that they were not Arabs, that they were Phoenicians.  I was taken aback and began to wonder what on earth they saw in me to say such things.  This is especially disturbing since the Israeli border is still so close and since the Israelis are known to make hostile excursions into the area.  Did the man and his son in the Jeep think me an Israeli?  Did they think me an American reporter?  After a bit of discussion, they seemed to flip politically and the son gave an interview that contained no indication of his Phoenician I-am-not-an-Arab apology.

An older woman came running trying to tell us her personal problems.  There was much that was interesting in what she said.  Her family lands had been partially occupied by the Israelis since 1948 and more was taken during this past war of July 2006.  She was angry and told of her many responsibilities with which she could not cope.  She had to care for four grandchildren whose mother lived in American and who refused to take them over to America so that they would be safe.

I noticed that each and everyone one of the people we talked to was wearing clothes that indicated they had a clean organized domicile, and that they must have had water in which to wash.  No one looked like they lived in the dust and destruction, while we, arriving in a van, walking around briefly, were dusty and disheveled.

#Picture files for Report No. 1

#Old town bint Jbeil 2 — photo s.h. sept 06.jpg

#Old town Bint Jbeil 3 — photo s.h. sept 06.jpg

#Old town Bint jbeil — photo s.h. sept 06.jpg

#Row of shops Bint Jbeil — photo s.h. sept 06.jpg

Report Two from Lebanon:  Attack and Defense or War

September 17, 2006

By Samia A. Halaby

We visited the hospital at Bint Jbeil on September 16, 2006, and were easily given an immediate opportunity to talk with the director of the hospital who told us about the injuries and death of people in the village and showed us where the hospital was hit.  The Israelis hit the hospital in three locations damaging the central electric exchange of the buildings, the generator, and the operating theater.

In Bint Jbeil we passed a school building whose entire curtain wall had fallen revealing rooms with children’s school chairs and tables.  Near Khiyam we saw a primary school damaged beyond use.  In Khiyam, we saw a museum bombed to uselessness.  Everywhere we saw homes, whole neighborhoods, and even whole towns bombed to shreds.

In Sur (Tyre) our delegation met with a doctor at the largest hospital and we received detailed information about civilian injuries, deaths, and the fact that injuries continue on a daily basis due to cluster bombs.  He also explained to us that there were two wars: one was of fighting between defenders of the south and the attacking Israelis, and one was a large scale attack on the civilians of Lebanon who were represented and defended by Hisbullah.

We have been told by the environmental expert and AUB (American University of Beirut) professor, Rania Masri, that one million and one hundred thousand cluster bombs are spread throughout the southern landscape and that they represent a manifold expense and danger that will not be solved for at least ten years.  This cost will be, first that of homes and infrastructure, then that of the economy, and lastly that of agriculture.  Agriculture will be the last to be fixed as it will take that long, perhaps as long as twenty years, to diffuse the cluster bombs that explode unpredictably.  This will create extreme economic pain for the farmers of the south and impoverish the area further.

We could easily see that the Israeli attack on Lebanon of July 2006 was a criminal attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure.  And we heard from the people that this was something even a donkey could figure out ¬≠ western media notwithstanding.  So why do those who read the western press insist on being so mystified?  Of course, me dummy, their interest! Instinctively, everyone knows the direction whence their interest is served.  So who is it who support Hisbullah and who attacks it?  Those who benefit or lose by it, of course, dummy!  Donkey!  At the base is our pocket that pays to fill our stomach.  The one thing that I do wonder about is why no one has built a huge stomach for us all to worship!  Or maybe I am a blind donkey!  Maybe the dome of the senate in DC is just that.

But, hey, even people of Dahye have a joke ¬≠ Dahye, the worst hit civilian neighborhood of southern Beirut.  There in Dahye they say that their apartments have gotten hugely more valuable now after the virtual rain of US missiles and bombs; because, finally, in spite of all the crowding of poverty, they have an ocean view.

