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Behind the veil

As if attending school wasn't tough enough, the French government is making life more difficult for some Muslim students who are now banned from wearing Islamic headscarves in public institutions. A view of the explosive and complex debate — and what it reveals about the country — from inside the classroom.


Sonia, a 25-year-old convert to Islam, was born in France but says that many French perceive her as a foreigner. Discrimination has only gotten worse since 9/11,” she says. (photo by Tanguy Kouessan)

In a scruffy classroom at the University of Paris X at Nanterre, in a suburb outside Paris, a group of academics, journalists, and activists of all stripes gathered in March to hash out the “crisis”: what to do about the Islamic veil in French schools.  A small group of college-aged women at the back of the room listened quietly until a man at the front pointed in their direction. Three of the women wore a hijab covering their hair, forehead, and neck. Together, they had been half-heartedly working on a crossword puzzle, but now they were on the spot.

“When I look at these girls,” the man said, “I can’t help but think that they’ve been branded ‘hallal’ — like a piece of meat — by an Islamist patriarchy. I fled Algeria for France to get away from this sort of intolerance, and now it’s infiltrating the Republic!”

One of them put down the crossword. “I’ve been wearing this veil since I was twelve, and it was my personal decision to put it on.” she said.  “It’s not a question of submission to men, but of religious expression.”

Her voice started to shake, and then, fighting back tears, she said, “I’m a French citizen. I was born here. I thought the French Revolution was fought for freedom, but here we are being marginalized and humiliated once again. Stop insulting our intelligence! Stop treating us like imbeciles!”

“Islamism is a wart on the face of this country.” responded the man, Derri Berkani, a journalist, filmmaker, and practicing Muslim. Berkani said he had heard enough about the symbolism of the voile.  “The veil is not a religious issue, but a political one, so I could give a damn about their cause,” he said. “There’s nothing in the Koran that obliges a woman to wear a veil.”

The packed lecture hall erupted in fragmented arguments and debates that exceeded my level of French. A literature professor who called himself a communist extolled the secular values of the Republic as a counterweight to religious extremism and American imperialism, while a young Moroccan proclaimed that only Islam could combat the moral decline of the West. Just when the room verged on complete anarchy, Nelcya Delanoë, a professor in the Anglo American Studies department at Nanterre, called for order, but the women in the back were still seething.

The veiled woman who had spoken earlier, a 23-year-old political science student named Khalidja (students quoted in this article requested that only their first names be used), asked Delanoë if she could respond to some of the comments, but slipped into the informal “tu,” rather than the more formal “vous,” in her request.

“You will not address me as ‘tu,’ young lady,” Delanoë chided. “You will show me some respect!”

“Only when you show us some respect,” Khalidja replied.

When I found Khalidja after the meeting, she was exasperated and enraged. Surrounded by a group of friends chatting away on cell phones, some wearing veils, some not, she seemed to embody all the contradictions of a reinvigorated Islam in secular France: She wore stylish sneakers poking out from under an austere robe and sprinkled her French with a variety of curse words. Khalidja had almost finished the equivalent of a master’s degree and would soon start looking for a job, probably as a government functionary.

I asked her if she would have to take off the veil if she worked in government.

“I will leave France before I’m forced to take off my veil. I’m French and I don’t see a contradiction between my country and my religion, but I’ll move to the U.S. if it comes to that,” she said.

I asked her if she thought Islamophobia — a popular term in the French media — is a problem in the United States as well. Like almost every French person I had met, she despised President George W. Bush and prefaced her answer with a denunciation of the war in Iraq and the current administration’s Middle East policies.

“But do you think the United States is more tolerant?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Religion is important in the States. Here if you have any sort of religious belief people think you’re a barbarian or just plain retarded.”

The Paris Mosque is the spiritual center of France’s “second religion,” Islam. Many French now question whether the growing popularity of Islam is compatible with the country’s strict secular traditions. (photo by Tanguy Kouessan)

Lost in translation

Like the United States, France constantly wrings its hands over the separation of church and state, although the rebirth of Islam in the marginalized banlieues — dreary, crime-ridden suburbs — poses a problem for France which the United States has yet to face on the same scale. It is undoubtedly a vast, complex problem that has much to do with France’s troubled colonial history as it does with religious extremism. Nevertheless, the veil has become the flashpoint for almost every discussion about immigration, Islam, terrorism, or French identity since last December when a 20-member commission, assembled by French President Jacques Chirac, named the Stasi Commission (after a former education secretary), recommended a ban on all conspicuous religious symbols in state-run spaces. In addition to the ban on the veil, the commission called for a ban on large crosses and yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcaps, as well as two new official days off for Yom Kippur and Aid-e l-Kebir as tokens of acceptance of non-Catholic holidays in a country where Ascension Day is still a paid holiday.

By all accounts, a majority of the French supported the ban: in a poll taken in early February  2004, 57 percent said that conspicuous religious symbols were “a threat to national cohesion” and 69 percent said they favored banning the headscarf from public schools. The law sailed through the National Assembly shortly after the poll was taken, with little opposition.  Although Chirac signed the bill into law in February, it took the French Council on Education until May to work out the finer details, like whether bandanas will be prohibited (it will depend on the point of view of individual principals). The law is set to go into effect at the start of the next school year. Among the few politicians to criticize the law was France’s new economics minister and fastest rising political star, Nicolas Sarkozy, who went so far as to call the ban “secularist fundamentalism.”

To really understand why the Islamic headscarf has become so controversial in France, one must try to understand two words that are often bandied about in this debate and are not easy to translate into English: laïcité and communautarisme. The first term is often translated in the American press as “secularism,” as if it simply designated the separation of church and state, a familiar issue to Americans. In reality, laïcité implies a set of political and cultural values, that, in a way, have become a pseudo-religion of the state.

