Blog

The statistics of death


Amnesty International reports today that there were a minimum of 3,797 people who were executed last year in 25 countries; 97 percent of those executions occurred in China, Iran, Vietnam, and America.

In 2004, Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal, and Turkey joined the list of 115 other nations that have abolished the death penalty.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Outside looking in, inside looking out


issue banner

Belonging. It’s one of the most basic human needs, and the price of its absence — exclusion — is both the source of some of our greatest conflicts and, paradoxically, a motivator of change and innovation.

Sure, some of us may be chameleon-like, blending in so as to not stand out. But most of us, no matter what our nationality, struggle to fit in ways both big and small thanks to our beliefs, our gender, our sexual preferences, the color of our skin, age, our accents, physical and mental dispositions, financial circumstances, and family structures, to name just some of our distinguishing characteristics.

In this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we examine what it means to belong — and what it means to be an outsider. To elucidate the global dimensions of this phenomenon, photographer Chika Watanabe shares her photos from some of the world’s most vibrant and prosperous cities — New York, Madrid, and Tokyo — in Envisioning belonging.

Far from these metropolises, Raque Kunz relays how a move to rural Rincon, Cape Verde, demands reconsideration of the importance of family and friends and a new approach to dating in A hard bargain. Meanwhile, in rural Shandong, China, InTheFray Assistant Editor Michelle Chen illuminates how one Chinese teenager’s failure to belong to either the city or the village complicates her struggle to make her way in the world in Homecoming for Hai Rong.

Bringing us back to the skies, streets, and bookshelves of the United States, David A. Zimmerman, in Walk this way, tackles the question of how female comic book characters are faring in what is often thought of as a Superman’s world — and how today’s superheroines are improving humanity, one comic book at a time.

Rounding out this month’s stories is the winning essay from InTheFray’s first annual writing contest. Showing readers how he goes about Respecting life, Bambi-style in a small Minnesota town where killing is the norm, Thomas Lee Boles emphasizes the value of animal — not just human — life. Thanks to everyone who entered the contest this year — we received some great entries and look forward to receiving more next year.

Thanks for reading — and remember all of these dreary April showers are sure to bring May flowers!

Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor
Brooklyn, New York

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Photo Essays

Envisioning belonging

A photographer’s journey to understanding in New York, Tokyo, and Barcelona.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

What is belonging?  Or rather, how?  Belong-ing implies that it’s an action in movement, constantly fleeting, always changing.  

How is belonging? You establish relationships with people that you can rely on and who can rely on you. You engage with certain objects in the environment. These actions can give you entry into the social, cultural, economic, and political networks that make a place, and feel that you can take some kind of role in that community. To me, this participation, as marginal or ephemeral as it may be, is the workings of belonging.

I don’t know how individual people in the various cities I visit create their belonging. I can only assume. The following images are my personal glimpses into the hidden mechanics of belonging in New York, Tokyo, and Barcelona.  

Economic belonging
Individuals contribute to the economic circulation of a city. This interaction creates a consumerist role for the person. Whether intentional or accidental, desired or resisted, this is one of the most basic actions of belonging to a community.

Political belonging
One form of participation in these particular cities was the imposition of political speech onto the street. From protests to graffiti, private beliefs were etched onto the urban landscape. As rebellious as this is, just as a child rebels against his or her parent, to me it seemed to be a show of their belonging.  

Belonging by not belonging
There are those who are on the margins of participation — those who are ignored on the street, those without an imposing voice. Their ways of belonging are more invisible to me than those of anyone else. As outcasts or strangers, how do they belong? What does their presence say about the other ways of belonging? What does this say about me?

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Respecting life, Bambi-style

WINNER of the 2005 InTheFray writing contest
I'm subverting the killing norm, one animal at a time.


Killing for fun may not seem like a social norm, but it is in Minnesota. Recently a nationally syndicated comic strip, “Zippy the Pinhead,” recognized this. One of Zippy’s friends, who was considering a run for the presidency, remarked, “I eat meat occasionally. But I can’t see hunting and killing as a pastime.”

Zippy replied, “Well, we just lost Minnesota.”

Similar conditions obtain in Wisconsin and New Mexico, where my stories take place. I have heard gunshots on opening day and discussions of this activity at church.

Thomas Lee Boles cares for Marena, a fawn residing at the Alameda Park Zoo in Alamogordo, N.M.

Marena

When I lived in Alamogordo, New Mexico, I had the very special joy of hand raising a fawn. I named her Marena, after a doe in the novel “Bambi” who prophesied peace between humans and animals. Though I was unemployed, nearly broke, recovering from a nearly fatal illness, and still facing difficult surgery, I wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything.

