Havana by now can be imagined as one city in two countries. The fiery splendor of Old Havana has emptied money and momentum and much its future into Miami. But the magic and mystique in the name are rooted forever in the island of Cuba. This was the message of the whoops and tears among returning exiles (who, under the Bush dispensation, could visit no more than once ever three years) when our charter flight touched Cuban ground late in December. The jazz piano giant Chucho Valdes said as much to me eight years ago, explaining why — unlike his father Bebo Valdes, who’d expatriated to Sweden, or his Grammy-winning Irakere bandmates Arturo Sandoval and Paquito Rivera, who became American stars — he himself had never left home. “How can I leave Cuba?” the autochthonous Chucho pleaded. “This is where my music comes from, where my music lives.”
Industriales 1, Las Tunas 9 in Havana
Havana plays tricks with our sense of time as well as place. Fifties Havana moved to Miami, but the visitor keeps feeling that our stateside Fifties, my Boston Fifties, are alive again here: in the fat fish-finned Plymouths and Pontiacs, of course; equally in the black phones and seven-digit phone numbers and the calm voices who answer them; in the family worship in places like the Church of Our Lady of Charity in Centro Havana; in TV baseball without commercials, and stadium baseball with small crowds under yellow lights, so like Braves Field in Warren Spahn time. It is almost twenty years ago that Robert Stone, the American novelist, observed Havana as “an exercise in willpower, a dream state being grimly and desperately prolonged.” But back in that “dream state” of the pre-Revolutionary mid-Fifties, Graham Greene’s famous vacuum-cleaner salesman and spy, Wormold in Our Man in Havana, found himself held to the spot, even then, “as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield…” It still does.
We’re talking here with the world-traveling Cuban architect and planner Mario Coyula about the allure of a wreck. Havana is one of the rare world cities that has no skyscrapers and no shantytowns, almost. It is a gorgeous fairy godmother with warts and missing teeth. Coyula makes many points here that I’d not have noticed: Havana historically was not a city of the poor, he notes. Cuba’s poverty was mostly rural, and in the capital it was artfully disguised. By the Fifties, he says, Havana was growing self-destructively. Curiously, the Revolution that has neglected Havana so spectacularly was also lifting standards in the rest of the country and may, in fact, have saved Havana from drowning in rural immigrants. In the long run, he argues, Havana could discover as other cities have that stagnation brought blessings. Worse, less reversible than stagnation would be to turn Havana into Las Vegas or Tijuana with “horrible big hotels” financed by a few foreign investors. The wise mean, he suggests, might be “a little of everything” — many thousands of investors and planned development — with a sense of history.
For many centuries Cuba, and especially Havana, was a springboard for Spain to conquer and plunder central and south America. Later it was also a springboard for the US to go into Latin America. So we have to find a niche for Cuba — what will be our role? In 1958 Havana was already a great world city and Miami was a sleepy town of retirees. Now Miami is a big ugly city, except for a few nice places, but it’s very alive economically. I don’t know if the money is from the drug trade, but it took away part of a role that belonged to Havana as a pivot between North and South America. I think we need to face this. And in any way we think about the future, it more and more depends on the relations with the US. We need to accept each other, and accept differences, be more tolerant.
Mario Coyula in conversation with Chris Lydon, in his apartment studio in Havana, December 19 2008
The polite name for it was folklore, but it was the daily stuff of peoples’ lives. Dancing and music were never very far away, It didn’t mean people were happy. It meant that — not for all Cubans, but for many — dancing was the way they walked, and singing was the way they breathed. It is still that way, which is one reason musically attuned visitors to Cuba today come home so excited.”
We came to Cuba to get a week’s taste of what Brown students had a 4-month semester to absorb. Their native guide, our mentor Adrian Lopez Denis, implants in all of us the idea that the Revolution – even at its 50th anniversary – isn’t the most interesting thing about Cuba, and Fidel and Raul Castro aren’t the most interesting things about the Revolution. My own prejudice is that music beats sugar as the all-time expressive Cuban export; and that in Cuba the rumba feel of life will outlive and outrank the revolution in the long run. So this first 15-minute introduction is with a master of Cuban jazz and dancehall music, Bobby Carcasses. He’s a singer who plays congas, and flugelhorn and alto saxophone. You’ll hear him say that in sports and in music he is a decathlon man — “a decathlonist in art.” He drops other tell-tale bits of a Cuban musical profile: he’s a religious man who believes in reincarnation, to begin with. He lives and loves Italian opera, Miles Davis, the blues and Bobby McFerrin — that is, his music has no categories of nation, style or the moment. He makes light of his anti-American Castro government, which suspected that jazz was a CIA trick. And he believes in a dark unexplainable genius – and geniuses – in music. Duende is the Spanish word for “these dark sounds,” as Garcia Lorca famously put it, “the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art.”
