Sunday, May 14, 2006
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Autumn of the Phantoms
Autumn of the Phantoms by Yasmina Khadra
Just finished reading this book, it’s a fascinating look into violence and terror in Algeria of the 1990's. The writing is internal and psychological, it does not give much information on the background of the conflict. But a lot of description of the psychology of men’s minds. It does not seem a typical mystery novel, more political and historical.
The story centers around police man Brahim Llob, who is also a detective writer, and is summoned by the chief of police and dismissed on the basis of his book Morituri, which is considered dishonorable and filled with lies. The disgruntled policeman hangs out with his friends disgusted with the state of affairs in Algeria. He then goes back to his village where an insurgency is going on. He returns to Algiers to be blow up and riddled with bullets.
The book is dark and heavy, here’s a taste, but it is worth a read.
I’m the one who’s despairing though. Despairing at the sight of my world, wilting under the exhalations of phantoms; despairing at the realization, at my time of life, that nothing remains of hopes I struggled to entertain in the face of adversity and the Hun like advance of oppportunitistc and greedy arrivistes.
Just finished reading this book, it’s a fascinating look into violence and terror in Algeria of the 1990's. The writing is internal and psychological, it does not give much information on the background of the conflict. But a lot of description of the psychology of men’s minds. It does not seem a typical mystery novel, more political and historical.
The story centers around police man Brahim Llob, who is also a detective writer, and is summoned by the chief of police and dismissed on the basis of his book Morituri, which is considered dishonorable and filled with lies. The disgruntled policeman hangs out with his friends disgusted with the state of affairs in Algeria. He then goes back to his village where an insurgency is going on. He returns to Algiers to be blow up and riddled with bullets.
The book is dark and heavy, here’s a taste, but it is worth a read.
I’m the one who’s despairing though. Despairing at the sight of my world, wilting under the exhalations of phantoms; despairing at the realization, at my time of life, that nothing remains of hopes I struggled to entertain in the face of adversity and the Hun like advance of oppportunitistc and greedy arrivistes.
Generation Xerox more about Kaavya
Interesting summary of the Kaavya episode in a historical social context by Kurt Andersen in the New York Magazine.
Generation Xerox
Youth may not be an excuse for plagiarism. But it is an explanation.
* By Kurt Andersen
How different everything sounds in retrospect.
As a senior in high school, the well-to-do girl from the swank New Jersey suburb of Franklin Lakes explained to Forbes how hired experts had refashioned her paper self to appeal to Harvard. “They take all the raw material,” she said of IvyWise, a college-application consultancy on West 57th Street, “and help you put it together in the way that an admissions officer is going to be most impressed by.”
Last summer, between her freshman and sophomore years at Harvard, she published a Times op-ed piece, “Growing Up With a Dose of Magic,” about coming of age in thrall to Harry Potter. She loved the stories’ “promise of hope, sustaining the fundamental childhood belief that in the end, good really does triumph over evil, and justice is meted out to those who deserve it.” And yet in the same piece she confessed that as a middle-schooler she bought The Prisoner of Azkaban, read it in one night, and returned it the next day to the bookstore—“unethically”—to get her money back.
Earlier this year, when an interviewer asked which authors most “inspire” her, she didn’t mention J. K. Rowling—nor a well-known novelist in the teen-romantic-comedy genre, Megan McCafferty. No, the novelists Kaavya now loved best were impressively literary—Amitav Ghosh, who also happens to be her creative-writing professor, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
When another reporter asked, a few weeks ago, if any particular book had inspired her to write How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the answer was unequivocal. “Nothing I read,” she said, “gave me the inspiration.”
“We encouraged her to slow down,” her proud mother said on the eve of publication. “She’s very driven.”
Poor, perfect Kaavya Viswanathan. When the first reporter, a kid from the Harvard Crimson, called about the dozens of cribbed passages, Kaavya stonewalled. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Later, her continuing, elaborate disingenuousness made it harder to pity her. McCafferty’s books “spoke to me in a way few other books did . . . [I] can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.” Why’d she go on the Today show? To tell “the truth.” Such chutzpah. But last week—as Little, Brown canceled the novel—the Times unearthed more appropriations from another girlocentric romantic comedy. And the Harvard Independent found that parts of Opal Mehta were also lifted from Born Confused, a novel about an Indian-American girl growing up in New Jersey. Such over-the-top chutzpah; no wonder she got into Harvard.
Everyone relates to plagiarism stories because everyone lies at least a little. But why is this episode so especially compelling? For one, because a fiction writer caught stealing from fiction is rare. The last big American case was a decade ago, when the best-selling romance novelist Janet Dailey was discovered to have repeatedly ripped off the best-selling romance novelist Nora Roberts.
And then there’s Kaavya herself. All the reasons an unknown girl got such a large advance for a slight novel—her promotability: extreme youth, voguish ethnicity, good looks, public poise, and Harvard imprimatur, as well as the book’s autobiographical verisimilitude—are the same reasons her downfall is so riveting. The story also has a crossover appeal, pleasing both young people envious of their mega-successful peer and older people who enjoy imputing moral inferiority and too-clever-by-half stupidity to the younger generation.
The schadenfreude also has a righteous tint: Just as the Duke-lacrosse-team case confirms ugly stereotypes about privileged white jocks, Kaavya Viswanathan, the only child of a brain surgeon and gynecologist, confirms the invidious stereotype of privileged meritocrats gone wild. She is a flagrant example of the hard-charging freaks that our culture grooms and prods so many of its best and brightest children to become, a case study in one sociopathology of the adolescent overclass.
Plagiarists almost never simply confess. There are always mitigating circumstances. Nonfiction offenders often chalk it up to carelessness—they mixed up their notes. This was part of Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson’s alibi when he was busted last month for his management guide copied from a 1944 book.
Kaavya told the Times that she “never take[s] notes,” ruling out that alibi. The ultimate act of chutzpah for a Harvard English major would have been to say that the similarities were part of a deliberate postmodern intertextual take on “real” genre novels. But it’s probably too late to mention Barthes now.
Janet Dailey pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. “I recently learned,” she said in 1997, “that my essentially random and non-pervasive acts of copying are attributable to a psychological problem that I never even suspected I had.” Kaavya, conversely, suggested that it isn’t a disorder but a mental superpower that explains her unconscious copying, not kleptomania but a photographic memory.