As one member of Chirac’s Stasi Commission, philosopher Henri Peña-Ruiz, put it in Le Monde Diplomatique recently, “laïcité only favors what is in the common interest [of the Republic]. With moral and intellectual autonomy, it promotes the freedom of conscience and the total equality of rights without regard to sex, [ethnic] origin, or spiritual conviction.” Because of laïcité, he continued, “tomorrow, thousands of young women will be recognized by the Republic as having preserved their right to bare their heads at school and sit next to boys who have the same status as them.”

Communautarisme, on the other hand, roughly means “multiculturalism,” although its connotations are almost entirely negative. Communautarisme, to the French, is what happens when you let immigrants form their own communities, speak their own languages, and practice their own religions. Consequently, France becomes less “French” and more open to foreign values and cultural practices.

To be sure, there are real dangers associated with communautarisme — such as support for female circumcision in Malian or Senegalese communities or acceptance of stoning women who are accused of adultery by certain Muslim imams — but it’s hard to distinguish when legitimate concerns about human rights cross over into racist notions about cultural superiority.

The controversy surrounding the Islamic veil actually dates back to at least 1989, when the Council of State, one of France’s high courts, ruled that religious symbols that “constitute an act of intimidation, provocation, proselytizing or propaganda” could not be worn in public schools. Under this decision, individual schools were left to determine what was a provocation and what was simply a personal expression of faith. Often, this came down to a judgment call by individual teachers and principals.

“I had girls with half-scarves and full-on veils,” remembers Isabelle, a middle-aged English teacher in a poor suburb northeast of Paris who did not want her last name used. “You couldn’t tell the difference between religious proselytism and fashion. That’s why I supported Chirac’s law at first: It backed teachers up so that it wasn’t just us against the students and their parents.”

Now, however, some of the same teachers who favored the ban are rethinking their positions. “It’s going to be impossible to enforce,” Isabelle predicts. “And the Muslim girls who refuse to take off their veils — where are they going to go?”

Khalidja, the political science student, says she favors opening up more Muslim private schools if France won’t compromise on the veil issue. So far, however, there is only one Muslim school in the entire country, in the far north near the Belgian border. “Every time we start the process of opening up a school, the government shuts it down,” Khalidja says. “Catholics and Jews can have their own schools, but if Muslims want one, it’s labeled as communautarisme by the government. It’s a totally hypocritical position.”

Contrary to popular belief, many leading French Muslims like Dalil Boubaker, the rector of the Paris Mosque, have not opposed the new law, and some of its most vociferous proponents, such as Derri Berkani, the filmmaker and journalist at the Nanterre meeting, are Muslims themselves.  Although many Muslims I spoke with took varying positions on the veil, the sense of discrimination at the hands of the secular French state seemed nearly universal.

“I’d say the biggest problem is not the veil at all, but jobs,” says Sonia, a 25-year-old Muslim convert who wears the veil. “You don’t see any diversity in French media or French politics. I’m a French citizen, but because I’m black and because I wear a veil, I’m doubly marginalized,” she explains. “I’ve had people scream, ‘Go back to Morocco,’ at me from their cars. I’m from France and my parents are from Benin.”

“This isn’t about the veil,” one Moroccan-born student at the Nanterre meeting had said. “It’s about a profound problem that France has with Islam.”  

Many staunch advocates of laïcité argue, on the other hand, that it is the version of Islam which refuses to separate religion from the public sphere that is the problem. This is what Nelcya Delanoë, the professor who kept order at the meeting, tells me later.  When I sum up Khalidja’s and Sonia’s arguments to her on an unseasonably hot May day at her apartment in central Paris, she seems unimpressed.

Delanoë has written extensively about secularism in Morocco and France, but doesn’t view this issue with the typical detachment of a scholar. Delanoë was born and raised in Morocco and speaks Arabic. Her father, a Moroccan-born Frenchman who was also raised Jewish, fought against the French occupation of his homeland and envisaged a “liberal and independent” country quite different from the Morocco of today. Delanoë shares that vision and works closely with liberal Moroccans on human rights and women’s rights issues. For her, the headscarf is a pretext to legitimize an extremist political movement.

“There were no headscarves here three years ago,” Delanoë claims, referring to the Nanterre campus. “Now, they’re everywhere. I’ve heard people say, ‘This is multiculturalism, this is great,’ but we’ll see where it leads in ten years.” She cites her experience in Morocco as proof that Islamism is indeed a threat to democratic countries like France. The Islamists “claim that there’s no contradiction between their religious beliefs and democracy, but they have an ignorant understanding of democracy: It’s not just voting, but a social contract,” she insists. “I’ve changed my mind on this issue about fifteen times, but I’m now convinced that each new veil is a victory for the Islamists.”

A popular poster at the university in Nanterre labels George Bush as the world’s biggest terrorist. (photo by Russell Cobb)

The Revolution is dead. Long live the Revolution!

My window into this controversy opened last year when I took a year-long position as an adjunct English teacher at the university in Nanterre. It is a strange place: Most of the buildings were built in the early 1960’s and resemble a modern American-style commuter campus. Despite its placid exterior, it has been a hotspot for radicalism. In fact, Nanterre has changed the course of French history at least once. In May 1968, a group of students protesting everything from same-sex dorms to the Vietnam War ignited a sequence of events that eventually led to the downfall of President Charles de Gaulle a year later.