Marena was a mule deer (the species is named for their large ears) brought to the Alameda Park Zoo by someone who found her wandering along a highway alone. I had already made friends with the zoo’s two adult mule deer, whom I named Bambi and Faline, and, through them, with the zookeepers and director, Steve Diehl. Bambi had given the first warning that my appendix was about to burst, so we all knew something very special was going on.

Marena was the happiest baby I have ever known, always full of life, love, and joy.  When I came to visit, I called out, “Marena! Where is my little sweetheart?”

There came the sound of tiny galloping feet (all four of them could have fit on the palm of my hand, with room to spare) and an eager voice calling, “Meh! Meh! Me-eh-eh!” To say that her tail wagged would be a gross understatement.

Like a dog greeting her dearest long lost friend, the whole animal wagged, from head to toe. She fizzed, like champagne.

Once I suggested to Steve that Marena wanted me to come in at night.

”At night!” he exclaimed. “Why ever at night?”

”She nibbles my ears,” I explained. “You know what that
means.”

As another friend said, in a deep, throaty voice, “Hey, baby, whaddaya doin’ tonight?”

One day, as I was feeding Marena, a family stopped to watch, and began asking questions. Soon the conversation was like one of those scenes in Family Circus when the word balloons float free, not attached to anyone in particular.

Meanwhile Marena finished her bottle and began to run and play, returning occasionally to be petted and bestow kisses upon me lavishly. A pattern emerged in the conversation. The man kept repeating, “She’s so docile! She’s so docile!”

As they left I heard him say, “I don’t think I’ll ever eat venison again.”

Thomas Lee Boles and a doe, Sugar, share a close moment at Fawn-Doe-Rosa in St.  Croix Falls, Wisconsin.

Sugar

When I moved to Minnesota in December 2000, I mentioned my experiences of deer to several people at church.

One person said, “You’d like Fawn-Doe-Rosa. You can go into the yard with the deer; they eat from your hand.”

”Where’s that?” I asked.

”Near Taylors Falls.”

In the middle of the worst winter in about 10 years (even the natives were impressed), I went looking. I drove all the Minnesota approaches to Taylors Falls, and found no Fawn-Doe-Rosa.

That was because it isn’t in Minnesota. It’s across the Saint Croix River, in Wisconsin.

It was closed until May 15.

I awaited that date as eagerly as the Christmas when I got my Lionel train. Presenting myself at the entrance, I bought my admission and some feed, and began getting acquainted with white-tailed deer. I did this every day off, all spring, summer, and fall, until the place closed for winter.  As in Alamogordo, I watched for sick or injured animals and humans doing things that they should know better.  (Deer are not riding animals, like horses.)

One day I found that my money was no longer any good. Admission and all the feed I could give away were free. Not only that, there was a party for my birthday.

In my second summer, a fawn appeared with an odd malformation of the left ear. The tip was bent over and welded, as it were, to the inner lining. I called her Lop Ear, but soon had good reason to change that to Sugar, and look eagerly for that peculiar ear.

My mom once said my dog loved me because “You were the one who got down on the floor with her.” So I began sitting on the ground among the deer. I saw that they groomed each other, and even their babies. Seeing the fawns return the favor, I realized this is more than sanitation: it’s love.

One day in June there presence appeared behind me, and felt the same touch on my hair. In the most profound delight I have ever known, I grew very still. Suddenly, there were two more waiting in line — and one was Sugar.

She began doing that every day, and washed my hair better than I ever did. She was very thorough, sometimes working half an hour at a time, yet incredibly gentle. But if she sees another deer do that, she flies into a jealous rage and beats him up. Even the queen of the herd, who started all this, isn’t safe.

One day someone asked, “Do you have a name for this animal?”

I answered, “I call her Sugar, because she’s my sweetheart.”

A picture of a bottle-feeding session with Marena adorns the cover of my book, Deer Diary.  A picture of Sugar’s ablutions is at BookCather.com, and will be on the cover of my next book, Deer Companions.

Anyone who thinks all this doesn’t challenge a Minnesota norm should consider what happened to our former Governor, Jesse Ventura, when he spoke up for Bambi.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Reviews

Walk this way

From Alias to Elektra, female warriors are giving a new face to girl power — and our sense of justice.


“There is just something intriguing about a woman who looks like she could kill you.”
— Bryan Williams

Jennifer Garner walks funny. Watch Alias and you’ll see what I mean — one arm is raised in front of her, as if to stop what’s coming, and one arm is bent back, almost cocked. Her feet don’t quite criss-cross, as though she doesn’t want to be off-balance. She floats rather than walks, always one step away from a battle stance.