She clearly did go a little crazy under the pressure, desperate to keep impressing all the important adults who had invested in her. A year ago she told a reporter that her manuscript was due in six weeks, but that she still had almost two-thirds left to write. Authors renegotiate deadlines all the time, but she evidently couldn’t even permit herself that failure. However the plagiarism happened exactly, she had already come to understand that her success so far was not just a matter of talent and discipline but of buying the right connections, cutting deals for behind-the-scenes assistance, cunning. She was hooked up with her packager, Alloy Entertainment, by the agency William Morris (which also represents me), and hooked up with William Morris by her college-application consultant, Katherine Cohen.
Cohen may be worth the $33,000 she charges for her “platinum package.” But there’s something fundamentally untoward about the cynical lessons that such a makeover process teaches the kids who go through it—especially when it seems to work. Until a week ago Kaavya’s testimonial was on the firm’s Website (“More than just my counselor, Katherine became my role model and my friend”), and she freely mentioned IvyWise in interviews. It’s like a 17-year-old beauty queen bragging about her fake boobs and thanking the plastic surgeon in her remarks to the judges.
Youth may not be an excuse here, but it is an explanation. Omnivorous ambition and risk-taking pathology burn hot and blindingly in late adolescence and early adulthood. Most of the best-known recent plagiarists and fabulists were 25 or younger when they committed their thefts or fabrications: Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Jayson Blair, and so on. All were precocious up-and-comers, and two of those three were Ivy League graduates.
And, of course, there’s Jacob Epstein. He wrote Wild Oats, his first (and only) novel, as a senior at Yale; it was among the Times’s “best books of 1979.” But then Martin Amis discovered that 50-odd passages had been stolen from his own first novel. Like Kaavya, Epstein said he had accidentally copied a writer he adored. In both cases the plots were as brazen as the ripoffs: Wild Oats concerns plagiarism, and Opal Mehta becomes a “master liar” to win Harvard’s approval. “The psychology of plagiarism is fascinatingly perverse,” Amis said apropos Epstein. “It risks, or invites, a deep shame, and there must be something of the death wish in it.”
I smelled something odd—if not shame, it seems now, at least the secret knowledge of her own inauthenticity—in Kaavya’s pre-publication Times profile: “She planned to become an investment banker after college.” As she told the Globe, “writing is not anything I see as my job.” So publishing a novel at 19 was just another awesomely super-impressive item on the résumé.
We have become a culture of borrowers—musicians sample, painters appropriate, computerists worship open-source software. Cool. The problem is that at the same time we’ve forged a society in which misrepresentation is routine, encouraged, obligatory. For all her sweet Hogwarts dreams, an observant, canny, IvyWised-up kid is bound to draw certain conclusions about the way the real world works. She might have noticed, for instance, that the “announced” first printing of her novel was 100,000, about twice the number that shipped—and if she asked why, she would’ve learned that 100 percent exaggeration is simply publishing’s rule of thumb.
And to the degree she analyzed the long-term risks of plagiarism, she may not have been deterred. Swanson is still CEO of Raytheon. The plagiarists Martin Luther King and Helen Keller are saints, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge part of the canon. Nina Totenberg, fired from a newspaper for plagiarizing when she was 28, is a distinguished NPR reporter. Doris Kearns Goodwin, four years after her unattributed borrowing in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was publicized, just won a $50,000 prize from the New-York Historical Society. Janet Dailey is still a best-selling novelist. At the New York Times, Fox Butterfield lifted five paragraphs (in a story about plagiarism committed by a university dean) in 1991, and retired just last year. And at Harvard, the three law-school superstar professors who were found in 2003 and 2004 to have lifted footnotes (Alan Dershowitz), a brief passage (Laurence Tribe), and six paragraphs (Charles Ogletree) have gone unpunished.
“Even adults,” Kaavya wrote about Harry Potter, “like to think that somehow, everything will be all right.” And though now she looks more like Draco Malfoy than like Harry or Hermione, she can hope.
Jacob Epstein has had an extremely successful career as a television writer. But Kaavya should also understand that he’s served a 26-year sentence for his youthful crime: Here he is now, the poor man, dragged as always into a discussion of plagiarism because of a mistake he made half his lifetime ago . . . and now privately hoping, perhaps, that despite her tongue-twisting surname, a new young wretch is about to replace him, for the next generation, as literary plagiarism’s poster child.
Generation Xerox
Youth may not be an excuse for plagiarism. But it is an explanation.
* By Kurt Andersen
How different everything sounds in retrospect.
As a senior in high school, the well-to-do girl from the swank New Jersey suburb of Franklin Lakes explained to Forbes how hired experts had refashioned her paper self to appeal to Harvard. “They take all the raw material,” she said of IvyWise, a college-application consultancy on West 57th Street, “and help you put it together in the way that an admissions officer is going to be most impressed by.”
Last summer, between her freshman and sophomore years at Harvard, she published a Times op-ed piece, “Growing Up With a Dose of Magic,” about coming of age in thrall to Harry Potter. She loved the stories’ “promise of hope, sustaining the fundamental childhood belief that in the end, good really does triumph over evil, and justice is meted out to those who deserve it.” And yet in the same piece she confessed that as a middle-schooler she bought The Prisoner of Azkaban, read it in one night, and returned it the next day to the bookstore—“unethically”—to get her money back.
Earlier this year, when an interviewer asked which authors most “inspire” her, she didn’t mention J. K. Rowling—nor a well-known novelist in the teen-romantic-comedy genre, Megan McCafferty. No, the novelists Kaavya now loved best were impressively literary—Amitav Ghosh, who also happens to be her creative-writing professor, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
When another reporter asked, a few weeks ago, if any particular book had inspired her to write How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the answer was unequivocal. “Nothing I read,” she said, “gave me the inspiration.”
“We encouraged her to slow down,” her proud mother said on the eve of publication. “She’s very driven.”
Poor, perfect Kaavya Viswanathan. When the first reporter, a kid from the Harvard Crimson, called about the dozens of cribbed passages, Kaavya stonewalled. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Later, her continuing, elaborate disingenuousness made it harder to pity her. McCafferty’s books “spoke to me in a way few other books did . . . [I] can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.” Why’d she go on the Today show? To tell “the truth.” Such chutzpah. But last week—as Little, Brown canceled the novel—the Times unearthed more appropriations from another girlocentric romantic comedy. And the Harvard Independent found that parts of Opal Mehta were also lifted from Born Confused, a novel about an Indian-American girl growing up in New Jersey. Such over-the-top chutzpah; no wonder she got into Harvard.
Everyone relates to plagiarism stories because everyone lies at least a little. But why is this episode so especially compelling? For one, because a fiction writer caught stealing from fiction is rare. The last big American case was a decade ago, when the best-selling romance novelist Janet Dailey was discovered to have repeatedly ripped off the best-selling romance novelist Nora Roberts.