Report Number Three from Lebanon: Occupied Palestine48

September 18, 2006

By Samia A. Halaby

As we approached the southern border and were only yards away from the many Israeli posts where invisible Zionist soldiers could and did spy on us, some members of the delegation and southern Lebanese referred to it as Israel.  I immediately reminded them that that was Palestine, occupied and learning the lessons of Hisbullah’s success.  But what I saw was neither Palestine nor southern Lebanon as I looked over the fence from the several points that we visited.  What became clear was that Israel was not the enemy of Palestine and now the enemy of Lebanon, slowly expanding its occupation, using its movable borders, its killer earth movers, its US armaments, its cowardly use of soldiers against civilians, and it racist destruction.  What disappeared was the specificity of nations and what appeared was the digestive system of imperialist greed on the march ¬≠ the greed of desperation in the background of a disintegrating capitalist economy.

I looked at the Dutchmen in the delegation and told them that if Israel bordered the Netherlands, they would be experiencing this attack and the demonization of the western press.  Israel is the face of imperialist attack, and Judaism is a pawn manipulated against Islam.  People here talk about the many different sects that will render Lebanon an arena of civil war.  Yet they overlook the basic sectarian division that is Zionist Judaism on the one side and Hisbullah Islam on the other.  The religious nature of Zionism escapes them, is made invisible by media brainwashing.  Yet, the religious aspects of Hisbullah’s Islam blinds them to its heroic accomplishments.

Hisbullah works against sectarian division within Lebanon, a divisionism promoted both on the diplomatic and military fronts.  On the political front the US does its utmost to make arrangements with sects leaving out others.  On the military front, the Israeli selective targeting of US made weapons is obvious even to a donkey.   Poor communities both Hizbullah’s Muslim and others were hit while wealthier communities — especially those Christians in the ruling class — were unharmed.  The infrastructure of the entire country was attacked in all places.  The class intentions of the Zionists and the US was studied and brutal — divide the country along class lines, kill the poor, reduce the number of workers, make them more desperate, cheapen their labor, seize their lands, and call it all the “birth pangs of a New Middle East” — that being the “Middle East” of America and Israel not the Arab national lands and homes of the Arab people.

Report Number Four from Lebanon:The Mountain of Radam and Jihad al-Bina’

September 18, 2006

On September 15, 2006, as we were returning from our trip to the south we saw the insignia of an organization of Hisbullah called Jihad al-Bina’.  Western press for obvious reasons of greed and conquest deliberately misinterprets jihad, the name ascribed to Muslim service to the community.  The Arabic word Jihad means to do one’s best.  It is what we urge children to do to earn good grades.  Refusing to understand Jihad is much like the insistence on saying that Allah is the god of the Arabs, refusing to translate this particular word as God, the same god along with the same accompanying religious discourse that forms the core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Jihad as service to the community can be military or social.  Jihad al-Bina’ is the service of building for the community.  Jihad al-Bina’ is volunteering to help beautify, build, and rebuild.  Its practice right now here in Lebanon in the southern districts of the country and of Beirut is amazing.  The energy and enthusiasm with which work is going on to rebuild the damage created by Israeli-delivered US-made weapons is amazing.  The effort is historic — rapid, vigorous, optimistic.  The jihad of evacuating disaster areas is equally amazing.  Dahye and its surroundings were evacuated in approximately 36 hours.  Now, after the war, the people have received enough money to rent a home for a year and buy new furniture.

Jihad al Bina’ also is clearing the rubble and moving it at an amazingly rapid pace to form a mountain of rubble, Jabal al Radam.  Trucks loaded with rubble arrive at the rate of one each minute — 1350 per day as the taxi driver tells.  As we climbed the mountain, we saw embedded in the rubble the torn bits of family life.  Shoes, clothes, curtains, shards of furniture, bits of rugs, closet doors, children’s books, school books, shards of kitchen utensils, all torn to shreds, all smashed, all dusty, all mixed in an ugly salad of dust, shattered cement, broken glass, and bent steel.  But the dust formed the largest percentage of the mix.  I try to imagine the power that made dust out of life.  I try to imagine the will to resist and rebuild.  What miraculous, monumental will of mankind, what determination, what beauty is leading the people to such heroism!

Meanwhile, to cover the horrors of the crime in Lebanon, the western press has been redefining the dictionary.  Terrorism is the defense of one’s own community and the preservation of its life and culture.  Democracy is the racism, apartheid, and murderousness of Zionism, the destruction of nations, the assassination of leaders, and the theft of resources.  Self Defense is the hostile killing of civilians on neighboring lands, and the bombardment and destruction of that neighbor’s land.  Freedom is the kidnapping of others, and their torture and imprisonment.  Piety is Jewish and Christian blindness to Islam.  Fascism is the moral practices of Muslims in the Arab world.

