Danny Postel

“[Tunisian dictator] Ben Ali’s departure on January 14, 2011 released a host of formerly unaired and long-suppressed grievances. After decades of repression, many Tunisians are talking openly across the political table—hearing one another’s views in an atmosphere of free debate for the very first time. This process of self-reckoning has proven both exhilarating and immensely frightening for many Tunisians, some of whom are shocked to see their so-called Islamist party rejecting a fully sharia-based constitution, others of whom find it difficult to fathom that their seemingly secular state could be the site of antiblasphemy protests and pro-niqab rallies.”

This observation from the Tunisia scholar Monica Marks remains as relevant today as when she made it six months ago and very much resonates with my own experience over the last ten days in the small but hugely pivotal North African country. It was here, after all, in December 2010, that the cascade of uprisings that would convulse the Arab world got going.

This was my first time in a country so soon after a revolution. I was in Cuba forty years after its revolution and Iran twenty-eight years after its own. But in Tunisia the revolution is hot off the presses—literally. Since the dictatorship of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled just over two years ago, Tunisia has seen an explosion of newspapers, TV stations, and websites giving voice to a plethora of opinions. Under the twenty-three years of Ben Ali’s rule, Tunisian media were purely an organ of state propaganda. No independent outlets were allowed, no dissent tolerated.

I never visited Tunisia before the revolution, so I can’t speak from first-hand experience, but Tunisians are quick to emphasize how different the atmosphere is today. Last Monday I spent the afternoon with Mongi (pronounced “Moan Jee”) Smaili, a professor of economics at the University of Tunis and a researcher with the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT). We were discussing Tunisia’s increasingly contentious political landscape while strolling down Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the central thoroughfare of Tunis, when he paused to reflect on the experience. “Before the revolution,” he remarked, “this conversation that we’re having would have been dangerous.” Ben Ali’s security forces, he said, would have approached him after our visit and grilled him about who I was, how he knew me, why we were together ,and what we were talking about.

“Now,” he explained, “we’re free to talk to anyone we want, about anything we want, without fear.”

And this from someone who is sharply critical of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that has been at the helm of Tunisia’s current governing coalition since winning the country’s first postrevolutionary elections, held in October 2011. But on this point every Tunisian I spoke with, across the political spectrum, agreed: the one unquestionable achievement of the revolution is the freedom of expression now enjoyed in the country. And Tunisians are taking advantage of that new breathing space. This new spirit in the country was palpable everywhere I went. Taxi drivers, students, waiters, bureaucrats, intellectuals, housewives, and trade unionists all volunteered passionate opinions about the current political situation, and dramatically different ones. Some expressed strong approval of Ennahda, others strong disapproval. And Ennahda’s opponents claim allegiance to several different parties: some to the centrist secular party Nidaa Tounes, others to the Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing parties. For all the challenges Tunisians face—and there are many—they have now entered the realm of multiparty democracy and are engaged in a spirited debate about the country’s future.

Anxiety is also widespread, and on the rise—particularly since the assassination in early February of leftist opposition leader Chokri Belaid. The investigation into his murder is ongoing, and impatience is growing. This event has rattled Tunisian society, in part because political violence is so rare in the country’s history. The last time a Tunisian political figure was assassinated was sixty years ago, shortly before independence, when the trade unionist and anticolonial leader Farhat Hached was murdered, and agents of French colonialism are widely believed to have been responsible. Many Tunisians were left wondering who might be next.

“People are really freaking out,” one young Tunisian told me. And not just over Belaid’s assassination, but over the growing atmosphere of violence and intimidation in the country. Salafists, though small in numbers, have been making their presence felt, staging attacks on cultural events and fellow Tunisians they deem un-Islamic. This too is something that many in Tunisia, where secularism enjoys deep roots—and where the practice of Islam has historically been decidedly unextreme—find perplexing. Then there are the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution, vigilante groups of morality police who patrol the streets to keep people in line, in a manner evocative of Iran’s thuggish basij militias.

A debate is now raging among Tunisians over Ennahda’s role in these developments. Many blame the Islamist party for fostering this climate of intimidation or at least for turning a blind eye to the rampages of such groups. Why, many Tunisians ask, hasn’t Ennahda disbanded or at least reigned in the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution? Why has the party not cracked down on these thuggish elements who seem to be roaming more freely than ever before?

Ennahda counters that Tunisia under its rule is no longer a police state, and it can’t control everything that goes on in the country. “If crimes are committed we should prosecute them, but we can’t arrest people for their beliefs,” Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s leader, has said. The party officially denounces Salafist violence and complains that these groups, which outflank Ennahda on the right, are a thorn in its side. But Ennahda also points out that there are divisions among Salafis, and not all of them are engaged in troublemaking. Secular and liberal Tunisians are unsatisfied by this response and hold Ennahda responsible for the climate of fear that has begun to permeate everyday life and polarize the society.

