Nov

1

2024

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Before they became cliched slogans, theories of intersectionality were a way of answering a thorny question on the left: How do we reject forms of oppression which claim to be correcting for other forms of oppression? How do we critique colonialism, for example, when it claims to be attenuating discrimination against religious or ethnic minorities in colonized societies; against women, against gay people? Often, answers to this question veer in one of two unfortunate directions: either agreeing that oppressed people have conservative tendencies that necessitate colonial interventions, or denying those tendencies altogether. In this context, Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World is a truly “intersectional” novel, able to look at misogyny in Arab societies without ever losing sight of the Western intervention that produces and exacerbates these (and many other) forms of violence.

Abulhawa’s protagonist is Nahr, a Palestinian refugee and resistance activist who tells the reader her life-story in an extended flashback from a high-tech Israeli prison. Nahr grew up in Kuwait where, forced by her family’s dire economic circumstances as well as by the maneuvering of her sometimes-friend-sometimes-pimp Um Baraq, she became a sex worker serving Kuwait’s well-off men. Abulhawa’s descriptions of the sexual violence that Nahr endures are harrowing, and, related through Nahr’s broken and emotionless recollection from prison, they are almost too much to bear. At the same time, we’re made aware that these stories of horror are also used against Nahr by Israel, which positions itself as her savior. Foreign reporters show up to the prison, not to ask Nahr about her activities in the resistance or her reasons for undertaking them, but about her history of being raped by Arab men. A note that a Palestinian friend manages to slip to Nahr in prison spells out the dynamic: “Israel is selling a story that Muslim men abused you your entire life, then forced you to join a terrorist group. They claim Israel saved you, and prison has given you a better life.”

Here, Abulhawa forcefully outlines the painful dilemma where the narration of one form of oppression can cynically be used as fuel to justify another. For her part, Nahr rejects this colonial narrative by refusing to talk to reporters of her time as a sex worker. Abulhawa herself, however, speaks, unflinchingly relating Nahr’s experiences of sexual violence, though also situating them within the frame of a lifetime of dispossession inflicted by a colonial world order: experiences that include everything from the reverberating trauma of the Nakba, to Nahr’s childhood and adolescence as a refugee, to the torture and displacement her family faces after the US invades Kuwait in 1990. We also see Nahr return to Palestine, fall in love with a farmer and resistance fighter, find a community, risk losing it each day that nearby settlements grow, and finally, decide to try to get her land back through both mundane and spectacular forms of resistance. Through it all, we see the various fronts on which Nahr has been fighting her whole life, and their many violent intersections; in perhaps the starkest manifestation of this, it is a former rapist of hers from Kuwait who helps build a case against Nahr in the court of public opinion by releasing nude photos of her to Israeli intelligence agencies and newspapers. Oppression breeds oppression, Abulhawa seems to be saying, and no new oppression can free you from an old one—an insight that remains as urgently necessary as it is obvious.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Recently, McSweeney’s posted a humor piece entitled “If Jack Kerouac Tried to Write On the Road Now,” the point of which is that Kerouac must’ve really concentrated to bang out that book in just a few weeks (which he actually didn’t, but whatever), whereas nowadays we’re so inundated by alerts on our smartphones that sustained focus is impossible. That’s cute, I guess. But there’s a much better answer to the hypothetical of Kerouac writing today in Emma Copley Eisenberg’s recent road trip novel, Housemates. Because, if Kerouac were to write that book in 2024, I hope he might make his female characters more than “one-dimensional objects of the male gaze” and cool it a bit with the “romanticized racist stereotypes.”

Eisenberg gives Kerouac a nod, explicitly, but she presents the road trip novel without the heteronormative, misogynist, fatphobic, and exoticist assumptions so often baked into that genre. The Housemates trip takes place during the summer of 2018, and the travelers are a couple of queer twentysomething not-quite-yet-artists who’ve met in a shared house in West Philadelphia. Leah is a nonbinary Jewish writer in search of a subject; her grad school summer fellowship pays for the trip, and her girlfriend supplies the vehicle. Leah’s traveling companion is Bernie, a large-format photographer who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, and who needs to travel to her dead mentor’s cabin to find out whether she can stomach accepting any of the photographs or cameras he willed to her. Without putting too fine a point on the tenser, more threatening moments of this generally calm, contemplative novel, driving through rural Pennsylvania, camping and staying at motels, means something quite different for women and gender nonconforming folks than it meant for Kerouac’s dudes.

