Browsing Category

Pandemic Staff Contributors

Portolaos

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Laura Alexander

Translation of the title of a book seen in the Benaki Museum:

“Portolaos, Namely book containing the seaports, the Distances between one place and another, and Other useful information for this Enterprise”

I was finally sitting down again to write after all the delicious laziness, in the dry heat where I fled the sun and moved like a sleepwalker, with things spread out so fine I only really did one thing a day, if anything. Hot hours drinking cold cappuccinos, sweet and strong with cold milk the texture of uncooked meringue, and later beer, on street corners, and then crashing to sleep naked in the heat. Crashing back into city life after a month of roughing it across the great scroll of Europe, a kind of self-hood had come back to me. Not a real self-hood of responsibilities and worries, still in the no-time of holiday, but my hitchhiker’s ghost feeling was melted away. I tried to look good, in clean clothes and the backless top I hadn’t worn all across Europe because it felt dangerous to be sexy while hitchhiking. I met people, and said goodbye to them expecting to see them again. I went to the café, and the bookshop, and the corner shop next to the cinema where the owner recognized me and spoke to me in Dutch because he’d once lived a year in Utrecht. Life was leafy and calm, easy to walk in, the streets patch-worked with graffiti and the cafes full of scruffy punks and gorgeous girls who sit with all the time in the world. At night, the open-air cinemas cast snatches of tinny dialogue in Greek or English over the walls onto the street like a football they expected to have tossed back.

Selves are formed by cities. Having discarded myself to travel through all that land between here and home I found a new self here, waiting to be slipped into like the red shoes I found waiting for me on a street corner in Paris once at two in the morning, neat and unexpected and precisely my size. In the same way, here in Athens I find a plausible version of myself, to be tried on and discarded, or to fuse so completely with all the selves I have been up till now that if I looked back in a few years it won’t be possible to make out the join, like with Paris, like with Amsterdam. Just like when you arrive in a new place, especially a city, how it feels like cognitive dissonance to remember that it was always there, that these streets were stretched out against the earth’s surface exactly as you see them now while you were still living for years before blissfully unconcerned with them, like Stephen Dedulus says, “there all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end” – anyway just like that you have to face the fact that the person you could be here is already within you, lurking like a seed, and ever more shockingly, a seed already shaped and formed by all that’s gone before. So if I’d come here a year ago I’d have been calculating how to find a job in a bar here, how to scrape by and wait for adventure, wondering how many places would let you get along with not speaking Greek at first. Now after months of slightly fancier work I was looking at the local British Council, and cultural institutions here and whether I could possibly persuade them to hire me. So the potential self I can taste around me comes from me alone.

In Athens time was thick and golden. From one day to the next I could hardly remember what I’d been doing – the opposite of tourism. One day I dragged together enough energy to get to the Acropolis museum, bright and sleek. Another night we went to a free outdoor screening in the gardens of the French archaeological institute, and while we were watching a minor riot broke out a few blocks away. The film was a French one, with Jean-Paul Belmondo. It was subtitled in Greek so I could only follow about half the plot, which turned out not to matter as the plot was very silly and the visuals were stunning, all long slow shots of Niemeyer’s half-finished Brasilia buildings. The riot was over by the time the film was, and the restaurants were moving tables back out into the street. From the balcony of the apartment all we could see was a huge pillar of black smoke and the reflected orange light on a building about a block away. When I went down to the square to get more beer the fire was burnt out and I stood and looked for a while at the slightly smoking, twisted and blacked remains of two cars. It was the first time I’d seen a burnt out car, though in Paris I’d seen the melted tarmac remains of where two motorbikes had been burned then taken away.

Photo by Matt Artz

Hot night under the glow of colored bulbs, speed and slowness with hours passed in drunkenness and shouting and cicadas loud as sirens fading finally silent. Endless unremembered conversations jokes and absurdities, and above all movement and heat in stillness. The taste of beer and ouzo, the dirt under the feet, the smell of the pine trees in the bar on the hill with the hill looming black and the barely payable bill. Fuck roughly when we get home, beer-drenched four-in-the-morning cunts, and wake to a sunlight so clear and strong, the pinkness of flowers and their sticky-sweet smell on the street.