And then there’s Kaavya herself. All the reasons an unknown girl got such a large advance for a slight novel—her promotability: extreme youth, voguish ethnicity, good looks, public poise, and Harvard imprimatur, as well as the book’s autobiographical verisimilitude—are the same reasons her downfall is so riveting. The story also has a crossover appeal, pleasing both young people envious of their mega-successful peer and older people who enjoy imputing moral inferiority and too-clever-by-half stupidity to the younger generation.
The schadenfreude also has a righteous tint: Just as the Duke-lacrosse-team case confirms ugly stereotypes about privileged white jocks, Kaavya Viswanathan, the only child of a brain surgeon and gynecologist, confirms the invidious stereotype of privileged meritocrats gone wild. She is a flagrant example of the hard-charging freaks that our culture grooms and prods so many of its best and brightest children to become, a case study in one sociopathology of the adolescent overclass.
Plagiarists almost never simply confess. There are always mitigating circumstances. Nonfiction offenders often chalk it up to carelessness—they mixed up their notes. This was part of Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson’s alibi when he was busted last month for his management guide copied from a 1944 book.
Kaavya told the Times that she “never take[s] notes,” ruling out that alibi. The ultimate act of chutzpah for a Harvard English major would have been to say that the similarities were part of a deliberate postmodern intertextual take on “real” genre novels. But it’s probably too late to mention Barthes now.
Janet Dailey pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. “I recently learned,” she said in 1997, “that my essentially random and non-pervasive acts of copying are attributable to a psychological problem that I never even suspected I had.” Kaavya, conversely, suggested that it isn’t a disorder but a mental superpower that explains her unconscious copying, not kleptomania but a photographic memory.
She clearly did go a little crazy under the pressure, desperate to keep impressing all the important adults who had invested in her. A year ago she told a reporter that her manuscript was due in six weeks, but that she still had almost two-thirds left to write. Authors renegotiate deadlines all the time, but she evidently couldn’t even permit herself that failure. However the plagiarism happened exactly, she had already come to understand that her success so far was not just a matter of talent and discipline but of buying the right connections, cutting deals for behind-the-scenes assistance, cunning. She was hooked up with her packager, Alloy Entertainment, by the agency William Morris (which also represents me), and hooked up with William Morris by her college-application consultant, Katherine Cohen.
Cohen may be worth the $33,000 she charges for her “platinum package.” But there’s something fundamentally untoward about the cynical lessons that such a makeover process teaches the kids who go through it—especially when it seems to work. Until a week ago Kaavya’s testimonial was on the firm’s Website (“More than just my counselor, Katherine became my role model and my friend”), and she freely mentioned IvyWise in interviews. It’s like a 17-year-old beauty queen bragging about her fake boobs and thanking the plastic surgeon in her remarks to the judges.
Youth may not be an excuse here, but it is an explanation. Omnivorous ambition and risk-taking pathology burn hot and blindingly in late adolescence and early adulthood. Most of the best-known recent plagiarists and fabulists were 25 or younger when they committed their thefts or fabrications: Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Jayson Blair, and so on. All were precocious up-and-comers, and two of those three were Ivy League graduates.
And, of course, there’s Jacob Epstein. He wrote Wild Oats, his first (and only) novel, as a senior at Yale; it was among the Times’s “best books of 1979.” But then Martin Amis discovered that 50-odd passages had been stolen from his own first novel. Like Kaavya, Epstein said he had accidentally copied a writer he adored. In both cases the plots were as brazen as the ripoffs: Wild Oats concerns plagiarism, and Opal Mehta becomes a “master liar” to win Harvard’s approval. “The psychology of plagiarism is fascinatingly perverse,” Amis said apropos Epstein. “It risks, or invites, a deep shame, and there must be something of the death wish in it.”
I smelled something odd—if not shame, it seems now, at least the secret knowledge of her own inauthenticity—in Kaavya’s pre-publication Times profile: “She planned to become an investment banker after college.” As she told the Globe, “writing is not anything I see as my job.” So publishing a novel at 19 was just another awesomely super-impressive item on the résumé.
We have become a culture of borrowers—musicians sample, painters appropriate, computerists worship open-source software. Cool. The problem is that at the same time we’ve forged a society in which misrepresentation is routine, encouraged, obligatory. For all her sweet Hogwarts dreams, an observant, canny, IvyWised-up kid is bound to draw certain conclusions about the way the real world works. She might have noticed, for instance, that the “announced” first printing of her novel was 100,000, about twice the number that shipped—and if she asked why, she would’ve learned that 100 percent exaggeration is simply publishing’s rule of thumb.
And to the degree she analyzed the long-term risks of plagiarism, she may not have been deterred. Swanson is still CEO of Raytheon. The plagiarists Martin Luther King and Helen Keller are saints, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge part of the canon. Nina Totenberg, fired from a newspaper for plagiarizing when she was 28, is a distinguished NPR reporter. Doris Kearns Goodwin, four years after her unattributed borrowing in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was publicized, just won a $50,000 prize from the New-York Historical Society. Janet Dailey is still a best-selling novelist. At the New York Times, Fox Butterfield lifted five paragraphs (in a story about plagiarism committed by a university dean) in 1991, and retired just last year. And at Harvard, the three law-school superstar professors who were found in 2003 and 2004 to have lifted footnotes (Alan Dershowitz), a brief passage (Laurence Tribe), and six paragraphs (Charles Ogletree) have gone unpunished.
“Even adults,” Kaavya wrote about Harry Potter, “like to think that somehow, everything will be all right.” And though now she looks more like Draco Malfoy than like Harry or Hermione, she can hope.
Jacob Epstein has had an extremely successful career as a television writer. But Kaavya should also understand that he’s served a 26-year sentence for his youthful crime: Here he is now, the poor man, dragged as always into a discussion of plagiarism because of a mistake he made half his lifetime ago . . . and now privately hoping, perhaps, that despite her tongue-twisting surname, a new young wretch is about to replace him, for the next generation, as literary plagiarism’s poster child.
letter to a daughter and letter to a mother from Alternet
You say words such as "cheesy," "hooker boots," and "like" too often. You own polyester tops and plaid skirts exactly like the ones I rejected in the late '50s as totally uncool. You drink "40's," email obsessively and love your writers' group. You roll your eyes at me a lot, a whole lot, especially when I nod to the beat of the latest rap song on the radio but don't realize that the words are misogynistic or violent.