As with most good road novels, Kerouac’s included, plot isn’t especially the point in Housemates. What propels the book, instead, is concern for its characters. The moments that got to me were very small ones, blips of razor-sharp observation. To take just one example, the novel gives us glimpses of Leah’s Jewish, Upper West Side family, and her strained relationship with her brother, Evan. While Leah’s been building up a queer community for herself in West Philly, Evan, who went to Brandeis and got religion, has tilted to the Trumpian right. Towards the end of the novel, Eisenberg sums up the current state of the sibling dynamics, neatly capturing how sexual, family, and international politics could overlap in the late 2010s: “Evan’s wife posted anti-trans articles to the original social media app. Leah posted Free Palestine memes to the photo-sharing one.” But, frayed as their relationship is, there’s still hope there. The narrator muses, “If, to a father, a daughter is his heart with feet, walking around in the world, what to a little sister is an older brother? A tether, a satellite, a mirror, a fact-checker, a mentor and mentee?” And then the novel launches into a little memory that explains why Leah hasn’t given up: “When Leah was little, she and Evan had played a game where they would try to keep the other under a blanket for as long as possible. While she had held the blanket down with all her might no matter how much Evan swore and yelled, at the slightest squawk from her, Evan would whip the blanket off, releasing her, asking if she was alright.”

If you’ve felt estranged from a sibling who helped to make you who you are; if you’ve wondered whether it’s possible to make art anymore; if you’re worried about the future of the United States even while you kind of hate the whole idea of it, I suspect Eisenberg’s Housemates might be the road trip novel you’ve been waiting for.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This week I’ll urge you to see a pair of new documentaries that are of equally enormous interest but formally at antipodes. Black Box Diaries austerely narrates the director’s own terrible ordeal. In 2015, the journalist Shiori Ito—then a 25-year-old intern—met Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior figure in Japanese journalism, for dinner; she got drunk and was taken back to Yamaguchi’s hotel, where she passed out and later awoke to find him raping her. The Tokyo prosecutors refused to act on the case, claiming there was insufficient probative evidence. Even when a warrant was finally issued, the office of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe almost certainly exerted pressure not to disturb or arrest the accused (Yamaguchi is Abe’s biographer and friend). Ito then tried civil courts, where—despite calumnies, threats, and ostracism—she ultimately won her case.

As its title suggests, Black Box Diaries tells this sadly familiar story largely through the victim’s own testimony, supplemented by secretly recorded conversations. It’s as unadorned a film as one will ever see: Ito directly addresses the camera, and the visuals are minimal. She doesn’t shy away from sharing the most vulnerable moments of her experience, including her wish to end it all. But her intense sadness—the result of being assaulted, insulted, vilified, and countersued—is compounded by the way the film depicts Ito almost entirely alone, other than visits with her lawyers and the publisher of her memoir. Her solitude is unbearable, as was her personal Golgotha.

If Black Box Diaries errs on the side of minimalism, Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is perhaps too visually busy. This is a function of the director’s effort to tell the extremely complex story of the Congo’s gaining of independence—and subsequent collapse into a multi-sided war, which led to the murder of the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba—at the same time that it makes a case for jazz (particularly free jazz) as the cultural backdrop for the liberation struggles of what was then called the Third World. (Those interested in going deeper into all this should read Stuart Reid’s The Lumumba Plot, which manages to weave this story’s many threads into a coherent whole.) In this film, the hypocrisy and viciousness of the West and the UN are on full display, as is the venality of too many African leaders.

