Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 November 2016
Nawal el Saadawi : Egyptian feminist, author, and acitivist.
“ I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes. It was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few minutes ago.”
Tuesday, 1 November 2016
Beat Generation Impact On Moroccan Youth
" I
saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging
themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded
hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night,
who
poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who
bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who
passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who
were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene
odes on the windows of the skull. " Howl, Allen Ginsberg
Two
years ago I was quite depressed, I had been undergoing a rough
breakup, my mood was very suicidal in away, nihilist to an extent
until I discovered Allen Ginsberg and it was the best thing that ever
happened to me. By the time I had an online friend ho had this
middle-aged bearded man on his facebook cover picture, with a link to
HOWL, I was raging with curiosity to discover more about the
mysterious hippie, he looked so free, independent, and careless, my
friend later on advised me to read Howl, the first time I was taken
by the Jazzy Rhythm, later on while I was confiding my misery to my
friend, he said that I should listen to the recorded Howl, and read
it along out loud, and feel the words running through my veins.
Beat
Generation or Beat Movement is the result of political, economic and
literary frustration, it is a generation that sought liberation from
all these constraints, and wanted to get rid of formal ways of
dealing with poetry, they were politically engaged, and most of them
were drop outs, or jobless. Beat stands for weary, and it also
connotes a musical sense, a spiritual movement. Inclusiveness of the
beat generation. Popular culture.
the
beat generation relationship with the hippie movement. Basically, the
hippies are the result of the beat generation, the term hip was first
used by Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Also, both movements share
the same values which are love, peace, and liberation. The hippies
wanted to alienate themselves from the standard American way of
living, and the protested by dropping out of society, by living in
communal groups, or the cult of traveling or going into the
wilderness. Actually wilderness represented the primitive, natural,
and authentic way of living they felt they needed in order to feel
spiritual and meaningful, on the hand one can easily notice the
second hand store clothes, the unshaved beards and long haired males
and females in addition to the spread of naturist culture and
behavior, on the other hand the hippies and beat generation
engagement were all against the modern destructive consumerist
culture and the Vietnam war, most hippies were vegetarians or vegans,
and the hippies are the ones to invent and celebrate Earth Day for
the first time. To conclude both the hippies, and Beatniks were a
result of the political sphere and decisions of America, and are a
reaction against war, capitalism, and climate destruction.
Allen
Ginsberg, at least for me, is the main figure of the beat generation,
and his poetry is universal, prophetic, and timeless. Discovering the
poems of Allen Ginsberg for the first time felt like salvation, like
I was redeemed, and the fact that he and I don’t share the same
culture, nor language just shows the universality of his poems, the
generation described in his poems is not only the American generation
of the fifties, it is every generation living under a capitalist,
consumerist, violent, and unjust regime, it is every generation
living In a culture of conservatism, homophobia, and exclusiveness in
general.
In
my country, Morocco, more young people are turning to the beatnik
culture without knowing it, at least most of them don’t know it
yet. First reason I see is the influence
of the Beat Generation on American pop culture, music and film
mainly, for example the movie Into The
Wild is widely appreciated among youngsters, actually every year
hundreds if not thousands of Moroccans hitchhike through the woods
and mountains of Morocco, or go the Essaouira Festival, which is an a
Gnaoua festival where you can notice the crazy long hair, and afro
haircuts, hippie way of dressing, in addition to the drug use during
the festival, two examples of the effect of the beat generation in
Morocco is Anass Yakine, a young Moroccan who dropped out of
university to spend two years walking around the country and who is
now quite a popular figure in Morocco, second example is Djebli Club,
an ecological commune located in Mokrisset, near ouazzane City, which
has became last year a popular destination for people with
alternative or beatnik minds. Second reason for turning to beatnik
values is to escape injustice, violence, and intolerance committed
both by the state, and the traditional Moroccan society.
Showing
the influence of the Beat generation on American society is best done
from a literary perspective. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee
Williams, William Burroughs, William Carlos William, Jimi Hendrix and
a lot of the modern and postmodern literary and artistic figures of
America used to frequently visit Tangier, in fact Paul Bowles lived
his last fifty years in Morocco, and he had a huge impact on a
generation of writers and musicians, mainly on a distinguished
Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri.
Mohamed
Choukri in his first book “For Bread Alone”, which he wrote in
jail and later on collaborated with Bowles to translate into English,
tells us the story of his family who was driven by famine from Rif to
Tangier when he was still a kid, to find himself later on homeless, a
kid to face a big crowded city such as tangier. For Bread Alone
depicts the underground or the rough aspect of the Moroccan society,
it brings in controversial and sensitive topics that were for ages
hidden under the rug, such as prostitution, homelessness,
homosexuality, and famine, it also deals with the political context
of the 40s and 50s. For Bread Alone was described by Tennessee
Williams as, “A true story of human desperation, shattering in its
impact”, in fact the two authors were close friends, and there is a
collection of there correspondences available.