Decades later, the place is still roiling in political turmoil, and classes are often disrupted by routine strikes, sit-ins, and sometimes violent protests over Israel, Iraq, and the length of spring break. Non-French professors and lecturers, such as I, learn to take these things in stride. When a chalkboard is spray-painted with graffiti or a lecture is interrupted by a megaphone call for a general strike, we generally sigh and say, “c’est Nanterre.”

It was surprising, then, that when I asked my students to debate the headscarf controversy in class, I got an almost uniform endorsement of French Enlightenment values over what was perceived as American-style multiculturalism. Rare was the student who argued against Chirac’s new law. I asked one Jewish student, a 19-year-old named Nili, if she thought that banning religious symbols from schools might backfire and intensify religious extremism and anti-Semitism.  “France’s policy of laïcité is preceded by the concept of equality, which prohibits any sort of discrimination. In order to maintain social cohesion and public order, we must keep religion out of public space,” she said thoughtfully.

I received similar — almost identical — responses from most of my students, who agreed that the Islamic headscarf should be banned. My plans for class debates turned into rousing eulogies to French values: liberty, equality, fraternity, and, most importantly, secularism.  

I taught, arguably, some of the best and brightest in the university system: future lawyers and technocrats studying for the equivalent of a major in English and a law degree. Whenever the subject of religious symbols came up, however, the students started to sound like modern-day Jacobins. “If you allow religion into the public sphere,” one bright Italian student said, “France could become like the United States, where the president declares war while in church.”

Declaration of war? In church? Did I miss something? I tried to explain that in the United States there is also a separation of church and state — however precarious it may seem these days — and that no president since Roosevelt had actually declared war. Still, it was useless: These law students were convinced that France was caught between two dangerous fundamentalist movements: one Christian (led by George W. Bush), and one Muslim (led as much by radical French imams as by Al-Qaeda).

But while France has proven largely immune to Bush’s seemingly messianic vision — a recent New York Times poll reported that 85 percent of French respondents had a “negative” image of the American president — radical Islam appears to be gaining a foothold in the marginalized outskirts of the country’s big cities. Young, firebrand intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan have gained popularity at the expense of more moderate, government-backed leaders like Dalil Boubaker. Politicized Islam is becoming a force to be reckoned with among France’s five million or so Muslims, about 8 percent of the total population; the questions, of course, are how significant this force is and how to respond to it.

The government’s reaction to political Islam has been famously heavy-handed. Clerics accused of spouting anti-Semitism have been deported in recent weeks. Police arrest and interrogate Arab-looking men in the banlieues and in the Paris Métro without cause. The far right party of Jean-Marie Le Pen continues to gain popularity in some areas. And now Islamic headwear is banned in schools, even though the Sikh turban, for example, is still allowed. On the campus of Nanterre, meanwhile, Arab students have complained of the appearance of a mysterious group called the Jewish Defense League and of being singled out and beaten up by university security guards since the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict broke out. The whole thing, many Muslims claim, smacks of a growing Islamophobia at best, and at worst, a European import of Middle Eastern conflicts.

Considering the complexity and gravity of the issue, it started to bother me that my students all had the same point of view. So I devised an experiment. I divided my classes into pairs and told them to debate the pros and cons of such hot-button topics as the death penalty, the war in Iraq, and, of course, the veil. We talked about multiculturalism vs. equality, personal freedom vs. security, and private vs. public space. We had very interesting discussions, but when I asked them to give their honest opinions about the headscarf issue at the end, only one, an 18-year-old named Caroline, said she was definitely opposed to the ban.

“You can’t be serious, can you?” Valentin, the guy sitting next to her exclaimed in French.

But while my mostly white, middle-class students attacked the veil and supported the government, others on campus have a quite different take. After I asked professors and minority students about the issue, I found that everyone on campus had become hyperconscious about headwear and its symbolic power, but no one could agree on what the Islamic headscarf actually represented. Oppression by a fundamentalist patriarchy? An Islamic expression of feminism? The latest fashion in teen rebellion?

Michel Allner, a professor in American Studies at Nanterre who has recently finished a book about the West’s perception of Islam, explains that the foulard has replaced Che Guevara T-shirts as the ultimate symbol of anti-Western imperialism. “The veil is a uniform in opposition,” he says with the lyrical abstraction so often found in French intellectuals.

I heard all sorts of interpretations on the veil’s true meaning. Still, the diversity of the foulard itself made it hard to generalize about its symbolism. At one point, I had a Lebanese student in my class who wore a polka-dotted silk scarf lightly draped over the top of her head. But she also wore more make-up than most of my “French” students. Certainly her headscarf did not mean the same thing as Khalidja’s all-black veil, which covered the forehead down to the eyebrows.

Civilizing the natives

Nanterre and its surrounding communities — like many Parisian banlieues, or suburbs — are heavily populated by Muslim immigrants from North Africa, many of whom live completely cut off from mainstream French culture. Among young people, unemployment runs as high as 50 percent in some banlieues and crime has soared the past two decades, even though it slacked recently in the face of controversial, Giuliani-esque tactics taken by Nicolas Sarkozy during his tenure as interior minister, which expired in April.  

To see a slice of la France communautariste, I went to a suburb in Northeast Paris widely regarded as one of the poorest and most disadvantaged. Collectively, the area is known as “93,” for its postal code. The high school I visited, Olympe de Gourges, has one of the lowest graduation rates in all of France and teacher turnover is high.

I expected the worst. The French media play up ethnic tensions in the banlieue to the point that it seems, in the eyes of a bourgeois Parisian, like the Balkan Peninsula circa 1995. There are stories every day of Muslim dads keeping their daughters out of P.E. and biology classes, teachers derided for teaching the Holocaust, and Jewish students beaten up and called “salle juif” (or “dirty Jew”) by their Muslim classmates.

