Category Archives: Blog

When Loss Becomes You

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
__________

When I got into college, Pasadena City College,…I heard some remarks from a young man who was the same age I was but who had apparently never made the connection with what his parents did to keep him alive. He was still blaming them for their humility and their acceptance of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people. He said, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.” When he said us he meant black people, and when he said old people he meant older black people. That was actually the germ of the idea for Kindred (1979)

I’ve carried that comment with me for thirty years. He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older generation had to do, without really putting it into the context of being necessary for not only their lives but his as well. I wanted to take a character, when I did Kindred, back in time to some of the things that our ancestors had to go through, and see if that character survived so very well with the knowledge of the present in her head. – Octavia Butler

First, a spoiler-free refresher on Kindred if you haven’t read it, or if you can’t remember it: On July 9, 1976 (which was contemporary when it was written), Dana feels dizzy, and then collapses, while unpacking in her new house. She comes to on the banks of a river she has never seen before. Luckily, space and time travel have a short jet-lag period in this world, because almost immediately after she arrives 161 years in the past, she saves the life of a little red-haired boy drowning in the river beside her. We later learn that the boy is Rufus, her great-grandfather. Rufus will grow up to have several children by one of his future slaves, Dana’s great-grandmother Alice. But for now, he is a boy who needs saving, and so she saves him. Dana continues to save him over the course of the story, because consanguinity has bestowed upon Rufus the ability to call Dana into his time when his life is in danger.

Now, a spoiler free plot point: Dana loses her left arm on her way back from the last of these travels. It has to be amputated in the present-day, as a result of an injury she sustains while coming back. She also sustains a permanent scar on her face from being kicked by a slave-owner after falling down.

Amputation and scarring are permanent, and should not be the metaphor to represent the injuries that slavery has caused to those racialised-as-Black in this day. This isn’t to say that there are people racialised-as-Black living outside of structural racism, or that if you ignore reality, injustice goes away. Rather, what I want to hold up for scrutiny is the notion that injury and impairment are necessarily and perhaps even inevitably, a part of identity for descendants of slaves and those who look like them in contemporary America.

If you’ve read Wendy Brown, you’re probably familiar with what I’m getting at. If not she’s a political science professor at University of California, Berkeley, and my question is related to the one Brown poses in States of Injury. That is, “how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity?”, but my response is different. Brown argues that its the capitalistic superstructure that we need to jettison in order to bring about liberation. You see, by getting mad that the path to your piece of the pie is unjust, you maintain that the pie really is the thing you value. “The reviled subject becomes the object of desire,”she warns.

The horrors of the slave trade seem to lend its support for her proposition. What were the slaves doing? They were making things for people to buy while keeping the cost of production minimal. They were working on sugar plantations so the land owners could have cookies, and cakes, and boiled sweets. They were working on cotton plantations so the land owners could look fashionable. They were building Georgian colonial homes to shelter the plantation owners from the brutal southern heat and the back-breaking work of beating people within inches of their lives. Though slavery is not capitalism proper, it has the capitalist’s existential project at its core: that the making and buying of things for profit, determined by membership in stratified social classes, should be the primary preoccupation of state and society. All the while, the slaves wanted what the slave owners had- the spoils of the American Dream, despite the fact that it was the Dream that justified their enslavement. We still do this in various forms today.Many groups and movements criticise the state as a monolithic site of oppression qua unjust dominance, but then seek its protection under the logic that state dominance is only unjust if its dominating the wrong demographic.

I’m not convinced that capitalism is the problem though, or that anarchy or communism are potential solutions. Perhaps domination is inextricable from capitalism, but domination doesn’t belong to any particular political economy any more than religion has monopoly on morality. Yes, her experience of enslavement permanently impairs Dana. But let’s not elide over the fact that her impairment would not be a disability if her society did not make safety and self-actualisation a two-handed commodity.

