Bangla in Benghazi

The attendant at Zia international was so pleased I'd visited the country that she bumped my return flight to first class. "Please come back and visit us, sometime!". Following me onto the plane were a large group of Bangladeshi men of various ages, all dressed in dark blue uniforms. On their backs, in letters they could not read, was the logo of the construction company they'd be serving. Each man held a manila folder with a job description written clearly at the top. "Welder", "Sanitation Engineer", "Heavy Equipment Operator", "Pipelayer"....it looked and felt like something out of a dystopian novel.

When I asked Nazrul sitting next to me (until a flight attendant forced him to move) where he and his men were headed, he smiled and said, "Libya". He said he would be there for two years, maybe more, that he knew nothing about the country, and not a word of Arabic. In the unfolding drama that is Bahrain, Libya and beyond, the role of these men, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, will remain largely untold. When all of this is over, will they remain a vulnerable, disposessed class of laborers living in constant fear of deportation?

Perhaps Nazrul made it to Italy as he said he would, maybe he's among the hundreds of deshis now held hostage in eastern Libya. For now, though, all I can think of is a nervous Ghaddafi pacing to and fro in a room somewhere, surrounded by his trusted Amazons, wondering how he got there and where he'll run away to next.
______
Update: Hostages Freed.

Captain Abu Raed

I once asked my grandfather why, after the revolution overthrew a dictator, our country slipped so quickly into the same dehumanizing oppression. Avoiding the complicated historical answer about war, hostage crisis and geopolitics, he told me that even though the Shah had left, there remained a little shah in the heart of every Iranian. We had to confront that demon before we could truly gain our freedom. Thinking back, I realize what he was saying, about the way a people often internalize the worst traits of the systems they are forced to endure.

I watched Captain Abu Raed last night with this idea, and events in our region, fresh in my mind. In the film, Abu Raed, an elderly airport janitor, brings home an abandoned pilots' hat to his poverty stricken neighborhood. Local children, thinking he is really a pilot, ask him to tell stories of his travels and Abu Raed obliges them. Through this process, he becomes slowly involved in the lives of the children and feels an increasing sense of ownership towards the challenges they face. One boy in particular, Murad, lives with an abusive father who spends his day trying in vain to hawk his wares in the market, returning each night in a drunken rage.

I could not help but wonder where Murad's father got all of his frustration, more so where he got the notion he could inflict horrific daily abuse on his wife and children with near impunity. Was he so different from our dictators, with their security services that do with us as they want with no regard for law or justice? Perhaps when we are too afraid to raise our fists against these leaders, we turn them instead towards the people in our lives who are more vulnerable and disempowered than we are. When we cannot raise our voices in the squares and streets, we raise them in our homes. We internalize the dictatorship and tyranny, identify with the men whose images hover constantly on every empty wall and billboard across town, and create a microcosm of our social order. That the opposite is also true gives me a lot of hope.

فراتر

گه ملحد و گه دهری و کافر باشد / گه دشمن خلق و فتنه پرور باشد

باید بچشد عذاب تنهایی را / مردی که ز عصر خود فراتر باشد

محمدرضا شفیعی کدکنی -

Cultures of Resistance

Today I stumbled upon the work of director Iara Lee, a Brazilian of Korean descent who has done amazing work producing films and music that confront militarism and promote peace. What I didn't know, and was very excited to learn, was that she helped produce a music video for Hichkas, pioneers in Persian hiphop featured in Bahman Ghobadi's "No One Knows about Persian Cats". Supporting Capoeira initiatives among Palestinian refugees, skate boarding in Afghanistan, or sustainable farming in Africa, her work is an example of how global perspective has a really important place in facilitating the transfer of peace oriented solutions into new arenas. Check it out!

Nightfall in Tehran

Nightfall in Tehran. The people have gone out onto their rooftops for the first time in a year. Cries of "Allahu Akbar" through the streets, the same cries we heard last year, and again three decades before that. Friends returning from today's demonstrations in Tehran, (and Tabriz, Kermansha, Isfahan and beyond) this time unfazed by the batons and tear gas, said the people were chanting "Khamenei hayaa kon, Mobarako negaah kon"...Khamenei have some shame, see what became of Mubarak. Elsewhere cries of "Mubarak, Ben Ali, now the turn of Seyyed Ali [Khamenei]".