So I was surprised to find the most diverse group of French I’ve ever encountered, lingering outside the school’s gates. There was a Russian-Congolese guy flirting with a blond French girl, whose best friend was Algerian. They weren’t dealing drugs or beating each other up; they weren’t even engaged in the national pastimes of smoking and arguing. They were like poster-children for racial harmony: They smiled and took turns practicing their English on me. They all seemed to get along so well, I decided to ask them what all the fuss was about.

“I think it’s played up by TV,” Olaf, the Russian-Congolese kid says. “There’s no intolerance here at school,” he says even as his face darkens. He points across the street to a housing project. “Over there, though, now there’s intolerance.”

More and more of these students — children of immigrants — have entered the university system, which, with its promise of free and universal acceptance to all French students holding a high school diploma, promises to be the great equalizer of socio-economic and cultural difference.  Despite the relatively new influence of Anglo American concepts like multiculturalism and affirmative action (or “positive discrimination” as it is known here), many French still believe, like Diderot over two centuries ago, that “to teach is also to civilize.” The pinnacle of civilization being, of course, the French version, armed with the ideals of its Great Men buried at the Pantheon: Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo, et al.

Indeed, the French secular state has become a sort of church unto itself, in which all loyalties, allegiances, and creeds must be sworn off in favor of Enlightenment values. One Stasi commission member, Régis Debray, a former Marxist revolutionary-turned-public intellectual, has unwittingly supported this argument with an oft-quoted analogy: “If I visit a mosque, I take my shoes off before I enter as a sign of respect. We only ask that Muslims show the same respect when they enter the French schools.” Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the blunt Prime Minister, has noted with optimism, “Secularism has a chance to become the religion of France.”

If the school’s job is to create model citizens of the French Republic, then the university’s job is to be “the temple of reason,” claims Michel Allner. “This is the heritage of the Third Republic,” Allner tells me. “The idea back then was to erase regional differences and build a nation based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Regional dialects and customs from Brittany and the Basque Country, for example, were suppressed and the tablier (a sort of white smock) was imposed as the uniform for all schoolchildren. It was a very repressive system and I think we can agree now that it was a mistake.” As is the current ban on religious symbols, Allner says. “I know it’s an unpopular position, but I think multiculturalism is the way to go.”

Not surprisingly, many high school students I spoke with agreed that any sort of dress code for kids was a bad idea. “The teachers want to make us all equal,” a 17-year-old student at Olympe de Gourges named Camelia says. “But look at how we dress — of course we’re not equal. Still, I think we’re old enough to make our own decisions about how we want to dress.” Camelia, for example, comes from a conservative family of Algerian origin but no one — including her parents — has ever tried to force her to wear a veil. “I wouldn’t wear it even if they did,” she says firmly.

Nicolas Ginsburger, a professor of Franco-American relations at Nanterre, disagrees that secularism à la française is simply about freedom of choice, as many Americans would believe. The law that definitively separated church and state in 1905, notes Ginsburger, declares that the state must remain neutral with respect to religion. “That means in school, the student and teacher must remain neutral as well,” he notes. “This law has guaranteed civil peace in France and put an end to many centuries of religious warfare. ”

Ginsburger puts the issue in a historical context, which is perhaps lost in the media frenzy over exotic images of veiled young women living in what is, after all, a highly sexualized country. The current flare-up over the veil is nothing, he says, compared to the civil wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, or even 19th-century anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, Ginsburger has been shocked by the negative reaction to the ban on religious symbols coming from the American media and government. Last month, a Justice Department spokesperson called a similar ban on headwear in an Oklahoma school district “un-American” and “morally despicable.” Also, last December the U.S. ambassador on religious freedom said that the Bush administration would “watch carefully” what happened in France on the headscarf front. “Why can’t they mind their own business?” Ginsburger asks. “The big difference is that, in America, religion is used as proof of morality in political life,” he says. “In France, the idea is that the less religious one is, the better.”

When clichés come home to roost

Throughout my year in France, I discovered that the two primary fears in French society — radical Islam and Americanization — are often mingled into one discourse. During the meeting at Nanterre, for example, the only thing the leftist French professors and Islamist students could find in common was their disgust for American cultural relativism and political correctness.  The professors worried about American-style multiculturalism ruining the secular “exception française”,  while some Muslim students voiced conservative concerns about the liberal American influence on the gay marriage debate in France. The “threat” always came from elsewhere — the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Algeria — and never from a domestic source.

A similar phenomenon took place in my classroom: When it came to tough issues like the veil or racism, students blamed the Other. I was reminded of the reaction to a tragic incident that took place two years ago at the Nanterre City Council, when a gunman burst into a meeting and killed eight people. The next day, French newspapers called it an “American-style massacre,” as if the United States invented mass-murder. “Everyone in America carries a weapon,” proclaimed one of my students, 19-year-old Alexandra. I told her that I had never owned a weapon and did not know anyone who actually carried a gun. “This can’t be possible,” she responded. “Have you not seen Bowling for Columbine? That is the real America!”

I suddenly felt a strange solidarity with Sonia and Khalidja, the two women I had met who wore veils: I knew what it felt like to be assaulted by stereotypes. That wasn’t my America, I wanted to answer Alexandra. Instead, I was seized with the opportunity to impart a little English language pedagogy.