So that’s why I loved Kindred, but am also a little wary of it. I loved that it shows so vividly the kinds of things that happen when you put ego and profit above universal human dignity and justice. But it also seems to suggest that injustice is primarily a problem of unjust commodity distribution, rather than a problem of us valuing a questionable set of social goods. It also reifies various forms of injustice by suggesting that we need to expand the class of people who can afford freedom, rather than question why freedom is so closely tied to desert and not something else. Do we really want to say that freedom is a cookie given only to those who have worked hard enough at the right things? Perhaps so, but then we’d need an account that can explain why freedom’s metaphysics only kick in after you’ve joined the right social club. If you’re really free, you need to be free from the start, not after conquering (or being born having conquered) a set of social ordeals.

“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery,”Dana thinks to herself, after a few travels back into the past. I now think to myself, “You can make a person accept nearly anything, if you tie acceptance to their livelihood”. The characters in Kindred that question slavery either attempt to run away, or hope to one day get their free papers. I sympathize with the characters who tried to run away, but I’m sympathetic of the stance of waiting and hoping. It’s just that, waiting for your free papers suggests that you really are property (as many slaves had been convinced), and continues to hold the plantation owner as the ultimate arbiter of freedom. If we untie our livelihood from needing to dominate others, we can start to live differently, and oppression becomes a social condition, rather than a permanent personal injury.

No, oppression is not an amputation, but a sign that you want to use that two-handed tool too. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is perhaps another conversation. What’s important though, is that we distinguish between “I want to be free”and “I want what those who deem themselves free have”. Pursuing the latter has the unfortunate and pernicious effect of stopping the conversation about whether self-professed free people are really any freer than those they dominate. There’s no need clamouring over one another for pie when what you really want is chocolate cake anyway. The metaphor might be trite, but you’d miss it if you took the injustice-as-amputation metaphor at face value.

 

Kindred-octavia-e-butler-124291_408_600

When Goddesses Change

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
__________
One summer, Octavia Butler came to me in a dream. There were black feminists and ice sculptures everywhere. And a porch. It must have been heaven. Octavia walked up to me and tilted her head. She lovingly said “I hate you.” And laughed. And played a little bit with my hair, her hands as gentle as humidity. Then she went on to explain something important about mosquitoes that I can’t remember now.

Sweet ancestral hate. That’s a new one.

As a self-identified Black Feminist Love Evangelist, my relationship to chosen black feminist ancestors has been one of love and affirmation. Mostly, I identify with the black women writers and activists whose words I read, reread and chant and sing. They offer affirmation for who I am and for the world that I believe in. One January I even found myself receiving urgent love letters (motherourselves.wordpress.com) from the internalized voices of the likes of Audre Lorde, Ella Baker, June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara every morning. And at the end, when I had thanked my grandmother and declared the project complete…I got this letter from ancestor-trickster Octavia:

Alexis,

Ha! Didn’t think I would show up, did you? Here I am, making room for the difficult, the unsatisfied, the restless creator in you. She is the one that will make the hard choices and the new worlds to live on. She is the one who will question everything, down to how life appears.

With all this loving you are doing, and which you must do, don’t disdain your opposition. You would call it the queer thing, the part of you that just wont fit into the terms of this world. It deserves to grow and to shatter everything, even your sense of who you thought you were.

I know I came in and messed up the whole coherence of the project, your whole timeline and pretty picture. And I know you trust me less than the others, that you have never been seduced by my narrative voice.  That is why I showed up here anyway.

 

What your life and work will be will exceed your expectations, your invitations, your affinity. Life is stranger than anything you would want to imagine, and that’s the good news. Wake up to the reality that survival is a sharp thing, full of edges and decisions and sacrifice. And while you believe in abundance, I will stay here, insisting that everything here is a shell that still needs to be broken through. Acceptance is not what you think it is. Remember me while you learn that the boundaries will not hold, and whatever safety they provide is strategic at best, but usually false, usually lazy, usually a trick for evading breakthrough.

I do not rest because this world does not warrant it. And it is the restlessness in you that will knock things out of place that should not be set up how they are.