Similarly, I love the beat of your feminism, your generation's spunk and confidence, but I don't always understand the message. It seems vague and undefined. It trickles out in bits and pieces instead of bursting out in decisive shouts like ours did. Sometimes I wonder if you get the bigger picture of how the power structure in this country (mostly older, white and male) is still gridlocked, letting only the few token women actually come to the table no matter what their education or experience.
But I do believe that we need more women leaders, and I think they'll make different decisions that I expect might serve us better. They'll change the conversation, maybe not in the beginning, but definitely once there's a critical mass of a variety of women of different colors, ages, experiences and beliefs. Men and women are different in ways crucial to the way that businesses are run and social infrastructure is put into place. I think women will govern in a more collaborative way and take the effects of their decisions on women and children more into account than men do presently. Perhaps when men have had years of experience with hands-on parenting, more permission to experience their own feelings and a chance to expand their focus beyond the quickest way to get up the corporate ladder, then I'll revise my assessment, and these differences won't exist in quite the same way if they exist at all.
My generation of feminists loves thinking big picture, because we were forced to focus on minutia for so much of our lives. We wanted the next generation to expect vast equality and opportunity. I appreciate your Mother's Day thank you, but honestly, it was my pleasure watching you play basketball and observing that you demanded to be heard and paid fairly (well, as fairly as writers and teachers can expect in 2006). In some ways, it actually gives me joy that you take the right to choose for granted. It is the water you have swum in. Notwithstanding the epidemic of eating disorders and egregious focus on looks, I think your generation is more in control over your own bodies than any before it. I just hope you can mobilize one another to protect that power.
I have always wanted you to have choices. I wanted you to be able to be yourself in the world without dumbing down, settling for less or being afraid speak your mind. I tried to be a model, but I have to admit that sometimes I talked a good game without playing it particularly well. I did most of the management of the household and relationships with extended family, and cut down on my paid work to handle the majority of parenting, despite the promises my husband and I made each other when we got engaged at 19. Although I was pretty good about speaking my truth, I often quietly gave in so no one would suffer my "selfishness."
Some things take time. I was born in the Midwest to traditional, Episcopalian parents, so being "nice" and a "good wife and mother" are part of the blood that runs through my veins. Let's appreciate each other's gains and struggles. I am proud of my continuing work to resist the "nice and good" lessons of my upbringing. I love that these requirements seem to have been bred out of you. I love it that you're sassy, empowered and outspoken. I love that you do a better job of addressing class and race in the mix than we did, and the way you've taken networking to a whole new level with blogs and organizing online.
I don't want you to be superhuman. No wise second-waver does. Instead, our dream is that you each have the opportunity to be happy in the fullest expression of your true nature. There's still a lot of work to be done in order to support you, to support women less privileged than you to realize that dream.
I'm just not sure I understand how you are organized as a group to fight on the issues still before you, and I do think you're going to have to fight and fight harder. No one is going to just hand you anything just because it's fair. That's not the way power operates.
But we can all lighten up and have more fun along the way. It feels like the older I get the less serious I feel I have to be. I'm having a lot of fun in my 50s as the mother of a grown-up daughter and as my own grown-up, independent, feminist self. I can't wait to see how much fun I'll have as a grandmother.
Jere E. Martin is an artist, film consultant and activist living in Santa Fe, N.M.
You use words like "patriarchy" and "crone." You have a dream group, two book clubs, a medical psychic. On your bathroom wall, you have a photograph of a middle-aged naked woman stretched out in the curve of a leaning tree. I love you, but sometimes your ideas of feminism seem sappy, sentimental, unproductive.
I am not one of those Sophie Kinsella fans who likes my heels high and my man Cro-Magnon. In fact, despite my teasing, you are the most powerful person I have ever known. You founded the longest running women's film festival If you like a book, 10,000 of your closest friends immediately buy it. You can sense that I am sad from thousands of miles away. You gave me feminism, and when I was old enough to comprehend the profundity of that gift -- 18 years old and watching all of my friends fall apart from eating and anxiety disorders -- I embraced it with a vengeance.
On Mother's Day, I first and foremost want to say thank you. It is clearly not said enough by the women of my generation, the inheritors of Title IX and day-care centers and gender studies programs. Thank you for getting us these things, and thank you for doing away with others -- girdles and sanitary belts immediately come to mind. Thank you for teaching us to speak truth to power. Here I speak, not just to my all-powerful mother, but all second-wavers.
Your version of feminism sometimes feels like what Bitch Magazine founder Lisa Jervis called "femmenism", an idea that "female leadership is inherently different from male, that having more women in positions of power, authority, or visibility will automatically lead to, or can be equated with, feminist social change."
We have witnessed Abu Ghraib and Condoleeza Rice and Paris Hilton. This to me is evidence enough that women aren't inherently better or more just. We don't believe in goddess worship or that getting just any old lady into office will make the world a better place.
What we do believe in is education and choice. We believe in pleasure. We believe in humor. God knows, OK, Goddess knows, we believe in ambition; too many of us are unhealthy, perfect girls -- faithful, if unconscious, imitators of our supermoms.
Sometimes your legacy feels like a ten-ton weight, like we can never accomplish enough. Sometimes your adoring gaze feels like a critical stare -- as if our moments of frivolousness movement is dead. Sometimes your well-intentioned advice feels like a dooming prophecy. One feminist writer told me that she could not bear to connect me with her agent because the publishing world was inhumane. I was 24 with a mountain of ideas and hope that wouldn't pay the rent. Let us earn our own bitterness. Stop shaking your heads at NOW conferences because "the youth" don't show up. We are trying to maneuver a new path towards social change, and it has less to do with "everyone say aye" and more to do with blogs, networking sites, the hostile takeover of pop culture. Watch Pink's new video "Stupid Girls" (http://popsugar.com/5256) or read Feministing (www.feministing.com) if you want a sense of where we are fighting the 21st-century battle.
We want to fight the good fight, but we want to make sweet love too. We want our partners -- girl, boy or something radically in between -- beside us. We want boys to be less buttoned-up and more down for parenting and dancing to stupid '80s music in public; if they pay for dinner, unlike Maureen Dowd's hyperbolic claims, it doesn't mean we are riddled with '50s-era nostalgia. We just don't take some things as seriously as you do.
I can hear a chorus of Eileen Fisher-wearing women now -- wait until you have kids. I surrender. I have no clue about how I am going to realize my equal parenting dreams; I watched my own idealistic parents fail. My mom and I joke that she has grandmother Tourette's these days -- she shouts, "Babies would solve that," and then looks over both shoulders and asks, "Who said that?"