Many are confused here and everywhere.  Hizbullah keeps its head and its commitments, thus its influence with those who have no influence grows.

Report Number Five from Lebanon:

September 22, 2006

By Samia A. Halaby

Today we decided to use the public taxi called ’service’ to get to the southern village in the surrounds of Nabatiyye where we were scheduled to meet with the Nuclear Physicist, Dr. Muhamman Ali Qubeisi who claims that he found high radiation in some of the pits created by Israeli bombing in the south of Lebanon during the July 2006 attack.

Dr. Qubeisi was interested in telling us his history and his work record, all of which were both impressive and interesting.  He spoke English flawlessly as he told us all this including the fact that he was also a US citizen.

He began by giving us a background on the history of Israeli attack on the southern area of Lebanon.  We knew from other interviews that in 1948, the Israelis had grabbed a large chunk of southern Lebanon which included approximately six villages.  We knew that this fact was not well known because the villagers, in order to receive UNRWA help, said that they were Palestinian.  Dr. Qubeisi then added to our knowledge that when the Israelis occupied the south of Lebanon in 1982, they began to build settlements near the Christian area and near the sea.  Thus, when the people of the south became familiar with the continued Israeli attack on their lands, they thought of the Palestinians.  They realized the importance of resistance and supported Hisbullah who supports the cause of the Palestinians.  The people of the south know that the difficulties of Palestinian refugee life arise from the prohibitions of the Lebanese government.  Dr. Qubeisi continued, that yes, the Palestinians should return to their homes as they want to, but treating them like animals is not right and does not send them home faster.

Qubeisi continued saying that when he saw Dahye (southern neighborhood of Beirut) after the war for the first time he immediately went to the Lebanese Council on Scientific Research, a council of which he is a member and which is part of the Lebanese Atomic Energy Commission.  He asked that they meet to make a plan to test for chemical weapons and radiation.  But as they exhibited reluctance and did not reply, he published some of his finding on his own.  This brought a huge negative and angry response from members of the Council and the Commission.  He feels that he must continue to do the research, get foreign interest, and publish findings and do so quickly for the safety of the residents.  He thinks others are remaining quiet so that they would not unduly frighten people.

Dr. Qubeisi said that he tested some deep pits made by Israeli weapons and that his results indicated that there is uranium in the soil.  He measured 50 nsV on the outside rim of the pits and 300 nsV in the heart of most pits with the exception of one which measured 800 nsV.  It was explained that 50 nxV was within normal range but 800 and 300 were very hight.  However, it was conjectured by Henk Van der Keur, a member of our delegation and staff member of the Laka Foundation (Documentation and Research Center on Nuclear Energy) in the Netherlands, that if these measurements were taken from the first moment and included the ash, that the higher measures could be due to the concentration of uranium in the ash — a natural process which does not indicated the presence of nuclear weapons or the use of Depleted Uranium.  Van der Keur’s conjecture was based on measurements they took of Dr. Qubeissi’s many samples stored just outside of his house in the back yard — all of which measured within normal range.

A new delegation came and we went outside with Dr Qubeisi to meet them thinking of the importance of an expanded meeting.  It turned out to be a press delegation from Austria.  While we were meeting them, Dr. Qubeisi locked his house and apologized to us.  We begged him to open it again for us to get our things.  The other delegation and Dr. Qubeisi made their excuses and we were thus ejected.  Being out in the country with no taxi information, we begged for a ride to the nearby town where we could find a taxi.

It was then merely 11:00 am and we were in the south without a car, but at least on the edge of a town that did have lots of transportation services.  We decided to go to Bint Jbeil for a second time and do a more thorough investigation and spend time walking around the most damaged downtown area.  We took a ’service’ who asked us about a permit and we did show him ours.  A Permit is needed from the Lebanese military in order to travel to Lebanese lands south of the Litani river.  At the checkpoint, our permit turned out to be a three-day permit instead of a 40-day permit as we had been promised by the military police.  The military bureaucrat did not want to keep calling about us and our driver was impatient, so we were ejected, forced to pay our full taxi fare, and found ourselves standing in the hot sun while soldiers shunted us from spot to spot out of their way.  Lost and a bit shocked we tried to flag various vehicles.  Ten minutes after the departure of our taxi the bureaucrat waved to us that we could head south and that our pass was valid.  So we sought another taxi going in our original direction all to no avail.  Of course it all seemed bleak, hot, painful, as we stood there in total rejection between no no and then yes and maybe another no.  One of the soldiers offered to flag us a cab and told us to wait in the shade of a road sign.  The sun is hot beyond belief.  The soldier succeeded where we had failed.