Don’t forget that even your crankiness is bigger than you. And make room for me and for knowing that some things must be destroyed.

Here, watching and waiting, undoing the neat package you thought you had. Remember, gifts are messy.

Octavia

Right.   The thing is, unlike other chosen ancestors, I don’t particularly identify with Octavia Butler. I don’t see justification of who I am. I define myself by my unconditional (and possibly undeserved) love for our species. I truly believe that we can come into alignment with our planet and stop killing ourselves and each other, and I am disturbed by what happens to our species in all of Octavia Butler’s stories. My interpretation of Butler’s work is that she believed that our species and this planet were fundamentally incompatible. There is no future where humans and Earth work it out. Through disease or through the interventions of another species, humans in Butler’s body of work must give up on being human or get the hell off this planet. It is never going to work. Humans will always use their intelligence for hierarchy which will breed destruction.

What a depressing thesis. But of course it is more than justified. Our species has a drastically abusive relationship to the resources of the planet, the other life-forms on the planet and to ourselves and each other. And Butler’s experiences on this planet would not necessarily lead to cuddly feelings about this species.

I remember watching a video of Octavia Butler sitting awkwardly in a circle of black women writers gathered in the Bahamas at a 1988 retreat coordinated by Cheryll Y. Greene, executive editor of Essence Magazine and late great hero of my soul.  Octavia was explaining to the pantheon of writers (including Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara and many more) that there was no reason that she should be the only Black woman science fiction writer. It was lonely. She encouraged them to start writing science fiction and gave them some tips. She also explained some of the struggles she had faced in deciding to be a writer at all.

She described when she first moved out of her mother’s house. She was in her twenties and she got her own first place. A cheap apartment. And she had a dog. And she worked all the time. And one day the children in the neighborhood tortured and eventually killed her dog. She told this story to the gathered women writers and she laughed as if it still hurt. What kind of a species is this, where children kill a dog because they can?

In that moment I had to acknowledge that the futures we imagine are based on our lived experiences and what we can possibly extrapolate from them. I did not come to adulthood welcomed by dog-murdering children. In fact, I came through childhood and into adulthood with my own hardships, but also with the irreversible impact of Octavia Butler and Black women writers and thinkers in and beyond that circle lifting me up. I was six years old when Butler spoke those words and when the recorded image reached me I was sitting comfortably and gratefully in Cheryll Greene’s living room where she was actively transferring legacy and love.

In the finding aid to Octavia Butler’s archival papers there is not very much mention of correspondence with other known black women writers who were in that circle or who were her elders or contemporaries. There is testimonial and archival evidence that she took care to mentor younger black women science fiction writers like Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor, but who was there for her?

In Toni Cade Bambara’s papers at Spelman College I read some letters from Octavia Butler to Toni Cade Bambara and was surprised and not surprised that her letters to Toni felt as abrupt as her surprise ancestral letter to me.   She bluntly told Toni Cade Bambara that her handwriting was terrible and that she really couldn’t be expected to read her letters unless she evolved to the use of a typewriter. And maybe that, and her rigorous book production schedule, had something to do with the fact that it had taken her almost a year to write Toni Cade back. Bambara and Butler stayed somewhat in touch, but they also had very different theories about the species. Bambara’s Salteaters offers the proposition that the life of an individual human, the organism of her family, the ecology of her community, the vibration of the species, the synchronicity of the environment and the ringing of the solar system were all the same thing on different relevant and interconnected scales. The thesis was that if people could heal themselves and each other, the imbalances (many of which were/are human made) in the environment and the society could be healed. Not that they would be healed, but that they could be.  Whereas Butler’s humans seem to be hopelessly out of sync with this planet and any other planet that they journey to (as evidenced by Survivor…the out of print novel in the Patternist series that she didained and repressed…and the recently written about drafts of the unwritten books in the Parable series…), Bambara’s humans are one with everything, for better and for worse.

I would love to be a mosquito near the blood of their living conversations. I wonder if there was hair-touching or any sweet declarations of hate.