But for all our laughing, we know that the still-unsolved problem of work-family-gender balance is grave. I am scared of compromising my cherished independence, deathly afraid that I will wake up at 40 with an indistinguishable fire of bitterness in my guts. Sometimes I find myself standing over the sink washing my boyfriend's dishes even though I made dinner, and it scares the shit out of me.
When I recently came across second waver Cynthia Horney's rare message, it made me breathe a deep sigh of relief: "We got nowhere close to Having It All. But here's what I think … we had an awful lot of it. My point is simply that this turned out to be the very life I wanted: not my mother's life, not my husband's life, but a patched-up-some-of-both model that I worry is in danger of being cast aside as unworkable by people who have listened to too many women like me despair over what we are missing. We didn't make enough noise celebrating the great parts, did we?"
No, you didn't. But it is never too late.
Courtney E. Martin's book, "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in March 2007. Read more of her work at courtneyemartin.com.
Similarly, I love the beat of your feminism, your generation's spunk and confidence, but I don't always understand the message. It seems vague and undefined. It trickles out in bits and pieces instead of bursting out in decisive shouts like ours did. Sometimes I wonder if you get the bigger picture of how the power structure in this country (mostly older, white and male) is still gridlocked, letting only the few token women actually come to the table no matter what their education or experience.
But I do believe that we need more women leaders, and I think they'll make different decisions that I expect might serve us better. They'll change the conversation, maybe not in the beginning, but definitely once there's a critical mass of a variety of women of different colors, ages, experiences and beliefs. Men and women are different in ways crucial to the way that businesses are run and social infrastructure is put into place. I think women will govern in a more collaborative way and take the effects of their decisions on women and children more into account than men do presently. Perhaps when men have had years of experience with hands-on parenting, more permission to experience their own feelings and a chance to expand their focus beyond the quickest way to get up the corporate ladder, then I'll revise my assessment, and these differences won't exist in quite the same way if they exist at all.
My generation of feminists loves thinking big picture, because we were forced to focus on minutia for so much of our lives. We wanted the next generation to expect vast equality and opportunity. I appreciate your Mother's Day thank you, but honestly, it was my pleasure watching you play basketball and observing that you demanded to be heard and paid fairly (well, as fairly as writers and teachers can expect in 2006). In some ways, it actually gives me joy that you take the right to choose for granted. It is the water you have swum in. Notwithstanding the epidemic of eating disorders and egregious focus on looks, I think your generation is more in control over your own bodies than any before it. I just hope you can mobilize one another to protect that power.
I have always wanted you to have choices. I wanted you to be able to be yourself in the world without dumbing down, settling for less or being afraid speak your mind. I tried to be a model, but I have to admit that sometimes I talked a good game without playing it particularly well. I did most of the management of the household and relationships with extended family, and cut down on my paid work to handle the majority of parenting, despite the promises my husband and I made each other when we got engaged at 19. Although I was pretty good about speaking my truth, I often quietly gave in so no one would suffer my "selfishness."
Some things take time. I was born in the Midwest to traditional, Episcopalian parents, so being "nice" and a "good wife and mother" are part of the blood that runs through my veins. Let's appreciate each other's gains and struggles. I am proud of my continuing work to resist the "nice and good" lessons of my upbringing. I love that these requirements seem to have been bred out of you. I love it that you're sassy, empowered and outspoken. I love that you do a better job of addressing class and race in the mix than we did, and the way you've taken networking to a whole new level with blogs and organizing online.
I don't want you to be superhuman. No wise second-waver does. Instead, our dream is that you each have the opportunity to be happy in the fullest expression of your true nature. There's still a lot of work to be done in order to support you, to support women less privileged than you to realize that dream.
I'm just not sure I understand how you are organized as a group to fight on the issues still before you, and I do think you're going to have to fight and fight harder. No one is going to just hand you anything just because it's fair. That's not the way power operates.
But we can all lighten up and have more fun along the way. It feels like the older I get the less serious I feel I have to be. I'm having a lot of fun in my 50s as the mother of a grown-up daughter and as my own grown-up, independent, feminist self. I can't wait to see how much fun I'll have as a grandmother.
Jere E. Martin is an artist, film consultant and activist living in Santa Fe, N.M.
You use words like "patriarchy" and "crone." You have a dream group, two book clubs, a medical psychic. On your bathroom wall, you have a photograph of a middle-aged naked woman stretched out in the curve of a leaning tree. I love you, but sometimes your ideas of feminism seem sappy, sentimental, unproductive.
I am not one of those Sophie Kinsella fans who likes my heels high and my man Cro-Magnon. In fact, despite my teasing, you are the most powerful person I have ever known. You founded the longest running women's film festival If you like a book, 10,000 of your closest friends immediately buy it. You can sense that I am sad from thousands of miles away. You gave me feminism, and when I was old enough to comprehend the profundity of that gift -- 18 years old and watching all of my friends fall apart from eating and anxiety disorders -- I embraced it with a vengeance.
On Mother's Day, I first and foremost want to say thank you. It is clearly not said enough by the women of my generation, the inheritors of Title IX and day-care centers and gender studies programs. Thank you for getting us these things, and thank you for doing away with others -- girdles and sanitary belts immediately come to mind. Thank you for teaching us to speak truth to power. Here I speak, not just to my all-powerful mother, but all second-wavers.
Your version of feminism sometimes feels like what Bitch Magazine founder Lisa Jervis called "femmenism", an idea that "female leadership is inherently different from male, that having more women in positions of power, authority, or visibility will automatically lead to, or can be equated with, feminist social change."
We have witnessed Abu Ghraib and Condoleeza Rice and Paris Hilton. This to me is evidence enough that women aren't inherently better or more just. We don't believe in goddess worship or that getting just any old lady into office will make the world a better place.
What we do believe in is education and choice. We believe in pleasure. We believe in humor. God knows, OK, Goddess knows, we believe in ambition; too many of us are unhealthy, perfect girls -- faithful, if unconscious, imitators of our supermoms.
Sometimes your legacy feels like a ten-ton weight, like we can never accomplish enough. Sometimes your adoring gaze feels like a critical stare -- as if our moments of frivolousness movement is dead. Sometimes your well-intentioned advice feels like a dooming prophecy. One feminist writer told me that she could not bear to connect me with her agent because the publishing world was inhumane. I was 24 with a mountain of ideas and hope that wouldn't pay the rent. Let us earn our own bitterness. Stop shaking your heads at NOW conferences because "the youth" don't show up. We are trying to maneuver a new path towards social change, and it has less to do with "everyone say aye" and more to do with blogs, networking sites, the hostile takeover of pop culture. Watch Pink's new video "Stupid Girls" (http://popsugar.com/5256) or read Feministing (www.feministing.com) if you want a sense of where we are fighting the 21st-century battle.