I finished the last volume of Proust a few days later, sprawled topless on a rock that was digging into my thighs, with my head in a girl’s lap and a picnic of melons and bread spread out. Me and the girl I’d been living with had gone out to an island to camp. We fucked on top of my sleeping bag in the forest of night and then come back down to the stony beach to sleep. In the sunrise by the cool clear water I felt the weirdness of finishing nearly a year with one great mass of book (about a week later back in Athens I came across where Anne Carson has a character say reading Proust is like having a second unconsciousness, a formulation of words which allowed me to give a shape to my sadness). By the end of the book all the tiny hundreds of fragments of story come together, and the outcome is that you can see how over time all those little fragments do become a life.

When we took the boat back to Athens and were sitting on the top deck of the boat, some hippy kids were taking turns throwing little bits of bread up to the gulls. Following along with the speed of the boat they seemed to be stationary above the deck. Every time a gull managed to snatch a scrap out of the air the whole deck would clap and whoop. By this point the clouds had come in, and everything around was soft shades of grey, different everywhere you looked.

That tremendous observation; that there is only one world and that everything you see and read exists inside it at the same time. These are many things, and it’s difficult to put them together in anyway that feels coherent. Like Proust and his fragments of life, all these othernesses, in a way so simple it’s a cliche even to say it, come together and form the fact of all the things that are the case.

Moria: When Home is Neither Ahead, Nor Behind

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Jurek Wötzel, Head Writer

It’s a regular day on the island of Lesbos, Greece in late March 2018. In the infamous Moria Camp, a young Syrian refugee sets himself on fire after learning that his application for asylum has been rejected for the second time. He would rather die than go home.

Home, that is where the bombs fall, where the sirens scream, where the relentless fire of the machine guns keeps you up at night. It isn’t for no reason that millions of Syrians have abandoned their home since the beginning of the war, five years ago. Many of them ended up in Lesbos, waiting for the authorities to decide their fate.

Since the EU-Turkey deal was put into effect, refugees arriving in Greece are immediately detained in Moria Camp. When the Greek state erected the camp in 2015, it was supposed to temporarily host 2,000 people. Now, that number has increased to 6,000.

Payman Shamsian, a former NGO worker at Moria camp saw many people arrive there. “They are so happy that they have made it to the land of freedom,” he says. “They think their life is becoming better and better from now on. They come to the camp with thousands of hopes and dreams. And wait. And wait. And wait. I witnessed the entire process of collapse and destruction for many asylum seekers, and how the reality hits them on their face over a course of even one week.”

About 2,500 asylum seekers land on the island every month. Most of them will soon be accommodated in sparsely equipped tents, providing just the bare minimum to keep them sheltered. Each year, when winter approaches, new headlines about the humanitarian crisis in the Greek camps appear in media outlets all over Europe. Still, no one really seems to be bothered.

The conditions in what has earned the name ‘Moria Prison’ among refugees are horrendous. Not long ago, Greek migration minister Ioannis Mouzalas warned they are potentially life-threatening. Yet, detainees do their best to deal with homesickness, the fear of deportation, and the daily struggle to survive.

“I have seen or personally been in many situations that people in the camp talk about their traditions, their culture, and language with others”, Payman remembers. “Homesickness has a huge presence in the camp. Expressions of it range from the way people decorate their tents to strong hatred toward their tents because it’s not their home.”

The atmosphere in the camp is a pendulum between hope and frustration. “Refugees and asylum seekers mostly don’t want to accept that they don’t have a home anymore. They either think that one day they go back home or think they can make the new place they are moving to their new home.”

It’s not only the homesickness that causes hatred. Anger about being rejected, intra-group conflict, and simple overall despair spark violence and aggression. In 2016, a large group of refugees set fire to their tents in the french Calais camp, leading to outrage at the dinner tables of European families. In Moria, too, riots erupted several times. In the same year, a riot led to a fire resulting in the evacuation of 4,000 detainees. These incidents exacerbate the misery even more.

“The camp can’t be a humane place to have a dignified life, let alone being a home”, Payman tells me. “Every person has a different coping mechanism to face this reality. Some can’t cope with it, some can. It depends on many things. But one of the main problems is that your social status in the camp is totally different from the outside world. Coping with that aspect is the hardest part for people.”