The good news is that because Tunisia is now democratic, these disputes are being hashed out in the court of public opinion and will be resolved at the ballot box. Elections are likely to be called in November or December.

At a conference on “Democratic Transitions in the Arab World” I attended in Tunis over the weekend, the comparativist Marina Ottaway observed that conflict grows out of all democratic transitions. All revolutions, she pointed out, produce winners and losers, and postrevolutionary situations involve clashes of visions. The war of position in Tunisia between Islamists and secularists today is nothing unique. Indeed it’s a vital sign for a postrevolutionary society. The fear is that the growing climate of violence, intimidation and polarization could rip the fabric of Tunisian society apart, just as this new democratic space and culture of pluralism are forming. But I left the country feeling optimistic that, despite all its challenges, Tunisia will navigate these waters and find its way forward.

My next post will feature my interview with Mongi Smaili, the economist and labor researcher I mention above, about the state of the labor movement in Tunisia and the Ennahda-led government’s economic policies. Stay tuned for that.

I’ve just been catching up on my journal reading and very much appreciated the recent bundle of articles on the Occupy movement in Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668047 But I also have one critique. Initially I hesitated to write, but I realized I was reading something that was very familiar to me, not only in your writing but in many others, that bears commenting on. Your preface offers an overview of the Occupy movement from an almost invisibly American perspective. Of course you are American, and so you may argue that this perspective makes sense. But I think there is a problem when it leads to misrepresentation. I especially think there is a problem in our current world of geopolitical inquiry, globalization, and transnationalism.

            As I’m sure you know, the Occupy movement took its name from the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters. Occupy movements were present in every major city in Canada. In my city, Ottawa, which also happens to be the nation’s capital, the movement produced controversy as well as assent, a space for debate and gathering as well as a space of occasional violence. But when you reference the Occupy movement geographically you interestingly “confine” it primarily to the US. Consider your references. Occupy moves “from highly particular events in New York’s Zucotti Park” (this is true enough), to its relation to “American politics,” to “uprisings that spread like a virus across the Middle East to Europe, the United States, and beyond.” This virus apparently bypasses Canada, the US’s closest neighbour. Later you note that “protests spread from Zucotti Park to scores of cities all over the US.” Later still you refer to “nonviolent protestors across the US.” Of course it is fine to discuss the Occupy movement in its American context, but it is just the assumption that this context is the context for the movement that troubles me.

            I want to be clear: I am by no means calling for national inclusion; my point is not that Canada was left out of your narrative. I am not suggesting that you add “and Canada” to your lists. Rather I am making a plea for rethinking and reframing the way that nation is discussed, in general, and the way that the US is referenced, in particular. Too often, it seems to me, American intellectuals read large political and social movements only through the lens of American geopolitical identity. The imagination of a broader context does not even enter the discussion (or, if it does, it is captured by the vague and uncritical “and beyond.”)  

            You are in a prominent position to make an intervention here. When a leading intellectual participates in and reinforces this sort of partial, geographically bounded, description of a major social movement, it limits the way that we think about the issues. I am making a subtle request but I do believe it is hugely consequential for the ways in which we understand our roles in the academy and our vision for the future of intellectual inquiry. For, as you suggest, a shift in language can trigger shifts in our conversations that expand the limits of what is both thinkable and possible. 

Carleton University

Danny Postel

     Most of the postmortem commentary on Hugo Chávez has focused on his domestic legacy in Venezuela, his wider regional legacy within Latin America, and what we might call his hemispheric legacy—his “special relationship” with the United States. And for good reason: these were the principal realms in which he operated during his fourteen years as Venezuela’s president (1999–2013), and it is for his accomplishments in these domains that he will be remembered and the Chávez Era (it was, to be sure, an era) will be evaluated.

     But there’s a less discussed dimension of the Chávez legacy that I’d like to examine briefly: his relations with the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, a story whose significance became more salient with the onset of the momentous changes the region has been undergoing over the last few years—not merely since the “Arab Spring” or Arab revolts starting at the end of 2010 but going back to the upheaval in Iran in the summer of 2009.

     But, first, let me be clear that I admire a great deal of what Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution accomplished in Venezuela. As Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, the Chávez government

reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70 percent.  Millions of people also got access to health care for the first time, and access to education also increased sharply, with college enrollment doubling and free tuition for many. Eligibility for public pensions tripled.