As
Howl, when For Bread Alone was published in 1972 it was hugely
attacked, specially after it was published in classical Arabic in
1982. You can compare Mohamed Choukri’s masterpiece to Jack
Kerouac’s On The Road in terms of tone, both of them were written
and expressed in slang and underground culture, both depict the
immediacy of experience which carries with it moving emotions.
In
the near future I will get into details and analysis of beat
generation poetry and literature, and also some of the Moroccan
postmodern writers as a sequel to this introductory article.
Sunday, 18 September 2016
A debate of two lost souls. The Sunset Limited.
I don’t believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There’s a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men’s hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and everything that you have chosen to care for. There’s the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?" -----White.
Today’s material is a play, a debate, a serious poignant soulful conversation between two men. This debate confronts you with the most delicate and grim topics, death, family, suffering, and meaning, this play is perfectly written, full of emotions, as well as an intellectual and spiritual journey for its readers. The setting is nothing but a room in a small tenement in a ghetto in Manhattan, New York, it is animated by only two nameless characters whom the playwright chose to call by their racial roots, Black and White. The play explores the clashes between two different cultures, races, classes, ideologies and beliefs in a very moving debate.
There is not a precise or complicated plot in the play, except for the pretext, Black was on his way work, White was on his way to off himself, until Black intruded in his suicide, brought him back to him place where they debate about existence, and nonexistence, where Black desperately wants to convince White not to attempt killing himself again.
The first character is an ex-convict, a man of religion, he was convicted after killing several people, yet he claims it wasn’t the worst thing he has ever done, he is black, uneducated but smart, an old man seeking redemption, while the second character is a middle class white man, a man who is cultivated, loves art, literature, and music, at least he used to, he is a nihilist, suicidal, and pessimist, a soulless individual yearning for nonexistence
The two men embody a class of cultures, represent two separate perspectives on religion, suicide, suffering, and meaning. Basically the difference in terms of education is a milestone in the debate, first you have the white man who is great with words, he has read thousands of books in his lifetime, while the black man speaks slang southern English, the bible is the only book he believes should be read, and as the debate gets more intense both characters face the question of how much our misery is caused by our education, would we be happier not being able to see the world as it is? in other words, White can’t undo his perspective, while the Black doesn’t want to see life as it is in order to be happy, and sane, for both of them, there was this point of questioning weather they can start anew, in fact Black while being hospitalized in the jailhouse, he was a murderer, a criminal, then he was reborn after he felt God’s presence, but for White, the concept of God is something we create to start anew, to avoid guilt, he can’t seek redemption in a world doomed to suffer.
Their debate also covers the quest for meaning, Black finds meaning in solidarity, in brotherhood, and in God, but those things never gave White meaning, and the things he valued were frail and fragile, lost their charm in a sense, he used to find meaning in, as he calls it, the foundations of civilization, music, art and culture. Black and White’s perspectives are influenced by class, not generalizing, but poorer countries are the most religious, so is the case for Black.
The debate of the play is the contrast between two individuals who have and lack what pins them to existence, what gives them meaning, but it extends as most philosophical fiction or drama to show how we relate to the things that give us meaning, what keeps us alive, and up how much of our daily lives we spend on denying the cruelty of existence, or on rejecting the lack of a prior meaning to our existence. To accentuate, for example the difference between a political activist, specially in current monarchies or for example in Saudi Arabia, see repression and fight it, while the remaining citizens are not stupid or don’t have an opinion as much as they are terrorized to see the repression that befalls them and acknowledge it as it is, because in doing so they will feel like a failure, hence our relationship with existence, we don’t want to complicate life, we don’t want to think about things on a grand scale, deep down we all know that we are ill-fated to live in a meaninglessness.
Furthermore, responsibility and lack of duty are very important in religions to keep people alive. Religions provide individuals with a sense of belonging to a community, thus a sense of responsibility for their kins that give them sort of a meaning I their life, but without religions, a lot of atheists consider that nature in general is our home, collective home, and we have to be responsible of preserving it all of us, the thing that gives them purpose, but for WHITE building communities is a desperate move towards fulfillment, because they are as meaningless and painful as existence, and it if for this reasons he desires death, death has no communities. White doesn’t feel obliged to be responsible for other people.
This book is a must read for any person, it gives a insightful perspective of how people relate to what gives them meaning, either you were nihilist or essentialist, religious or atheist you will find your way to relate to it.
Friday, 16 September 2016
Banned Books, Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan.