Photo by Roman Kraft

Hannah Arendt, who lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany, was particularly concerned with the lack of belonging one experiences as a refugee. She saw the struggle of the refugee being no different than the struggle of the stateless person. The loss of legal protection of a sovereign state makes the refugee cease to have any social status at all; their actions become meaningless. They have no political community in which there is good and bad, right and wrong. Being stateless is essentially the loss of political identity.

Payman is less worried about abandoning your community of origin in general. “I personally believe that associating the concept of home to a country, usually your birth country, is very overrated. Home can be anywhere for various reasons and change over time for different people based on their life experiences. Even not having a place to call home is becoming very common among people.”

There is a difference, though, between those who left home voluntarily and those who were forced to leave. As Somali-British poet Warsan Shire writes:

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

Obviously, this is not the story of voluntary migration. It is a story that should end with the possibility of permanent resettlement or the possibility to return home. Unfortunately, the realities of the Syrian war and European refugee policy continue to prevent both. The increasingly prevalent image of the refugee as the criminal immigrant who is nothing but a parasite to society is not a positive sign for change. It also isn’t making it easier for refugees to feel at home in a new country once they manage to leave camps like Moria or Calais behind.

“The only thing I want from any country hosting refugees and migrants anywhere in the world is to see and perceive refugees and migrants as simple persons living in a society”, Payman replied when I asked him for advice for Europe. “They’re not necessarily angels or hard-working and full of hope all the time. They are not necessarily evil and criminal. Let’s not romanticize them. Let’s not get shocked when one of them becomes successful or hate them because one of them commits a crime. Let’s just see them as what they are, and embrace them in our societies, as any other person in the society.”

Hence, what Payman and Hannah Arendt would agree on, is the need to include refugees in a new community. A community that allows to them to feel at home, that allows them to have a political identity and that allows them to live a purposeful life.

Moria does not do any of that. Instead, it puts refugees into a political purgatory situated between the hope of a new life and the fear of deportation. A truly humanitarian response of the all-so humanist Europeans would look different.

—-

Payman Shamsian currently works for the migration team of Samuel Hall, an independent think tank providing research and strategic services, expert analysis, tailored counsel and access to local knowledge for a diverse array of actors operating in the world’s most challenging environments. He has obtained two masters degrees before joining Samuel Hall. He obtained a joint basters degree on Global Studies between Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO Argentina) and he studied at Central European University in International Relations and European Studies program. Prior to working for Samuel Hall, Payman worked for the Danish Refugee Council as a Protection Assistant in Greece.

HOMEWARD - May 2018 Sarah Osei-Bonsu

White Masks

Posted on May 1, 2018

Written by Sarah Osei-Bonsu, Staff Writer

I grew up in the most religious country in the world. Ghana is a melting pot of Christian, Muslim and ‘traditionalist’ African beliefs. However, the dominant religion is Christianity and it is fundamentally at odds with the traditional belief systems. Growing up in the city of Kumasi, the cultural center of the Ashanti, Ghana’s major ethnic group, I witnessed this clash between our African spirituality and Christian colonial legacy first hand.

When I was little, I observed a traditional ceremonial dance at a funeral. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the man in the grass skirt kicking up dirt as he swirled in hypnotic circles, every inch of his body twisting, curling and contracting to each drumbeat. His entourage threw white dust as he turned and he was enveloped in white mist, his skin slowly turning grey. His face was already painted in the dust, like a white mask. This man was an Akomfo, an Ashanti priest, his dance a spiritual performance of the traditional belief system, Akom. There was a strangeness about this mystic man, yet one thing wasn’t all that extraordinary. Many Ghanaians today wear white masks. The only difference is that these masks are invisible. They are not symbols of our traditions, but rather tokens given to us by our colonizers.

The white masks conceal our identity, altering the way we saw ourselves. We first wore these masks because we had no choice, but in the centuries since, we forgot what lay behind them. Colonialism damaged Africa’s cultural integrity. One of the greatest and most damaging colonizing tools on the continent was Christianity. The Christian faith itself is not harmful, often it manifests itself beautifully. However, in Ghana it is rooted in the racism and subjugation of our colonial past. The Christianity we initially encountered was that of slavers and murderers. It was spread on the basis of our assumed inferiority and that of our customs. Because of this there is an implicit self-hatred in our history with Christianity, and this is a self-perpetuating system. Not only are we forgetting our culture, but we are actively demeaning and rejecting it.