“Here’s a good idiomatic phrase to learn,” I said. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

“A Frenchman or a Jew”
By Fernanda Eberstadt. Published by The New York Times Magazine. February 29, 2004.
URL: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40D1FFF3C580C7A8EDDAB0894DC404482

Le Monde Diplomatique dossier on secularism and the headscarf
URL: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/index/sujet/laicite

ORGANIZATIONS >

Ni putes ni soumises (Neither whores nor doormats)
URL: http://www.niputesnisoumises.com/html/index.php

The Brookings Institution’s take on Islam in France
URL: http://www.brookings.edu/fp/cusf/analysis/islam.htm

“

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Say goodbye to the Beemer …


Here’s the problem — I can’t decide whether I find Sí TV’s new reality show “Urban Jungle” revolting or delicious.  

The show extracts “nine suburban yuppies from their oh-so-comfortable lives” and drops them in East Los Angeles’ barrio to survive on low income wages. The teenagers are charged with adapting to their new life in the ‘hood, and are judged by three padrinos, who “evict” a cast member each episode.

At first I was appalled. The show panders to all of the simplest stereotypes: silly, rich, naïve white kids from Burbs vs. bad-ass, street-wise, and pragmatic residents of the inner city. You can predict the encounters between the visitors and the residents almost without watching. The presence of a TV camera reasonably guarantees that no serious danger will come to the show’s stars, but simultaneously ensures that people will act as they think they should — that is, that both the teenagers and the residents will play up the roles they know their audience is assuming they’ll fulfill.

Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to the perpetuation of these stereotypes because the neighborhood I’ve worked in the for the past several years lives with the same kind of experiment. West Philadelphia is home to a large, low-income African American community — and the University of Pennsylvania. It’s jarring to ride the bus to work and watch shirtless fraternity brothers playing drinking games on their porches alongside the falling down homes of my clients and the delis where you can buy a single cigarette for 50 cents. There’s an unsurprising tension within the community, and little is done to bridge the gaps of understanding between the disparate groups. No less jarring are the non-students in the neighborhood — kids living and squatting in communal houses and playing Frisbee in the parks. They’re almost more out of place because of their attempts to fit in: they shop at the cheaper supermarkets and visit the free health clinic.

Assimilation is a tricky business. I’ll go out on a limb and argue that we can’t even begin to address it within the confines of a reality TV show. Jeff Valdez, the show’s creator and founder of the network says:  

This is more than just a reality show, it’s a social experiment. We’re taking these kids, whose only window into the barrio is a crime story on the late night news, and immersing them into a brand new environment. This show will humanize the Latino barrio and hopefully teach these kids a thing or two about life on the other side of the tracks.

A social experiment? A simplistic one at best, because while playing at poverty isn’t very funny, playing at poverty for an audience ensconced in their arm chairs isn’t funny at all. But maybe I’d feel a little less sympathetic towards the show’s hapless stars if they were making their mistakes on a major cable network, instead of Sí TV. The network is the only English-language Latino network available on your remote — in itself, a grand experiment in assimilation. As The New York Times points out, the network caters towards the projected 33 million Latinos who will live in bilingual or English-speaking households by the year 2010.

So, I confess: When the show premieres this Sunday, I’ll be watching. I’m expecting something thrillingly awful from “Urban Jungle.” Part of that is the ironic glee with which I can’t help but view all reality TV. But part of it too is that I’m hoping that by exposing the blatant frustrations and mistakes of culture-bending, it’ll make it a little easier for us to talk about what assimilation and differences really look like.

—Laura Louison

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When “sorry” isn’t good enough


A man apologizes for turning his back on true love. A woman apologizes for having an affair with a married man. Someone else apologizes for embezzlement. Yet another apologizes for ever being born.

From the sound of it, you might think these were the players in a group therapy session. Or maybe you’d think these were the stories of Jews on Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance. But you would be mistaken.

These are the voices and stories of people who have left their apologizes on an answering machine to heal themselves. Started by a 20-year-old Vassar student, the apology hotline allows people with guilty consciences to experience some release and get the words out — words that they can’t say in person, words that they can’t say to any other human being when there’s a risk that the other person will speak, write, or call back.

Though some psychiatrists have praised the hotline for giving people who otherwise wouldn’t speak a chance to do so, there are, of course, skeptics. One can’t help but wonder how much closure one really gets by saying something that the person who should hear it never will. By virtue of calling a machine, the repentant’s words are not directed toward the person(s) they’ve hurt. They’re about healing oneself. And though healing oneself may be important — integral even — to moving on and regaining self-confidence, it seems like not saying those words to another human being, or not  writing them down, would preclude any genuine closure. That is, it may provide temporary closure with oneself, but by never confronting the other person, I imagine there would be remnants of repressed guilt potentially forever. For people with depression, that’s only likely to trigger a relapse of the illness.

Even if this isn’t the case, this hotline seems dangerous because it lures callers — people who are potentially suicidal or depressed or whose problems extend far beyond the one incident they’re apologizing for — to call and think, “Well, if I can get up the nerve to call the hotline, I’ll be redeemed for my actions and I won’t really have to confront my fears — i.e., fears that reside in interacting with other human beings.” Others may be suicidal — is it really helpful for them to call a hotline where they speak to a machine, or would it be more beneficial for them to call a hotline where the phone is answered by another person, albeit one the caller doesn’t know? How is the anonymity of the latter any different from the anonymity of the former? In my mind, they’re not all that different. But the person who listens to the apology is more likely to be able to open the caller up, however little, or get them help. The machine can’t do that.

Or can it? I can’t help but wonder about the student who started the hotline, the one who receives all of the messages. Does he listen to them? Apparently.

This poses a couple of problems. First, the fact that he does listen to them deceptively undermines the privacy and solitude of the answering machine. Would you feel more comfortable calling a machine about your failures in life, knowing that someone else was going to be listening to you silently, subconsciously judging you? I don’t think I would …

Second, by providing the false illusion that callers are really just speaking to a machine, what kind of precedent does this set for the way in which we define our relationships to other humans? Suddenly, we don’t have to express our emotions to other human beings. We can just replace them with machines, which serve as our intermediaries.