Recently on a visit to Los Angeles I had the honor of being taken on a tour of Octavia’s first world and the general setting of some of her novels (Pasadena, CA) by Dr. Ayana Jamieson, founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy network and brilliant scholar on the psychological, literary, spiritual and historic impact of Butler and her work. We went to places where Butler used to live, the libraries she devoured as a child, what used to be her elementary school and at the end of a transformative day where I learned so much about Octavia Butler we went to pay our respects at her grave.

Ayana, guardian and generous distributor of so much about Octavia Butler’s legacy had been holding birthday celebrations and remembrance rituals in honor of Octavia Butler at the gravesite in order to bring visibility to the fact that she was home and as a marking point for the work of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network which brings together people whose activism and creativity is inspired by the models that Butler created.

She had been to the grave many times and had brought other colleagues to pay their respects as well.

I was excited and nervous to visit Octavia’s gravesite. But when we arrived at the spot…she wasn’t there.

That’s right. I went to visit Octavia Butler at her grave, and she stood me up. But as Ayana’s dissertation explains, graveyard hi-jinks are well in Octavia’s wheelhouse. The Yoruba goddess/orisha Oya, is a key figure in Butler’s Parable Series. The protagonist is named Lauren Oya Olamina, after the orisha who is most associated with change. It is no coincidence that Lauren Oya Olamina creates a religion and movement called “Earthseed” based on the premise that “God is Change.”   Oya is also understood to be the guardian of the graveyard and the double-helix whirlwind that connects the living to the dead, because the change between life and death is one of the most mysterious changes we know about.  Ayana explains it much better in her dissertation, but in that moment of being stood up and engaging the employees at the cemetery (who didn’t know about Butler’s literary fame) we both knew that if anyone could hide in a graveyard…it was Octavia Butler.

Ultimately it turned out that initially Octavia Estelle Butler’s black gravestone (which reads “All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is Change.”) was stacked on top of her mother’s gravestone. Her mother’s name is also Octavia Butler. (Her pink gravestone reads “God is love.”)  The mistake had been intact during all the birthday celebrations and previous visits. But before I got there it was corrected. Octavia’s stone was moved to where her body was actually buried, but at the time we had no idea where that was and neither the find-a-grave computer at the cemetery or the nice workers there could help us find her.

Like every troublesome experience I have had with ancestor Octavia, this left me thinking. What happens when the dead move? What happens when the dead move us? Is this a sign from the black and humid universe that because of the work of people like Ayana Jamieson and Adrienne Maree Brown (who bases emergent strategy workshops on the visionary models in Butler’s fiction and is co-editing with poet Walidah Imarisha a collection of visionary fiction short stories by social justice activists) Octavia is shifting her position? Does she believe in the species again? Or did she believe in us all along, and just offer drastic critiques and bleak futures in order to motivate those of us who legacy has afforded love to act immediately on our love for the species and the planet?

&Maybe both. Maybe all of it. I love your sweet and smirking face Octavia. You confuse the best out of me. Thank you for being who you are. (And hating me so good.)

Octavia_Butler-02

On The Left Hand of Darkness

Posted on by

tumblr_static_aa31cj7d1nso0s8kgw8gwk40w

 
Noah, I’m guessing your mixed feelings on your first read of Left Hand of Darkness had something to do with the fact that the male protagonist and his androgynous companion never consummate their relationship. Setting aside the fact that the book was written in 1968, I think it would have been weaker if they had “done the deed” and possibly lived happily ever after. The fact that the protagonist is left to live with his regrets makes it all the more realistic, and, for me anyway, that much more powerful.
 
____
This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
 

Utilitarian Review 7/5/14

Posted on by

On HU

Our Octavia Butler roundtable continued:

I asked folks to tell me their most and least favorite Butler novels.

I wrote about Octavia Butler as romance novelist, and Laura Kinsale as sci-fi author.

Vom Marlowe reviewed Butler’s Wild Seed.