Just like our colonial masters before, most Ghanaians view traditional religions, like Akom, with hostility and condemnation. These traditional belief systems in our popular culture have become synonymous with words like Satanism, fetishism, and magic. These all fall under an umbrella term: ‘Juju’, by which Ghanaians refer to anything that is neither Muslim nor Christian and is thus by default evil. This stigma is deeply embedded in Ghanaian culture and it directly descends from the colonial roots of Christianity in Ghana.

Today Christianity is a big business in Ghana. New denominations and ambitious pastors (or entrepreneurs) are making their mark across the country with churches overcrowding the cityscape. This is often an aggressive brand of Christianity. The problem with this kind of Christian gospel is that it condemns any other religious beliefs. Given the massive role of Christianity in Ghana, this perpetuates a cycle of self-hatred. Adoring the deity of our colonizers is in conflict with our local culture and tradition and demands their rejection.

Throughout Ghana’s cities you will encounter preachers, condemning everything satanic. Satanic meaning anything spiritual outside the realm of Christianity, such as Akom. In Akom, the belief is that the spoken word holds power. Every word spoken is an evocation. In Ghana, most of the times, that which is spoken and preached is hateful and demeaning of traditional spirituality. These evocations have clearly been realized in Ghanaian society.

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde

Ghanaians are very spiritual people. Pre-colonial beliefs, like Akom, assume that there is a spirit in everything: the earth, rivers, thunder, animals, blood. Our custom, music, and dance, passionately built on this conviction. Christianity in Ghana instrumentalized this spirituality and radicalized it. In modern-day Ghana ‘spirituality’ is seen as something harsh and overbearing, sometimes taking the form of ‘exorcisms’ during lunch breaks at school or, violent ‘possessions’ of my colleagues attributed to some vague spirits.

Akom, has been so misconstrued. Now it is merely juju. I used to believe this too, or at least I never questioned it. When Ghanaians are not actively perpetuating this stigma, we relegate ourselves to ignorance. This might be even more damaging. How have we forgotten the complexity and harmony of our traditions? Most of us don’t know that at its core Akom seeks balance between the physical and spiritual worlds. It claims the immortality and infinity of the earth and our ancestors. We have not only turned our backs on traditional worship, but in the process we have lost much of our identity. Beyond the beautiful rituals that are being lost, we are drawing further and further away from nature. Rejecting our culture builds on the assumption that we’re not cultured and we have filled this void, or rather covered it, with a new one.

Christianity, this religion we have tied all our hopes to is not an innocent faith in the African case. These masks we wear, have worn, and will continue to place on our children are harming our society. I want to remind you again, that my issue is not with Christianity itself, but with the denial and self-hate which afflicts our practice of it. Like Frantz Fanon explained:

“The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.”

Christianity was a central underpinning of imperialism and the slave trade. How can we worship the same tool used to subjugate us? In the slave castle of Cape Coast, above the dungeons in which slaves were held stands a proud church. By the time the colonial era was over, the mask was already firmly in place. Just like Cape Coast, modern, independent Ghana, has built churches above its disturbing history with Christianity. Now Christianity is deeply embedded in the fabric of Ghanaian society. We once worshipped in nature and then we were herded into Churches. The community used to be a family, now we clash because we belong to different denominations. The business of Christianity is unnatural, and it cannot be sustained.

There is a popular symbol in Ashanti culture called Sankofa. It means ‘go back to that which you have forgotten’. I hope that as Ghanaians, and Africans, we can return to our roots. That Christianity in Ghana will no longer sustain itself on the suppression of our traditions and customs but can coexist with them. Religion should not be dependent on conversion and dominance, but should cohabit with spirituality and a pride in our traditions. I think of the Akomfo, his vigorous dance a memory of our traditions and the pride that once was. The white mask a reminder of where we are now. It is time to take off this mask.