Third, let’s say the student listens to the messages and a caller says s/he is committing suicide. Given the euthanasia and suicide laws in the United States, does the student then become a conspirator in such a suicide?

This isn’t to degrade the difficulty many people have with apologizing and expressing their true feelings. It’s also not to condemn the innovative student who sought to give sad people a way to cope with their feelings when they’re lonely. But the hotline, it seems, is the easy way out, the quick fix that may not really be much of a fix at all.

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MAILBAG: Pass me some of that moonshine


Dear Michael,

Thank you for the short fiction piece. It reads like Lord of the Rings on ’Shrooms, depending on how far you want to take the introspection. If this story is meant to serve as a metaphor for any real life situation, I guess it might reflect experiences backpacking in Asia. The plot might read as follows:

Frodo is on spring break from Vassar and decides to take a backpacking trip to Vietnam. Along the way, he stumbles along traveler cafes, mingling with other expats. He becomes engrossed in the lifestyle, decides to take a semester off from college and continue traveling. He feels estranged and struggles to be accepted by the locals. In order to assimilate, Frodo must adapt to the unfamiliar customs and foods. Taking it a step further, Frodo explores with drug use and becomes a fiend.  

He lives each day struggling to keep his habit alive. Having spent all of mommy and daddy’s funds, he takes up odd jobs dishwashing, whoring himself, and dabbling in the tourism industry to help other expats. He is taken under the wing of a local transvestite Madame, aka, “the ancient Moonshine Magi,” who provides Frodo with a roof, a mattress, and the occasional allowance to purchase yaa baa and hash from street corner hustlers, or “diggers” as you call them.

Feeling disillusioned, Frodo runs away from the Madame in confusion and disgust into the central highlands of Vietnam. There, he remains secluded, searching for money to buy a plane ticket back to the United States.

Pass the moonshine!

—Greg

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The Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains


Greetings fellow traveler, I’m currently living with the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains, observing a praxis that may allow me to unlock the paradox of a philosophy centered around the mythical knowledge of sustainability.

For the first few months, manic giggling greeted me whenever I mentioned my desire for answers … the whispering behind my back almost broke my determination, but I hung in there until an elder Magi of the Clans began to take pity on this Lost Boy from the Western Lands. She claimed to have originally come from the City of the Red Night, where they teach their young that one cannnot seek “the” answer; instead they must expose themselves to the “multiplicity” of questions, for it is in the masking of “possible” questions that power rests upon, and the prying free of these nuggets from the earth’s moist grasp is the quest of the Clans of the Alphane Mountains.

The ancient Moonshine Magi cackled, swigged from her jug, and said, “This is where the neophytes can get in trouble.” She told me that when chasing these evasive questions the skillful seeker notices that the landscape shifts and reshapes each time a question is revealed. It seems that the Clans learned long ago that when one unearths a question revealing its essence, the disturbance of the surrounding landscape generally causes an accompanying re-veiling of surrounding questions. In fact, she warned that often eager groups of diggers, banded together for strength and safety, will bury smaller groups/individuals digging nearby. This is why the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains always stop and retrace their steps, reflecting on the pathway they are traveling, in order to re-cognize what disturbances their digging causes. The Magi seemed to derive much amusement from my comment that the Bushes that cover the western lands have long forbidden self-reflective contemplation in order to freeze traditional concepts and to fuel travel to the future-past.

I asked the Magi how the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains retain their reflective ability while unearthing large complex concepts and revealing troublesome questions. “How do they dream the impossible and imagine the unaskable?” The Magi leaned back and swigged from her jug and chuckled at my Western ignorance. She stared at me like an adder stares down a mouse and dared me to think upon it. After a long uncomfortable two days, I unkinked my frozen limbs. The emptying of my mind allowed me to recognize that the best way to build a hearty, enriching intellectual bouillabaise, is to blend it with (an)other body(ies) of knowledge. The Clans, following the wisdom of the Dispossessed, require all learners to travel to other realms (physical, spiritual, and mental) in order to experience different realities and to act as multi-conduit translators (within and without their clan)

It’s obvious that the Magi is still toying with me. Perhaps I still must quest for these answers on my own, perhaps I still must travel, perhaps I should look into the interstices of production for missing clues?

I screamed, “Please help me! What is a traveler to do when there is no map to guide me?” … The Magi just cackled, “Foolish Lost Boy of the western lands, when will you learn that the quest is the journey and that as soon as you pin down an answer, it only means that you have reveiled other healthy questions — questions that must be once again revealed.”

Shaking and confused, I picked up a large jug of Alphane moonshine and stumbled into the forest to look for questions …

Your fellow traveler,
—Michael Benton

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MAILBAG: The measure of (gay) man


Dear Mimi,

Thank you for touching upon the recent phenomenon of “gay as hip” in your article. The current fascination certainly raises questions of whether these shows have “stifled” serious conversation on this issue. However, instead of censuring FOX’s trashy and tasteless attempts, the program, “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay,” might actually provide a message that absolves them from your charges: “homosexual behavior” is non-existent. A gay man can “act straight” a much as a straight man can “act gay.” Whether FOX or its viewers know it or not, the program derides stereotypes and proves that guessing one’s sexuality based on their behavior is completely ridiculous.  

To the extent that this television show exploits humanity as much as any other program, FOX is not demeaning gays in an exceptional way. The “gay coaches” are not enforcing negative portraits of gay men, they are simply playing off the exagerated and foolish socially contructed stereotypes in order to win a game … and money.  