Bobby & Chris… Charles Hill Photo
This is the first of several posts from Havana — about the beat-up and tumble-down but all-the-more bewitching city itself, in conversation with the international architect Mario Coyula; also about a thrilling encounter with three American students at the Latin American School of Medicine — marking a sort of culmination of the civil rights revolution in the US and the most exalted Cuban vision of its own healing touch in a global healthcare emergency; and with Adrian Lopez Denis about a time coming when the US obsession with Cuba and Cuba’s obsession with its world role both fade — when fetishes give way to understanding and the unmistakable bonds of affections across the Straits of Florida.
Barry Posen is a very smart, connected foreign-policy “realist” who runs the MIT Security Studies Program. He was one of those prized 33 policy types who signed the New York Times ad in September, 2002, arguing that “War with Iraq is not in America’s National Interest.”
Barry Posen of MIT
He isn’t always right. A little more than a year ago, he was pretty sure that Dick Cheney would get his last big wish in office, a thundering strike on Iran: ”There will probably be a series of air raids,” Barry Posen begins, that will leave the mullahs’ regime standing but lethally enraged, and will thicken the air of a universal American confrontation with Islam. And then…? But he wasn’t so far off. ”It’s going to take an accumulation of costly mistakes to turn the elite in this country toward a policy of realism and a policy of restraint,” he said to me. Perhaps a decisive presidential election would set another direction.
“The United States needs to be more reticent about the use of military force; more modest about the scope for political transformation within and among countries; and more distant politically and militarily from traditional allies. We thus face a choice between habit and sentiment on the one side, realism and rationality on the other… ”
In James Der Derian’s global security class at Brown University this month, Barry Posen read the Obama tea leaves and appointments — and judged that the President-elect may yet be in the grip of habit and sentiment in the realm of strategy:
Judging from the cast of characters and even judging from things that President-elect Obama has said himself, he’s not very far from the grand strategy consensus I described and in fact, in some ways, you could say, based on things he’s said, he’s even more energetic about certain things. And certainly some of the people he’s advised are more energetic. You know, I can find you somewhere in my briefcase…chapter and verse from say Susan Rice about the need not just to do something about Darfur, but to do very, very forward things about Darfur. Senator soon-to-be Secretary of State Clinton same. The president-elect has talked about humanitarian miliary intervention as if its something you should do. Samantha Power is a friend and advisor of his. So you could easily come to the conclusion that the change is going to be at the tactical level. The kind I talked about, you know, more emphasis on international institutions, more emphasis on diplomacy and, you know, probably more emphasis on doing something about nuclear weapons.
But if you believe that president-elect Obama does have a kind of a sense of proportion, a sense of priorities, a sense of scarcity, an ability to weigh, then I think you can look at this whole panoply of things that are there in the consensus and sort of say what’s likely to be priority and what’s likely to be second priority, right? And something’s got to give.
So my own guess is, when I take off this grand strategy prescriptive hat that I had on and try to assess what’s more likely, I think there’s a set of inter-connected issues that start in North Africa and end somewhere on the Pakistan-India border that are in some sense all have to be addressed at once and this was sort of the message of the Baker-Hamilton Commission… So if you look at all the things that need to be done there: some attention to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, attention to the Indian-Pakistani dispute, trying to get out of Iraq, trying to do something about Iran’s nuclear program, trying to decide what to do about Afghanistan because there’s a lot of loose talk about escalation but also some other talk that says maybe we better stop and think, right? And these things all have somthing to do with the other, right? So addressing all those things would be a project for an administration. Eight years, address those things. Fix one or two. Prevent the rest from going completely to hell; you’re a hero, right? So that project alone, which they’re out front on and they’re stuck with, I think is going to drive their activity.
Robert Coover — in contrast to Rick Moody — would give you the measure of what doesn’t change. Coover’s parody version of America, going back to The Origin of the Brunists in 1966, is a nutbag nation where small-town mysticism and barely veiled religious frenzy are the norm, ever on the verge of erupting into doomsday hysteria. Sarah Palin in 2008 fits nicely into the Coover context, as a lineal descendant of the accidental Brunist cult figure, Giovanni Bruno, who survived a lethal mine explosion in the Midwest to start a new mass movement on the Mount of Redemption nearby. Well might Coover claim to have seen the Palin-drome coming — to have seen that it’s always been there, and perhaps always will be. Accounting for the Obama triumph is another story. In conversation Coover reminds us that the Obama-McCain score, roughly 50-50 in the States, would have been 99-to-1 in the world at large.
In a capsule of his own story, Robert Coover likes to tell of his self-exile as a very young man to an island in Canada. The Bible and the works of Samuel Beckett were his only books. A large supply of peanut butter was his reserve of food. His vow was to write a story a day, and to practice writing “as a vocation, or nothing.” The Public Burning, a big public success in 1977, was his telling of the spy trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — much of it in the mental muttering of Richard Nixon, in a weirdly empathetic self-projecting voice: “Like my own father,” says Coover’s Nixon, “Harry Rosenberg had tried to keep a store going… but had failed, fallen into abject poverty, and then through hard work and tenacity, had fought his way back… Like something out of a Horatio Alger story, except that Harry was a socialist… Little Julius had been very serious about his religion as a boy - we shared this… He had led lessons and had even considered becoming a rabbi, just as my mother had always thought I might become a Quaker missionary. He was younger than me…” In Coover’s reinvention of the Rosenberg case, Richard Nixon was the only one of the witch-hunting principals who deeply doubted the Rosenbergs’ guilt.
