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Sara ElHassan, Revolution and the in-between.

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Illustration of Sara ElHassan by Jordan Andrew Carter

If you follow Sara ElHassan on twitter be prepared for some sharp social and political commentary, complete with a little bit of sarcasm and zero tolerance for bullshit. Meeting Sara in person was actually not very different. She speaks with the rhythm of a spoken-word poet; Spelling out hard-hitting truths and filling every syllable with passion, she articulates her hopes for her country with insistence, and expresses her desire for the freedom of her people with urgency—a people that have risen once again in a revolution against years of oppression and dictatorship.

While I could easily imagine her as the loud protester at the front of the march, her determined rallying cry rippling through the crowds, the contributions Sara has made to the current revolt have actually come through the power of her writing—and from thousands of miles away, too.

As a freelance writer, blogger, poet and editor, she has always written about Sudanese social and political issues, publishing her work on her own blog, but also for publications with a wider reach like CNN and OkayAfrica. One of her more recent pieces on the art fueling the Sudanese revolution, a series of uprisings that have persisted since last December, reflects her commitment to strengthening the role of art as a catalyst for social change. She has held her belief in art as a revolutionary tool since moving back to Sudan after college and recognizing just how much passion and talent is waiting to be unleashed in her home country.

In 2012, together with several of her friends and collaborators, Sara started a monthly event series and literary club called Nas with Notepads in Khartoum that brought together aspiring writers and poets to engage in writing workshops, collaborative work and performance. The events were usually private and would be publicized through a mailing list. But after gaining a lot of traction and attracting 4000 participants, Nas with Notepads held their first public event as part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change. The event was a great success, but as soon as the first Arabic poem was read, the authorities shut it down. Eventually they had to stop holding events all together. 

Sara knew the power of literary art in influencing and educating. But until the current political movement began, putting into motion a wave of talent and energy in art that spread quickly and drove people to take to the streets, she had never understood that visual and graphic art could fuel change in her country to the same degree as writing. She hopes that by sharing this art on her social media, by writing about it and publicizing it, she can help fuel the revolution and reach people in a way that her alone words can’t and in the long run, she hopes to help create the environment for Sudanese artists to have the support they need.

I first met Sara when my student association invited her to give a talk at Wellesley based on a professor’s recommendation. Her talk was focused on gender, media and art of the Sudan Uprisings and it was completely different from any lecture or talk I had attended at the college in the past. Not only were we hearing from a highly sympathetic young person about a powerful political movement that had just ousted a long-standing dictator, but her perspective turned out to be very unique. Sara was born in the US, but lived in Sudan for many stretches of her life and since 2017 has been based in Arizona.

As a Sudanese-American she feels she is always in between—not Sudanese enough for the Sudanese, not American enough for the Americans. And it is from this vantage point that Sara writes about the issues of her country. “I am fortunate enough to have an outsiders perspective and be more critical but at the same time I have a very deep understanding of Sudanese culture. So my analysis is not lacking context.”, she explains. Though her in-betweenness comes with a set of challenges, she is grateful for the role she is able to play in amplifying people’s voices and putting the international spotlight on Sudan. She does it not only to fight stereotypes about Sudan, Africa and post-colonial countries in general, but also because an international eye on a local issue is a method of protecting those vulnerable to the brutality of dictators.

Sara ElHassan feels passionately about her people’s freedom and the important role that art and advocacy can play in making change. Her dream is for Sudan to have a civilian government that cares about its people and gives them the chances and opportunities they deserve in life.

Op-Ed: Resisting the Couch Party.

Op-Ed

The president of Egypt can now legally stay in power for 11 more years. But rest assured, he will not be in office forever, because “there’s no such thing as ruling for eternity.” According to President Abdel Fattah ElSisi. “We all die at some point.”

On the 23rd of April 2019, Egypt passed the most dangerous constitutional referendum in its history with an alleged 88.8% of voters saying YES to the proposed changes. Admittedly, it’s a slightly more creative percentage than the presidential elections of last year, which ElSisi won by 97%, after jailing all but one of his opponents.

Faced with a sham referendum that, among other changes, extends the presidential term until 2030, some Egyptian government-opposers decided to go vote No, despite the predictable result. By doing so, they hold on to a fleeting sense of hope and raise a voice of dissent against the regime, albeit a muffled one.

