Because the Lahore High Court’s head exploded and it has now blocked Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Internet services (except for email) on Blackberrys, and as of a few minutes ago, Gmail and GOOGLE.
Twitter might be next or WordPress or Blogspot, because bloggers have this irritating habit of blogging.
I have to run out now and buy some postage stamps. So long and thanks for all the clicks!
1. Journalistic deep thoughts, brought to you by Reuters’ Myra MacDonald who went in search of Kipling’s characters:
I had not expected Pakistan’s tribal areas to be so neat and so prosperous.
These are meant to be the badlands, mythologised as no-go areas by Kiplingesque images of xenophobic Pashtuns, jezail musket in hand, defying British troops from rugged clifftops.
MacDonald makes the raging discovery that Kipling might’ve been a tad inaccurate. After being taken around on a helicopter tour of the the region by the Pakistani Army which was hoping to show that it’s making headway in its war in the tribal areas, MacDonald’s observes, “At the very least, the myth of the “ungovernable” tribal areas — so beloved of Raj-era tales — has been broken.” A perfect message in sync with what the Pak Army wants the foreign journalists to take home, all under cover of breaking Orientalist racist “myths”. Reporter and author Mary Ann Weaver apparently didn’t get the memo. In the preface to the new edition of Pakistan: Deep Inside the World’s Most Frightening State, she writes, “One of my most vivid images was of decay…of the breakdown of law and order, as dark-haired, dark-eyed men moved through the villages with AK-47s slung from their shoulders, swaying gently against their hips.” Guns and hips. Violence and sex. It’s orientalist writing at its finest. The subjection of ‘brown’ men to the sexual gaze of a white woman. I cannot but helplessly think of Lynndie England’s photographs. We are treated to this passage on Khyber-Pakhtunkwa (formerly NWFP) a few pages later:
…these tribal lands have beguiled and fascinated, bewitched and repelled, potential conquerors for thousands of years.
I had first come to the Pakistani border regions to cover the jihad, a war that was never fully resolved….It was a war of contradictions and confusions [oh Tavernise couldn't do it better!] a war fought in Kipling’s world, between independent peoples and independent tribes whose ancient codes of honor and animosities have coalesced to make this one of the most volatile, dangerous, yet fascinating places on earth. And the war’s contradictions were, in ever sense, mirrored here, in the jihad’s staging area: Pakistan.
And here are more journalists giving us reasons to junk the media: this is a roundup of Reuters gems of un-knowledge about Central Asia, here’s one on Somalia, and this is one on Zimbabwe. And, here’s Pakistani news show host Talat Hussein’s list of what he hates about foreign media and reporters.
2. One of our cultural elite gets schooled by a Laotian restaurant owner. Writing about her move to Vietnam in this week’s Newsline magazine, Pakistani reporter Muna Khan has an amusing anecdote about the night Obama gets was elected to office that says scores about the discursive maps of the Pakistani elite and their allegiances. Khan doesn’t pause to reflect on this moment, but I certainly did:
I travelled to Laos all by myself…and watched Obama make his acceptance speech at a Laotian restaurant and felt so overwhelmed that I cried, which prompted the owner of the restaurant to ask, “Why you cry? He gonna bum your country.”
Bummer.
3. The creme of the elite: An excellent review of Fatima Bhutto’s new book Songs of Blood and Sword by Manan Ahmed. The book has been roundly criticized in Pakistan causing Fatima Bhutto to throw 140 character long tantrums on Twitter lashing out at her critics. She’s also thus far refused to give an interview to a Pakistani station (though that may have more to do with her non-existent Urdu language skills much like her cousin, Bilawal or her auntie, Benazir, when she began her political career) though she’s been traipsing around western media outlets.
Still wondering whether she’ll take up Manan’s suggestion that the Bhutto papers be turned into a public archive so that the rest of us can have a crack at them. They would serve us better than her, um…book.
I’ve been running around a lot for the past few days, and I’m still not done. But, I’ve been thinking about female comics, particularly standup comics, for the past few days…mostly because I watched Date Night and Tina Fey was AWESOME. She’s the only female comic I can remember since I started to have some memory of these things, who manages to be a comic and a female without that ending up in some bizarre overly-sexualized carcicature. Most female standup comics seem to be fighting that one way or the other: either they embrace it and play a sexpot with a sense of humour or they reject it or they go out of their way to tell dumb sex-related jokes to show they can be just as raunchy as the men. This is the conundrum of feminism in America these days generally, I think.
Anyway, a long way of saying, I ran across a commencement speech that Gilda Radner gave in 1980 at yes, the Columbia Journalism School, one of the places I’ve passed through. So here it is. Enjoy!
Today, I happened to re-read a bit of Partha Chatterjee’s critique of liberal and conservative (and Marxist -see Benedict Anderson) theories of nationalism, and it reminded me of this op-ed recently published in the International Herald Tribune (IHT) about modernity in Pakistan. Note: I do agree with the author about the need to “let Pakistan make its own progress”, but dammit, the route she takes to get there, really sucks and it’s dangerous. Here’s why. Chatterjee first.