And it’s significant that Chávez did all of this through the ballot, not the bullet. He was elected and reelected repeatedly, and by wide margins. I’ve praised the experiments with alternatives to neoliberalism in Venezuela, suggesting that other movements around the world study and learn from them. I’ve even been taken to task for being too pro-Chávez.

     It’s precisely because of these positive accomplishments that Chávez’s record on the Middle East and North Africa is so disconcerting.

  Chávez had been an enthusiast of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since the latter became Iran’s president in 2005. In 2006, while Ahmadinejad presided over a massive escalation of repression against dissidents, trade unionists, and human rights activists in Iran, Chávez awarded him the Order of the Liberator medal, the highest honor Venezuela bestows on foreign dignitaries. In June of 2009, as millions of Iranians took to the streets to ask Where Is My Vote? Chávez was among the first world leaders to congratulate his ally in Tehran on his reelection, and the Venezuelan foreign ministry issued this statement:    

The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela expresses its firm opposition to the vicious and unfounded campaign to discredit the institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed from outside, designed to roil the political climate of our brother country. From Venezuela, we denounce these acts of interference in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while demanding an immediate halt to the maneuvers to threaten and destabilize the Islamic Revolution.

     This provoked widespread dismay and appeals to Chávez from Iranians, many of whom sympathized with the ideals of the Bolivarian Revolution, to stop supporting their reactionary president. Those appeals, alas, went ignored, further damaging the standing of the Venezuelan leader among progressive Iranians.

“Complicated”

     “In Egypt, the situation is complicated,” Chávez pronounced during the Tahrir Square protests that brought down Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. He remained conspicuously silent on the Battle of Cairo, one of the great democratic uprisings of recent times, remarking merely that “national sovereignty” should be respected.

     But silent he was not as the Arab revolts spread to Libya and Syria; he spoke out emphatically in support of Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar Assad. Chávez had been chummy with the Libyan leader before the 2011 uprising against him; in 2009 he regaled Qaddafi with a replica of Simón Bolívar’s sword and awarded him the same Order of the Liberator medal he’d bestowed on Ahmadinejad. “What Símon Bolívar is to the Venezuelan people,” Chávez declared, “Qaddafi is to the Libyan people.” As the Libyan revolt grew and Qaddafi went on a rampage of slaughter, Chávez was one of a handful of world leaders who stood by him: “We do support the government of Libya.” That support, as one observer noted, was “politically costly and proved to be an embarrassment to many of Latin America’s erstwhile revolutionaries who now share a vision of a democratic future.”

     “How can I not support Assad?” Chávez asked last year as the body count in Syria approached sixty thousand. While the regime bombed bread lines and hospitals, Chávez shipped upwards of 600,000 barrels of Venezuelan diesel to his ally in Damascus. Meanwhile, the Chávez-inspired Bolivarian Alliance for Latin America (ALBA) denounced a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution that condemned the Assad regime for the horrific massacre of over one hundred noncombatants, including forty-nine children. The UN resolution, ALBA protested, was an attempt to “interfere in Syria’s internal affairs.”

     Chávez’s support for despotic and murderous regimes isn’t limited to the Middle East; he also hailed Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe, the late Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, and Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive Belarusian leader known as “Europe’s last dictator.”

     These international alliances raise troubling questions about Chávez’s judgment and legacy (a legacy that awaits, and deserves, a thorough historical reckoning along the lines of Perry Anderson’s magisterial retrospective on Brazil’s Lula), especially for those of us who do admire many of the Bolivarian Revolution’s accomplishments.

     Some of Chávez’s defenders chalk these unsavory alliances up to realpolitik calculations that a Third World leader has no choice but to make in dealing with a global hegemon hell bent on undermining all alternatives to its dictates. But this only goes so far. Lula’s foreign policy involved lots of deals and alliances—the Brazilian-Turkish attempt to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue, for instance—but, unlike Chávez, he never defended the repressive domestic policies of the Islamic Republic or denounced Iran’s democratic movement.

     A group of Iranian leftists who support the goals of the Bolivarian Revolution made this point in an open letter to Chávez. “To us,” the letter reads, “it is possible for the Venezuelan government to have close diplomatic and trade relations with the Iranian government without giving it political support—particularly where domestic policy is concerned. Above all, endorsing its labor policy is in complete contradiction with your own domestic policy.”

     Dealing with ambiguity has never been a particular forte of the Left. Yet assessing the legacy of Hugo Chávez requires nothing so much as a sense of ambiguity. I thus find Bhaskar Sunkara’s observation that the Bolivarian Revolution contains “both authoritarian and democratic, demagogic and participatory” elements most refreshing. I know from personal conversations with countless progressives that ambivalence about Chávez, particularly on the international front, runs deep—but the critical conversation has yet to reflect that ambivalence.