Along the way Coover became a champion of hypertext when the World Wide Web was yet but a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. Endlessly productive, proudly anti-commercial, himself a literary cult figure by now, Robert Coover could plausibly be cast as Our Becket: a literary magician of the dark side of self and civic life. With the major difference that far from the furrows on the tortured face of Beckett, Coover’s mask is merry, verging on the cherubic. We began with his take on the Obama Moment:
It sounds like a good title for a parodic novel, “The Obama Moment.” Where we are is, in a lot of ways, where we’ve always been. It’s just that there’s been a fresh gasp of possibility. A glimpse of possibility is what we’ve got now. Up until now things have been pretty much buttoned down, following a pre-designed course, forced upon us by political ambition, on one hand, and world events, on the other.
CL: What was “it”? What was that course?
RC: It began after World War Two, with the adoption of a kind of Manichean vision of how the world works, that notion that there’s a Black and a White. Black was really Red. The White was the good guys in this country and our few unreliable allies. Then there was the rise in the 1950s of this paranoid fear of the outside world, represented by the Communism. That era never quite went away. It’s close to a religious view of the world. It has gone through temperings, but it is still underneath everything that happens still to this day. And it’s reared its head again in this recent age of terror and terrorists… directed now against a new set of zombies. The Kennedy era looked like a glimpse of hopefulness, and still produced some of the conservative ideas that nearly got us into a war over Cuba and did get us into Vietnam. There’s always that cluster that is the underpinning of all governments, as it will be with Obama’s, too…It’s our fate always to be dragged into this vision of the world.
CL: Is it in the water?
RC: No. It doesn’t happen in the water, or in the blood. It happens in the upbringing we get, in the education we get, by what the media tells us, by the conversations we enter into, the peer groups we associate with, that establish these troublesome mythologies. There is a deeply peasant-like mentality in this country that’s very difficult to shake off, and that interferes with the way our children are brought up. This ridiculous stuff that appears on television every night, that certainly totally undermines the so-called “media.”
CL: Are you talking about Fox News?
RC: No. Everything. CNN, NBC, ABC, all of it. It’s all played for the lowest common denominator of intelligence and perception, of patience and attention. It’s notoriously lacking in content. All you have to do is watch CNN in Europe, and it’s so much better than CNN in this country. Here they censor out all the stuff that might be too difficult for the average Sixpack Joe…
CL: Where does an artist like yourself – a satirist, a story, a fabulist, historian, maker of great fictions – where do you look for a story to explain the choice, the rise, the reality of Barack Obama?
RC: That will be left to next generation of writers. I’m still encumbered with the past. Right now I’d say there’s a lot of ephemeral and ethereal thinking going on. It takes a bit of reality for settle in. We’re in a war. We’re in a recession, if not a depression. We’re in a dying planet. All of these things are still there, and they’re on his plate. As he confronts these issues in reality, not in hope and as he has to make compromising choices, we’ll understand better what the options are and how much of a hero he is going to be for us. He could be a massive hero for the nation through the next century, in a way that Lincoln did for his generation and since. There’s that kind of lingering hope out there.
The novelist Rick Moody is one measure of what has changed. He has been known as a generational figure, the “wrathful” child of the fiction he grew up reading, “striking a blow,” as he puts it in conversation, for the children of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. “Rabbit treats his children so despicably, you know, and the kids in the Cheever books don’t get off so well either.”
Rick Moody has lived 40 of his 47 years in the peculiar public and private distemper that Rick Perlstein calls “Nixonland.” But early in the new year, within a month or so of the Obama inauguration, Rick Moody will become a father for the first time in his life — his own proof that we can all grow up sooner or later, that perspectives can shift.
My prejudice in this conversation, and the next one with Robert Coover, is that “novelists get there first,” in their feeling for what’s developing. We touch here on comic novels, the publishing meltdown, Moody’s own musical ambitions with his modernist folk band, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, what’s missing in blogs, and “white guys from Connecticut.”
I live in Brooklyn now, and I’ll give you two examples of what I see — totally anecdotal — as a beginning of a change of attitude in my city. The first was right after 911. I was just coming back from Washington about a day and a half later. I was riding the subway, and there was a bi-racial couple sitting across from me, a Jamaican guy of African descent and his white girlfriend. And the Jamaican guy was singing softly to himself, and as they were getting up to get off the train, the guy got up, walked across the aisle to me, and kissed me — for no reason. I was just sitting there. Everybody in this whole car was thinking — this is the B train, and it’s going to go over the Manhattan Bridge right past the smoking remains of the Trade Center buildings. It was all people were thinking about, but what they were thinking about at the moment was: this stuff that was taking place in this city for 30 years prior to this moment can’t be sustained. We can’t keep living like this — you know, at one another, red in tooth and claw about our differences and our violent distaste for one another.