And then the roundtable took a sort of pause as people didn’t quite have their pieces in…but it will resume next week!

In the meantime,

Adrian Bonenberger examined the movie-making talents of radical Islamic insurgent group ISIS.

Chris Gavaler wrote about the first comic book and the comics artists of Lascaux.

And I provided an index of all my writing on Orange Is the New Black, plus some responses to critics.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about Orange Is the New Black, gender stereotypes, and male representation. This turned into a viral hate read this week, if you missed it.

At Salon I did a list of great double entendre songs.

At Splice Today I wrote about

— the great Al Green song I Can’t Get Next to You; better than Robin Thicke!

—Obama, generic democrat, with maybe slightly less hawk.

At Bitch I wrote about Ariel Schrag’s lovely new novel Adam, about a cis man passing as a trans man.
 
Other Links

Steven Heller on the long-running comics anthology World War 3.

Mary McCarthy on the perils of sex in a hot tub.

Jill Filipovic has a nice piece on the Hobby Lobby decision.
 

7102WDiKj9L

Orange Is the New Black: Index for the Haters, and Response to Critics

Posted on by

So I had a post on Orange Is the New Black become a viral hate read over at the Atlantic this week. In celebration (?) and as a low key way to post without posting on the fourth, I thought I’d provide an index of my writing on the show for those who are curious. The articles are arranged chronologically in the order they were published.
___________

At Public Books, Orange Is the New Caged, on how the first season picks up on tropes of femininity and lesbianism from the 1950 women-in-prison film Caged. (This is part of a roundtable at Public Books; lots of other good essays on the series by other folks there too if you want to browse around.)

At Splice Today, The Crassness of Orange Is the New Black, on how the first season adds sex and deviance to the memoir.

At the Atlantic, “A Lewd Reminder of How Tame Oranges Is the New Black Really Is”, in which I compare the first season to the 1974 film Caged Heat, and talk about political and sexual fantasies.

Right here at HU, Orange Is the New Black: Episode 7 Hate Blogging, in which I blog my way through a second season episode.

At Splice Today, Prison and White People, in which I talk about why focusing on Piper’s white privilege misses out on the way that institutional racism is not her friend.

And finally, the hate read at the Atlantic, Orange Is the New Black’s Irresponsible Portrayal of Men, in which I argue that the show’s relationship to male prisoners is problematic.

There were a number of online responses to the piece, most of them not really all that useful from my perspective. A couple of the more interesting ones were by Alyssa Rosenberg and Madeleine Davies. This piece by Sonny Bunch is probably the best though; mean-spirited and clever.
__________

What the hell; might as well respond briefly. Alyssa’s piece argues that it would be more strategic for me to criticize some show other than Orange Is the New Black. Her reasons are somewhat unclear; as far as I can tell, the argument is partially that OITNB is relatively good, and partially that it has a relatively small audience, so I’d be better criticizing NCIS, or whatever. To the first point, I’d say that whether the show is good or not is part of the question at issue; just because Alyssa thinks it is isn’t a reason for me to toss over my own opinion and write about something else. For the second…you don’t influence people based on what show you talk about, in any direct way. You influence people based on the reaction to what you, yourself, are writing. And as far as being strategic and getting my message out…this was one of the most popular things I’ve ever written (for better or worse.)

Alyssa concludes by saying, “If we want a culture that tells a wider variety of stories, we need to work on moving culture at the mainstream, rather than simply at the margins,” but that seems to assume that my criticism is going to move NCIS or OITNB in some direct way. I really doubt that that’s the way these things work, particularly. You move people through criticism the way you move people with any art; sporadically, confusedly, maybe if you’re lucky but generally not, depending on a lot of factors. The idea that you move the mainstream by talking about a mainstream show and move the margins by talking about a marginal show strikes me as really simplistic (not least because, for example, Alyssa probably wouldn’t even have written her post if I had been writing about something other than OITNB.)

Caroline Small on facebook also pointed out that culture often moves not by moving the mainstream, but by changing the margins, which then shifts the center. Which I think certainly can be the case, at least.