     Theorizing Chávez’s international relations—examining the ideological affinities between his left-wing populism and the right-wing populism of Ahmadinejad, exploring patterns between his domestic and foreign policies, comparing his international dealings with those of other progressive leaders in the Global South—remains to be done. I don’t think any complete reckoning with the legacy of this historic political figure can be complete without confronting these questions, thorny though they may be.

     Rather than draw any grand conclusions on this phenomenon, though, I’d love to hear what thoughtful admirers of Chávez like Ernesto Laclau might have to say on the subject. Perhaps we can enter into a critical dialogue on this theme.

     Danny Postel is the associate director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran (2006) and the coeditor, with Nader Hashemi, of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2011).

This includes, of course, West’s attempt to set the record straight on MLK. For liberals, MLK has long appeared as an icon of collective progress, one summed up almost exclusively by the collapse of de jure segregation. The West clip, however, went viral not only because it pointed out the more radical aspects of MLK’s critique ignored by liberals but also because it appealed to all of the POTUS’s detractors, wherever they might stand politically.  

For twenty-first century conservatives, the West clip was assimilable because MLK has also emerged as a primary source for the creeping opposition to civil rights; within the libertarian subsect, racial inequality is understood as having become sufficiently minimal that it is now time to judge individuals by the content of one’s character rather than the color of one’s skin.  Such sentiments are so common amongst conservatives that The National Review’s article accompanying West’s YouTube clip didn’t even reproduce the substance of West’s argument. The paragraph-long piece simply recited the most usable sound bites: that the POTUS had invoked MLK’s “prophetic fire as just a moment in presidential pageantry”. 

Not only MLK’s words then, but West’s, too, were renarrated by the herd mentality he sought to displace, only this time via the conservative rather than liberal herd. As one YouTube commenter would then go on to confidently proclaim, “MLK would have voted for Ron Paul.” It is plausible that this may be the fate of ideas in the age of the social media sound bite; as Susan Sontag once remarked in a different context, abbreviated thinking often takes the form of “aristocratic thinking” since sound bites are decontextualized by default. Thus, very differently positioned stakeholders appear to agree, even if they are far from any such state. Just as the abbreviation MLK accommodates 140 characters more easily than the extended Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., then, so too does concise rhetoric become resharable rhetoric, which then becomes renarratable rhetoric. This perhaps, is the truth of the comment accompanying one user’s retweet of the West clip: “do I even want to read what he said?” 

Of course, MLK really did assert the inseparability of racism, militarism, and capitalism, as West asserted. The question, though, is how does this remain so undigested today? Does digital culture promise genuine political debate while delivering cloaked consensus, just as Karl Marx claimed liberal secularism promises theological diversity while delivering cloaked Christianity?  Perhaps the answer is to be found in MLK’s political theology. Shortly before his assassination, MLK gave one speech that, to invoke one of West’s terms of art, is particularly characteristic of the black prophetic tradition. Indeed, so much so, that ever since “Where Do We Go From Here?” rumors have circulated about his affiliation with democratic socialism. As he put it therein: “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.” Just as West’s words were largely lost to the virality of digital culture on MLK Day 2013, the theological roots of MLK’s antimilitarist, post-Communist “democratic socialism” have also been lost and for quite some time. Twelve years prior to that speech, MLK wrestled with the question of collectivism vs. individualism in remarkably resonant language, in his dissertation: “Wieman’s ultimate pluralism fails to satisfy the rational demand for unity. Tillich’s ultimate monism swallows up finite individuality in the unity of being. A more adequate view is to hold a quantitative pluralism and a qualitative monism. In this way both oneness and manyness are preserved.” The dissertation, accepted by Boston University’s School of Theology in 1955, was entitled “A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” Concerned with the tension between impersonalist, all-engulfing monism and personalist, ultimate pluralism, MLK’s theology, like his later politics, asserted a “higher synthesis.” West, along with scholars like Gary Dorrien, Dwayne Tunstall, and others, show how this higher synthesis eventually grounded his political convictions; for MLK, racism, militarism, and capitalism devalue the diversity of human personality while also violating the divine oneness upon which it is grounded.  

Translated to digital culture, if American society seems as shallowly individualist in the conservative sense as it does narrowly collectivist in the liberal sense, perhaps something reducible to neither would require more than just viral, renarratable sound bites; at the same time, it may be precisely the substance of those ubiquitously reshared MLK quotes, if read carefully. 

Jason Adams teaches in the departments of philosophy and liberal studies at Grand Valley State University, in Allendale, Michigan.