The second thing I’d say was the night of the election, in Brooklyn. It was unbelievable. It made New Year’s Eve look like a dry run. It really was all these people feeling optimism and tremendous relief that we didn’t have to play out this ‘I’ve got more money than you’ and ‘Fuck you!’ Maybe that’s done for a while.
CL: I always thik of you, Rick Moody, as a child not only of so much fiction you’ve read, but of all the fictionists of the mid-century — son of Cheever, son of Updike, son of Mailer and Roth, or whatever. As you grow up and outgrow those emotions of childhood and the “wrath” that Thomas Pynchon celebrates in your work, what’s the next perspective?
RM: The truth is I’m about to have my first child in a couple of months. My wife is pregnant. In looking back at my career it’s really obvious to me that there was an intergenerational, Oedipal, parricidal rage undergirding a lot of those early books. I felt when I was writing The Ice Storm that I was striking a blow for Rabbit Angstrom’s children. That was uppermost in my mind. Rabbit treats his children so despicably, you know, and the kids in the Cheever books don’t get off so well either. They’re just chattel, just something to be moved around from story to story. So I felt like I wanted to say what it felt like to grow up with these Swinging Sixties parents and organizational men of the Fifties and Sixties…
RM: But I think that work is done. And Wallace is a good example, because I think with the publication of Infinite Jest in 1997, things really tilted around to my generation a little bit. It’s also true that we are now ineluctably middle-aged adults and our responsibility is to try to reflect more points of view and more kinds of psychology — the culture of the whole, if possible, from this vantage point that we have now. I can’t anymore just write about my generation or just about upper-middle-class white guys from the suburbs. I feel this may be an Obama perspective, this responsibility to try to have all kinds of characters in my work.
Daniel Barenboim’s conversation starts high as a kite on the fumes of the Wagner he’s been rehearsing, then lands with both feet on the Middle East. “The situation in the Middle East has never been so bad,” he began. Barak Obama will be a huge relief after the Bush “disaster,” but “what is wrong in America — a unilateral way of thinking” has its own destructive inertia, in America and in Israel. “Which party in Israel is willing and able to give back the territories?” Barenboim inquired rhetorically. “None,” he answered. He did not sound impressed with the lame-duck Ehud Olmert’s speculation about sharing Jerusalem with Palestinian officialdom. “Until there is a Prime Minister in Israel who understands that there is an element of artificiality and injustice” in the making of Israel today… “until an Israeli Prime Minister can speak of injustice,” there will be no moving forward. Time is working for the Palestinians, he says, not for the Israelis or the Jewish people in general. American hegemony, even before the economic crisis, was coming to be a memory. There is much to be done.
We sailed into this conversation after Michael Steinberg at Brown’s Cogut Center for the Humanities opened all the doors for about 50 students and faculty — first to the red plush opera house in mid-morning at Lincoln Center, and then to Maestro Barenboim’s easy, open, stream of thinking.
Barenboim conducts “Tristan und Isolde” without a score (”But I can read music,” he interposed with a laugh. “I remember the choreography of the piece”) and he declaims on the politics of Palestinians and Israelis without a licence. He long ago broke with the choreography of the official peace processes. The brilliant mixed ensemble of Arab and Israeli players that he organized with the late Edward Said, the West-East Divan Orchestra, says more about Barenboim’s fundamental convictions even than his words can: “I am a short-term pessimist about the Middle East,” he has said before, “but a long-term optimist. Either we will find a way to live with each other or we will kill each other. What gives me hope? Music-making. Because, before a Beethoven symphony, Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, all human beings are equal.”
It’s Barenboim’s way, with the Met players and with us, to spell out the finest points of sound — the consonants “ta” and “da” that come out of horns, for example, and the uniquely Wagnerian manipulations of vowel sounds in the German language. The word “auge” (eye), begins with a double vowel sound, with implications for pitch and rhythm… Serious ear training, Barenboim convinces us, could make a happier world. “The economic crisis would not have happened if the bankers knew from music that everything is connected. When you risk making a modulation in the music you immediately have to pay the price: when you make a rubato you have to give it back.” And then he was off:
Tell me another profession where you know more than yesterday but you have to start from scratch? This is the great privilege of being a musician. It’s exactly that: to combine more and more because you’ll never get to the bottom of it, but you always have the freshness of starting from scratch… There are some pieces I play on the piano that I played when I was 7 years old, you know, I was 66 last week–that is a long time… There are pieces I have played one hundred, two hundred times. Yet when I start, there is nothing there because sound is ephemeral, and therefore you start from scratch. And it is this combination, if you want, intellectually and humanly: knowing more and more, and at the same time, having the freshness to start from scratch. That’s the difference between being a musician and a carpenter, no?
CL: Is there a chance that diplomacy or international relations corresponds here, in terms of building on the past but starting from scratch… We will have a new government in Israel and a new government in the United States. I keep wanting to ask you if you’re available to be secretary of state if Mrs. Clinton doesn’t take it. Do you see a start-from-scratch possibility?