Sonny Bunch in his response to my piece sneers at the whole idea of thinking about representation in art, arguing that doing so isn’t criticism. He says that:

There’s also the obvious point to be made that this isn’t “criticism” in the traditional sense: there’s little discussion of craft or storytelling, no sense of how the authors of the program help us understand the world they’ve created. It’s a simple collection of grievances that can be summarized thusly: “Why aren’t you telling the story I think needs to be told and why have you portrayed a group I believe needs defending in an unflattering light?

What’s really funny about this is that it’s gloriously self-refuting, and utterly unaware of it. After all, Bunch isn’t looking at the craft of my essay; he’s not trying to figure out how my essay forms a coherent intellectual world. He’s just listing grievances, and asking, “why aren’t you writing the kind of criticism I want you to write?”

I’d argue (contra the somewhat confused Bunch) that Bunch’s criticism is entirely defensible as criticism, because engaging with the ideology and the preconceptions of the work you’re looking at is a legitimate critical project. The problem with Bunch’s view isn’t that he engages with my ideology and my preconceptions; the problem is that he’s not a very attentive reader, and so isn’t alert to the fact that I have quite a bit to say about craft, about storytelling, and about how the program creators help us understand the world they’ve created (hint; they do it in part through gender stereotypes.)
 
70242311

The First Comic Book

Posted on by

01-lascaux-cave-painting

 
The world’s first comic book, Lascaux, was published in France 17,000 years ago. It was a single edition, printed on limestone, and arranged in a pair of strips over 128-feet long. The title refers to the medium (“lascaux” is French for “limestone”), but it is also the genre (cave drawings) as well as the specific work of art. Similarly, “pulp fiction” refers to magazines printed on paper made from wood pulp but later came to mean the tales themselves, eventually inspiring Quentin Tarantino to adopt the term as the title of his 1994 film Pulp Fiction.

Most reviewers refer to the Lascaux creators as “Cro-Magnons,” a generic designation which in this case might literally be true. The bones of the first so-called Cro-Magnons were found in a hole (“cro” in French) on property owned by a farmer named Magnon in a nearby town. Cro-Magnons are people of Magnon’s hole. More specifically, the creators of Lascaux were a loose collective of artists of the Neolithic Publishing Period who signed their work with a symbol resembling the head of a four-pronged pitchfork. This signature has been compared to a graffiti tag, but since it also appears in other caves of the region it probably denotes a clan or congregation and is mostly likely a corporate logo, similar to the globe Atlas Comics used before becoming Marvel in the 1960s. It may also be an umbrella logo like the circled “DC” icon that linked National Allied Publications with its affiliate branches All-American Comics and Detective Comics in the 1940s.
 

Lascaux2

 
Since Lascaux was published before France passed its first law protecting authors’ rights in 1793, the artists’ heirs retain no proprietary rights. A court challenge could argue that the 1940 discovery of the cave signifies a new “first” publication, but since copyrights lapse into public domain after seventy years, the point is mute. Four Pronged Publishing went out of business millennia ago and so collects no royalties on the postcards, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and other gift shop memorabilia appropriating Lascaux artwork.
 

800px-Lascaus,_Megaloceros$(KGrHqZ,!iIE8LNufJV7BPVvwDkJPw~~60_57

 
Legal issues aside, the work has influenced comic books for centuries. Reviewers often liken it to Michelangelo’s most acclaimed graphic novel, the Sistine Chapel. The comparison is apt, as the Lascaux artists also painted religious imagery on the ceilings of a temple while lying on their backs suspended by wooden platforms. The scope is also similar, with the largest bull drawing spanning seventeen feet. Michelangelo, however, worked in distinct panels, while Lascaux includes no formal frames or gutter, prefiguring Will Eisner’s use of open page space. The absence of captions and word balloons also influenced later works by Jim Steranko and Alan Moore.