Photo of government posters in Tahrir Square. Cairo, April 2019. [MOHAMED EL-SHAHED/AFP/Getty Images]

No one, of course, was surprised by the April results. In fact, we Egyptians have grown accustomed to these types of elections, complete with DJs and government-commissioned music videos accompanied by dancing supporters in matching T-shirts. Not to mention subsidy boxes exploiting the poor and buying their vote in exchange for two packets of flour and a month’s supply of cooking oil. In the past, people in the opposition have called for a boycott of elections in an effort to expose the illegitimacy of the vote and to refuse to participate in what many want the world to know is simply a travesty of democracy,  staged by a dictatorial military regime.

What was interesting this time around is the online movement by regime-opposers to actively participate in the referendum and vote No, rather than the usual boycott. For days – and it was only days between the announcement of the amendments and the start of voting – my social media feeds were filled by friends in the opposition debating about the vote, asking themselves and each other the common question: “What’s the point?”. The tired and the cynical made fun of those supporting the movement to vote No and popularizing the hashtag #انزل_قول_لأ (Go say no); The latter responded with impassioned posts about our country’s future and our people’s lost revolution.

When the revolution erupted in January of 2011, I was only 14 years old. Politics were not really a topic of discussion in our house, but I knew my parents didn’t like then-president Mubarak. As an Egyptian, self-censorship is a skill passed down to you at an early age out of fear of the reach of the police state. In fact, I remember one of my first lessons. One day in primary school I was singing a jingle from a famous advertisement while walking home with my father. The song was for the popular cheese product La Vache qui rit, The Laughing Cow. And to my father’s surprise, I turned to him and asked loudly “Why do we call Mubarak the laughing cow!?” … Unknowingly, I was referring to a derogatory caricaturization of Mubarak, a tacit form of humorist resistance, commonly used as a tool of popular dissent. At the time, I was not old enough to be let in on the joke, but this was the day my father explained to me what a plain-clothed informant is and why we don’t talk about politics in public. Or at all.  

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The Laughing Cow cheese logo. PC: Getty Images / La Vache Qui Rit Arabia

My parents’ generation is one that experienced an era of disillusionment and political disengagement, brought about by the military’s dominance of the political process since 1952. A period that gave rise to what is now known as the “Couch Party”, a term coined during the revolution to refer to the silent majority of politically detached Egyptians, whose participation in public life does not extend beyond the couches of their homes. Many in the Vote No campaign this year warned that boycotting the referendum would be a return to the same political stalemate; A return to the proverbial couch.

The 2011 revolution broke through a barrier of fear and political paralysis. When millions of Egyptians took to the streets and ousted Mubarak, not only did politics become a topic of discussion in every household, but the people actually saw themselves as participants in the political process, agents for change after years of oppression, suffering and inequality.

That sense of agency was short-lived. When people mobilized again in 2013 to protest the Muslim Brotherhood’s push for more power, their movement was hijacked by a military coup, masked as a response to popular demand. Today, many call the the series of 2011 uprisings, dubbed the Arab Spring, failed revolutions. Apart from Tunisia, all the countries that saw massive protests in 2011, today are far from meeting any of the revolutionaries’ demands, the removal of the president simply being the tip of the iceberg in most of these cases. Just to name a few, Yemen is entangled in an ugly proxy war, Libya has become a failed state, Syria is committing war crimes against its own people in its torture facilities, and Egypt has made a full circle back to brutal military dictatorship.

ElSisi’s is the most oppressive and relentless regime Egypt has ever seen. Since his rise to power in 2014, we have witnessed countless executions without due process, waves of forced disappearances, detention of young people and activists, and torture, which as in the case of Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student researching labor rights, can end in murder. Most recently, we were traumatized by the images of people burning to death after a railway accident in Cairo’s main station which exposed the level of neglect to which the regime has allowed the basic infrastructure to descend. Repairs to the railway were proposed last year, but in a televised conference the president brushed off the proposals claiming they were not worth the investment.