That Casablanca finished first several years ago in a poll of critics designed to select the greatest screenplays in the history of cinema is not altogether surprising. I wouldn’t place it this high. I might give a nod to Lubitsch’s Ninotchka or Naruse’s Floating Weeds or Ozu’s Late Spring. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle has a film length voice-over narration which is invincible, but the film itself is a failure, which is to say that the screenplay fails. Nonetheless, Casablanca always charms me.

But there is a moment in the film which always rankles me. And despite the fact that white supremacy and anti-Black racism were at that time more profoundly rooted socio-historical, socio-psychological, and socio-linguistic structures than they are today, I’ve never been able to explain how this moment could have been placed in the film or even more why this moment was not expunged at some point prior to the film’s release. No matter how many times I might try to think it was a question of a “convention of the time”—and I don’t think it would have necessarily been a convention amongst those who wrote the screenplay—an explanation eludes me. Certainly the easy explanations don’t satisfy me or to whatever degree they do, they become exonerations and I don’t think there should be any exoneration here at all. Could I say that from one point of view or from one significant affective and one significant affective-ideational place within me this moment could vitiate my good will for the film? That it doesn’t really do so bothers me even though I understand the inescapable polyvalent simultaneity of human experience and of human thoughts and emotions.

Ilsa Lund has entered Rick’s club with her husband, Victor Laszlo. She sees Sam—whom she had known well in Paris—at the piano and wants him to come join her. She asks a waiter: “Could you ask the boy at the piano to come over here?” Doubtless, the point is obvious and perhaps so obvious that it will considered tedious. But the tedium will appear as such only to those caught in the vortex of cynical reason’s proliferations or in the vortex of that reactionary and delusional notionality held and trumpeted by right-wing opinion wherein all references to continuing or past socio-linguistic instantiations of domination, racism, and denigrations of African humanity are considered to be anachronistic and/or divisive. But the obviousness of the point in question is rendered neither null nor illegitimate just because there are a million other instances in past—and in present—cultural productions and in cinematic history where there are indignities and infelicities in relation to people of African ancestry, to people of color, etc. Still, no matter what prolepses, no matter what anticipations to objections in advance I might or have employed, I can immediately hear the inevitable retort to my displeasure at the existence in the film of the nominative, “boy”. According to this retort the nominative’s use was simply a function of the fact that the film dates from l942 (the film was proposed to Warner Brothers on December 8, l941). This inevitable retort is impatient—and pre-fabricated—because for it there is no matter to raise, no discussion to be had. Convention and past but not present history rule—and explain all.

But who in the United States in l942 used the word “boy” with reference to an African-American man? Millions certainly. More. It was conventional usage—and thereby the willed usage of domination—in the South and amongst millions of others in non-southern states and across class and ethnic lines too. Yet, it was not a universal convention and it was not a conventional usage amongst a significant portion of the country’s population, indeed in significant portions of the country and population it was understood as a pejorative, even a pejorative of the first order, and was condemned.

It must immediately be considered that the usage makes no sense at all given the character who utters it. Ilsa is someone with left-wing views (not liberal, but rather left-wing). These views would have as an important component a condemnation of ethnic and racial domination and prejudice (which is not to say that all leftists at the time, European or American—or at any time, past or present—were or have been immune from racism and prejudice or lapses in this regard). Her husband, Victor Laszlo, is, given his status as an anti-Nazi resistance leader, almost certainly a communist, if that is one were to extrapolate the most probable scenario from the film’s objective significations. And the man she is in love with is (or was) almost certainly a communist, given that he had been an American volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (the majority of whose members were of communist affiliation), the American brigade within the International Brigades that fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist army of Franco. Moreover, one could easily speculate that Sam himself was a Spanish Civil War volunteer and combatant, given that there were a significant number of African Americans who went to fight in Spain (or as in the case of several women, volunteered to serve as nurses there), and that it was in Spain that Rick and Sam formed their friendship (or maybe they even volunteered together and had already been friends in New York). Of course one could vis-a-vis the origin of the friendship of Sam and Rick also imagine that in l938, when the International Brigades were disbanded by the Spanish Republic (the Republic desperately hoping that this move could win them—impossible and naive hope—aid from western countries), Rick made his way to Paris and there met an expatriate American jazz musician, Sam, and that they became friends. I prefer to think they became friends in Spain—or even already in New York.