We want to fight the good fight, but we want to make sweet love too. We want our partners -- girl, boy or something radically in between -- beside us. We want boys to be less buttoned-up and more down for parenting and dancing to stupid '80s music in public; if they pay for dinner, unlike Maureen Dowd's hyperbolic claims, it doesn't mean we are riddled with '50s-era nostalgia. We just don't take some things as seriously as you do.
I can hear a chorus of Eileen Fisher-wearing women now -- wait until you have kids. I surrender. I have no clue about how I am going to realize my equal parenting dreams; I watched my own idealistic parents fail. My mom and I joke that she has grandmother Tourette's these days -- she shouts, "Babies would solve that," and then looks over both shoulders and asks, "Who said that?"
But for all our laughing, we know that the still-unsolved problem of work-family-gender balance is grave. I am scared of compromising my cherished independence, deathly afraid that I will wake up at 40 with an indistinguishable fire of bitterness in my guts. Sometimes I find myself standing over the sink washing my boyfriend's dishes even though I made dinner, and it scares the shit out of me.
When I recently came across second waver Cynthia Horney's rare message, it made me breathe a deep sigh of relief: "We got nowhere close to Having It All. But here's what I think … we had an awful lot of it. My point is simply that this turned out to be the very life I wanted: not my mother's life, not my husband's life, but a patched-up-some-of-both model that I worry is in danger of being cast aside as unworkable by people who have listened to too many women like me despair over what we are missing. We didn't make enough noise celebrating the great parts, did we?"
No, you didn't. But it is never too late.
Courtney E. Martin's book, "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in March 2007. Read more of her work at courtneyemartin.com.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
1984 Anti-Sikh Riots in Delhi
I was 13 years old, on October 31st 1984, the day Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards' Beant and Satwant Singh. The bodyguards did it to avenge, the destruction of the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, by the Indian army, on June 5th 1984.
Schools had shut down, and people were not going to work, regular Indian TV, Doordashan, in black and white, had gone off the air with their regular programs, replaced by a sad musician crooning on the screen. My parents were tunning their radio to BBC world service to figure out what was happening in our backyard, Indira Gandhi had been shot and was most probably dead.
My parents had gone to our farm which is in the outskirts of Delhi. They were planning to spend the night, but changed their mind and were driving back passing A.I.M.S., the hospital where the Prime Minister had been hospitalized. Ten minutes earlier, in the same place, a mob had stoned the car of a Sikh. President Giani Zail Singh of India. We are from the Sikh faith. We were all in a state of shock, none of us gloated or celebrated, Indira Gandhi’s death. We heard later that some Sikh immigrants in Britain and Canada had gone out and celebrated. The new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi made a statement "When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake" on the Sikh carnage. This allowed mobs organized by local politicians to kill over 3,000 innocent Sikh men, women and children in North India.
The next morning, November 1st 1984, we were sitting outside in our garden having breakfast, when I heard the sounds of drums beating. It felt like Holi, the Indian festival of color, where the groups of young intoxicated men stalked the streets to harass women. I went to the edge of the lawn and looked out through the bamboo fence, and saw men, angry, drunk and chanting khoon ka badla koon (blood for blood), Indira Gandhi ki ek he asha . . . , sardaro ko maro . . . The voices were getting louder and more stringent khoon ka badla khoon, I rushed and called my parents.
My parents were having breakfast with a Muslim film maker. They rushed me and my younger brother into the house. We lived in a residential colony built by my great grand father, named Sujan Singh Park. My father's brothers lived on the 2nd floor, so we called them up and told them the situation, and we went upstairs to the home of my uncle, and his Egyptian wife. My younger brother, and two younger girl cousins were holed up in the bedroom, watching videos for many hours. I am not sure what we spoke about, we were not afraid, but more in a state of shock, thinking it must be a temporary aberration, before things went back to normal.
A couple of hours later I saw my mother come into the room brandishing a Kirpan (Sikh sword). She took it out of its red curved case and started rubbing it to the floor so that it retained its sharpness. What are you doing with his ma? I asked, she responded if they (the rioters) do anything to you, I will kill them before they get to you. That day I felt all Sikh women were powerful and strong and brave like my mother.
We all laughed in a way that was not entirely funny. The next day the adults decided that staying in my uncle's house was not safe, so we needed to move to Hotel Ambassador, next door.
The hotel was no longer taking reservations by Sikhs, for fear of reprisals. So the Muslim film maker made a reservation in his name, and we were ushered in the early evening to Ambassador Hotel. We were not allowed to go out, or let anyone in. We entertained ourselves by playing some board games, but I was afraid for my parent's lives. A few days later we were moved to a Sikh bureaucrats house in Vinay Marg, a government colony. We all kept wondering why the army was not called in? Why were innocent Sikhs being tortured and burnt alive, for a crime they did not commit? The army will protect us we felt, it has a lot of Sikhs in it. But for four days Delhi burnt, Tirlokpuri Block 32 and Kalyanpuri in East Delhi, Sultanpuri and Nangloi in West Delhi sizzled, with unprotected Sikhs being murdered by mobs, sanctioned by the great indian state.
My father refused to move, and stayed back and, kept all night vigils with other Sikhs in the colony and servant quarters.
Khushwant Singh deposed before the Nanavati Commission what he saw outside his house in Sujan Singh Park
"On October 31, 1984, I came out of my house, near Ambassador Hotel and from the gate near the road, I saw a mob burning a taxi, belonging to a Sikh. From a distance of 10 yards, I saw around 30 policemen, an inspector, who was armed and a sub-inspector, standing across the road. The policemen did nothing to prevent the mob from burning the taxi," Singh told the commission. The mob had burnt shops in the adjacent Khan Market and had attacked a gurdwara nearby. Thereafter the mob burnt cars sent to repairs to Sukhwant Singh, a mechanic, he added”. The next day we heard that at my uncle's farm, trees had been chopped, he decided to sell the land, and mouthed drunken abuses at the attackers. We later learnt that our farm house had been burnt, the fridge, furniture, tv, oven and cooker had been looted by the local Gujar villagers organized by Sajjan Kumar the politician of the area. All sardar farms were attacked. Our farms is still called Sardar (Sikh) farm in the area. Just in case there is another riot, they will not need electoral rolls, the houses are already marked for attack.
H.K.L Bhagat the politician, who always wore dark glasses gave the sweeper colony, next to our complex, alcohol, weapons and electoral lists of Sikhs in our neighborhood.