Jennifer Garner is the current head of state in Grrl World. She’s tough, gorgeous, sensitive and serious. She’ll do romantic comedy when she wants to, but mostly she just kicks butt in a variety of venues. She’s inherited the throne of the action chick with her successful turns in Alias, and will reign on the big screen in Elektra. She is a force to be reckoned with, and serves as the latest signpost in the journey of feminine heroics.

Tough old birds

There have always been women who have captured the imagination of their cultures, and many of them have done so by force. ‘Woman as warrior’ is not such an unfamiliar image that its history cannot be traced. In the West, we can look to the ancients for examples of women accustomed to the thrill of adventure or the terror of violence — witness Artemis the Greek goddess of the hunt, Deborah the judge of Israel, or Cleopatra the queen of Egypt. We can recall Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, or even the iconic farm wife of the American westward expansion. These are women of strong backs and iron wills.

We have left room in our hearts for women of valor, but these visions can become caricatured. Some images persist: the noble, frail, civilized women who must be protected from the world outside, or the wild women from whom young men must guard their hearts. For much of history, woman of valor didn’t challenge, so much as mitigate, that cultural bias. Deborah was revered by Israel as its judge, yet she derided her warrior Barak for needing a woman to fight his battles. Rosie the Riveter served as a convenient icon for World War II America, when women were needed in industrial labor while men were at war, but she was quickly replaced by the Happy Homemaker once the war was won. In more recent history, however, strong women have lingered, as have their audiences. Since World War II, and more forcefully since the Civil Rights movement, women in heroics have moved from temporary positions to strong, silent partners, to principals in their own stories.

Wonder women and girly powers

Scholar Richard Reynolds characterizes the superhero as a modern mythology, complete with its own gods and goddesses. But these goddesses were slow in coming. It took an intentional act of creation on the part of psychotherapist William Moulton Marston for the first great superheroine, Wonder Woman, to come out swinging. The heroines that followed were either granted distinctly “feminine” powers, or were utterly derivative, with names and powers identical to, but muted from, their male counterparts.

  • The “lasso of truth” bound Wonder Woman’s enemies, rendering them unable to fight and incapable of lying. The domination imagery has been widely commented on.

  • While Batman and Robin would swim through a sea of villains, throwing punches as they went, Batgirl tended to sit above the fray, letting the bad guys come to her, then kicking them in the face with her high-heeled bat-boots.

  • The Scarlet Witch didn’t fight physically; by controlling the laws of probability she changed the outcome of conflicts by changing her mind.

  • The X-Men’s Marvel Girl was a telepath — another ability characterized by passivity rather than physical prowess.

  • Susan Storm of the Fantastic Four took the name Invisible Girl (not yet, apparently, a woman, despite her marriage to team patriarch Mr. Fantastic). In battle she would simply fade from view.

Six steps behind

In spite of obvious gender inequalities inherent in the design of women characters, the commitment to an expanding female presence in comic books was a significant development. With the advent of Invisible Girl and the women who followed after her, the dynamics of comic book storytelling changed. Sexual politics, now far more sophisticated than the cat-and-mouse games of Superman and Lois Lane, were driving a storytelling format that had shifted from issue-specific epics (one issue tells one complete story) to a serial format (plots and characters developing over years and even decades). Women had found their niche in the genre, as they were finding their niche on television and in song.

Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie told the stories of women with exceptional abilities living out an idyllic existence from week to week. Women sang about the joys and challenges of romance in chart-topping hits like He’s So Fine and It’s My Party (I Can Cry If I Want To). While women were enjoying prominent roles in a variety of mediums, their worldview was highly restricted. Male characters (such as Superman, Captain Kirk, and Marshall Dillon) were often driven by the call of adventure, while female characters were still motivated largely by romance and domestic tranquility.

While the far-reaching implications of the Civil Rights movement prompted discussions about equality as a practical rather than cerebral issue, the job market was also being forced further open to women. By the late 1970s Nancy Drew and Charlie’s Angels were on television as (relatively) independent heroes, and the comic book hero Dazzler, disco singer with mutant powers, celebrated the power of women to define heroism for themselves: “World savin’ ain’t my style . . . I prefer singin’ my heart out to an audience that really digs me,” said “Dazzler” in Comic Book Encyclopedia.

The good, the bad, and the beautiful

Moral ambiguity ruled the day in the 1980s — or so it would seem. Marvel Girl had grown in power, sacrificed herself on behalf of the X-Men, and was reborn as the Phoenix. A sympathetic hero, she was driven insane by her newfound power and destroyed an entire universe. The beloved Jean Grey had gone bad and had to be punished, but at her trial she once again sacrificed herself to save her friends. Whether hero or villain, she was dead.

Catwoman, with a longer history than Jean Grey, gained prominence as well. Always acknowledged as a villain, but with a clear hold on Batman’s affections, Catwoman played a role in the landmark Dark Knight Returns, a story of Batman ten years after his retirement, and in Batman: Year One, the first year of Bruce Wayne’s crime fighting career.