Chatterjee argues that both conservative and liberal theories of nationalism fundamentally share the same Enlightenment-era beliefs about Rationality and Progress. The main debate between them then is whether non-Europeans have the ability to grasp these notions, to in effect, become ‘civilised.’ The conservatives say “no”: non-Europeans are mired in “traditional loyalties” masquerading as modern political organisations. That’s why nationalisms in the post-colonial world are such bloodthirsty, regressive exercises. The liberals say “yes”: give them time and these ‘backward’ features will disappear, modernisation will take hold and
once the conditions that are detrimental to progress are removed there is no reason why they should not also proceed to approximate the values that have made the West what it is today. But neither side can pose the problem in a form in which the question can be asked: why is it that non-European colonial countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control? [1]
Modernity is inscribed as European modernity, and even that becomes a caricature of itself in much impressionistic reportage. So, back to the article. What are Ms. Naviwala’s signs of Pakistani modernity? Back when she moved her family to Pakistan in the 1990s and lived there for a maximum of 6 years, there were “shootings in mosques, kidnappings, violent break-ins and streetside executions if you belonged to the wrong ethnic group.” It was bad, really really bad:
Worse than the violence, for a Pakistani-American child, was that Pakistan was boring. As far as I am concerned, Pizza Hut was the only good thing that happened to Pakistan in those years. Prior to that, there was no American fast food in Karachi, let alone malls or highways. You couldn’t even find a decent candy bar.
But now, well now, on her recent trip to Karachi, Naviwala noticed:
I never imagined that I would see Pakistan the way I saw it this summer, after a mere 14 years. Karachi today looks like any major, cosmopolitan city — movie theaters, restaurants, and cafés full of boys and girls smoking, in jeans, mingling together.
More women are finishing college and getting jobs, and they have traded traditional baggy shalwars for trousers and capris. The city has been aggressively transformed by a mayor so impressively capable that he seems misplaced in a culture of corrupt politicians and broken bureaucracies.
This is Naviwala’s laundry list of modernity: American fast food, malls, highways (to get to the malls), Pizza Hut, movie theatres, restaurants, smoking, jeans, and capris. First, I’d advise Naviwala to step off posh Zamzama Blvd and have a look around the rest of the city. Second, what’s the point here exactly? That if Pakistanis didn’t zip over to malls dressed in jeans and engorge themselves on Pizza Hut, then what…Pakistanis should be bombed and killed? Because that’s what she’s arguing: Pakistan is becoming modern–that is, it’s a mini-America–so don’t bomb it. WTF? This is a peculiarly liberal style of argument that Uday Mehta also discussed in Liberalism and Empire. Rather than being external to liberal thought, empire can be thought out within the liberal paradigm. (Mehta discusses J.S. Mills.) In Naviwala’s statements, there’s more than a little racism, unintentional though it may be, because Pakistanis are only pardoned on account of them being like us, her liberal readers who so gleefully lap up these slipshod arguments that feed American and European nationalisms by fortifying their sense of their imagined communities. This is an op-ed, but much ‘objective’ reporting looks the same, teasing out symbols. That’s what description is. It’s not just filler space, but ways to get the reader–liberal, objective–cues as to how to read a story. And often, that reading–when it comes to reporting politics in the Muslim world or frankly anything in the Muslim world–has to do with inscribing national ideologies into apparently objective stories.
Third, what interests me is that what’s on offer here is consumption packaged as modernity. Fourth, women, or at least their bodies, play a special role here. Naviwala mentions capris; elsewhere she mentions burqas and “traditional dress”, a perfect collusion between liberal feminism and capitalism. Take a look at this if in doubt.
And in case you don’t think that’s what she’s arguing, this is what she says of Afghanistan:
Pakistan is a different story from Afghanistan — it is far more developed and modern. Afghans may not have the ability to lead themselves out of this mess, but Pakistanis do.
Fuck those backward, un-malled, un-jeaned mofos. Signs of us/modernity are lacking in Afghanistan. That’s why, after all, Afghanistan is the good war. Culture–that big word–is just another tool of war. And now, a “cultural unit” has been set up among British troops in Afghanistan to understand the locals better. According to Air Vice-Marshal Andy Pulford, assistant chief of the defence staff responsible for operations,
The unit “will help improve the military understanding and appreciation of the region, its people and how to do business there”
Presumably the business of how to kill them.
1. Partha Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Perhaps because I feel there are lessons to be learned from the African-American experience for immigrant Muslims in America today, or simply because I find James Baldwin’s essays brilliant, I’ve been looking him up. Here’s Baldwin reviewing Langston Hughes for the NYT (1959):
Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts–and depressed that he has done so little with them. A real discussion of his work demands more space than I have here, but this book contains a great deal which a more disciplined poet would have thrown into the waste-basket (almost all of the last section, for example).
If only, among Pakistanis, we had similar critics now with the intellectual courage and honesty to take on the second-rate writing that passes for Pakistani English language literary production these days. Hasn’t anyone noticed how god-awful much of it is?
Some other notes:
As part of the class of the over-educated and underpaid, I’d say it’s not just academia that the myth of academic meritocracy affects, but nonetheless, a thought-provoking piece about the ‘Life of the Mind’:
The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
Unable even to consider that something might be wrong with higher education, mom and dad begin to think there is something wrong with their daughter, and she begins to internalize that feeling.
Everyone has told her that “there are always places for good people in academe.” She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there’s something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.
This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What’s left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?
Find the whole article here. Speaking of, watch out for my friend Shamus Khan’s forthcoming book on schools and the production of the elite. Very eye-opening.