There are boys lying awake, hating themselves. There are boys screwing for the right reasons and boys screwing for the wrong ones. There are boys enraptured by love that they can’t get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love they can’t stop picking at their pain. There are boys who clutch secrets at night in the same way they clutch denial in the day. There are boys who do not think of themselves at all when they dream. There are boys who will be woken in the night. There are boys who fall asleep with phones to their ears.
I just finished reading Two Boys Kissing few minutes ago, then I went for a cigarette as my mind is sorting out the emotions in my head, I feel angry and satisfyingly proud of the achievements of our community, although on a grand universal scale the war for freedom is still fiercely being fought, in the twenty first century people are still being decapitated or jailed for being gay. I haven’t posted anything on the blog for a while because I had too much on mind and couldn’t focus on anything else, my family just found out that I am gay, they are in denial about it, they’re acting very weird, like they don’t want to lose me for something so sinful and disgusting, so they are holding on, avoiding, moping, they are trying to get closer to me, they ask me about my friends specially my male friends and how I got to know them and stuff, indirectly picking out the-might-be sex friend or boyfriend. I thought of escaping to the one thing I know best which is reading, I thought of The Destiny of Me, by Larry Kramer to make me feel better, a sense of consoling solidarity, to remind myself of who I am, to weep as the main character loses himself in his painful childhood memories, but that play led me to think of a book closer in theme, and closer to my experience and heart, Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan.
Two Boys Kissing tells, simultaneously, the story of eight characters as they come to terms with their sexualities and gender, as they define themselves, as they are defined and challenged by others, eight characters that are although very separate physically, still they connect, in fact essential to each others in ways they don’t yet recognize. The two main characters are the one performing a kiss, a kiss that will set up the Guinness record of the longest kiss, in fact the kiss did happen outside the story of David Levithan in 2013, in the book it is performed by Craig and Harry, former boyfriends, but yet they did it together to show the world that love is equal, that two boys kissing is okay, bu they did it after Tariq, another character in the book, got beaten up in the street by some homophobic group of guys, in fact they did know him only after this incident.
The books takes us into the the lives of five other character, Cooper, Avery, Ryan, Peter and Neil. Cooper is very hard on himself, he is always behind the screen of his laptop, taking refuge in sex gay apps talking to strangers but never meeting any of them, because it is so hard for him to accept that his sexuality is not only virtual, that it extends to his real life, but he had to confront that when his parents find out that he is gay from his online conversations, which came as shock to them specially in the way they found out, Cooper finds himself aimlessly in the street with his beat down self. Avery has pink hair, and Ryan has blue hair, they meet in a gay prom, they danced and exchanged numbers in hope to get catch up; Avery is a boy born in the body of a girl, and he is undergoing a transition to his real skin, so we get a peak at how it feel to grow up in a different skin, how it is hard to be born in the wrong body, and most of all how hard to find love when you had to explain to people all of this, but Ryan is different, Ryan understands, their relation is so sweet and cute, it makes you want to fall in love. Then there is Peter and Neil, in fact Neil is the character that made me want to read this book all over again, I weirdly relate to him now because I am going through the same thing with my family, his Korean background and my own north African background are both alienated from the other characters, his family and my family are both in denial and avoiding the unpleasant fact of our sexualities, Neil and I both feel lost between acceptance and rejection.
The perspective of the story is the most interesting in the book regarding the style of writing, the story is told from the view a Greek Chorus of gays who died of AIDS, they are the ones who takes us around and tells us about the characters, they also tell us about the change from their time up to now. They are very important in the book, they had to be present to witness a memorable and challenging event such as two boys setting the world record of the longest kiss, they add the item of nostalgia and wisdom to the book, sometimes you feel like they are directly talk to you which makes it more engaging and emotional. Walt Whitman poetry in the book signifies the change between the two eras, in the old times where they used to read his poetry in their closets, and in nowadays where it is celebrated and read in public.
The eight characters all go through a situation so violent and intense, some of them have a breakdown in their family kitchen asking for recognition , for approval from their parents like Neil, while Cooper got punched by his dad, was called a whole, was denied oblivion. Avery had to deal with people’s stares when he went for girls’ bathroom, and as we learned it is a day-to-day struggle, Ryan got humiliated by some homophobic peers, almost got beaten up he and Avery. Tariq was hospitalized after a very violent homophobic attack. Craig and Harry during the kiss endure physical pain, and the outrage of homophobic protesters, and Craig had to deal alone with his parents not supporting him, not coming back to witness and celebrate his accomplishment, in addition to all the memories of his relationship with Harry coming back all at once, like an unfinished business.