Much later, in the 1980s, the character of Catwoman was played with supreme sensibility by Michelle Pfeiffer in the second film of the Batman franchise. Sexy and sympathetic, Pfeiffer’s Catwoman stole the show. Blurring the lines between good and bad, Pfeiffer saw the villain “as a positive role model if you look at her metaphorically. She’s about empowerment, a character coming into her own,” Suzan Colón wrote in Catwoman: The Life and Times of a Feline Fatale.

Into the midst of these longstanding characters came a new woman with a nebulous history: Elektra Natchios was an intriguing romantic interest for fan favorite Daredevil. She appeared out of nowhere and prompted a mild revisionist retelling of Daredevil’s history — a college love of Matt Murdock, she witnessed her father’s killing and lashed out at Matt: “I used to love the world. . . . You’re a part of that world. And you love it. You let it hurt you and you love it all the more. I’m not that strong, ” she said in Elektra Saga. Her innocence lost, Elektra channels her rage into a job as an assassin. Even after dying (more than once), Elektra remained a popular character who would ultimately make the jump to film — not simply as a foil for the male hero, but as the center of a storyteller’s universe.

Girl power remixed

Elektra opened the floodgates for strong, independent women in heroic roles. In the comics, characters like Witchblade carved out their own niche audiences, and writer Anne Nocenti took a turn crafting Daredevil, taking up where Elektra’s creator left off,  introducing her own complex character, Typhoid Mary, whose split personality made her sympathetic one moment, psychotic the next.

On television, women were becoming the focal point for action. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a cult favorite that rested the fate of the world on a teenage girl’s shoulders. With its commitment to ensemble heroics and relationship development, Buffy and its spinoff series Angel turned convention on its ear. Whereas “legitimate knowing in Western patriarchal cultures has for centuries situated the ideal knower as an autonomous individual,” and in particular “strong female heroes have been represented as isolated from other women socially,” Sharon Ross wrote in “Tough Enough,” in Action Chicks. Here we saw men and women fighting side by side with a young woman — a child, really — leading them.

Alongside Buffy were others — shows like La Femme Nikita, Xena: Warrior Princess, Witchblade, Dark Angel, Birds of Prey — each showcasing the particular strengths and challenges of women in heroic roles. Even children’s programming got in on the act with The Power-Puff Girls and Totally Spies. While many such series featured a man in prominent leadership over the principal characters, the women remained the heroes, and the drama involved watching them come to terms with their emerging power and womanhood.

Alias, Elektra

That brings us to Alias, the most recent entry in grrl power television. Alias follows Sydney Bristow, a young woman working alongside a man, and under the authority of her father and a father figure, until she realizes that the spy agency she works for is an enemy of the American government. She turns herself in to the CIA and begins to work as a double agent. In the process, she is given another male mentor, her “handler.” The show develops from there as Sydney and her viewers have to make sense of unbelievable plot twists from minute to minute while Sydney avoids being killed or revealing her secret mission.

Jennifer Garner brought a youthful naiveté to the role of Sydney, striking a difficult balance between supreme competence and a sense of being in over her head. As the series develops, we see Sydney seize and effectively wield power, not just physically, but bureaucratically: she makes the systems work for her.

In this sense, Alias reflects a common theme in female heroics, particularly for the young: our hero is as much becoming as she is overcoming. The most recent wave of women characters has brought this insight into heroism, where it has often been lacking. Rather than hacking away at villains until there are no more villains to hack away at, “feminine” heroes are “flexible with how they approach the events with which they become involved. They learn to listen before they speak, converse before they act,’ according to Sharon Ross. This shift offers a corrective to the negative agenda of the conventional epic (putting an end to clear and present danger) by pursuing a positive agenda: the peace and prosperity of the whole community.

This pursuit finds its way into the Elektra film as well. In the 2003 film Daredevil, Jennifer Garner plays Elektra, a character who bears a striking resemblance to Sydney Bristow. In the 2005 sequel, Elektra, Garner reprises the titular role. Here, we no longer find the young, naïve girl struggling to get by. Elektra is hardened, old-souled and is almost mythically ruthless until she meets a girl who is at the first step in the same journey. Elektra, having left behind her own “handler,” Stick, becomes the handler for her protégé while fighting to protect the girl’s life. In the process, Elektra fulfills a prophecy that leads to a final peace after centuries of conflict.

Naturally, she also learns a lot about herself. Garner told Wizard magazine that Elektra “does not enjoy this journey back to well-being at all. She doesn’t see the good in it. Nor does she see any good in herself.” The good becomes evident, however, in the maternal looks she gives her student, in her reconciliation with Stick, in the vindication of her mother’s death, and in her own happy ending as she walks off into the sunset.