Indeed, in ElSisi’s Egypt, human lives are not worth the investment and human rights have no place. Neither does the rule of law. The constitutional amendments extend presidential term duration to six years and allow for two consecutive terms. The changes will be applied retroactively to the president’s current term, extending it until 2024, but they also disregard the president’s first term that ended in 2018, making it possible for him to stay in power until 2030… or until the next referendum. The amendments also extend presidential powers over the judiciary and make the military in charge of “protecting democracy”. The final text was never made available to voters and was not posted at voting stations.

In the few days between the announcements of the referendum and the window to vote while abroad, I tried to arrange a trip to NYC in order to vote, but it was impossible at such short notice. I had spent the entire week arguing online as I made up my decision about whether to Vote No or to Boycott and had eventually decided I wanted to join the efforts to Vote No simply in order to fight passivity.

The entire operation was illegitimate and undemocratic and the turnout figures were clearly inflated, claiming 44% participation rate (~27 million people), despite empty polling stations. Those pushing for a No vote were fully aware of that. In fact, this movement actually has nothing to do with the results, but only with the act of participation. It is a movement against passivity, against defeatism and against the reemergence of the politically unengaged Couch Party. It is a movement of hope to remind the people, but also to remind those in power that once the barrier of fear is broken, nothing can reimpose it. Despite the brutality of the current regime, the movement to Vote No in this referendum served as an attempt to hold on to this glimmer of hope, to the promise of the revolution and to the memory of those who died fighting for it and those who are still in prison for believing in it.

‘Ida’ Film Review: A long take on Polish memory

Movie Review: "Ida"


Still from the film PC: Opus film

“Ida”, Paweł Pawlikowski’s brutally simple yet deeply powerful film is as much a deep-dive into collective Polish memory as it is about the conflicting emotions of a novitiate nun’s journey through her own past. The film swept up two Oscars at the 2015 Academy Awards (Best Foreign Language film & Best Cinematography), but was less well received at home. In a country that has recently passed a controversial law against forms of holocaust guilt attribution, it is no surprise that a film with a strong message about Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities has caused some backlash. One might try to link this to the rise of right-wing populism in the country, but in fact the controversy over this film was not limited to one side of the political spectrum. By means of a compelling narrative presented through stunning cinematography, the director confronts his native Poland with a dark and uncomfortable side of its history. One that carries an important message for the present day.

“Ida” tells the story of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), who at the start of the film is days away from taking her vows. Her mother superior at the convent, where she has spent her entire life since being orphaned as a child, sends her away to meet her only living relative, her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). At their first encounter, this woman who was once known as ‘Red Wanda’, a reference to her time as a staunch communist state prosecutor, reveals Anna’s true family history to her. The young novitiate’s real name is Ida and she comes from a Jewish family that was murdered during the holocaust. In this pivotal scene, Wanda offers only an insensitively brash explanation and walks around the house smoking a cigarette as the viewer is left staring at Ida, who is composed, yet in shock at the revelation. Her wide, expressive eyes and young features exert a strong emotional pull on the viewer in this moment and throughout the entire film. This young non-professional actress has eyes that can tell a whole story. I can’t help but see in them the looks of Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Together, Wanda and Ida go on a journey into their past and across Poland to retrieve the remains of their murdered family members and reach some form of reconciliation with their unspoken history. They start to unravel bits and pieces of their own identity and, in doing so, pull at the threads of Polish memory regarding the historical fate of its Jewish population.

In one scene, the son of Wanda’s former neighbor bends down crying while he sits inside the hole in the ground out of which he has just dug up the skull of her son. He was the one who had delivered Ida as a child to the convent and murdered her mother, her father and her older cousin, Wanda’s son. Until this scene, the viewer is never invited to view Wanda as a Jewish victim herself; here we see her in pain for the first time, although we are not given enough of a moment to fully register that pain.

Indeed, the film never lets the viewer engage directly with the scenes or even the history they refer to. There is no soundtrack and very little diegetic sound to guide our emotions, but there are narrative elements in every corner of every shot. Quite literally in fact, for most of the film the characters are confined to the margins of the frame, depriving viewers of the satisfaction of taking in a full action or even a full person at once. The camera is tilted upwards and rarely ever moves. Most shots are long takes that last a little too long, yet don’t wait for an action to be fully completed. The space above weighs down heavily on every scene, almost pushing the characters out of the frame to center on an absence of people, a dead space.