DB: I would take Secretary of State. Her Senate seat? No. I think that the situation in the Middle East has never been as bad as it is now. And I think that it’s a wonderful step forward that you Americans have chosen Barack Obama. But if I may be bold, and not very polite, I think that what is wrong and what was wrong in America and therefore the world–namely this unilateral way of thinking–is not Mr. Bush. Who was a disaster. But Mr. Bush was not a foreign element in American society. Don’t misunderstand me, had I been an American of course I would have voted for Obama. And I would have tried to cheat and go and put in two votes if I could. But I think that the expectations that he’ll put the world in order are false. What is he going to tell the Israelis? You tell me what political party in Israel is willing and able, both, to really give back the territories? Honestly. Which are a conditions for dialogue with the Palestinians. None. You can put Barack Obama ten times in the White House and this is not going to happen.
DB: It’s not having a conversation; it’s understanding the human needs of the Palestinians. The Israeli and Palestinian conflict is not a political conflict. It has been treated as a political conflict for sixty years, and this is why it has not been solved… A political conflict is a conflict between two nations… about water, about oil, gas, about borders. And that you solve diplomatically, and if that doesn’t work, militarily. But this not like that, this is a conflict between two people who are deeply convinced that they have the right to live on the same little piece of land. And until they have understood that this is so, that the other has the same conviction, it will not happen, it will only be nonsense… Because basically the Palestinians don’t see why there is a need for a Jewish state, for a state that is exclusively Jewish. They have been made to accept the fact that people from Ukraine, Argentina and New Zealand came there since the 1920s pretending to have the right to live there; they somehow swallowed that. It was never particularly pleasant experience but they did swallow that. But now they don’t understand why these Ukrainians and their descendents need to stay for only for themselves. And they say the Holocaust is dreadful, and what a terrible thing, but why do we have to pay for it? It is all actually very simple logic. And until there is a prime minister in Israel that is willing to understand that — I am not saying agree with it, but understand — that we have come, the Jewish people, that there is an element of artificiality, and that there is an element of injustice. And I’m not against the state of Israel, on the contrary, I believe in the right of the state of Israel to exist. But I know how many terrible mistakes that have been made, and I know that history has taught us that certain things you cannot change, but you have to recognize them. And therefore until there is a the prime minister of Israel that can stand up and say that there has been an injustice committed, and we really have to sort this out, it will not move forward.
More and more, time is working for the Palestinians and not for Israel nor for the Jewish people. Because of the demography and because of the fact that the argument of Jewish suffering, of course, gets a little bit paler with the passage of time. People felt about the cruelty–the unbelievable and unique cruelty towards the Jews with the Holocaust in Europe–in 1948, 1950 and 1960 much more strongly than in 2008. And therefore in 2015 or in 2020, more and more people will start saying why do the Jewish people need to have a country of their own? That they have a strong army [so] why can’t there be a one state solution? And this, of course, is what Israel is most afraid of, and this is what has brought the country to a point where neither the one state nor two state solution is feasible. I was saying the other day, if I was a Palestinian — I mean, I have a Palestinian passport as well as an Israel — but if I was an active Palestinian and I could get everybody to agree on this, I would say that we should tell the Israelis that we have learned a lesson. We accept the fact that you have conquered the land and we accept you as the landlords and everything. Okay, now you can annex the country and now we will fight for equal rights. And what would Israel say? First, they would say that it’s a trap. But when, if, the Palestinians were to give up the arms, it is not a trap.
And now we have to make amends and live together. And all the Jews that live outside of Israel and have a bad conscience about not having moved to Israel but support the government of Israel in all of its stupidity are actually responsible as well. Not only in America, but especially in America.
I ask myself, American hegemony is going down, we’ve seen that long before this crisis happened. And we’ve seen how China and India and Brazil are getting important economically and otherwise. And then I think: we’ve [Israel has] put all our eggs in the American basket. Where is the Jewish lobby in Beijing and New Delhi that will take care of Jewish interests twenty years from now? It’s very short-sighted.
My criticism is not about the injustice to the Palestinians or not, because one can argue this and that. But that basically it’s a diminishing understanding of what Jewish history is about. We … were, for centuries, concerned with morality and with all of that. And, when I went with my parents when I was 10 years old in the 1950’s, there was no talk about the Holocaust then because individually it was too painful, and because collectively, no one wanted to talk about it. My generation did not want to hear about the Warsaw ghetto, we wanted to create a new profile of a healthy Israeli… I would understand an Israeli patriot who would say we have done that and now it is our duty to see to it that we can all work together, and really get it all going; and we stand for justice and we have a strong army and let’s make a federation and get it all together. That is patriotic language. But what we’re doing is making monsters of youngsters of 18 and 19 at the checkpoints to harass Palestinians, and who basically have no understanding and no knowledge of why they are doing this. And with the help of artificially importing one million Jews from the Soviet Union in 1990. Well now 25% of Israeli army are ex-Soviet immigrants. This is terribly unhealthy — forget about the Palestinians — for Israel! It’s very unhealthy. Don’t get me started…
Daniel Barenboim in conversation at the Met with Chris Lydon and visitors from Brown University, November 21, 2008.