We were fortunate in the driver we got even though four of us sat in the back like sardines.  He took us to his home in Hula, the communist town, and we talked with his mother and father in law and with his wife, all of whom had stayed in the area during the war.  His mother in-law was easily the individual who controlled the conversation, supported by the son-in-law, to tell what she experienced.  While we were there, the children came in, ranging in age from the oldest approximately 12 to the youngest, approximately 2 years of age.  The mother-in-law and the wife together told us the story of what happened to them.

The mother in-law began to tell us the story of their taking refuge.  When ever I made the mistake of saying shelter they would immediately correct me.  A place for refugees to gather and a shelter were clearly different and they well knew that difference.  At first they were coaxed into going to a center for a few days where they would be cared for by the Red Cross.  But there was nothing there but a bit of water to drink and no food and no facilities to bathe.  They had been rushed out and had no extra clothes with them.  After three days they braved the bombing and went home walking.  The first thing they did was begin cooking a lunch and fixing breakfast and then they bather and changed clothes.  After lunch they decided to walk uphill from their house in the country, surrounded by orchards and cultivated fields, and go stay with their in-laws up the hill in a house in town that they thought was more able to withstand the bombing.

On the way up the hill, they were pursued by missiles from the air and each time just escaped by mere yards.  Approximately 4 to five missiles were aimed at them.  One was so close that after raising her head from the spot she had hidden herself in, a spot to which she had run to thinking to throw her face onto the ground so that if the missile fire would reach her it would burn her back not her face, she could not see her husband as the air was thick with smoke and dust.  She felt that she was blind.  When she did find her husband, he had shrapnel injuries.  They did reach their destination feeling great fright.

One night as they were in the basement of the house where they sheltered with their in-laws, a missile hit the house and damaged it.  It had struck only meters away from the area they were sheltered.

The mother told us bout the children, how they all suffered from diarrhea and vomiting and fever.  The adults also suffered from it but not to the extent of the children.  Once one recovered another would get ill again.

The driver talked about the Palestinian fighters of the seventies.  He told us that he worked for Hizbullah in his youth but that now he had to leave it all because he needed to work and support his children.

He said that they have to seed and have many children against the danger that the Israelis might kill a few.  He asked us to consider, was it not better to sacrifice a few of the children now so that all who survived might live in dignity and good health.  He said that they considered how the Palestinians lived in their refugee camps, and that miserable life was not a life fit for humans, and that it was better to sacrifice in order that the whole community might survive against the Zionist enemy.

About the Palestinian fighters of the seventies, our driver said that they were good and honest and brave but that by 1978-79 they began to be silly and exploit privilege, and that foreign intelligence services had completely penetrated them and there the principle of divide-and-rule was used successfully against them.  He was persuaded that most Arab governments and much of the Arab population are more concerned with their own private pleasure and comfort than they were interested in honesty and integrity.

More details coming soon.

Report Six from Lebanon:  The Pictorial Report

September 21, 2006

All photos taken by the author, Samia Halaby, on September 21, 2006

Here is an amazing picture taken of a home in Bint Jbeil on September 21, 2006 where the front of the room had been removed by an Israeli missile and the living room is open to view from the street.  The dust and destruction reminded me of Israeli handiwork done in Palestine — especially parts that I photographed in Beit Jala, Beit Shour, and Ghazze.

This is one of the thousands of bits of color that is the remains of family life scattered among the ashes and rubble of the general destruction in the heart of the old town center.  A town center that once was full of magnificent old style stone architecture.  The shredded fluff once was the clothing of family members, or it was the curtains, mats, and rugs of the family.  The excessive power of the explosions blew them into twirls of fluff scattered here and there.

This is a photograph of the three members of the D4 delegation examining the Israeli war crime of targeting civilian life in the neighborhoods of the south of Lebanon and southern Beirut.  Here they are walking down the ancient center of the town which had many buildings that are centuries old — now turned to ruble.

