Twenty-three months ago, Jennifer and I left San Francisco for London. Though we miss the Bay Area, and have weathered many difficulties since, we’ve never been more convinced that the decision we made to leave America was the right one.
In The Egyptian Plumber and My ‘Eurabia’ Problem, I discuss how the move has impacted me politically. What I’ve learned, where I’ve learned it, in Milano, as well as in Berlin. Check it all out, in this week’s edition of The Jewish Daily Forward.
There wasn’t a day that he wasn’t there. If he wasn’t standing at the bottom of the stairs, leading down from our side of Piazzale Loreto, he’d be in the middle of the tunnel, connecting one side of the square to the other. Whether it was hot or it was cold, the same sock hat was always affixed to his head. Upon reflection, I can’t remember when he wasn’t wearing a down jacket, either.
I always assumed that the guy was deaf. I don’t know what lead me to conclude that. Blindness is not the same thing. Nonetheless, I’ve always unconsciously equated the two. Carrying my recording equipment through our underground station, taking pictures of the adverts, recording the sounds of the Milanese, I always found myself turning off the mic when I passed him by.
I wasn’t so disciplined with my camera. After six months, I finally gave in and took this picture last winter. Editing audio recordings I made in the Loreto tube station, I was reminded of this photograph. Somehow, I imagined, he saw me.
On Tuesday, Italian daily Il Riformista ran an opinion sampling-piece on the Gaza flotilla fiasco. The talking heads were myself, speaking for the left, and Efraim Inbar, of Bar Ilan University, representing the right. Download the PDF.
South Asian-focused photo exhibit. South Asian migrant workers. Via Padova, Milan. February 2010.
Click for larger photo.
Compare the messaging. The first image, on the left, is a campaign flyer for Italy’s anti-immigrant Lega Nord party, photographed in March, outside our apartment in Milan. Notice the Turkish national flag depicted subsuming the northern Italian province of Lombardy.
The image on the right is a government-commissioned poster offering support to Turkish immigrants, displayed at a train station in Berlin. Given how accustomed we’d become to seeing Lega posters the past year, the German advert’s vibe took us totally by surprise.
The high point of our year in Milan was discovering its longstanding hip-hop scene. Not just any artists, but the brilliantly-named MCs Marracash and Karkadan. Routinely employing cheeky oriental signifiers, both musicians attack typically racist fantasies of predatory Arab outsiders.
Charlie Bertsch wrote an in-depth piece on Karkadan in Zeek on Tuesday, reflecting on the singer’s significance as a multilingual Tunisian immigrant, playing the role of the ‘Post-European.’ Check out the videos. They do a great job of embellishing the complexity of the MC’s music.
Irrespective of how many times I’ve commissioned articles on Arab musicians, in context, it still feels precedent-setting to run these pieces. Part of that has to do with the poor state of music criticism, in general, in Jewish publications. And part of it has to do with identity politics.
The ideological link, for me, is the original experience of otherness that Jews once had in Europe. The situation of Arab Europeans is unbelievably close. Because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, it’s something we tend to forget, precisely when it needs remembering.
Zeek adds a new landing page image every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Since we relaunched the magazine in conjunction with the Forward last Fall, our art director has been using photos I’ve taken both here, in Europe, as well as in Israel and the US. Maya added this photo on Wednesday.
Shot in Venice last October, it’s one of a dozen or so pictures I took in Italy over the last year, of black figurines, used in window displays like this. The arrangement of little white kids, around the bust of the noticeably larger, young black woman, is particularly interesting. Their eyes are so vacant.
“I’m so over Italy,” said an American relative who spent many years working in the country. “It’s just too frustrating these days.” Indeed, if one were to read British news periodicals, after Israel, the Italians have the second worst reputation. Based on the behavior of Italy’s political leadership during the year that we lived in Milan, it’s not difficult to understand why.
The hardest part in explaining why isn’t in criticizing Berlusconi, or any of the boorish, racist behavior of his cabinet members. They’re too easy to disassemble, since they are already such grotesquely exaggerated caricatures in their own right. The challenge is to provide the kinds of examples of their misrule, that would lead others, outside of Italy, to actually care.
For me, that means finding ways to narratively represent how utterly depressing it was, for example, to be invited to a sumptuous dinner at a Mediaset journalist’s home, and told how strongly she backed a government proposal to impose quotas on immigrants in public schools. “How can we tolerate a situation where we Italians are a minority in our own classrooms?” she asked.
I can cite so many instances like these, some far worse even, mixed up with far more mundane everyday events, all of which communicate the same thing. That’s the advantage, I think, one gets, living in a particular place for any length of time. If you pay proper attention to what’s going on around you, all the elements are there to mount the most effective kinds of criticism.
A disenchanted Italian is responsible for the poster. Pasted to a lamp post, in Navigli, some time in January.
You don’t see Arab grocery stores around here like we did in Milan. However, the number of Middle Eastern restaurants and fast food places in this part of Berlin would be enough to make any Italian conservative’s head spin. In Boxhagenerplatz, the square in which we’re temporary ensconced, there are no less than four falafel places, and one doner shop.
The difference, between Friedrichshain and Piazzale Loreto, is an absence of Arabs. The pedestrians are largely European, speaking any number of languages. Though I have heard a higher incidence of Israeli-accented Hebrew, the emphasis is on German and English. One has to go next door, to Kreuzberg, to approximate the oriental vibe of our former home.
Being able to discover a Levantine continuum, this far into eastern Europe, and live within it, definitely has its advantages.
Discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Italy is highly unique. It’s complicated, on the one hand by Italy’s own recent colonial history in the Middle East (Libya), and its burgeoning Arab population on the other.
I’m working on a series of essays trying to tackle the subject, in non-traditional ways. One avenue I’m working on is film. This is a screen shot from Pasolini’s brilliant Sopralluoghi in Palestina, shot in Israel in the early 1960s.
About half way through the documentary, the legendary director says something to the effect of “It’s not Biblical enough here.”
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