Why is Barenboim so fascinating and, I think, so important? Just because a musician with courage can say and do things that almost nobody else can. I’ve observed this about Barenboim before: Like Yo-Yo Ma of the Silk Road Project, or Dizzy Gillespie with his United Nations Orchestra, or Leonard Bernstein leaping Cold War boundaries and the musical divides between Broadway, Hollywood and the New York Philharmonic, Barenboim — born in Buenos Aires of Russian Jewish parents, and an Israeli since his early teens — has made himself an icon of musical implications for a world-wide audience that hungers for a great deal more than performances.
The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, Sea of Poppies, six years ago, we might have saved ourselves the folly of Iraq. Instead, you could argue, we reenacted the cruel absurdities of superpower addiction and the illusions that weave themelves around it.
Sea of Poppies, the start of a projected trilogy on Britain’s Opium Wars against China, elaborates the premise that, as Ghosh says in conversation, “basically, it was opium revenues that made the British Raj in India possible. Indeed, it was silently acknowledged by the British who resisted all attempts to end the opium trade until the 1920s. In fact the British Empire didn’t long outlive the opium trade.”
Our own foreign-oil habit — yours and mine — suggests itself as the counterpart addiction that drives the American empire. Evangelical bullying and the theology of “freedom” are vital links. President Bush’s line, justifying the invasion of Iraq, has been: “I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.” In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh’s kingpin Ben Burnham — closely modeled on historical figures from the Raj — has no trouble invoking his God in the service of opium.
“One of my countrymen has put the matter very simply,” as Burnham says in the novel. “‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ Truer words, I believe, were never spoken. If it is God’s will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it. For myself, I confess I can see no reason why any Englishman should abet the Manchu tyrant in depriving the people of China of this miraculous substance.”
Popular will, democracy, representative government have as little to do with the action of Ghosh’s novel as Congress did with the war in Iraq. “Parliament?” Ben Burnham scoffs to a disbelieving Indian raja. “Parliament,” Burnham laughs, “will not know of the war until it is over. Be assured, sir, that if such matters were left to Parliament there would be no Empire.”
Our free-ranging conversation touches on, among other things, Niall Ferguson’s apology for empire; the narrowing discourse in American media; Afghanistan and Pakistan today; the polyglot world of sailing ships; the anthropological eye; and the history of Asian words in English.
It is not his project as a novelist and an Indian, Amitav Ghosh remarks, to break the “imperial gaze” of British writers from Kipling to Conrad. Rather he would love to recapture the cosmopolitan vision of the American, Herman Melville — the real precursor, he says, of Barack Obama.
Conrad’s work really doesn’t interest me that much… Conrad is writing about the age of steam, as opposed to the age of sail, which is what really interests me. The writers who have profoundly influenced me and my project are Americans, Melville most of all. To me, Melville is the greatest writer that America has ever produced. And I find his writing, his projects, so rewarding in every sense… his take his anthropological projects like Typee, or his ethnographies of the ship, like White Jacket. “Benito Cereno” precisely addresses the question of repression and rebellion, a really amazing story. Benito Cereno was based upon an episode in the memoirs of Andrew Delano, who was actually an opium trader, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ancestor…
One of the most wonderful things about Melville is that he was just about the only one of the nineteenth century nautical writers who paid enough attention to the world of the sea to actually write about Indian sailors. Even Conrad, when he does write about Indian sailors writes them as faceless and demonizes them. Melville is much more open-minded, much more curious. He’s Obama’s true precursor if you ask me.
Melville has a level of curiosity, a level of engagement with the world that is completely absent from 19th century English writing. Even though England has a long connection with Asia, it is so rare actually to find a believable representation of an Asian in English books. In Melville, on the other hand, you remember in Moby Dick, the 40th chapter, all of the sailors sing in different languages, and then suddenly you discover that this ship, which is a Nantucket whaling ship, actually has forty different nationalities on board, including Indians. In those ways, Ishmael — there you have him, a figure who is articulating a very challenging view of our relationship with nature, in terms of attention to nature; and the whole idea of the destructiveness — both the interest of whales and the horror of killing whales, and at the same time the joys of men working together in killing whales. All of these things are so richly and ambiguously rendered in Melville. In many ways, his work is inexhaustible in its inspiration.
Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Chris Lydon, November 19, 2008.
So the first homework assignment, kids, is: read Moby Dick.
The writer Chris Adrian is a medical doctor, a pediatric oncologist, who seems to have known from the beginning that our bodies are not the problem. I think of Beatrice, an attempted suicide, “the jumping lady,” in “The Sum of Our Parts,” one of ten stories in Adrian’s shimmering, glow-in-the-dark collection A Better Angel. Beatrice is comatose, being readied for a liver transplant. But “that part of her which was not her broken body” doesn’t want to live. Her spirit lifts off, finally, “in search of a place without loneliness and desire; without misery and rage, without disappointment; without crushing and impenetrable sadness.”