A plot twist towards the end of the film, after Wanda suddenly commits suicide, changes the pace of the film completely. The narrative jumps awkwardly as Ida returns to her aunt’s home and explores every aspect of Wanda’s sinful and adulterous life at once. She wears her late aunt’s dresses, forces herself to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol; she suddenly reunites with a musician who had taken an interest in her and sleeps with him. The narrative jumps seem jarring and removed from the raw feeling of the rest of the film. This sequence is short and the events it recounts confusing. They culminate in Ida’s return to the convent after her lover fails to give a satisfactory answer to her repeated question: “And then what?”

The film ends by breaking all of its own rules: An audible soundtrack accompanies Ida home as she walks towards us, center-frame. Her glance looks past us, in a final, shaky long take we lose our grip on all the threads of Polish memory this film has pulled up and we abandon, just as Ida does her lover, all the questions left unresolved. Despite this unexpected ending and the narrative jumps leading up to it, Pawlikowski suceeds at confronting the viewer with the complex internal struggle of the film’s main character and the dark points in Polish history that many might wish to forget. He manages to provoke thoughts and questions, but not to resolve them.
That is the viewer’s task.

Ida (2013)
Director Paweł Pawlikowski
Writers Paweł Pawlikowski (screenplay), Rebecca Lenkiewicz (screenplay)
Stars Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik
Rating PG-13
Running Time 1h 22m
Genre Drama

It’s Not Just About Keeping Your Voice Down

Letter to the Editor

The insight that Dr. Kate Klonick’s “A ‘Creepy’ Assignment: Pay Attention to What Strangers Reveal in Public” (Op-Ed, March 8) gives into how easily our privacy is compromised is both eye-opening and incomplete. While it’s true that people will divulge information without any awareness of their surroundings, it’s more interesting to see what kinds of people feel anonymous in a public setting. Tellingly, every student Dr. Klonick writes about performed the experiment on test subjects that had one thing in common: all of them were men.

Perhaps the three anecdotes Dr. Klonick chose to share were simply the most interesting ones. But if not, it is a disservice to overlook the cultural influences that determine who is in need of this advice. The article would paint a more complete picture of what privacy means to different kinds of people if it considered the following question: is there a reason men are less careful about revealing too much information, at least in America? The answer is straightforward: men have the privilege of knowing that the entire culture system is slanted in their favor. They take over the space around them because they feel it’s their space to take. Not only that, but they feel secure enough to do so without fear of repercussions.

Meanwhile, your author fails to grasp the fact that an invasion of privacy is not merely “creepy,” it’s an issue of personal safety. In a political climate such as ours, it’s not enough to just write about how easy it is to compromise another’s privacy. It is a gross oversight not to acknowledge the inherent dangers that a large majority of Americans face when a stranger figures out a person’s nationality, religion, gender, or sexuality without their consent. Rather than limiting herself to generalizations, Dr. Klonick should have considered what it is about American society that poses these risks in the first place, and focused her advice on those who are most vulnerable.
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/google-privacy.html

Days in the life of Augusta Forrer Bruen

Feature Report

By Lia James

“Every day […] makes me long for the time that I will hope is to come, when […] we may live quietly at home, no more wars to disturb us in our endeavors to make all good and happy.”

Housed deep in the archives of the Wellesley College Special Collections is a series of handwritten letters. Composed by friends and loved ones of the Bruen and Forrer families of Dayton, Ohio, they are part of The Catharine Mitchill ‘31 Collection of Family Letters, some of which are also available in the special collections digital archive. At first glance, these letters seem quite ordinary, each regaling readers with tales of children’s playdates, the weather, and the ever-present shadow of “the war”—that is, the American Civil War. In fact, these letters are a testament to the complexities of the lives of homemakers during the Civil War, through the specific lens of Augusta Forrer Bruen.

While the collection includes letters to and from a number of family members and friends, one correspondence is of particular interest to me: the letters sent by Augusta Forrer Bruen to her husband, Luther Barnett Bruen, who was fighting in the civil war. Passion and propriety can both be felt in Augusta’s careful penmanship. Between the first “Dearest Luther,” and the last “Goodbye, darling,” she provides a plethora of detail that gives unique insight into the domestic life of a nineteenth century white woman against the backdrop of a war for black liberation.