Former villain and never-ending warrior, Elektra breaks new ground for women of valor. She has left behind the protection of men while maintaining a close relationship with them — she has no handler, only men who wish her well. She makes peace with who she is: as a woman and a warrior. In playing the role, Garner herself felt “like a great combination of a fighter and a girl.” While the film is unlikely to break box office records, the impact of Elektra will linger long, leaving young women and men with a vision of heroism that moves beyond simple opposition to evil by adding the promotion of good. Elektra is a hero, plain and simple, in the fight for her own humanity — just as all of us, male and female, are called to be.

STORY INDEX

RESOURCES >

Dave A. Zimmerman’s blog Strangely Dim
URL: http://ivpress.gospelcom.net/campus/sd/

A Tale of Two Superheroes: Spider-Man, the Punisher & the Ethics of Power
URL: http://www.bustedhalo.com/archive/2004_18pop_culture.htm

Elektra Artwork Gallery
URL: http://www.wordsandpictures.org/Elektra/maingallery.html

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

Comic Book Character
By David A. Zimmerman. Published by InterVarsity Press. 2004.
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0830832602

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

A hard bargain

Going from the city to rural Cape Verde requires some serious choreography when it comes to dating and socializing.


Making Grogue (a type of rum) is a tradition in Cape Verde. Villages take great pride in their distilleries, which use antiquated equipment and centuries-old techniques.

Click here to enter the visual essay.

“Shinta, shinta!“ Nha Olivia commanded.

I sat.

I wasn’t tired, but in Cape Verde, guest-host interactions follow exacting rules.

She left the room.

Scuffling noises came from under the table, but I refrained from investigating. I waited. I was learning that all things reveal themselves in time, if you are patient. A nose poked out from under the lace tablecloth. I stamped my foot.

Two piglets shot out from under the table heading in different directions. One barely touched the ground as it sped through the courtyard. The second one miscalculated and ran into the kitchen where my hostess was preparing food. Within 30 seconds it shot back through the room following its accomplice’s route, tailed by a five-year-old girl paddling its butt with a switch.

I took out a film canister and filled it with pebbles, turning it into a makeshift rattle. The girl watched me closely.

Ten minutes later my hostess, Nha Olivia, came back into the room.

Embarrassed that she had caught me playing, I composed myself. Adult males do not play. But instead of noticing my impropriety, Nha Olivia scolded the young girl and tried to get her to give me back the rattle. I insisted that it was a gift.

The Peace Corps had selected me to live and work on Santiago, the largest island in the Cape Verde archipelago. Even though Santiago is the home of Cape Verde’s capitol city, Praia, most of the island is struggling to develop. Villages lack infrastructure. Electricity, plumbing, and waste management are uncommon luxuries. When I moved to remote Rincon, I expected to suffer a lot. However, the lack of amenities was not the biggest hurdle in adapting to my island life. My difficulty was in learning a new approach to social situations and a new understanding of the importance of family and friends.

When it was time for supper, Nha Olivia began clucking at me and I pecked for a thread of meaning in what she’d said … something about the food.

“Katxupa … (clu, cluc, cluck) … Forti pa bu … (clu, cluc, cluck).”

She set the large bowl of Katxupa (a corn stew of beans and vegetables or, on special occasions, pork or tuna) on the table and looked at me expectantly.

I hated asking Capeverdeans to repeat themselves. After a year of struggling with the Kriolu language, simple conversations should have been easy. At the age of 32, I had been reduced to poorly constructed subject-verb-object sentences.

I stammered, “(Uh …), Kuze ki bu fla-m?” (which I hoped meant, “What did you ask me?”).

She smiled and calmly repeated the question a little louder, as though I were deaf rather than incompetent.

This time, I got it.

“Katxupa will make you strong,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

“Ayan.” I responded with bashful laughter. She spooned out a bowl full of the stew and left the room. In Cape Verde, it is polite to leave a guest to eat alone, one of many customs I never got used to.

My struggle to adapt in Cape Verde taught me to see in a new way. My ideas of what constitutes “normal” or “beautiful” changed. I learned that the issues of which colors grate, what sounds clash, or what body functions are publicly acceptable — all depend on who and what surrounds you.

Learning the steps

My lack of language ability in Cape Verde kept conversations focused on practical matters — fishing, farming, child-rearing. My friendships were largely restricted to men. When men get together, the conversation is about one of three topics: soccer, fishing, or mind-numbing grogue (a homemade rum produced in Cape Verde).