One wonders though how Rick, who would only have been arriving in Paris in late l938 or early l939, could have so quickly opened up a successful night-club and become so well-established—he drives an expensive convertible—in such a short amount of time and given that it is unlikely he was accumulating wealth at Jarama and elsewhere while in Spain . It is important to note that while Sam worked in Rick’s club in Paris and works in his club in Casablanca, they are not strictly employer and employee. They drink together, they socialize together, they travel together, they go fishing together, they commiserate together, etc.—which is precisely what friends, indeed, fellow combatants do. Quite simply then, racist pejoratives such as “boy” would not have been in usage and would not have been tolerated in the value-structure of the community and culture and dyadic and triadic friendship that Rick and Sam and Ilsa inhabited and had constituted for themselves in Paris—and no matter the weight of racism and white supremacy upon the generalized American and international culture of the l930s and l940s and even upon those opposed to racism and domination. An additional prolepsis: certainly when Ilsa asks the waiter in Rick’s cafe if he could call the “boy” over she would be speaking in French “in reality”. And in French the word for waiter is “garçon” (boy). But to argue that therefore “in reality” she was saying “garçon” and not “boy” and that “boy” was just a mistranslation of “waiter” becomes an exercise in evasion on several levels. If we want to imagine that the “script” was written as an imagined “English” version of the “reality” of the polyglot reality of Rick’s cafe where the predominant French would have also been surrounded by German, English, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Amharic, Berber, etc. etc. then “waiter” not “boy” would have certainly been chosen if “garçon” were to have been the nominative chosen by Ilsa although certainly she would not have chosen “garcon” for the very good reason that Sam was obviously not a waiter but precisely Ilsa’s friend—and a pianist and singer. “Si vous plaît, pouvez-vous demander le pianiste de me joindre?” “Sir, could you ask the piano player if he might join me here?” But in fact and in reality the script is heard by an audience in the context of all the significations that the word “boy” would have held at the time—and still holds. If we want to imagine that the script is a “translation” then the “original” word in French used by Ilsa would have to have been a French racist pejorative that could appropriately be translated as “boy” in English. But it is extremely doubtful that Ilsa would have been using such a French (or Swedish! or Czech!) term. In short and definitively the scriptwriters chose “boy” in its American context and signification and this cannot be explained away.

Consequently, since the term “boy” is a significant—certainly a very likely—non-sequitur in terms of the socio-logic and cultural and existential logics of the characters and of the film’s signifying itineraries, how did it get into the script and how did it remain in the script? It is true that there might well have been some in the population of writers and producers of the film for whom the term in question would have been considered conventional and for whom it might well have even been a term in play in their own everyday or intermittent usage. I would add that there certainly must have been those with automatic or ingrained racist prejudices and notions—whether of a weak or even of a strong kind—amongst the population of those who made the film. Warner Brothers was a studio that made—relative to other studios at the time—a share of mildly “socially conscious” films, but I would not at all assume that a Jack Warner or others in the studio’s hierarchy would have been immune from prejudice, racism, and the socio-linguistic realities that would have accompanied these dispositions and sensibilities. But nonetheless even among this possible group there could well have been the understanding that one’s own usage ought not to go into a film-script. And there would have been many others for whom this usage even in private, personal circumstances would have been considered improper or even abhorrent. And again, even if this term would have been appropriate at the level of verisimilitude in relation to the really-existing-conventions of the time, nonetheless it was not at all appropriate for the specific characters and characterological essences in this specific film.

Did no one amongst the cast object? If they did it obviously had no effect, although, given the fragmented nature—the temporal and spatial divisions of labor—of film production, and given that Dooley Wilson is not in the scene, only Ingrid Bergman and the actor portraying the waiter, perhaps the term wasn’t heard by many during the production process. But it would have been heard by all those present during the viewing of rushes. Would Dooley Wilson have objected if he knew? Could he have, given the tenuous and precarious status and existence of African American actors in the Hollywood of the time—and given that this was without question a preeminent and substantial role in a mainstream film for an African American actor, singer, and pianist? He certainly could have had he known prior to the film’s release. But he cannot be condemned if he did not. He might have been risking everything if he had. But it is possible or even likely that he never saw the whole script and didn’t even know of the usage till the film appeared. And at that point he would have undoubtedly rolled his eyes for the millionth time in his life in recognition of the absolute abjection of the American social order and socio-culture. And Bergman herself, would she have understood what she was saying? Would the director Michael Curtiz, an emigre from Budapest? I say yes and not simply because they had both already been in the States long enough to have learned. Anti-Black and anti-African racism and their socio-culture and significations were global—from the start. And the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch who were the credited co-authors of the script? Shouldn’t their circumstance, belonging as they did to an ethnic minority which also suffered domination, indignity, and prejudice in the American and global context—and which minority at the time was in Europe suffering a cataclysm—have provided a greater probability that they would and could have known better? Obviously they didn’t know better. But I for my part don’t want to simply shrug my shoulders at this….