Walt Disney borrowed animation techniques from Four Prongs too. Many of the horses and bulls in the Lascaux are drawn at angled perspectives with the closest front leg straight and the second front leg bent and slightly detached from the body to suggest motion. A single animal may be drawn multiple times in an overlapping row, with head or back end incomplete, to evoke forward progression—a technique copied by numerous artists suggesting the movements of speedsters Flash and Quicksilver. When viewed with Four Prongs candle technology (a hollowed rock filled with reindeer fat and a juniper wick), the moving animals flicker like nickelodeon images.

The artists also innovated crushed minerals for their palette, even for black, avoiding the charcoals favored by their contemporaries. Curators comment on the flawlessness of the artists as revealed by the lack of a single false or erased line in all Lascaux. This impression, however, may be due to the now invisible lines produced by one or more “pencilers” that later “inkers” effectively obscured as they finalized the pages. Credit is also due to the nuanced style of the colorists, whose muted amber bulls influenced Lynn Varley’s award-winning work in The Dark Knight Returns.

Sadly, after its republication in 1940, Lascaux was no longer preserved in its clay-sealed micro-climate—the geological equivalent of an acid-free mylar bag—and so it has been significantly downgraded from its former near-mint condition. As a result, reprints are flooding the market. Lascaux II—a painstakingly reproduced concrete tunnel located near the original—opened in 1983, Lascaux III is currently on tour, and Lascaux IV is in production.

While Lascaux has thrilled equine and bovine enthusiasts for thousands of years, casual readers should be prepared for a narrative told without human main characters. The comic book’s single human figure is located on the cave’s most inaccessible panel and, where many of the bulls and horses possess a slight and mildly Cubist quality of abstraction, the lone man is essentially a stick-figure with what may be a bird’s head and is most definitely a penis. This may in fact be the falcon-headed Horus or the ibis-headed Thoth, both of whom sojourned in Gaul before settling in the Nile valley. Fans of their adventures will also enjoy the comic books of ancient Egypt.
 

tumblr_m9jtfu1yW81qb9yj1o1_500

Movie Review: Clanking of Swords IV

Posted on by

Much media attention has focused on the capabilities of ISIS’s propaganda wing, a smart and decentralized group of well-funded jihadis who have produced one of the most vibrant – and, many say, most effective – bodies of artistic work to emerge from the region in recent memory. Their latest offering, fourth in the “Clanking” franchise, is light years ahead of its predecessors, which, it must be admitted, were little more than videos of ISIS fighting against Assad’s fighters and Al Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate (Al Qaeda has disavowed ISIS).

“Clanking of Swords IV” (caution – viewer discretion HEAVILY recommended, it is an exceptionally vicious film – and some versions offer “Clanging” instead of “Clanking”) is dedicated to the proposition that only violence can cleanse the Middle East. With the redemptive power of violence as its philosophical center, the film aims to unify those competing narratives of violence we know from YouTube and LiveLeak, the badly-recorded battles wherein people die or are hurt in all the surprising ways one encounters in war.

“Clanking” begins with a geopolitical statement: a zoom-out shot of the Mesopotamian region that ISIS intends to rule. The perspective descends to a quad-copter drone hovering over the city of Falluja. The drone flies over formations of fighters, and lines of pickups and old military 2 ½ ton trucks filled with fighters and heavy-caliber machineguns and staged for attack, then heads back into the sky, at the midway point between four roads, spinning around faster and faster, creating a whirlwind-like effect, which resolves into a battle where ISIS is attacking the Iraqi military. The battle doesn’t last long, and includes the now-obligatory picture of American-style military vehicles under heavy fire, with repeated invocations to Allah. “Clanking’s” introduction then spends time recording some of its fighters delivering speeches, and dedicating themselves to the cause of establishing a super-national caliphate in the region.