____

“Our last news is so threatening that I fear your time has come; I cannot but hope not; but if the worst comes will try to be patient and hopeful still; believe me dearest, I will do my best to keep up my spirits and take care of the little ones left to my charge.” (16 June 1863)

Fear is one of the more poignant threads that run through Augusta’s writings to her husband. Layered among uneventful stories of children’s playdates and visits from friends are increasingly despairing comments regarding Luther’s safety. It is as though Augusta is playing a tug-of-war with her opposing emotions. She is trying to remain hopeful for her children who often ask eagerly upon waking up, “Is Papa home?” while also being honest with herself and her husband: “…I’m trying to prepare myself for disappointment” (11 July 1861). These are no peacetime musings.

On the surface, the mundane updates that recur in Augusta’s letters to her husband do not appear to be anything special. Yet domestic concerns are more than they seem when juxtaposed with the uncertainty and instability begotten by war. These concerns are quite different, of course, from those of the black men and women for whom the war was being fought.

____

“I forgot to tell you I believe, about Joe Crane’s change of politics. He has become a great abolitionist.”  (21 June 1863)

Though I have not come across a letter in which Augusta explicitly discusses her own racial background and positionality, her superficial references to “the ‘darkey’” (31 July 1861) and “the slavery question” (12 March 1864) make it clear that she is not part of the black struggle. Despite the fact that her husband is at war, risking his life for this cause, Augusta’s quiet, distant life as a housewife in Dayton, Ohio spawned an unyielding ignorance to such issues.

In a time when becoming an abolitionist is no more than a “change of politics” to people like Augusta and her friends, who “watch the War with a sad interest” (30 November 1862), it strikes a modern reader as extraordinary that there were persons fighting and dying for this cause. These attitudes demonstrate just how distinct the divide was between the politics of slavery and its inhumanity. They suggest, too, how difficult it is for someone who is not on the battlefield to comprehend its horrors, and how far removed the idea of war is from the everyday American consciousness. In today’s society, ‘war’ is a spectacle watched—perhaps with Augusta’s “sad interest”—on screens that show bombs falling in faraway lands. In the mind of a western civilian, the experiences of Luther Bruen seem utterly foreign, and therefore all the more valuable.

____

The discussion of race and abolition in the letters is particularly fascinating today, likely because of the fact that race is still a live issue in mainstream discourse. Reading private exchanges regarding race during Civil War-era America provides remarkable insight and offers a more candid account of the historical events of the civil war than the narratives with which the public has become familiar. I wonder which of the billions of humdrum messages that we exchange each day will be preserved in the archives of the future, and how we will be understood by generations to come.

As the delicate letters are tucked away for safekeeping, I find myself eager for Augusta’s next correspondence, feeling acutely connected to the snippets of her daily life that I have explored thus far. After a final farewell from the curator, I reassess and decide that my original evaluation of the letters was accurate: they are indeed ordinary. However, ‘ordinary’ implies no lack of value or merit—they are ordinary, but extraordinarily so.

 

Collections such as The Catharine Mitchill ‘31 Collection of Family Letters may be consulted in the Special Collections reading room of Clapp Library. Readers are required to register and present photo identification. The catalog is online. The collections are available for research, free of charge to students and faculty of the Wellesley College community. (Source: Wellesley College Special Collections webpage) 

(Featured image: The beginning of one of Augusta’s last letters to Luther. He would pass away due to complications of a battle wound a few weeks later.) 