This is a photo of the wasteland created by the Israelis in neighborhoods of Bint Jbeil.

This is me on September 21, 2006 standing at a lookout point where we could see a huge panorama of Palestine48 now occupied by the Zionist enemy.  Everyone I talked to agreed that this is occupied Palestine and that it will be liberated.  Immediately behind the lookout is the fence that the Israelis build and next to it a road just like those they have in the strangulation wall.  In front of me on the road is house after house that has been hit by missiles and is beyond use.  I explained to the local residents my respect of their sumoud and told them that were it not for their resistance and the heroism of their defenders, they would have been refugees like us.  They all agreed.

This was our second visit to Bint Jbeil and we saw more and more of life coming back to the town.  Here is a baby pussycat sitting on one of the stones thrown about by the bombs, a stone near the doorstep of her home, waiting for the family to return.  Note that the rubble here is of old hand hewn stones fallen from a very old house.  Behind the cat is a bit of color from a book or box.  We saw many children’s books all through the neighborhood.  Inside the windows of the homes till standing we could see extensive damage.  I had asked why the garage doors of the stores were bent in various ballooned shapes.  The answer was that the bombs created pressure that blew out all windows and doors and bent the metal garage doors of the store fronts into various ballooning shapes.

This wonderful woman stood at the newly opened door to her living room — an entire wall blown off — with the content of her home turned to rubble.  She called to us to go inside and visit.  Our time was short and we declined.

All the building in one hole — maybe thanks to those bunker busters.  This is a picture of a building in Dahye, a neighborhood of southern Beirut, now turned into a hole in the ground.   Maybe it was a bunker buster or maybe just many bombs one after the other that managed to grind a multi-story building into dust and leave it a hole in the ground and nothing more.  We will remember all this for many many generations and Israel will have to pay for its crimes.  Israel is not more than a criminal in the collective popular memory.  This photograph was taken September 18, 2006.

These are private cars that are burnt, melted, some leaning on shattered walls and rubble in Bint Jbeil.  These were outside a neighborhood of private homes.  The metal carcasses are scattered as though weightless, tossed like bugs, from the force of the Israeli bombing

This is a scant shelter where 45 people huddled during the first 14 days of Israeli bombing.  It was under a building which was severely damaged.  Their survival is a miracle as most homes surrounding this shelter were damaged well below the ground floor level.

Report Number Seven from Lebanon

September 24, 2006

Samia A. Halaby

On Thursday September 21, 2006, I returned to Bint Jbeil guiding members of the Netherlandish delegation from D4.  We walked again through the streets and I searched for our friend of the scarves store.  It was 3:30 PM and I remember her saying that she goes home at 3:00 PM.  I was sad to miss her.  But I was glad to see more signs of life in town on the main road and in parts of the old town.  We walked through the old town and I searched more carefully with my eyes for the remains of family life in the neighborhood.  I remembered the destruction in Jenin and I could see that here the destruction was more complete, more thorough.  It was as though the neighborhood was put in its entirety into a monstrous machine which ground it to dust.  We stepped in many inches of fine beige dust‚Ķdust as fine as talcum powder.

In Jenin, I saw puddles of shoes and clothing, or batches of kitchen ware, or large bits of wooden furniture in specific sections of rubble.  Here in Bint Jbeil’s old town, there were no such things.  There were, however, strange bits of colored cottony clumps of fiber.  I conjectured that the explosive power of missiles had blown things into clouds of dust and fiber and that the clothing, turned to fiber, had coalesced in the roiling air into these twirls of colored fiber with bits of stubborn woven parts.  Only in a few places, I saw complete shards of things like a fragment of a decorative lamp or a piece of a fork or metal button.

In the old town, the structural components behind the architectural style, that of arches and domes, was revealed.  Arches, cross vaults, domes, holding floors above them, revealed the stone filling between the underlying structure and the floor above.  I remember my father telling me that in his childhood, the builders, once they completed a dome would build the side walls up to the next floor then fill the hollows with rubble.  The children would then be invited to stomp it so that it would be compacted before the floor of the next level was laid.  While this was a lesson in Byzantine building methods, it was also an indication of the precious old homes of the old town now ground to talcum and rubble.  Israeli crimes against civilian life extend to crimes against the art and culture of ancient civilizations.