Nonetheless, the book also shows the positive side, the solidarity of family, specially moms and the cause the kiss is defending. Family is a central theme in the book, the eight characters come from very different backgrounds, some families like Harry’s are there to support their son with all they could, some of them can’t really stomach it, others slowly start to come to terms with it, and finally some freak out that their outrage will result them losing their son. The book explore how far can go to harm you and make you feel bad about yourself, but at the same there will be those who lift us up, make us feel better, take our hands the whole way through.
Two Boys Kissing has been challenged since it came out, conservative claim that it has sexual explicit language, and others conceal their homophobia behind the cover, they say it is inappropriate for kids to see two boys kissing in a bookstore, or in their school libraries. Actually, it is considered one the ten most challenged books of the year according to Office Of Intellectual Freedom, what is more confusing is that most of these books mentioned deal with LGBTQ+ issues, so the question is not about suitability of these books for the young readers as much as it is purely homophobia. Some parents claim that the book doesn’t appeal to a wide audience, and it is provokingly against school libraries policies, but at the same school libraries you find straight couples kissing, which only proves the point.
David Levithan wrote the book to show the progress the LGBT community is undergoing, yet expose the homophobia that backfires whenever it gets the chance, and his point is accurate considering the attack on the book.
Tuesday, 30 August 2016
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a novel about the ambivalences of life, the dual nature of things, the randomness of life, and kitsch of politics, religion, and people’s choices. The book starts by Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return, Kundera suggests that we only live once, therefore we are ignorant of the value or drastic consequences of our choices simply because we have not lived another life, we don’t have other repeated experiences to compare our choices with, that we have no way of knowing what is meaningful or not since we only have to make one choice, walk one path, and thus reducing the possible turns our life might take either for good or bad. Life is a chess game, once you start playing, there is no turning back.
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory or test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.
we cannot know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives, nor perfect it in our lives to come
Kundera, unlike Albert Camus, perceives the meaninglessness of the universe as unbearable. Lightness rings the bells of positivity, but in terms of existence it is painful. Kundera in different passages keeps making comparisons between the human and the nonhuman experiences , how we are tormented by our consciousness. The novel is full of dualities, soul and body, privacy and publicity, love and sex, lightness and heaviness.
The Unbearable lightness of being is a novel, so we have the talk about the literary aspect of it. Kundera’s novel reminds me a lot of 1984 by George Orwell, it is set up in a world full of crisis, the 80s in a communist Czech invaded by the Soviets, in a world where there is no room for freedom of speech, nor for privacy under strict surveillance system. But Kundera chose four worn down characters, four of them seeking acceptance, lightness, adventure, and sex. Kundera is giving us a grotesque peek in the era through dreamy characters, heavy characters, and light characters.
These four characters represent the pillars of society, Tomas the surgeon, Tereza the photo journalist, Sabina the artist, and Franz the intellectual, but they’re disappointed and distrustful when it comes to politics, love, and sexuality. All of them are trying to escape a world into a lighter or heavier one, for Tereza she is yearning for a world where she doesn’t feel objectified, where she doesn’t feel like a pile of meat, a world free of her mother and infidelities, but infidelities and betrayal are at the core of the artistic and sexual life of Sabina, who betrayed her destiny and her history that is loaded with restrictions, and ideals, her betrayals make her life light. For Tomas life is a random collection of fortuities, and coincidences, for him love and sex are two separate things one for pleasure and the other to discover, and to reveal the “I” of his partners, but for Franz sex is a sacred thing, he believes only by being public can one live in truth, he is so romantic about demonstrations and parades, they represent for him what is real.
These four characters come to know each other by random circumstances, they lose contact in random circumstances, and they die in random circumstances, so random and human they are.
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is more of a philosophical novel, that a literary novel. One of the interesting things I got from the novel is the notion of kitsch. Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word, it excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. Kundera playfully expressed his opinions about politics, and social movements using this notion of Kitsch. Totalitarian kitsch that denies people their individualism, their artistic creativity, their sexual orientations, and their equal rights.
Tomas is disappointed both at the soviet union kitsch, and the editor and the comrades kitsch. Both of them wanted to misuse his words, both of them have death lurking behind, both of them wanted him to sign things he didn’t right.
For Sabina, her life was full of kitsch, first communism kitsch, and later on in her artistic life. A lot of artists dealt with censorship in that era, a lot of them had been called degenerate, they were harshly attacked.
By kitsch, Kundera claims that everything is just a dream, a fantasy, and only true theoretically. His characters are apolitical, not in the sense that they’re ignorant, but consciously apolitical.
The things that give our lives meaning have ridiculous roots. For Tomas and Tereza, their love is what makes their lives meaningful, but looking back at how they came to love each others we find that it was just a coincidence, Beethoven, room number six, the dog waking up at six. They could have fallen in love with a million other possible people. Even Sabina came to be an artist in a ridiculous way.