Max Muller THE CITY - April 2018

Understanding Cities through Metaphors

Posted on April 30, 2018

Written by Max Muller

Although I have never been to an Alicia Keys concert, I imagine it must go something like this: first you excitedly wait in line, eagerly waiting for the moment you’re allowed to enter the sold-out stadium. After you and your friends have found your seats, you share some food and thoughts on her latest album. Then, the lights fade. The buzzing noise of chatting people immediately follows suit. A few seconds later, a roar from the crowd breaks the silence: she has arrived. You sing and dance your heart out to her classics, including “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No one”. You get a sore throat and you’re exhausted from the intense experience. And yet… something is missing. Until you realize she has saved her best song for the finale: “Empire State of Mind (Part II)”:

“Baby, I’m from…

New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of

There’s nothing you can’t do”

You finally find closure, as she has put the cherry on the cake.

Well, at least that’s how I imagine the experience. To me, that’s her best song. Her beautiful voice and talented piano playing notwithstanding, there is another element of the song that appeals to me. It’s the lyrics: they’re clever. The comparison of New York with a “concrete jungle” strikes me as particularly insightful.

Transformations of Meaning

In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote their now seminal book Metaphors We Live By. Until their work, the role of metaphors in philosophy and linguistics had only been deemed of peripheral interest. Lakoff and Johnson made huge swathes of people realize that metaphors are not just stylistic devices to spice up a mediocre novel. They showed, on the contrary, that they’re essential ingredients for people to concoct an overarching view of reality. In other words: people largely understand the world through metaphors.

Consider, for instance, the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. This conception of arguments or discussions is deeply entrenched in our understanding of the concept. Our language betrays it. For us it is completely natural to say things like:

Your claims are indefensible.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.

Chances are you haven’t even realized that we use ideas from wars to metaphorically speak about arguments. Moreover, Lakoff and Johnson point out that we do not just talk about arguments in terms of war. We actually win and lose arguments. The idea of war thus gives us an indispensable tool that allows us to understand the concept of having an argument.

Throughout their book (which I heartily recommend) they give countless other examples of metaphors we use to grapple with complex phenomena, including IDEAS ARE RESOURCES (“he ran out of ideas”, “don’t waste your thoughts on useless projects”), LOVE IS MADNESS (“I’m crazy about her”, “she drives me out of my mind”), and SEEING IS TOUCHING (“I can’t take my eyes off him”, “he wants everything within reach of his eyes”).

Perhaps that is why Alicia Keys’ lyrics stuck with me. Though I sympathize with her fondness for New York in particular, I think it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to view all cities as forests, or, within an even wider perspective, ecosystems.

Let’s confine ourselves a bit and stick with the metaphor CITIES ARE JUNGLES. Obviously, the buildings are trees in this regard. It is perhaps for this reason that the English expression “to climb up the stairs” exists. In addition, hints of organic perceptions of cities can be found in sentences like “these are the world’s fastest-growing cities” and “Beijing is expanding rapidly”.

The process of incoming and outgoing commuters bears some similarity to the rhythmic movements of lungs filling and releasing air. Just like photosynthesizing trees that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, the buildings of the city can breathe people in and out. Antonio Gaudi’s “La Sagrada Familia”, a church that seems to have grown organically from the ground upwards, epitomizes this conception of buildings.

Illustration by David Fleck, 1972

Baucis, the tree city from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” , as illustrated by David Fleck. The motif of the city as a forest also appears in Calvino’s book “The Baron in the Trees.”

Modern man has thus linguistically incorporated cities as a natural place to live, just like early humans discovered that they could find a safe haven away from the savanna and into the forest. The trees provided shelter against the rain and their height proved very useful for evading predators. The higher and bigger the tree, the more protection it could provide.

Joseph Campbell in his book The Power of Myth, points out that one can tell what’s informing society by what the tallest building is. In medieval towns, it was the cathedral. In an 18th century town, it was the political palace. Whereas in modern cities, the tallest buildings are the office buildings. We attach great significance to our centers of economic life. This is consistent with the cultural value “Bigger is Better”, which in turn is coherent with Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor GOOD IS UP (“we hit a peak last year, but it’s been downhill ever since”, “he does high-quality work”).