In Chris Adrian’s world, the people who jumped out of the twin towers on 9.11 are still falling, some in the strangest of places. In “The Vision of Peter Damien,” for example, they are raining down on a medieval Ohio farm town which may also stand for Iraq. It’s a world where, as he says, “dead people don’t go away.” Out of his own experience and his own obsessions, Chris Adrian’s stories embrace the natural and the supernatural, articulate souls as well as hurting minds and bodies. It was his writing teacher at Iowa, Marilynne Robinson, who turned him toward theology, toward the unexpected pleasure of reading John Calvin, and then to Divinity School at Harvard.
Our long conversation here fortifies the hope that bad times make good books, and that Chris Adrian is as good as they get at making metaphors of this very strange moment. In one of his most widely read stories, “The Changeling,” which ran in Esquire with the title “Promise Breaker”, a single father hacks off his own hand with an ax to address the psychosis of his son Carl, who has taken on himself the pain of the 9.11 dead. “Is it enough?” the father asks. “And I think I mean is it enough to prove to them I love my son, or that I deserve to have him back, that I mean it when I say I promise to take better care of him, that I promise to be a better father, to unroot whatever fault in me threw him into the company of these angry souls who died to make us all citizens of the world…” In Chris Adrian’s cosmos of irremediable pain, father and son can both be seen meeting agony with love. “I am still a fan of happy endings,” as Chris Adrian said to me in conversation. “It was meant to be a happy ending.”
CA: I tend to write about whatever is troubling me most deeply at the moment. That used to mean writing about death, my brother’s death specifically. He died when I was 22, he was 25. A lot of what is in the first two novels has to do with that. But as I got older and became more removed from his death, in time at least, my capacity to be troubled by things that were not quite so personal opened up. And as I started to notice what a sorry state the world was in, and particularly America was in, it started to intrude into fiction in areas that used to be more personal or more private.
CL: It seems so brave to introduce not just angels, which are almost cliché, but a spirit reality that’s in endless conversation with us, with individuals but even with countries. Where does that conviction come from?
CA: I guess it’s a notion that I have demonstrated to myself in my own obsessions and the way that I have engaged in troubling things over the years, that has proven to me that dead people don’t go away after they’re dead. I think that is true for individuals that lose them, and for communities, and for countries and for the world at large. That is something I explored in a relatively ham-handed though satisfying personally way in that the first novel I ever got published [Gob's Grief] which was about the civil war but more particularly about a man who loses his brother in the civil war and spends the next ten years trying to build a machine that will bring his brother back to life but also bring back all of the other soldiers who died in the civil war with the idea that the whole world would be transformed if death were abolished.
CL: The godfather of doctor-writers, [Anton] Chekhov, once said, “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.” Throw in pastoral ministering in your life… how do these things relate to each other?
CA: They all, especially the medicine and the writing, because I have been at that longer than the divinity stuff, certainly seem to inform each other. I don’t think that I could do one without the other; I would be a worse writer and a worse physician if I weren’t a writer and a physician both. The things I am privileged to see in my work as a physician drive my work even when it is not about a hospital… I don’t want to say I imagine my patients’ lives, but I think that the habit of trying to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective even if that person is just an imaginary construct you’re using in the course of your work as an artist, makes it easier to make room for how big people are in real life. It helps you to remember to keep in mind that there is a lot more to the world or the person sitting across from you than what is in that little room.
Chris Adrian in conversation with Chris Lydon, November 11, 2008.
The Obama Moment in America reminds the Chicago anthropologist John Comaroff of the Mandela Moment in his native South Africa in the early 1990s. The whole world has embraced the Obama Moment as its own, Comaroff says, because it marks “the reentry of a pariah nation into the world” on the terms of a revived democracy.
There’s a bracing analysis here from a man who makes it his business to jar our perspective — whose definition of anthropology boils down to “critical estrangement.” Anthropology won the election, Comaroff says, only half kidding. He means not just that Barack Obama is the son of an anthropologist but has a mind to stand outside the consensus when he must.
“We’ve seen something like the the birth of a counter-Enlightenment in the Bush years,” Comaroff says. “‘Give me faith, and I’ll tell you the answer. Take my heart… as sufficient justification for the Iraq War, or for judging good and evil.’ Anthropology says: ‘Wait a moment. What do we sacrifice when we sacrifice reason?’ Digging at surfaces is the anthropological act. Anthropology as a discipline has a mantra: estrangement. Take nothing for granted. Whatever appears to you in the surfaces of everyday life is not an answer to anything; its a question about something. Obama, though trained as a legal scholar, is an organic anthropologist.”