There was something comforting, the first time around, knowing that Mousavi and Karroubi were there in the streets along with the people, in the illusion that their presence served as a kind protective embrace putting a limit on government brutality.   Now, with both figures under house arrest, there is a strange feeling that the people are unhinged, perhaps less safe but certainly more empowered to chart a more confident path. And as upheavals continue unabated in Yemen, Bahrain, Palestine, and Algeria, the poignant slogan of 2009 comes to mind "natarsid, natarsid, ma hame ba ham hastim" (do not be afraid, we are all together here) in the face of official violence. This time, the truth of that powerful idea extends far beyond Iranian borders.

Mubarak Leaves

How eerie and extraordinary that today, the 22nd of Bahman, is the anniversary of the Iranian revolution of 1979. It is also the first day of a new Egypt, may it heed the lessons of our perilous history and avoid it's sanguinary excesses. May she inspire us as Tunisia inspired her, to fight for liberty in Tehran as they have done in Tahrir, Alexandria and beyond. For the first time since 2009, you've given us hope.

Tahrir in Tehran

I visited Tehran's Azadi Square for the first time the winter before the election crisis. As I see images streaming in from Cairo, masses camped in the center of town for what is turning into weeks of public defiance, I often try to imagine how this square would look similarly peopled. I wonder how it must have felt for demonstrators standing here three decades ago and again after the 2009 elections. Opposition leaders have requested, and been denied, permits to demonstrate here on the 25th of Bahman in solidarity with activists across the Arab world. This square, with its iconic monument, stands as a quiet, daily reminder of promises yet to be fulfilled and more struggles to come.

On "Third Place"

In a thought provoking TED talk, award winning architect Ellen Dunham Jones articulates the goals of a new movement in American planning, one to "retrofit suburbia" with the trappings of urban life. This includes the conversion of strip malls and office parks (bankrupted by the recession) into art galleries, libraries, places of worship, community buildings and other thriving centers of suburban culture. The next stage involves active reworking of sprawl environments into walkable mainstreets, complete with public spaces for creative or political expression.

A key concept that stuck with me was Jones' reference to the idea of a "third place" first articulated by Florida sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Where home and work are the first and second places, the Third Place is where civic identity takes shape, social lives are cultivated and culture is produced and shared. Emaciating the Third Place, as has happened in suburbs across America, means isolating citizens, forcing them into costly auto-dependency, and restricting them to television and digital spaces to fill the social vacuum. 

Suburban architecture may spell the end of a healthy social life, but the consequences for a viable democratic society are far more acute. In his analysis of mobilizations of the Civil Rights era, Moldova and contemporary Iran, Malcolm Gladwell describes the limits of social media in single handedly redirecting the course of political events (and the dangers of relying on it to do so). Ultimately, it is physical networks, predominantly created through face to face interactions in the Third Place, that are key to any successful mobilization.

This phenomenon is nowhere more directly observable than in Cairo's Tahrir (Liberation) Square, where protesters have created a unique social order shaped by the  intersection between political mass action and public space. And regardless of all the social, economic and or regional factors that have gone into this uprising, it is ultimately the mechanics of actual street demonstrations that have played the largest role in shaping Egypt's dramatic revolution (see here for a planning perspective on Cairo).

Poverty and Separation

In "Suburban Nation", Duany (et all) describe the decline of the mixed income community across America. Many suburban zoning laws prevent these types of communities from emerging, and many home owners associations, afraid of the potential adverse affect on property value, want to keep the poor as far away as possible. This has created a kind of economic apartheid (which often correlates with racial divisions in frightening ways). In the past, economic mobility, up or down, didn't necessarily mean uprooting yourself from your neighborhood. Nowadays, losing your job usually means leaving town altogether. The poor, unless we ourselves are forced to join their ranks, tend to remain safely hidden from view. 

The fact that we don't interact with the needy within our own communities, and hence are not capable of helping them directly, creates a void in our moral lives. Looking for ways to satisfy our basic psychological need to help others, we often create imaginary portraits of those we are attempting to aid. And when the reality fails to match these portraits, we become unsettled by the cognitive dissonance and change the channel. The increasingly popular industry known as "voluntourism" is an important symptom of our physical separation. NGO's and aid organizations are scrambling to pander to our perceptions of what the poor should look like, which frequently include romanticizations of poverty. 

It's important to be a part of aiding communities far from home, and internationally. But it's also important to create spaces where people, as they experience upward mobility, retain the opportunity to contribute to the lives of their less fortunate neighbors. Separation reinforces the idea in our minds that the poor are a problem, instead of the reality that the poor can be our neighbors, friends and family. Promoting real, mixed income neighborhoods as an alternative to income stratified sprawl is an important part of the solution.