Another metaphor that pervades our languages and myths is that of Mother Nature. Thus we undoubtedly attribute nature with feminine characteristics. It is a bringer of life. The ancient Greeks, who coined the term “metropolis”, highlighted the nurturing character of cities as forests in particular. The word is a combination of the words mḗtēr (mother) and pólis (city). From their perspective, the city lied at the very heart of the origins of life. Since then, cities have only become more and more important. Nowadays, more than half of the world’s population consists of urban dwellers.

If cities are so important to us, it is perhaps not so surprising that the CITIES ARE JUNGLES metaphor is not the only one that has entered our collective subconscious. Concepts that are at once important to us and difficult to understand require multiple ways of viewing them.

This is because when we focus on one aspect of the concept, we necessarily leave out or ignore many others. Take love, for instance. Not only do we take the above-mentioned metaphor LOVE IS MADNESS into consideration when we speak and think about it. We also have the metaphors LOVE IS A PATIENT (“they have a healthy marriage”) and LOVE IS MAGIC (“she cast her spell over me”) in our mental repertoire. These other metaphors enable us to look at and think about love from different angles.

Berlin is, like, a pretty cool guy

So where does that leave us with regards to our beloved cities? Again, Lakoff and Johnson provide us with a hint, as they explain that personification is a widely employed metaphorical device. We could say, for instance, “his theory explained to me how tidal movements work”. In this case, the theory of tidal movements is personified. We conceptualize the theory as a person, or perhaps more specifically as a teacher.

Cities, too, are seen as people. Each of them has its own, distinct personality. Evidence of this is found in the adjectives to describe them. We use words such as “charming”, “rebellious”, “enterprising”, and “endearing” to speak about them. In turn, they reveal how we think of these places.

Who wouldn’t agree with me that Amsterdam is a rebellious, free-spirited, slightly scruffy but also strong, experienced, and battle-hardened guy with a mustache? He’s a man of extremes: both a party-person and a sophisticated art-lover, at once a rich business man and a poor, single father with a kid.

On the other hand we have Chartres, the medieval French town with the beautiful cathedral. She is more of a charming woman with long, brown hair and an elegant ocher dress. Whereas Amsterdam is tall and heroic, Chartres is petite and endearing. If Amsterdam is bustling and vibrant, Chartres is calm and composed.

Of course, cities are often too big to be described as having monolithic personalities. Amsterdam, for instance, is composed of a mosaic of different neighborhoods, each with its own personality traits. Amsterdam Zuid is old, rich, cultured, and of high stature. But Noord is more like the Wild West: adventurous, enterprising and experimental.

Some neighborhoods harbor multiple personalities. As a result of the quick gentrification process, the Pijp is hip, upcoming, and expensive. Its trendy restaurants and cafés act as magnets to young urban professionals hailing from all over the country. But it used to be the true Amsterdammers who lived there.

A glimpse of Amsterdam’s topographically
distributed personality types, by Nomad List

A while ago, I saw the words “Alle yuppen de Pijp uit!” (“All yuppies – young, urban professionals – should leave the Pijp!”) sprayed on a wall on the Albert Cuyp market. Viewed from a metaphorical perspective, the words signified a clash of personalities to me. It was also an expression of frustration about what kind of personality or image the neighborhood ought to have.

I hope this description of metaphors gives you some insight in the way we perceive our cities, and that it can aid you as a conceptual tool for greater understanding of all sorts of things. Considering cities in particular, we might wonder where the branches of the trees are in cities, if they are jungles. And if they are people, how do they relate to one another? How do their personalities change? Are there any other metaphors that characterize cities? I leave these questions for you to answer.

Contributing Writers THE CITY - April 2018

Who you calling a bitch?

Posted on April 30, 2018

Female rappers on the sexual dynamics of street culture

Written by Dorothy Carlos

“Instinct leads me to another flow

Every time I hear a brother call a girl a bitch or a ho

Trying to make a sister feel low

You know all of that gots to go”

In Queen Latifah’s Grammy award-winning song “U.N.I.T.Y.” off her 1993 album Black Reign, she speaks out against street harassment which is pervasive in cities. In the song, she responds to being groped by a man passing her on the street by punching him in the eye. Catcalling, as well as other acts of sexual harassment, are often criticized by female rappers from the late 1980s to now. In fact, the gendered experience of the city – a field of sexuation one has to navigate – has been one of the major themes of female rap since its beginning.