We face a contradiction when analyzing TV programming — we clearly acknowledge its trashiness and absurdity, yet, at the same time, we expect them to be forums for real discussion on serious issues. In this specific case, we find that the measure of man cannot be based on TV-enhanced stereotypes.

—Anonymous

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Knitting two worlds back together


Arts and crafts were always one of my favorite things when I was younger. I’m wondering, though, whether we made a mistake by not making arts and crafts mandatory for people throughout their lives, particularly people who hate each other, say, people in war-torn countries or people with different ideologies.

Though Bosnian Serb and Muslim women viewed each other as enemies not so long ago, hundreds of them have since linked up as business partners and knitting buddies. That is, a Tuzla-based non-governmental organization, known as The Bosnian Handicraft, hires women of diverse ethnicities — “mainly refugees who lost their men and homes during the 1992-95 war,” to use their hands to knit carpets, stockings, socks, and various other garments to sell to buyers abroad.

The Bosnian Handicraft was begun in 1995 to help Muslim women establish their economic independence after more than 7,000 men and boys were massacred in the eastern town of Srebrenca. Economically, the group has experienced quite a bit of success, selling over 3,000 pairs of socks to Robert Redford’s Sundance catalogue and to French fashion house Agnes B. The group is in negotiations with prospective British clients.

What the program’s creators weren’t expecting was just what a cathartic experience knitting could be, but numerous women insist that the program has saved their mental health. And by working alongside other women — many of whom they once saw as the enemy, once blamed for the loss of their loved ones — they’re learning how to not just live and work alongside the enemy but also to start to let go of the pain and hatred that defined their past. In the process, they’re starting to see these women as business partners and fellow knitters and creators, putting aside their differences to achieve a common goal of economic independence.

Reading things like this, it’s difficult not to think, “Yeah, right, as if knitting could save the day.” But I imagine that years and years of pain and suffering in which one loses her loved ones, her sense of home, and even a part of herself, fighting wouldn’t seem worth it anymore. I can imagine that if all one had left was her knitting, that might not seem to be much of a reason to keep struggling to survive. But if one was lucky enough to survive — if one had already suffered that much and made it that far, giving up might not seem like much of an option either, leaving coping as the best possible solution. And if it proves to be cathartic, then the struggle might not seem as pronounced.

But it’s difficult to imagine the tensions disappearing altogether or to imagine that economic incentives could make all of the difference. In other words, perhaps it’s a Bosnian form of detente (cooling for tensions), but it may take generations — even centuries — until the tensions cease to lie just below the surface.

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ITF readers forecast the future of love in a time of conflict


We asked:

What’s the toughest difference for a couple to bridge?

  • Investment Banker / Yoga Instructor
  • Southerner / Yankee
  • Republican / Democrat
  • Boston Red Sox fan / New York Yankees fan

    Almost 70 percent of you thought the political divide between Republicans and Democrats was the greatest obstacle to romance. Second place, at 20 percent, was the yawning chasm between Red Sox and Yankees fans.

    We asked:

    What will the status of gay marriage be in five years?

  • Gay couples will be allowed to marry.
  • There will be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
  • Gay couples will be allowed civil unions but not marriages.
  • It will continue being arbitrated in the courts.

    Forty-two percent of you were optimistic that gay couples would be allowed to marry in five years, while the rest were evenly divided over whether gays would be allowed civil unions or whether the issue would still be in the courts.

    We asked:

    How do you think you’ll meet your soul mate?

  • Through friends
  • On Friendster or another Internet meeting site
  • On some form of public transportation
  • Arrangement by family members

    Almost 70 percent thought they would meet their soul mate through friends. For the 20 percent of you who thought they would meet their soul mate on public transportation, I hope you don’t drive to work.

    We asked:

    In ten years, how will heterosexual marriages have changed?

  • More men will be raising children.
  • Men will have groom’s showers, where they’ll receive household items.
  • Men and women will have more flexible schedules so they can share child-raising responsibilities.
  • Women will raise children and do most of the housework.

    According to 42 percent of respondents, flexi-schedules will enable child-raising responsibilities to be more shared in 10 years, while 38 percent thought there would be more Mr. Moms. Only our editor-in-chief thinks that men will have groom’s showers where they get blenders. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking since he just tied the knot and still has visions of gifts dancing in his head …

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    Confessions of a late bloomer


    At 18, I didn’t want to go to college in the first place. At 22, armed with a B.A., I swore I would never return. Now, why am I going back for a Ph.D.?

    Last weekend, I went to a baby shower. The sun was out in Hollywood, and the caterers had outdone themselves. I feasted on salads and mineral water while watching babies and children in Armani crawl across the lawn and play the unceasing array of games they’re so brilliant at inventing, minute by minute.

    An unexpected thought sprang to mind; I guess I had let down my guard. It was: hey, if I’m lucky, I’ll be 34 or 35 when I receive my doctorate. That’s a little old to have kids, isn’t it?

    This thought made no sense. First of all, my pregnant friend, whom we were celebrating, is 36. I’ve also heard since I was first called a tomboy that women these days can have babies well into their 40s. (This, of course, is frowned upon by several of my Italian friends. It’s not natural, they tell me. It’s not fair to the children.)

    Of course, even knowing it was nonsensical didn’t stop me from doing a double-take.

    An only child, I’ve never given much thought to having kids.  Somehow I grew up believing my first objective would be to find some sort of occupation which would permit the things I considered necessary to existence: freedom and time to pursue creative projects and visit my dispersed family, enough to pay the bills, and the opportunity to throw myself into my work without being interrupted. Love interests and children being a distraction, I decided they would have to wait until after I discovered my ideal career. How else could I be sure I’d be able to pay for them?