The only times Capeverdeans deviate from this pattern of gender-segregated socializing is for dancing and sex. Having no girlfriend, I opted for the former. In Cape Verde dancing has a nearly spiritual importance. Children dance the Funana (a sexy two-step) by the age of two. Simply turning on the radio is usually enough to get two or three people out of their seats.

A good dancer automatically commands respect. In my village the best dancer was a gay man. Although gay men in Cape Verde are traditionally shunned, this man’s dancing prowess made him incredibly popular, especially with women. He was invited to every party.

My attempts at dancing, however, always sent two or three people to the floor laughing and clutching at their sides.

So I practiced. Eventually, I improved. Girls who had previously left me mid-song on the dance floor, laughing as they walked away, were now hanging around for a second song. I started to feel like I was fitting in.

The stark landscape of Cape Verde is spiced with lush Riberas (canyons) that provide water, shade and fertile farm land.

Choosing the right partner

One of the fundamental rules of cultural adaptation is honesty. If you don’t understand, acting like you do will only get you in trouble.

My first meeting with Ciza was a good example of this. I first encountered her on my way home from teaching at the high school. She and her daughter were the only other passengers in the flatbed truck. Dressed fashionably in a tight-fitting top and trendy jeans, she was wrapping her long straightened hair in a scarf when I boarded the truck. She was a beautiful change from the usual fishmonger co-passengers. It was difficult not to stare. Fighting back my anxiety, I introduced myself. We tried to chat but could barely hear each other over the flapping wind.

“Abo, bu mora na Rincon?” I asked, hoping to find out if she too lived in Rincon.

“Kuza?” she looked at me with a confused expression. I repeated my question louder.

“… Ooh, Sin.” she confirmed, nodding her head up and down in case I didn’t hear. Then she asked me the same question. “E bo?“

“Ayan. N mora ku Maria Tavares,” I answered, explaining that I lived with Maria. The wind was furious.

“Kuza?” We continued on like this for the hour-long ride.

I struggled to keep the conversation going. I asked what she did for a living and about her little girl, but I had trouble concentrating on her answers. Every time she looked at me, her large brown eyes whipped my thoughts into dizzy spirals. Luckily, by the end of the trip she was asking me questions too; wanting to know where I was from and why I had come to live there.

When I got home I asked one of the boys I lived with if he knew who she was. He said that she lived nearby and the father of her child was living in France with a French girlfriend and might not come back.

When I mentioned that I was interested in meeting her, Maria (the mother of the family I lived with) grabbed my hand and marched me over to Ciza’s house. I felt odd storming the home of a girl I barely knew, letting an elderly lady serve as my matchmaker. It was not the kind of dating game I was accustomed to in America.

We were greeted at the door by Nozhina, an older woman living with Ciza. After a lively — and to me, incomprehensible — conversation between Nozhina and Maria, Ciza came into the room. I blushed. Luckily, Maria did most of the talking. I stood by as they chatted for about twenty minutes, and then Maria took me back home. It seemed, at first, like nothing had been accomplished on our little visit, but slowly it became clear what Maria had done.

Maria explained that I was now expected to Txiga with Ciza’s family. In Cape Verde, if you meet an acquaintance’s family, you are expected to visit them as often as possible. This visit may only be once or twice a year, if you live on opposite ends of the island, or as often as once a week, if you live close. This type of visit is called a Txiga in southern Kriolu — and can be the perfect opportunity to strike up a romance. Maria was a genius!

I worked hard to uphold my end of the responsibilities, stopping by once or twice a week to say hello.

In time, I discovered the Txiga had a few drawbacks. Normally, Nohzinha would harass me till I had eaten two bowls full of Katchupa, even if I wasn’t hungry. Additionally, as soon as I arrived Ciza would often steal away to prepare something for me to eat. While she was in the kitchen, Nozinhia would make fun of my bad Kriolu and occupy me with chatter. As a result, Ciza and I never had time to talk.

Frustrated, I asked my friend Emiliano, a local who was better schooled in such matters, what I should do.

Emiliano decided to intervene by becoming my second matchmaker. He suggested that we go to the beach on the other side of the island for an afternoon. He told me he would arrange an outing for that Sunday with Ciza and one of her friends. But he insisted that I keep everything quiet and not tell people where we were going. I went along with his plot.

On Saturday night, I was ready for the rendezvous. But my fast paced island romance fell out of step. Emiliano told me that the outing was canceled because Ciza didn’t want to insult her ‘mother-in-law’ by going on an outing with another man.

MOTHER IN LAW? I thought I had misunderstood. Since I had heard that she and her boyfriend were estranged, I was puzzled. I asked Emiliano where this mother-in-law was.

“Oh, I thought you knew,” he said, “Nozinhia is her mother-in-law!”

I was mortified that I had spent weeks sheepishly calling on Ciza only to spend most of my time socializing with her husband’s mother. I ended my visits.