Everyone from Monie Love to Roxanne Shante has explored the mistreatment of women in the streets through their music. Salt N Peppa discusses the issue on the track “Tramp” from Hot, Cool, and Vicious, warning fellow women that if they respond to a catcalling they might become a “victim of circumstance” and be subject to harassment.

The cross-street proposition of the catcall communicates little else but a crude libidinal drive. What could possibly prompt someone to pursue a romantic/sexual interest via catcalls? One couldn’t possibly expect a positive reaction from yelling at a stranger on the street.

Female rappers articulate the fundamental antagonisms of social life, both gendered and class-based. They serve as a counter to what is going on in male hip-hop culture: a hypersexualization of women in order to gain social capital. Because of the way young men from impoverished neighborhoods, especially young black men, are forced to navigate a power structure which will be largely against them, they grasp at power by means of the social domination of others via catcalls and additional forms of sexual harassment.

Personally, I don’t know any rap songs about a love that isn’t broken or perverted. Slum Village’s “Fall in Love” from 2000 is exemplary of the way love is navigated in hip-hop music and in poor neighborhoods:

“Don’t sell yourself to fall in love”. Although one could argue that love in our society, in general, has been replaced with sexuality, the vulnerability of love is not easily found in rap music, which is often an expression of the hardness and resilience of an individual who comes from a broken environment.

Photo by Robert Katzki

While there are factors that are unique to our historical epoch, such as the building and subsequent neglect of segregated housing by the US govt, this is a broader issue of capitalist modernity. In the Metropolis and Mental Life, Georg Simmel discusses the blase attitude of individuals living in cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. The manifestation of this is the reduction of social interactions to capitalistic exchanges between city dwellers. For example, in smaller communities you might have a personal relationship with someone who produces a product for you such as a baker; in a metropolis, a personal relationship is unlikely to develop because of the fact that consumers are unknown to the producers. Interactions become matter-of-fact and people of the metropolis develop a hardness towards others.

Simmel did not live long enough to see the crushing effects Robert Moses had on the socio-economic landscape of cities all across the United States, but perhaps his essay was a prophecy of what is to come for modern cities. In the 1930s the imperious approach of Moses prompted a radical reorganization of cities; concentrating poverty in housing projects as a means to abolish it from the city as a whole. Areas with housing projects, such as the South Bronx in New York City, which was directly impoverished by Moses’ construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, are extremely underserved by the state and harassed by police.

In the aftermath of the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, Northern states, where the biggest cities were located, believed the ruling did not apply to them and made no attempt to desegregate. Even though de facto segregation was just as prevalent in the North as it was in the South, there were no laws enforcing it. There were schools for black neighborhoods and schools for white neighborhoods and this was a just product of the city structure, making it easy to perpetuate the lack of support for poor neighborhoods.

In an environment where individuals with little social and economic power are constantly in survival mode trying to make ends meet, love is compromised, and sex gladly takes its place. This is obvious if one pays attention to the explicitly sexual lyrics that make up a lot of contemporary hip-hop.

Many of the more contemporary female rappers sexualize themselves as part of their rap persona—reinforcing this idea of sex as a means to gain social capital; consider rappers such as Trina, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B, to name a few.

When asked about how to gain self-confidence, Cardi B told Hypebae: “If you feel you’re ugly just walk around the projects or something and see how many niggas holla at you.” Cardi B herself is from the Bronx and her community most likely began to experience the effects of the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway decades ago. Although parts of the female rap community have accepted the culture of sexual harassment, I believe this to be almost inevitable if you come from an impoverished, urban environment.

Within the sexual maze of the metropolis, women are caught somewhere in the middle as men try to navigate their sexuality. Because women are not as bound to heteronormative standards, they aren’t controlled by the system in the same way as men, largely due to the fact that women as a whole are often oppressed for being sexual regardless of whether or not they operate within heterosexuality. Although artists like Trina, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B have succeeded in gaining power via their sexuality, they compromise their own identity by hyper-sexualizing themselves in order to do so. Ultimately the women caught in situations of urban poverty are oppressed by the state in the same way men are. However, when women try to grasp at power via sexual domination they are likely to face oppression from their own communities, as well.

Older Posts

Newer Posts