The Obama Moment is an invitation to restore politics and a public space where nationhood “in any collective sense” almost died. President Bush’s invocation of the shopping cure after 9.11 helped define “a nation of individuals held together by a market.” The Obama Moment “reenvisions America as the sum of its differences.” The Bush years gave us “lying as a national practice,” with political impunity. “Forensic journalism” marks the path back to the estate of truth. Forensic journalism — argumentative interpretation of the evidence — is embodied differently in the Nobelist Paul Krugman of The New York Times, John Stewart of The Daily Show, and Charlie Savage, who broke the Bush “signing statement” scandal for The Boston Globe. But it will take more than a few heroes to sustain the euphoria in this unfamiliar Obama Majority. The rest is up to us.
JC: I have the audacity to hope that the return to democracy is going to be about hearing. But that, of course, throws a moral obligation on journalism. I think that the press let us down very badly over the Iraq war. I think it gave a free ride to a president who didn’t deserve a free ride, even when there were plenty of critics making very strong arguments, well-backed arguments about the falsity of the claims [justifying the war in Iraq]. They were cowards. They were self-censoring. In a democracy, no one self censors.
I have an enormous respect for forensic journalism. Forensic journalism is basically anthropology for the public: the kind of journalism that precisely takes as its obligation the probing of surfaces: why are we hearing what we are hearing, why are we being told what we are being told, who is asking the questions on our behalf. I think that journalism is the first estate, not the third or fifth or whatever, it is the first estate—the estate of truth. And it can only be the estate of truth to the extent that it represents its population. We know now that politicians don’t–they represent capital, they represent capacity to turn financial assets into votes in congress. They don’t necessarily, when they vote, represent us… But, the press is always there and always ought to be representing us.
CL: Wouldn’t Rupert Murdoch claim that he is practicing forensic journalism at Fox News?
JC: I have never heard news on Fox, I have heard representations of partial realities… We’re in the tragic situation, as Jon Stewart once said, where we get our news from Comedy Central. We certainly don’t get it from Fox.
CL: Is Jon Stewart practicing forensic journalism?
JC: Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert did a service during the Bush administration. They were really very serious people by pointing out the contradictions, the stupidities of administration speak—of regime speak. They weren’t producing the news but they were producing a forensic discomfort about it that made one think… They served notice about what it was we were not seeing by virtue of it being half-hidden by the likes of Fox and the liberal press, which didn’t do much better. A return to forensic journalism is about news analysis. It is about the relationship between the production of fact and its interrogation, after all the fact does not float free in space. The fact is as manufactured as anything else. And understanding the process of its manufacture and asking how we are being fed these kids of representations. Of course Obama must be held accountable, too. Otherwise we live in a world made totally of spin.
CL: Is it possible that Google has killed journalism?
JC: I think it is a threat to journalism. It poses the threat of trivialization, which is to say that we live in an oversupply of information and an under supply of facts and analysis.
I really think that this is a wonderful call for the universities to reassert their relevance. We have seen the trivialization of the university as an institution. Sarah Palin was talking about just cutting funding for research without knowing what that research was about. We need bridges into the recesses of knowledge; we need bridges into the reeducation of America, which has become de-schooled in fundamental ways since the 1980s. I think that the university’s own obligation is not only to policy (a cheap way of looking at the application of knowledge) but to critical analysis. Think about public culture in Germany or South Africa, some of the more enlightened states in the world, where critical analysis is a public obligation. The levels of discourse are so much higher, the notions of trying to understand what is going on in the world are so much higher. The conversations that I cannot have outside of the university in America, which are perfectly comfortable in Berlin, or perfectly comfortable in Barcelona and perfectly comfortable in Johannesburg. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what anthropology or sociology or economics really are. We have business schools, but that is something else entirely. In that sense we have lost our purchase on enlightenment: the notion that understanding the world makes it a better place. That goes back to strategic optimism about Obama. He is a truly intelligent and enquiring mind and that could bring the focus back to education because there is enormous cultural capital there.
The American empire is threatened: we are threatened by the economies of Russia and China, we are threatened by the resurgence of the Middle East and, in a sense, Europe. The notion that the American economy will triumph in the end is deeply under threat. How are we going to restore it? We are going to restore it not simply by investing money in the stock market but by investing money in human beings. That is how value is produced.
If we are to reenter the world as a positive force, a force that doesn’t presume that we can civilize others but instead learn from the civilizations of others… If we realize that the global moment is an opportunity to learn. If we understand that there are other points on the planet that are far in advance of us: in understanding the history of capitalism that we are living through; the history of democracy we are living through; the threats to world order; the identity politics that are surfacing. The moment that we begin to take those seriously is the moment we reenter the globe as equal partners, neither as dominators nor as pariahs. Domination and pariah status kill nation states, they don’t make them.
John Comaroff in conversation with Chris Lydon, November 7, 2008
Industriales 1, Las Tunas 9 in Havana
Architect Mario Coyula: glamour and decay
“Decathlon-ist in art” Bobby Carcasses
Bobby & Chris… Charles Hill Photo
Barry Posen of MIT
Amitav Ghosh: on addiction and amnesia
Chris Adrian: Pain’s Artist, Doctor, Minister