The rioters had arrived in our factory in NOIDA (an industrial suburb of Delhi), but their supplies of Kerosene, to fuel the fire, had been depleted after burning the Sikh businesses before ours. The workers also convinced the mob that the factory was not owned by Sikhs, and by burning and destroying the factory, the worker's livliehood would be destroyed. Interestingly the workers, mostly Muslims protected the factory against the Hindu mobs.
I went back to a school after a week, and some of my Sikh classmates had cut their hair. The boys were teased and harassed. The boys and girls whose families were probably forced and had to protect themselves by cutting their hair to blend it, were now subject to harassment by their classmates. I don't remember any teacher saying anything that made the Sikh students feel safe or protected or any psychological services being provided. I felt most of the teachers believed that the Sikhs deserved what they got.
Nagrik Ekta Manch was an organization that had been created to bring relief to the injured and to shelter the homeless. Once we got back to our homes, we cousins decided to help the Manch and collect relief supplies, so we went to our neighbors, and were shocked when some banged their doors at our faces, and said the Sikhs deserved what they got. My mother helped the widows fill up forms at government offices for compensation and relief. One of the widows asked my mother why did they kill my husband and child, Indira Gandhi was ours too? . I went with my grandmother to a gurdwara that had became a relief camp. I just saw women and children their, the men were all dead. We donated blankets, warm clothing and food.
The Nagrik Ekta Manch formed a team to investigate the riots, a black colored pamphlet was released of which we had quite a few copies and my father distributed it to people that were interested. It is searing indictment of politicians who incited the riots and the police who watched as rioters burnt, looted and destroyed.
This anti-Sikh pogrom was seminal in changing the course of our lives. It challenged our sense of an Indian indentity, and we were now different we were SIKHS. When I used to sing the national anthem with full throated pride I had never felt separate from a Hindu, or different. But that week we became a visible minority. The idea of the Indian nation was torn at its seams.
My grandparents felt that they were reliving the trauma of partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. My grandparents who had fled overnight, leaving homes, properties, lives and their souls in Lahore, Rawalpindi, North West Frontier Province and Sargodha were losing their belongings and livelihood again.
Movies like Kaya Taran and Amitva Ghosh's article the Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi have tried to understand and show accurately the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, many years later. Safina Oberoi’s documentary My Mother India, shows the effects on the riots on her Sikh father, who decided to regrow his hair and retie his turban.
After the riots we felt the need to have options, next time the cipher of violence spiraled out of control, we would have somewhere to escape. We were sent out of Delhi to study, and then to America for college.
Schools had shut down, and people were not going to work, regular Indian TV, Doordashan, in black and white, had gone off the air with their regular programs, replaced by a sad musician crooning on the screen. My parents were tunning their radio to BBC world service to figure out what was happening in our backyard, Indira Gandhi had been shot and was most probably dead.
My parents had gone to our farm which is in the outskirts of Delhi. They were planning to spend the night, but changed their mind and were driving back passing A.I.M.S., the hospital where the Prime Minister had been hospitalized. Ten minutes earlier, in the same place, a mob had stoned the car of a Sikh. President Giani Zail Singh of India. We are from the Sikh faith. We were all in a state of shock, none of us gloated or celebrated, Indira Gandhi’s death. We heard later that some Sikh immigrants in Britain and Canada had gone out and celebrated. The new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi made a statement "When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake" on the Sikh carnage. This allowed mobs organized by local politicians to kill over 3,000 innocent Sikh men, women and children in North India.
The next morning, November 1st 1984, we were sitting outside in our garden having breakfast, when I heard the sounds of drums beating. It felt like Holi, the Indian festival of color, where the groups of young intoxicated men stalked the streets to harass women. I went to the edge of the lawn and looked out through the bamboo fence, and saw men, angry, drunk and chanting khoon ka badla koon (blood for blood), Indira Gandhi ki ek he asha . . . , sardaro ko maro . . . The voices were getting louder and more stringent khoon ka badla khoon, I rushed and called my parents.
My parents were having breakfast with a Muslim film maker. They rushed me and my younger brother into the house. We lived in a residential colony built by my great grand father, named Sujan Singh Park. My father's brothers lived on the 2nd floor, so we called them up and told them the situation, and we went upstairs to the home of my uncle, and his Egyptian wife. My younger brother, and two younger girl cousins were holed up in the bedroom, watching videos for many hours. I am not sure what we spoke about, we were not afraid, but more in a state of shock, thinking it must be a temporary aberration, before things went back to normal.
A couple of hours later I saw my mother come into the room brandishing a Kirpan (Sikh sword). She took it out of its red curved case and started rubbing it to the floor so that it retained its sharpness. What are you doing with his ma? I asked, she responded if they (the rioters) do anything to you, I will kill them before they get to you. That day I felt all Sikh women were powerful and strong and brave like my mother.
We all laughed in a way that was not entirely funny. The next day the adults decided that staying in my uncle's house was not safe, so we needed to move to Hotel Ambassador, next door.
The hotel was no longer taking reservations by Sikhs, for fear of reprisals. So the Muslim film maker made a reservation in his name, and we were ushered in the early evening to Ambassador Hotel. We were not allowed to go out, or let anyone in. We entertained ourselves by playing some board games, but I was afraid for my parent's lives. A few days later we were moved to a Sikh bureaucrats house in Vinay Marg, a government colony. We all kept wondering why the army was not called in? Why were innocent Sikhs being tortured and burnt alive, for a crime they did not commit? The army will protect us we felt, it has a lot of Sikhs in it. But for four days Delhi burnt, Tirlokpuri Block 32 and Kalyanpuri in East Delhi, Sultanpuri and Nangloi in West Delhi sizzled, with unprotected Sikhs being murdered by mobs, sanctioned by the great indian state.
My father refused to move, and stayed back and, kept all night vigils with other Sikhs in the colony and servant quarters.
Khushwant Singh deposed before the Nanavati Commission what he saw outside his house in Sujan Singh Park
"On October 31, 1984, I came out of my house, near Ambassador Hotel and from the gate near the road, I saw a mob burning a taxi, belonging to a Sikh. From a distance of 10 yards, I saw around 30 policemen, an inspector, who was armed and a sub-inspector, standing across the road. The policemen did nothing to prevent the mob from burning the taxi," Singh told the commission. The mob had burnt shops in the adjacent Khan Market and had attacked a gurdwara nearby. Thereafter the mob burnt cars sent to repairs to Sukhwant Singh, a mechanic, he added”. The next day we heard that at my uncle's farm, trees had been chopped, he decided to sell the land, and mouthed drunken abuses at the attackers. We later learnt that our farm house had been burnt, the fridge, furniture, tv, oven and cooker had been looted by the local Gujar villagers organized by Sajjan Kumar the politician of the area. All sardar farms were attacked. Our farms is still called Sardar (Sikh) farm in the area. Just in case there is another riot, they will not need electoral rolls, the houses are already marked for attack.