Forgiveness took an unfamiliar form. About two weeks later I was sitting in front of the house when a shadow fell over me. I looked up to find Nozinha towering over me.
“Ingratu!“ (ungrateful) she spat out. For an instant her face was a mask of menace.

“Me? What do you mean?”

Then her grimace melted, and she grinned, showing all of the teeth she didn’t have.
“It has been two weeks since you stopped by. And I find you playing here! Come on, we are going to my house right now.”

She dragged me to her house where she fed me Katxupa and we listened to the radio. I had been so focused on my unsuccessful dating that I hadn’t realized my greater social accomplishment. I am sure that Nozinhia knew what my intentions had been but we never spoke of it. In all the confusion of trying to learn how to date Capeverdean style, I had accidentally made a close friend.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Comic books as psychological warfare


If you’re fluent in Arabic, have a penchant for psychological warfare, like getting your paycheck from the U.S. government, and have a knack for drawing, then there might be a job for you; the US Army is attempting to create a comic book that will, it hopes, have the youth of the Middle East and Islamic world embracing Americanism with open arms. The rationale is that “in order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached.” Thus, the American government’s Federal Business Opportunities website now posts an ad looking for a collaborator for “a series of comic books,” since the medium would provide “the opportunity for youth to learn lessons, develop role models and improve their education.” The comic book will be produced by a new player in the business: the U.S. Special Operations Command based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home to the Fourth Psychological Operations Group.

Applicants should note, however, that they need not be overly creative — the American Army has already concocted the basics of character and plot, which will be centered around “security forces, military and police,” and will take place “in the near future in the Middle East.” The ideal author and artist should not highly value artistic integrity, either, but he or she should be open to working in (or perhaps being trampled on) in a highly collaborative process, since the U.S. government hopes to tempt some Middle Eastern nations to participate in this comic book venture through their ministries of the interior.  

This new pawn in the escalating war of media propaganda between the U.S. and the Muslim and Middle Eastern world will be facing stiff competition. The tentacular reach and popularity of the graphic novel now extends to the Middle East with AK Comics’ Middle East Heroes line of comic books, which is the first comic book specifically targeted for the audience in the region. The graphic novel, which is published in both Arabic and English, pits forces of good and evil for control of the City of All Faiths. Al-Ahram Weekly recently ran an article about Middle East Heroes with the cheerful title “My Favorite Superhero,” which quoted a 27-year-old business analyst explaining the appeal of the comic: “The setting is familiar and most characters’ names are Arabic…it’s just easier to connect.”

Middle East Heroes comic books seem set to enjoy even wider distribution, if not popularity; the AK Comics website gleefully notes that EgyptAir has agreed to a first-of-its-kind deal to dole out 20,000 AK Comics magazines on their flights. In contrast, its naked propagandism and American authorship will likely make the American government’s nascent comic book a very tough sell.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

The distant apple


In a puzzling new study that destabilizes conventional knowledge on genetic inheritance, researchers have found that organisms can actually reject the genetic code they inherit from their parents and replace it with that of their grandparents.  

Published in the March 24 issue of Nature, an online scientific journal, the study shows that plants (particularly) and possibly other organisms, including humans, may possess an ability to control for healthier genes by replacing unhealthy sequences with stronger genes — in some cases, from their not-so-immediate forebears.  

“This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the past,” said Robert Pruitt, head of the study and a molecular geneticist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.  “While Mendel’s laws … are fundamentally correct, they’re not absolute.”  

Pruitt and his colleagues found that in spite of two copies of malformed genes in parent Arabidopsis plants, they could still produce offspring that expressed the healthier traits of their grandparents and even great grandparents. Mendelian laws have stipulated that offspring inherit their parents’ mutations.  

“If the inheritance mechanism we found in the research plant Arabidopsis exists in animals too,” said Pruitt, “it’s possible that it will be an avenue for gene therapy to treat or cure diseases in both plants and animals.”  

—Toyin Adeyemi

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

A time to reflect?


In the local Sydney paper over the weekend, the op-ed column was headed “A time for reflection,” which I thought was nice except that the world would probably be in a much better place if we took time to reflect for the other 51 weeks of the year. Sorry, better make that 50 because Christmas also seems to be the other popular time for reflection.

In response to the article, I took some time myself to reflect on where we are in our world and what the world has suffered for want of reflection for most of the year.

There are still asylum-seekers “imprisoned” in holding centers in outback Australia. Most of them are there because they chose to flee repressive regimes and the fear of death. So they came to Australia, an enlightened Western democracy, and must wonder at times if it is not another repressive regime.

