not the motorcycle diaries

“Interspecies love is all ri-ight, so come on baby turn out the li-i-ight ….”

*Affective Communities, pp. 100-105

On seeing and hearing Sohaila, from RAWA, today; under the auspices of women’s and student’s activist organizations in Australia:

“When the time came for me to go on stage, after Oprah Winfrey had read [Eve Ensler’s poem] ‘Under the Burqa’; all the lights went off save for one that was aimed directly at me. I had been asked to wear my burqa, and the light streamed in through the mesh in front of my face and brought tears to my eyes. A group of singers was singing an American chant, a melody full of grief, and I was to walk as slowly as possible …. I had to climb some steps, but because of the burqa and the tears in my eyes, which wet the fabric and made it cling to my skin, I had to be helped up the stairs.

Slowly, very slowly, Oprah lifted the burqa off me and let it fall to the stage.”

– Zoya, with John Follain & Rita Cristofari, Zoya’s Story: An Afghan Woman’s Struggle for Freedom, Harper Collins, New York, 2002. Qtd. by Gillian Whitlock in ‘The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan’.

“As another summer starts, Iraqi life will continue to be dominated by fear, daily killings, terrorism. For them, it is another summer under occupation. For the rest of us, a happy summer, without fear.”

- Lily Hamourtziadou, in her final Week in Iraq column, 3 June 2007.

“…the “political” has come to be viewed exclusively as a sign of the philosophical and ethical exhaustion of religion. Our conception of the “political” or “ethical” is in many ways hopelessly circumscribed by the secular, rational calculations which underscore the movement of modern European thought - from Europe “out” into the (post)colonial world; (…) predicated upon a [Kantian autonomous] subject who is constitutively transcendental, self-sufficient, unified, and as such invulnerable to both desire (…) and prayer (…).

[a certain stream in Derrida] nags relentlessly at the contradictions inherent in Kant’s extradition of religion from the realm of ethics and justice. It does so to posit a certain type of metaphysical experience (Derrida calls this “fiduciary” faith) as a profound and utopian address to the other.”

- Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Duke University Press, 2006, p.116-117

Further to a conversation here, and in response to Jennifer Martiniello:

Senator Nigel Scullion, dressed for a visit to the NT. Is that a keg on the back seat? Almost definitely.

How strangely wonderful to see, in the SMH, some actual analysis of the policing of protest in Sydney. So close to APEC, and all.

Germaine Greer.

Ana Maria Braga. (Or …?)

“He knew now that there is no secret of humanity which, from a wrong angle, orthodoxy has not viewed, that religion is far more acute than science, and if it only added judgement to insight would be the greatest thing in the world.” (p. 207)

“There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, no deserted valley for those who wish either to reform nor corrupt society but to be left alone. People do still escape, one can see them any night at it in the films. But they are gangsters not outlaws, they can dodge civilization because they are part of it.” (p.221)

I have started writing a chapter around the themes of friendship and solidarity and thought I would procrastoresearch a little this afternoon. As I really should have known, friendship and solidarity are also favourite themes of Erich Honecker, the late Pope, and Luke Skywalker. Oh, and Stalin.

As I stare down the exhiliration-tinged-with-terror of another International Travel Extravaganza, I also seem to be staring down multiple other emotions, close to the home (of three years) that I haven’t left yet (and will be absent from for less than three months). In travelling to another continent to fuel the final stages of my thesis (which will constitute my licence to practice intellectual life, or some conclusions about how to practice this life in the most aware and connected way, or a piece of tragic claptrap from a self-absorbed nerd head, depending on your viewpoint); I seem to be inconveniencing, disappointing, and downright hurting a number of people whom I love, as well as feeling the peculiar weight of privilege tug at my heart (as opposed to my purse strings).

I’m reminded of Mel Gregg’s reflections, from a while back, on contending with this chosen reality when it means that “we will need to move a long way from our family and friends to live according to the values and habits we’ve been taught (are worth losing all this for) in grad school, and to begin to imagine a shared ethics with which we can challenge those who’ve been part of this privileged world a lot longer than we have.”

Rather than join this guild after finally ‘achieving’ entry into it, perhaps I should just move to the South Australian countryside to farm chickens, feed cats, and watch over my family and friends. At the moment I just watch the conditionality of the words I write ricocheting off the universe I send them into. I do wonder sometimes what the point really is if I can’t use it to pierce the walls that surround me, thick with expectation.

*the content of this post may or may not have something to do with the bottle of Lindemanns (from the bottle-o bargain) Bin currently located next to my laptop.