Slavoj Žižek has written about the inevitable question that arises—and which he turns into one more of the paradoxological figures of which he is fond, but of which he is too often, notwithstanding his capabilities, not the master—as to whether upon Ilsa’s second nocturnal visit to Rick’s apartment upstairs from the club, they became intimate. It seems to me incontestable, although I understand that this circumvents and puts the brakes to the Žižekian paradoxology and its signifying resonances. But it is one of the least interesting aspects of the film. There are rather other threads to pull. Wouldn’t Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo, upon reaching the U.S., have been rendered useless vis-a-vis resistance work, unless he were to be parachuted into Yugoslavia or Greece or France or Italy, etc. to serve as an OSS link to the partisan resistance in these countries? Or would he have been able to work in the U.S. as a provider to the OSS of information to help coordination efforts between the OSS and the various resistance and partisan struggles? But it is fanciful—and absurd—to think that there ever could have been a Victor Laszlo character with knowledge of the “resistance leaders” in a host of cities which Colonel Strasser imputes to him. Resistance networks were even on local no less national levels invariably compartmentalized. And wouldn’t Vichy have simply arrested him on the spot? Yes, the Vichy authorities in Casablanca would certainly have arrested him on the spot.

There are of course other infelicities in the plot and in the dialogue beyond the major one which has given rise to this essay. In a Paris sequence (the Germans now but a day away from the city), Rick, Ilsa, and Sam drink champagne and Sam says: “This takes the sting out of being occupied!”. I can’t conceive that on such a terrible occasion this particular character, whether he were in fact a Spanish Civil War veteran—and scarcely two years removed from combat—or an expatriate jazz singer and pianist (or both) would say something so insouciant or even ridiculous at such a moment, and all the more since champagne would have been a commonplace in the period immediately preceding this catastrophic end to the nine month “drôle de guerre” which would have constituted at least half, if not more than half, of the possible duration of Rick’s and Sam’s Parisian club, indeed their refuge and sojourn in Paris. I think it unfortunate that the screenwriters gave this line to Sam and I don’t think this choice is necessarily free of possible, of possibly unfortunate significations. Moreover, when Victor Laszlo and Rick engage in a dialog about Rick’s previous vehement political engagements, the screenwriters have Rick say, cynically, that he was well-paid to go fight in Spain. He never would have said this even in his present cynical and despairing state for the simple reason that both he and Laszlo would have known very well that International Brigadists were paid almost nothing at all if even they were paid in the first place. Still further: when Rick goes to see Signor Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) to complete his deal regarding the sale of his club to Ferrari, Rick says he cares no more about Ugarte’s arrest and execution than does Ferrari. It is false. The film had already depicted his grief about this in the scene in his upstairs apartment the evening after Ilsa first appears in the club. “One in, one out” he mutters in despair referring to the arrival of Ilsa and the death of Ugarte (Peter Lorre). And he brings his fist down on the table in anguish. I don’t think he would have completely disavowed or dissimulated this feeling in front of Ferrari, even if it were simply a question of a false insouciance thought to be necessary in speaking to someone who is not an intimate—or even a false and shared insouciance thought to be necessary either for the sake of form or even more discretion. The earlier scene with Ugarte is in certain respects the best in the film with its depiction of that kind of special resonance we find in all moments, cinematic or existential, of intersubjective and reciprocal recognition—in this moment when Rick says having learned that it is Ugarte who has killed the Nazi couriers (it is only later in the film that we are able to infer the full depth of Rick’s admiration for this bold anti-fascist act, no matter that in Peter Lorre’s case the act has more monetary and less political motives), “Yes, I do now have more regard for you.” No, Rick wouldn’t have in this case with Ferrari had recourse to this particular kind of insouciance.

Yes, I know, one could find inconsistencies and infelicities a myriad of times over in this film and in any film. But the American vernacular denigration given Ilsa to say is not a mere infelicity. It rings in the film louder than the Marseillaise. It stings to hear it and no champagne—or charm—can assuage the sting.

This band was pretty much peerless in combining a classicist mid-60s sense of pop song structure (think The Who/The Kinks/The Beach Boys) with the finest dynamic heaviness of 90s alterna-punk. . . This is their hardest, fastest, and best. . . Try 2, 10, 13.

“If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already… the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.” – Cindy Sherman

“The writer is entitled to his boomboom.” – Tristan Tzara

What follows is intended to distinguish videopoetry from poetry films, film poetry, poemvideos, poetry videos, cyber-poetry, cine-poetry, kinetic poetry, digital poetry, poetronica, filming of poetry and other unwieldy neologisms, which have been applied, at one time or another, to describe the treatment of poetry in film and video but which have also developed different and divergent meanings.