Almost immediately after independence was declared on June 30th, 1960, the fragile unity of the Congolese fell apart, helped along in no small measure by the interference of Belgium, the former colonial ruler, along with the US and Britain. This intrusion included sending jazz musicians like Louis Armstorng to Africa, supposedly as goodwill ambassadors and representatives of Western democracy. But as Grimonprez shows, Armstrong was also a Trojan horse: During his post-independence tour, his entourage included CIA agents sent to spy on local figures and events. If the film has many villains (among them UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld, whose role in the Congo tragedy was actually far more despicable than in the events we see here), three figures stand out as heroes: The Indian diplomat V.K. Krishna Menon, civil rights icon Malcolm X, and, surprisingly, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev. While today the Soviet Union is routinely bashed, we should never forget that, for all its faults, it was a mighty voice against Western colonialism. Indeed, we have few leaders in the world today with the fire Khruschev had, standing at the podium of the UN, shouting, “Death to colonialism! Bury it!”

The opening chapters of the Torah return again and again to the subject of differentiation: God separates light from dark, sky from land and land from water, humanity from the dust of the earth. Our weekly reading, Parshat Noach, takes up this theme on the level of human collectives, asking how distinct nations come to be. For the Bible, this question is both anthropological and theological: What brings people to associate with groups larger and more enduring than themselves? What sets these groups apart from one another? And what purpose does each particular group have in the divine order of the world?

Our parshah addresses the question of the origin of nations in two different ways. First, in Chapter 10 of Breishit, it takes a genealogical approach. The text relates that the children of Noah begat descendants who spread across the earth, each of Noah’s three sons expanding “according to their land, each with their language, their families and their peoples.” The process is presented as a neutral, even benevolent, story of dispersal, described in a litany that echoes the ordered division of creation in the first chapter of Breishit—everything in its proper place, according to its type.

But Chapter 11 approaches this same question in a more mythological register. Following the story in last week’s parshah about humanity’s banishment from the Garden of Eden due to their sin and the account earlier in this week’s parshah of God’s decision to blot out the evil of humanity with a great flood, this tale is presented as yet another episode in the conflict between unruly humans and their frustrated creator. The story of the Tower of Babel—in which God disperses the people of the earth via a sudden confusion of tongues after they come together to build a soaring tower—is sketched out in nine tersely ambiguous verses that leave many questions unanswered: Why did humanity seek to build such a tower? What about it was displeasing to God? Despite its many points of opacity, the text definitively conveys one core message: the primacy of linguistic difference in generating other forms of human distinction. “And the whole land was of one language,” we are told at the story’s outset, followed soon after by its concluding verse, which explains that, in punishment, “God confused the language of the whole land.” Unlike in Chapter 10, where language is presented alongside family, tribe, and territory, here it is speech that pushes people into certain groups and away from others, disrupting an innate human drive toward togetherness.

If language could be the origin of human fragmentation, could it also facilitate the resolution of the tensions that arise from human difference? We find just such a framework much later in the Bible—in the words of the prophet Zephaniah, who lived in the tumultuous generation that preceded the fall of the Kingdom of Judah and destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the conclusion of his dark prediction of forthcoming doom, he shifts to a vision of God describing a future age of harmony and security: “Then I will turn all nations toward clarified language, for all of them to call in God’s name and to serve God with shared exertion.” Zephaniah’s vision evokes the Tower of Babel in mirror image: He sees the divine transformation of human speech as driving a new joint human purpose and possibility.

But crucially, Zephaniah does not promise a return to the “one language” that preceded the Tower of Babel. Instead, he foretells a tongue that is not unified but “clarified”; in Hebrew, the word’s root denotes refinement along with separation. This “clarified language” could be read as a dialectical synthesis of the contradiction between the pre-Babel single language and the post-Babel “confused language”: The language dreamed of by Zephaniah entails unity of purpose along with difference in mode of expression. In this moment when the questions of the relationship between universalism and particularism are so vexed—and when the idea of Jewish chosenness has wrought such harm—our parshah, read through the lens of Zephaniah, thus offers a way of understanding difference neither as a source of interminable strife nor as something that should be overcome, but rather as a force that may be productive in our collective struggle for a better world, a world in which cooperation and diversity live side by side.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.