H.K.L Bhagat the politician, who always wore dark glasses gave the sweeper colony, next to our complex, alcohol, weapons and electoral lists of Sikhs in our neighborhood.
The rioters had arrived in our factory in NOIDA (an industrial suburb of Delhi), but their supplies of Kerosene, to fuel the fire, had been depleted after burning the Sikh businesses before ours. The workers also convinced the mob that the factory was not owned by Sikhs, and by burning and destroying the factory, the worker's livliehood would be destroyed. Interestingly the workers, mostly Muslims protected the factory against the Hindu mobs.
I went back to a school after a week, and some of my Sikh classmates had cut their hair. The boys were teased and harassed. The boys and girls whose families were probably forced and had to protect themselves by cutting their hair to blend it, were now subject to harassment by their classmates. I don't remember any teacher saying anything that made the Sikh students feel safe or protected or any psychological services being provided. I felt most of the teachers believed that the Sikhs deserved what they got.
Nagrik Ekta Manch was an organization that had been created to bring relief to the injured and to shelter the homeless. Once we got back to our homes, we cousins decided to help the Manch and collect relief supplies, so we went to our neighbors, and were shocked when some banged their doors at our faces, and said the Sikhs deserved what they got. My mother helped the widows fill up forms at government offices for compensation and relief. One of the widows asked my mother why did they kill my husband and child, Indira Gandhi was ours too? . I went with my grandmother to a gurdwara that had became a relief camp. I just saw women and children their, the men were all dead. We donated blankets, warm clothing and food.
The Nagrik Ekta Manch formed a team to investigate the riots, a black colored pamphlet was released of which we had quite a few copies and my father distributed it to people that were interested. It is searing indictment of politicians who incited the riots and the police who watched as rioters burnt, looted and destroyed.
This anti-Sikh pogrom was seminal in changing the course of our lives. It challenged our sense of an Indian indentity, and we were now different we were SIKHS. When I used to sing the national anthem with full throated pride I had never felt separate from a Hindu, or different. But that week we became a visible minority. The idea of the Indian nation was torn at its seams.
My grandparents felt that they were reliving the trauma of partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. My grandparents who had fled overnight, leaving homes, properties, lives and their souls in Lahore, Rawalpindi, North West Frontier Province and Sargodha were losing their belongings and livelihood again.
Movies like Kaya Taran and Amitva Ghosh's article the Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi have tried to understand and show accurately the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, many years later. Safina Oberoi’s documentary My Mother India, shows the effects on the riots on her Sikh father, who decided to regrow his hair and retie his turban.
After the riots we felt the need to have options, next time the cipher of violence spiraled out of control, we would have somewhere to escape. We were sent out of Delhi to study, and then to America for college.
letter from Ahmadinejad to Bush
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure
Akeelah and the Bee
Saw an inspriational tear jerker of a movie today. Akeelah and the bee is about an 11 year old African American girl growing up in South Central Los Angeles trying to be cool and go to school at the same time, with an incredible talent for spelling. The odds are all against her, her father is dead, her brother is a dead beat, her sister has a baby in the house, her mother works all the time, and is on edge. Only her older brother is concerned about her. He is in the Air force and encourages her when he is around, promising to parachute down when she in Washington D.C. for the Scripps national spelling bee finals.
Her coach Dr. Joshua Larabee (Lawrence Fishburne), on sabbatical from U.C.L.A., is recovering from the loss of his daughter and divorce from his wife. He is inspirational and provides context to the words for Akeelah (Keke Palmer). He tells her you have to say the word correctly, before you can spell it, explaining the roots of words from Latin, Greek and French. He has her read books on African American history and the Civil Rights Movement. He does not allow her to speak to him in “ghetto talk” but to be polite and refrain from slang.
Akeelah meets up with another speller who has a crush on her, Javier. Javier invites her to his home in the ritzy Woodland hills, where his friends play scrabble on his birthday. He even gives her a quick impulsive kiss!
Akeelah practices for the spelling bee by including her whole neighboor hood, from the Korean grocer, to the local cool guy, from her mother to all her siblings, to her friends and her teachers at school.
After watching the movie, you come out feeling positive since at the Bee, Akeelah changes the meaning of winning to encompassing all with her goodness. She is willing to forgo the prize so that another contestant who is under a lot of pressure from his family to win, can will. But he sees through her kindness, and does not let her lose. So we come out of the movie in the true spirit of sportsmanship, where everyone fights a good fight and lets all of us be winners.
Review by Roger Ebert
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060427/REVIEWS/60421002/1023
Saw an inspriational tear jerker of a movie today. Akeelah and the bee is about an 11 year old African American girl growing up in South Central Los Angeles trying to be cool and go to school at the same time, with an incredible talent for spelling. The odds are all against her, her father is dead, her brother is a dead beat, her sister has a baby in the house, her mother works all the time, and is on edge. Only her older brother is concerned about her. He is in the Air force and encourages her when he is around, promising to parachute down when she in Washington D.C. for the Scripps national spelling bee finals.
Her coach Dr. Joshua Larabee (Lawrence Fishburne), on sabbatical from U.C.L.A., is recovering from the loss of his daughter and divorce from his wife. He is inspirational and provides context to the words for Akeelah (Keke Palmer). He tells her you have to say the word correctly, before you can spell it, explaining the roots of words from Latin, Greek and French. He has her read books on African American history and the Civil Rights Movement. He does not allow her to speak to him in “ghetto talk” but to be polite and refrain from slang.
Akeelah meets up with another speller who has a crush on her, Javier. Javier invites her to his home in the ritzy Woodland hills, where his friends play scrabble on his birthday. He even gives her a quick impulsive kiss!
Akeelah practices for the spelling bee by including her whole neighboor hood, from the Korean grocer, to the local cool guy, from her mother to all her siblings, to her friends and her teachers at school.
After watching the movie, you come out feeling positive since at the Bee, Akeelah changes the meaning of winning to encompassing all with her goodness. She is willing to forgo the prize so that another contestant who is under a lot of pressure from his family to win, can will. But he sees through her kindness, and does not let her lose. So we come out of the movie in the true spirit of sportsmanship, where everyone fights a good fight and lets all of us be winners.
Review by Roger Ebert
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060427/REVIEWS/60421002/1023
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