The U.S. also has its own detention center at Guantanamo Bay. I decided to Google and see what the latest news was on the center for suspects in the “war on terror.” In the Salt Lake Tribune for Tuesday, March 29th, there is a report of a member of the Utah Guard who has volunteered to serve at Guantanamo Bay. Colonel Blackner was quoted as saying, “It was important to me to be able to contribute to the fight against terrorism,” he said. “The mission here is critical to the success of this fight.”

Is the mission of Guantamo Bay “critical” to the fight against terrorism? If we take time to reflect on the past year or so, is there not a great deal of injustice being dealt out under the guise of the so-called war on terror?

What about life in Iraq? I’m sure the Iraqi population has had plenty of time to reflect on life after Saddam. Perhaps if America and Britain had formulated a plan for a reconstruction of Iraq before the events, rather than as events unfolded, then maybe the saga of Iraq wouldn’t be in the quagmire it is now.

We have also witnessed photos, in the past 12 months, of American and British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Oh, of course there were murmurs of discontent from some politicians, but what reflection has this caused for the proud Western nations, the defenders of democracy and justice?

Perhaps, as I get older, I am becoming more cynical, but as I read the op-ed over the weekend, I was struck by just how little our governing institutions really do reflect. Blame and excuse-making seem to take the place of critical reflection. Maybe if a few of us take time to regularly reflect and act upon our deliberations throughout the year, we might be able to build the foundations of a thoughtful, just democracy that is collaborative not just in principle but in practice.

—Rev. Les

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Fifteen minutes of fame for pharmacists in America


Note to Americans: make sure you find out whether your local pharmacy agrees to fill the prescription you think you’ll need before you need it. Articles in The Washington Post, on Alternet.org,  CBSnews.com, and the websites of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization of Women report that the number of cases in which pharmacists have refused to fill prescriptions is increasing in America.

In a debate today on The Early Show, presidents of Planned Parenthood and Pharmacists for Life International argued about the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Various state laws and refusal clauses allow pharmacists the right of refusal when filling prescriptions goes against their personal moral and religious beliefs.  In response to Pharmacists for Life President Karen Brauer’s statement that pharmacists are as liable as doctors for the prescriptions they fill, Planned Parenthood President Karen Pearl said,

“It’s really a matter of whose conscience matters, and I would say the conscience of the women is the conscience that prevails…[Pharmacists for Life] is a small group of extremists who really want to put their belief system, their ideology onto everybody else, and women in America simply won’t stand for that.”

In her Alternet.org article, “States of Denial,” Abby Christopher draws attention to the fact that currently there is no incentive for hospitals to abide by laws requiring them to make emergency contraception accessible to patients in cases of rape. One implication here is that such a law ties a woman’s decision to be proactive (in seeking medical assistance in lowering her risk of pregnancy) to her identification of herself as a victim (of rape).

NARAL Pro-Choice America has launched a campaign to protect women’s access to birth control in response to pro-life stands being taken by pharmacists, offering two proactive action plans for activists. In the meantime, the National Organization for Women has put together a quick-reference fact sheet which details why women should pay attention to the repercussions of the recently approved federal “Abortion Non-Discrimination Act,” which both overrides Title X guidelines requiring women to be referred for abortions upon their request, and “allows health care institutions to refuse to comply with federal and state regulations regarding a range of abortion-related services, including pharmacist referrals,” according to a heavily referenced article on the Planned Parenthood website.

—Michaele Shapiro

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Quote of note


“I do not know whether I am an adult or a child…All I do is eat and sleep, eat and sleep.”

— Majok, a Sudanese youth who was brutalized and castrated as a child, and who is now a freed slave. Majok does not know how old he is or what his name is.

In January of 2005, an agreement was signed to end the civil war in Sudan that raged for 21 years between the largely Muslim north of the country — where the Arabic speaking Sudanese identify themselves as Arabs — and the Christian and Animist southern region. In the months after the agreement to end the war, the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC), a six-year-old Sudanese organization, founded by the government, has been repatriating southern Sudanese who were enslaved by their northern compatriots. It is unclear how many southerners were enslaved; the London- and Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute has identified 12,000 abductions, 11,000 missing, and 5,000 murdered. In contrast, the controversial Swiss group, Christian Solidarity International, refers to 200,000 people who were abducted, a number generated by local southern Sudanese leaders.

The CEAWC’s repatriation of slaves is problematized and complicated; while many former slaves are relieved and delighted to return to their southern homeland, there are others, particularly of the younger generation, who feel displaced and wish to return to the northern region, which they have come to identify as home. Additionally, agencies including UNICEF and Save the Children UK have criticized or questioned CEAWC’s methodology for repatriating individuals, suggesting that some people were not clearly identified as slaves, or if they were, they were not consulted about whether they wanted to return to the south or if they even had families to return to.

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

personal stories. global issues.