not the motorcycle diaries

In a world that every night seems so riven with insecurity it really is amazing to climb into my eucalypt-clean bedclothes and drift off with a fine book and a belly full of noodle soup and friendship.

Women blog about the World Social Forum 2007 in Nairobi which is unfolding right now, as do Andrew, Adam, and Global Exchange.

I think Martin Sastre is going to help me write my thesis.

“[M]any politically aware, cool people … hide in desire, in that narcissistic space of longing where difference - rather than becoming the new site for resistance and revolution for ending domination - becomes the setting for high spectacle, the alternative playground.”

– bell hooks, in Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, 1990, p.163.

- Street in Mogadishu (source: BBC). 

As you can see, Somalia is a country with the kind of watertight milliondollar infrastructure to harbour positively zillions of Terrorists and should meet the full force of US Army airstrikes.  Life expectancy is 45 to 47 years* because they just keep killing each other, right?

*cf. 78 to 83 years for white Australians.

www.iraqbodycount.org

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more colouredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skins, the red gums were their own.”

- from ‘Beloved’, by Toni Morrison, Vintage, 1997, pp. 198-199