From there, the film moves between scenes wherein people renounce their citizenship in various Middle Eastern countries, pledging homage to a new Caliphate by tearing their passports, and various iterations on the theme of battle. ISIS hunts down rival Sunni gangs by conducting drive-by shootings. ISIS hunts down Shia military and intelligence apparatus officers with a special squad dressed like Iraqi Army commanders. Fighters deliver victorious speeches, or inveigle against western influence. ISIS offers clemency to those who convert to the Sunni faith, or turn in their arms. Fighters snipe unsuspecting Iraqi soldiers, detonate IEDs, force prisoners to dig their own graves, tear up more passports. Fighters execute more captured members of the Iraqi military apparatus.

The cinematography is effective, accompanied, unaccountably, by the sound of a sword being sharpened, or possibly unsheathed – and certainly not “clanging” or “clanking.” More on the name of the film later. The cuts between scenes are professional and effective, and particularly devastating IED strikes and checkpoint attacks are rewound and played back in slow motion, creating a response in the viewer that can only be described as enthusiastic expectation. At least, in viewers like myself who are accustomed to scenes of violence, having been to war. Well adjusted viewers should find such scenes horrible, sick, and almost unwatchable.

The point of the film – although historians will likely debate this in years to come, depending on how effective the ISIS brand is in Iraq and Syria – is twofold. First, to create fear in viewers loyal to Iraq and citizens who (according to the point of view of ISIS) collaborated with the regime. Second, to attract new members by demonstrating ISIS fighters’ prowess in battle. The film does both of these things successfully – and it would be successful, I think, whether or not ISIS were especially active on the battlefield, as it is now. The violence is graphic, and real. The killings and attacks are chosen with an eye toward casting their enemies in the most pathetic light possible – in no frame does the Iraqi Army fight back with tenacity, save by implication. Each finishing shot of a battle is triumphal, featuring dead Shia Iraqi soldiers and police, as well as weapons seized. The sniper victims are killed in ways that render them laughable, and there are usually subtitles that ensure viewers interpret the action in a way that is as generous as possible to ISIS.

The subtitles, as well as cut-away scenes narrated by one of the filmmakers, condemn each of the victims, and the government in general. At one point near the end of the film, the group of ISIS soldiers who are hunting down regime “collaborators” enters the home of a “tyrannical” member of the Iraqi counter-terror effort – a colonel. They show pictures of him working with the Americans, and smiling. They then execute him by cutting his head off, and placing it between his legs. He struggles. The film states that “the mujahedeen will not sleep in the face of injustice.”

Overall, the film views like the most extraordinarily violent action movie you’ve ever seen. The filmmakers do an excellent job of capturing scenes using high-quality cameras, and the bloodiest parts are celebrated and revisited throughout the film. It is a meditation on violence and revenge, and it’s impossible to watch the movie without concluding that the events that are happening in the Middle East will not be resolved easily, and are bound to get worse – which boggles the mind – before they get better.

The only weak point in the movie is that whomever translated the movie chose a terrible title. “Clanking of the swords” is ridiculous to western ears, and regardless of the intention – to echo a popular song, or some relevant event from whatever past ISIS seeks to reference – it fails to inspire the same level of dread as the film itself. This wouldn’t merit discussion if the title weren’t stereotypically laughable – the signifier by which people are first introduced to the movie / documentary is absurd, and will only elicit contempt among English-speaking viewers. ISIS would likely claim that Americans and Europeans are not part of their target audience – their audience is people who sympathize with their cause, but haven’t yet picked up a weapon to fight. Calling it the “fourth” installment, and encouraging interested individuals to dig into the recent past of ISIS, before it was a nation-beater, is a further mistake. But perhaps the people who chose the name can be forgiven for catering to jihadis who had already watched the first three “Clanking” videos, and had developed emotional attachments – they probably didn’t expect to go so far, so fast. They couldn’t have expected that America would return to Iraq, giving U.S. soldiers and Air Force pilots an opportunity to make a sequel of their own: “Exploding of the Smart Bombs III.” Coming this July.
_____
Adrian Bonenberger is a freelance journalist, author of the epistolary war memoir “Afghan Post,” and helps run veteran intellectual blog “The Wrath Bearing Tree.” His twitter handle is @AHBonenberger.