The democratization of the medium realized by the introduction of video technology has, in the last 25 years, only sharpened the initial art vs entertainment debate; in particular, the movement of poetry to the “big screen” has exposed two conflicting positions – one demystifying the poem by complementary “visuals”, the other augmenting the suggestive power of poetry by unexpected juxtapositions.

The underlying dichotomy opposes videopoetry – I envision the measured integration of narrative, non- narrative and anti-narrative juxtapositions of image, text and sound as resulting in a poetic experience – to works which publish poems (voiced or displayed on-screen) in video format. While the latter are to be commended for bringing a new audience to poetry, their use of imagery as embellishments to (if not direct illustrations of) the text, their preference to employ narrative over self-reflexive sequences, their rejection of contrast, fragmentation, the incongruous and the dissonant, prevent these works from being considered as models for a new genre of technology-assisted poetry.

Noise accusations against minorities are nothing new.   Such an accusation was made against the Jews who lived among Christian communities in the Middle Ages, and in modern times it remains as fresh as ever.  The Nazis sophistically used it to justify the expulsion of the Jews from Germany.

Like the Jews in Europe and the Muslims in Israel, every ethnic, cultural, or religious minority is suspected of embodying and inducing disharmony from the start.  From the “point of hearing” of the hegemonic community, the sounds of the minority grate, they are grotesque, threatening.  According to the Christians, by comparison with the harmony in their churches, what prevailed in the Ashkenazi synagogue was nothing but chaotic shouting.  Sometimes they used images from the animal kingdom to describe what they heard.

The noises, which sounded strident to them, served as the basis for an accusation: the Jews hated “our” harmony so much – so said the Christians throughout Europe – that when they heard an innocent and pure Christian boy singing hymns to the Virgin Mary, they would slit his throat mercilessly.  Later on, when they found that Jews, when given the opportunity, marched in the vanguard of the “decent” musical camp, they attributed this success to forgery and imitation.  Therefore they prevented the advancement of Jewish composers and performers years before the Nazis came to power.  A long time passed before they began to listen to the sounds of the Jews and to find beauty in them, though this was partially “exotic.”  The Jews themselves sometimes rejected their own heritage in embarrassment and adopted the dominant Christian sound.

Prayer in a Mosque in Sakhnin. Silencing the sounds of Islam is a loss to non-Muslims as well. Photograph: Dan Keinan

Particularly in the Arab world a dialogue was created between Jews and Muslims.  They borrowed from one another without raising a fuss.  When composers who had been nurtured in European conservatories arrived in the Land of Israel, they tried to adopt the local sound.  What began as an “orientalist” approach developed into moments of mutual attentiveness.  Examples of joint creativity emerged here and there, and in some places in Israel, such as the Holy precincts of Jerusalem, the tolling of church bells still mingle with the chants of the muezzins, and, on certain days of the year, with the sounding of the shofar as well.

Thus a miniature Utopian area has been created – not harmonious, not organized, but still possessing beauty and uniqueness.  Each religion has its own sounds.  Over centuries and millennia, every religion created its own forms for itself, each different from the others, and each bearing worlds of meaning for its believers.  Clearly a blow to those sounds is regarded by the injured party as desecration of sanctity and profanation of the sublime.  However, the suppression of the sounds of another religion – Islam in this case – is a loss for non-Muslims as well.

True, sounds can be disturbing.  High decibels are shocking and deafening.  During my stay in Zurich, Switzerland, a few years ago, at first the church bells disturbed me with their harsh reverberations four times every hour.  I soon became used to it: I understood that people have been living that way in Switzerland for hundreds of years, and one has to adapt. Unfortunately, a law forbidding Muezzins’ calls in the public sphere is in practice in that ringing country, since 2009.

MK Anastasia Michaeli defines herself as the defender of “noise victims.”  However, her record and that of her party testify to the intention of undermining the legitimacy of the sonic presence of the other religion that dwells beside us. If it is a question of disturbing the peace of one’s neighbors, those, including some Muslims, who suffer from the early rising of Muezzins, might be able to engage in dialogue with neighbors who are not deaf to one another.  The residents of Caesaria, for example, neighbors of the Prime Minister (who actually was enthusiastic about Michaeli’s proposal) spoke to the residents of Jesr a-Zarka (“Netanyahu expresses support for the Mosque Law,” Barak Ravid and Jackie Huri, Haaretz, Dec. 12, 2011), and this led to a reduction of volume in a demonstration of good will without much ado.

Meanwhile, in my office on Mount Scopus, I open my window in the afternoon.  While Jerusalem is bathed in golden splendor, the chants of the Muezzins pour into the Kidron Valley from one minaret after the other, bearing with them a melody of sorrow and longing, and enveloping me.

Critical Inquiry will be hosting further comments on this development as the opinion becomes available.   WJTM