In the old town and up the hill of the old town, I saw and photographed several mosques which were damaged.  I saw cars on the main road burnt and bent, melted metal carcasses now cooled, tossed askew against remains of walls.  One of them must have gotten so heated that after all the parts burnt, the metal hull had melted enough to flatten down on the ground and was later tossed against a wall like the carcass of a bug flattened in a book.

As we were leaving the old town, we asked directions from some men clearing rubble and collecting scrap metal.  They asked us if we wanted to see a spot where 45 people jammed together, taking refuge from the bombing, and we said yes.  I tried to photograph the dark spot where they lit a faint little lamp for me.  I saw clothing, pillows, toys, blankets, and children’s books.  The place was low, a cellar open on one side as the house was built on the incline of a mountain.  The ceiling was low and they warned me not to strike my head.  They said everyone struck it many times each day.  I said that I would not and I walked around with my head down but in the end, as I exited, I did strike my head on the cement.

I asked the men, how it was that the town was defended and that the Israelis never got inside.  They said that they were not there and had no idea how it was done, and one of them smiled as he said that leaving us to conjecture what we might.

We finally found a cab out of Bint Jbeil.  It was hard as it was evening and no one wanted to go out of town at that late hour.  Still yet there were taxis available and the price was tourist high.  We finally found a reasonable man who for a bit extra took us to Et Tire so that we might see the family who had waved a white flag but was bombarded by a helicopter nevertheless.

Before we could go to the site where the 95-year-old mother had died after her daughter had waved a white flag, we had to get approval from Hisbullah.  This was done via human telegraph ¬≠ a method invisible to us.  The driver stopped and asked someone who ran off to ask someone and we waited till someone ran back with an OK.  As we waited In Tire we watched men clearing rubble and trucking it out of town.  Jihad al Bina’ was at work.

On the way back, our driver offered to take us to see the sites of the old and the new Qana massacres.  We took a quick look at the old site and saw the long graves with the many names.  At the new site, we were amazed to see that it had been completely floored over and had become a collective grave with special stone burials above it for the bodies of those who were killed.  Around the graves were families with children sitting in chairs surrounding the graves receiving messages of condolence from those who came to give them. Some were reading from the Koran over the graves.  Along the remaining wall of the building were placed large cards holding the name of each one of the victims.  Some had photographs of the victims in the beauty of their living selves.  Children came and went to some of them and arranged and rearranged the flowers or added some.

We saw the photograph of a fighter who had been martyred elsewhere and we saw the pictures of his children who died at Qana — pronounced Anna in Arabic.

Report Number Eight from Lebanon: The Divine Victory

September 22, 2006

Samia A. Halaby

On the way back from the south of Lebanon on Thursday September 21, 2006, we watched groups of people walking north to attend the great victory celebration planned for the following day.   By Friday noon, large crowds of people were already gathered at the site of the big celebration.  By three in the afternoon, it was a sea of yellow flags waved by millions of supporters of Hisbullah.  As much as I would have wanted to be there, I decided that it was wiser to go watch it on TV with a friend.  As I arrived, the opening reading had just finished.  My friend said she cried at the mention of those who died because she remembered how many Arabs had died in recent decades due to Western oppression.  As Nasrallah talked, we admired his style and his honesty, and my turn came to feel sad when he talked about Palestine and made his promises to Palestine.

Nasrallah is clearly a nationalist leader completely in touch with and animated by popular support.  He talks directly to the people at hand.  He does not give them ample time to cheer.  They, in their millions, go to total silence the minute he starts talking again.  What western leader could claim such popular support?  Maybe in their dreams!

I noticed that everyone in Lebanon was talking about the sectarian divisions but Nasrallah reminded them that there were no sectarian disagreements, but rather political divisions.  This was excellent but fell short, of course, of clarifying these political divisions as being divisions along class lines.

Another important aspect was his leadership in regard to Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, including them in the general Arab nation and urging unity and liberation, and the cessation of sectarian struggle in Iraq.  He made clear his disregard of Arab states and their governmental leadership.

Nasrallah praised the Lebanese military and called them brothers and said that it was the government, the disunited government, which was responsible for turning them into an adding machine of Israeli incursions rather than the heroic men that they were.  He added that they must be armed with modern weapons.

Nasrallah urged everyone to work for an honest, clean, moral, responsible, united government.  He said that personalities are not important but that all should work for such a government of Lebanon — a government that is not Hisbullah but rather a strong Lebanon.