 

 

いただきます

Itadakimasu

Blog Post

Neon lights glow in a riotous rainbow of color amidst the storefronts of a lively Shinjuku night as we exit the bustle of the subway and re-enter the city. He’s taking me to try Japanese barbeque for dinner tonight. I’ve been living here for months now, but this will be my first time trying it. We walk off the main thoroughfare, turning down a side street before descending a shady set of stairs. I glance to the side at Junpei and he smiles at me reassuringly. “It will be good!” he promises. I smile back and follow him into the restaurant. Outwardly unassuming, the location leaves me hesitant. It’s only after we open the door and step into the hazy interior to be embraced by friendly commotion that I shed my uncertainty about the location. It’s a neighborhood sort of place, where a visitor like me is rarely seen. The place you have to happen upon or grow up next to. I should feel like an outsider here, but I don’t. It’s boisterous, and dark, and matches absolutely none of my expectations. I love it. As we are guided down an aisle I catch snippets of conversation, more felt than heard, from the tables to either side. Joyous, celebratory, with comfortable abandon people’s lives play out in the room about us. Finally, our waiter stops to usher us into our own little nook and hands us the menu. As he goes to get us our drinks, I pause for a moment to look around and really take it all in.
 

Surrounded by horizontal planes of black-varnished wood, we have an illusion of privacy, but can still sneak peeks of our neighbors between the boards. Each table has its own little gray stove set in the middle with charcoal bricks nursing fiery crimson hearts. Next to it are an assortment of jugs, a couple of shakers with spices and pepper inside and a pile of small navy plates for dipping sauces. The walls have been painted a creamy hue of beige, or yellow, it’s hard to tell from our table. However, like the wood that embraces us, the ceiling has been painted black. A shiny metal bell-shape hangs above each table to draw up the smoke rising in tendrils from the charcoal stove, but the place is still smoky, and the lights are haloed in the clouds. That industrial bell, somehow so fitting here, snakes up and into one of the many large black tubes that try in vain to draw the smoke away and form a thick, tangled web on the ceiling above us. It’s like no place I’ve ever been in, but everyone is so full of life that I feel myself drawn into the excitement of this new experience.

—
I stare at him wordlessly for a moment before sputtering, “I can’t believe you just ordered that!” He smiles and quirks his eyebrows mischievously at me before taking a casual swig from his tankard of beer and telling me that I should give it a try. My stomach churns with uncertainty at the thought of eating tongue, and liver, and all those crazy things my dad would never cook back home. But…he’s right, I find myself thinking. I am in Japan. I should give it a try. The food begins arriving at our little table and distracts me from thoughts of the more unusual body parts Junpei wants me to try. I watch spellbound as he masterfully begins placing food on the grill in front of me while explaining how to cook it, when to turn it, what the best sauces are for dipping, and if it’s better eaten alone or accompanied by something else. He, of course, thinks it all tastes better with beer. But I’m already drunk enough in his company and my enthrallment with the whole novel process, I don’t need any assistance. “いただきます” (Itadakimasu) we say together as we begin eating to express our gratitude for the food. With the unusual meat temporarily forgotten amongst more familiar parts, I find myself extending my silver chopsticks eagerly for each sizzling piece.

He has me try each type of sauce and pairing. I’m a Texas girl, I was born and raised on barbeque, but I have never had it like this. The sizzle as each piece of thinly cut meat hits the metal grate, the licks of flame as fat pops and drizzles onto the bricks, the way the meat curls and colors with the heat. I am entranced. Each piece of meat rings with a delicious and unique litany of flavor as it hits my tongue and its juices fill my mouth. Before I know it, the only tongue in my mouth is not my own. My eyes pop open wider in surprise, caught off guard, as he tells me what I just ate. I swallow, uncertain, as he watches for my reaction. It’s nothing at all like what I would have imagined! A dim red color with only a faint marbling to it, the meat doesn’t really look or feel like tongue. It’s a bit denser than what I ate earlier, but it’s not bad. He chuckles at my reaction and I blush a bit. Daring me, he sets the chicken livers on to cook next. The livers are small, rounded little gobbets of meat and look more fearsome to me than the tongue did. My stomach does a little dance again and I glance down at my assortment of small blue plates and the gamut of flavors they contain. I comfort myself with this reminder of the sauces I can dip the meat in if needed. And I still have plenty of water left if I need to gulp it down quickly. I remind myself of how amazing everything had tasted up till now and steal a mischievous sip of Junpei’s beer before reaching out for one of those little balls of meat. I plunk it in my mouth and squint contemplatively as it hits my tongue. Weird…a different texture than I’m accustomed to in my meat…but not bad, I conclude. He adds another piece to the grill and I breathe a sigh of relief it’s just カルビ – short rib.