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The Week in Evil (27/3/10)

So much evil… where to begin?

1) Oh, here. While being sentenced for two rapes committed on the York University campus in 2007, Daniel Katsnelson declared that he “hopes some day the victim will be able to take away something positive from this, as he has,” and “suggested that now maybe she will know to keep her doors locked”. Which brings us to this clever list, and also very clearly to this — though obviously not to this.

2) Similar theme, but it gets a bit more horrifying here. Bibi Aisha, a young Afghan woman, was married at 10 to a man who kept her in a stable until she began menstruating at 12. She was jailed when she tried to escape, and upon release returned to her husband’s family (by her father) — who cut off her nose and ears as punishment for ‘shaming’ the family. Donations to fund reconstructive surgery and other assistance can be made here.

3) And last, I’ll point to allegations by Inuit that the RCMP slaughtered up to 20 000 sled dogs in Nunavut, northern Québec, and Labrador between 1950 and 1980. If you want to erode your belief in the decency of Canadians, read the comments. Mixed in with the statements of outrage (the kind that maybe make you hope that humans are not such wicked beasts after all), we find these gems:

“I think RCMP went to Nunavik, saw how the dogs were treated and the condition they were in and thought they were doing the right thing by putting them down.”

“My father was an officer in the north at this time. The citizens were warned to fence their dogs and keep them on leashes when out walking. The reason being the dogs were attacking people and killing people. The dog cull protected the community.”

“my father shot my dog and i want money too.“

So — in other words — an mass animal slaughter that was part and parcel of a colonialist cultural genocide was, of course, carried out for the good of the colonized. And my goodness, if only they wouldn’t whine so much about it. We can pretend that these aren’t the sentiments underlying comments like these, but we’d quite simply be lying to ourselves.

Now: take all of that anger — I stirred it up on purpose, people — and do something good with it.

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Categories CBC, Conscience, Evil, G-d, Globe and Mail, Human Rights, Middle East

Persepolis

30 Dec

I plowed right through Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis this week, in its English translation. It’s a tremendous book, about Satrapi’s experience growing up in Iran from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. In many ways, Persepolis is typical Bildungsroman: Satrapi starts as a remarkable child, gifted and willful, and ends up derailed or disillusioned when she is sent by her parents to Vienna at the age of fourteen, to be kept safe from both the Iran-Iraq war and the increasingly repressive Iranian government. Satrapi isn’t edified by this time abroad, however, and it is only when she returns to Iran that she begins to patch herself back together. This is a story that could easily have been a narrative of victimization, but it’s not: it’s a narrative of disrupted formation in a time of conflict and political repression, and it’s truly wonderful.

That said, what’s most important about Persepolis might be what it accomplishes politically. The version of Middle Eastern culture that is presented in North American media is, as goes without saying, grossly simplified. Even setting aside flatly offensive depictions of people of the Middle East as the enemy, the other — there are few if any mainstream sources that account even for regional or national differences, let alone for the real experiences of individuals or groups within regions. And there are real differences. If I’m going to insist on difference between Canada and the United States, or Canada and Britain, it’s equally important for me to insist on differences between Iran and Afghanistan, Egypt and Algeria. And yes, these differences are far, far easier to quantify.

Satrapi is concerned with Iranian culture, language, and history, and makes it clear that it’s distinct, in important ways, from that of the rest of the region. Her characters are compelling, nuanced, and (with a few exceptions) totally ‘modern’. This is a thoughtful, first-hand historical account, and one that I doubt could be read by somebody with a limited awareness of Iran, or the Middle East in general, without shaking up their concept of a homogeneous Middle Eastern culture. And I guarantee that most of you have such a concept of Middle Eastern culture.

Reading and writing, it bears saying again, always have a political purpose. If you want to be really politically and culturally aware, you should be reading not outsider accounts (or not only outsider accounts), but cultural documents from inside a region. If thoughtful, human, politically-aware books like Persepolis were typical on North American curricula, it’d be much harder to convince us of the abstract wickedness of people “over there”, wherever the “over there” of the moment happens to be.