He also declared that they, Hisbullah, are stronger now militarily than they were before the war and that they will never use their weapons against a single Lebanese.  He said that weapons are not forever and that once, at some future time, there is a safe and defensible Lebanon, Hisbullah’s weapons would naturally become unnecessary.

Nasrallah also clarified and stressed how this victory was historic and that it was a victory not for Hisbullah but for all Lebanon, for Palestine, and for the entire Arab Nation and for all the poor and oppressed all over the world.  Pride and optimism were clearly the message he communicated.

Amazingly, the huge crowd came and went without tragedy or undue difficulties for the city of Beirut.  All over the streets, people were happy and banners waved in the air declaring the victory to be a divine victory.  The banners also bore respectful messages congratulating the people for their victory, commending their dignity, and their will to resist.  Beiruties were to their vast majority in support of the victory celebration.  So it was a great beautiful day without any problems.  That is because everyone in Lebanon has the quality of making things work.  Little problems and little knots dissolve in the general willingness to grease the motion of life, to make a bit of livelihood, to respect others, to laugh a little.  If the Palestinian trait is stubbornness, then the Lebanese trait is clearing the little problems.

And while the people of Lebanon were in motion, happy in their Nasrallah, in New York, some people were cheering and doing.  I received the email message that I reproduce in its entirely below.  It is like the beautiful horizon opposite the sunrise reflecting its beauty.

(talking about Hisbullah stickers) yay, yay they are here and all over the place. They came last Tuesday.

Everyone loves them. Bill jumped up and down and giggled like a little kid given free reign in a candy store, and my neighborhood buddies have been getting them out EVERY WHERE! NYC, Brooklyn, queens and Bronx and that is folks from here going out there to work etc. and they give some to friends and so on.

We had a concert in Tompkins square and I spoke and announced the 30th of sept. and the m.c. announced it 2 more times during the show. and he had a sticker on.  One of the band members had one on his guitar.

I saw folks wearing them at the show.  Punk rockers and hip hop fans, and even a few hippies.  They are on the poles and every where here.

The folks where you are now would love it.  Some kids even put them on their jackets and back packs.  One of my friends even laminated one on to a button to wear.

Some one put one on the handle of the cop shop in the neighborhood on Tuesday night and it is still there!!!!  And here it is Monday.  They have been staying up and not many have been removed.  I walked by the cop shop and there it was.  He told me he did it but it is a whole other story when you see it for yourself.  I walked by on Friday and I held in a lauding attack from hell and pretended I was coughing.  I had to hold it in because I was by myself and didn’t want people to think I was one of those nut jobs laughing like crazy and I’m by myself.  So I held it in until I got to tribes and told Steve and we both cracked up laughing so hard it hurt.

One of my friends told me that he and four others where hanging out in the park and they all had stickers on their shirts and when they sat down, these 2 “Israelis” sitting there completed bugged out in fear and RAN out of the park, looking back in fear as they galloped the hell out of there, and my friends laughed so hard.  And they are mixed, one is Puerto Rican , 2 of them black , one Korean and the other one is white.  They are part of our neighborhood crew.

So tell your pals there that NYC is flying the flag!!

I am sooooooo happy!!!

yay!

Report Number Nine from Lebanon: A swim at the beach

September 23, 2006

By Samia A. Halaby

We arrived at the beach, one which is built out of cement balconies of many levels over rock next to the famous landmark called Al-Rauche.  On the cement slabs were many spots of oil, some large pools and some small splatters.  They colored my feet and took a lot of scrubbing to remove.  Yellow awnings were discolored with various tints of tarry oil.  The deck chairs in the hundreds had had to be replaced.  Now they were all new.  Red floating rectangular volumes of plastic were tinted with oil.  I asked what they were and someone said that they had to do with the clean-up.  The many floats chained together to mark the safety zone for swimmers were all black.  As I had approached the beach from a distance, I had thought them all heads of hair, people swimming far out into the water as normal.  But no, no one was in the sea.  People swam in the pool filled with cleaned sea-water, and they lounged under the umbrellas looking over the beautiful ocean.  I stayed with my friend to attend the sunset.  And, it did set slowly turning redder and reminding me of my childhood days on the beaches of Yafa — beautiful Arab Yafa, the bride of the sea, occupied