    Life being what it is, at 29, I’m still searching for the perfect career.

    Or maybe it’s just taken me 29 years to see the writing on the wall.

    As so many of my friends in the United States are getting married, having children, and buying their first homes, I’m made ever more aware I have little tangible evidence that what I’ve been doing since graduation has been anything other than a waste of time. In fact, I’ve given up my $600 a month apartment I never had time to visit, and despite the fact that I live in Los Angeles, I’m seriously considering selling my car. In addition, by going back to school, I’m abandoning an exciting, lucrative film career for a grad student salary of $15,000 a year.

    Call me crazy.

    Times are changing. I could argue that in Italy, children continue living with their parents into their 40s, marry later, and are still going to school in their 30s. Not so different from what I’m doing. However, as far as Italy is concerned, it remains to be seen how the European Union and the euro will change that lifestyle over the next decade.

    As my decision is made known to my former classmates, I’ve been surprised by how many of us are questioning the tradition of settling down, taking on lifetime-length financial responsibilities, and taking leave of our families. At the same time, making the decision to “leave the real world” and go back to school has been more difficult than I had anticipated, and not in any of the ways I expected.

    Even armed with the news that I’m not alone in the way my life is turning out as I near my 30s, I’m fighting a subtle backlash. I wonder whether it’s exclusively American. With not a little embarrassment, I remember how, at 24, I told my Italian friend, a painter, that he should start taking responsibility for himself and get a job. Five years later, he’s still living with his mother in Rome. He’s also well on his way to becoming a celebrated working modern artist, and his mother is in no hurry for him to leave.

    It’s not simple for me to watch as my boyfriend sticks with his 17-year career as a camera assistant, and with his responsibilities as a father and as a son. I watch as my mother, a single career woman, continues to work with no end in sight, in order to support the lifestyle she loves, a lifestyle which is usually made easier by two breadwinners instead of one. Both of them have more responsibilities than I, and neither of them have ever looked back. Just as I have kept my responsibilities to a minimum, and not without sacrifice.

    Whose world is more real, anyway? Theirs or mine?

    Somehow at 18, going to college seemed like an escape from the real world. After being out of school for seven years, going back feels like I’m entering the real world, though I’m constantly aware that to others, I may appear to be making my escape. It’s a liberation to know, by past experience, that I can live on the $15,000 a year that my fellowship is offering. It won’t be easy, but it’s a choice I’m making with eyes wide open. Maybe I won’t be able to host elaborate dinner parties and take my parents on vacation as I hope I’ll be able to do one day. But getting my Ph.D. will be my first job which pays me to do what I do best, and what I would do even without being paid to do it.

    —Michaele Shapiro

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    “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay.”


    Ever the vanguard of truly trashy television, the Fox network waded into hitherto unimaginably tasteless ground with a show that was to be called “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay.”  

    Bowing to pressure and a startling sense of decency, last week Fox cancelled the two-hour show — which was to be aired on June 7 — ostensibly for “creative reasons.”

    The now cancelled reality show featured two heterosexual men who would compete for the $50,000 prize by convincing a “jury of their queers,” that they were gay. According to a press release that incensed the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamations (GLAAD), the two contestants were to plunge head-first into the “the gay lifestyle,” by moving into two separate apartments in West Hollywood and inhabiting some sort of gay space by living with gay roommates. The contestants would feign homosexuality by coming out to their closest friends, frequenting gay nightclubs, and going on a blind date with a man. Lest the men be unable to appear convincingly gay, promotional material for “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay,” advertised that the men would also be allocated three “gay coaches.”  

    The grand finale of the show was to be a judgment, pronounced by a “jury of their queers,” — according to the Fox press release — of which of the two straight men was actually gay, with the winner pocketing the $50,000 prize for his convincing gayness.

    Fox was clearly developing its programming based on the financial and popular success of shows such as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which captivated three million viewers during the summer 2003 season. Metrosexuality has been welcomed into common parlance, and gay-themed shows, such as “Boy Meets Boy,” have enhanced the Bravo network’s ratings. For a brief and superficial moment, being gay is now hip.  

    The popular success and drawing power of such gay-themed shows has probably raised some sort of awareness of the gay community. The important question, however, is whether these shows have normalized homosexuality, or whether these programs are instead an “exercise in systematic humiliation,” as GLAAD described the now cancelled “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay.” It may be the case that far from blurring the dominant lens of hetero-normativity, such shows have made a fabulously packaged commodity of an identity at the cost of stifling any serious conversion or progress.    
      

    —Mimi Hanaoka

    EDITOR’S NOTE: To see one reader’s response to this story, click here.

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    Saddam’s trophy


    It may not come as a surprise that President Bush has been hoarding the gun that Saddam Hussein was holding at the time of his capture, and that the president has been gleefully showing off his latest trophy to choice guests to the Oval Office like a child boasting about his latest toy. The president’s memento-taking is, without a doubt, one of the most innocuous news items to have emerged from coverage of the Iraq war in recent weeks, but it nevertheless made me wince.

    At the same time that horrific photos of the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison are being flashed across news screens, the image of Mr. Bush, happily parading Saddam’s gun around the Oval Office, only reinforces the impression that the current campaign in Iraq is characterized by brutish and jingoistic machismo. For all of the money that the current administration is channeling into its propaganda war, both here in America and abroad, Mr. Bush’s aping around the Oval Office is bland but offensive enough, and may only confirm, for skeptics, the profoundly unreflective attitude that has come to be associated with President Bush’s catastrophic venture into Iraq.

    This is not to suggest that Saddam wasn’t a calculating despot who ruled through a genocidal regime, and that there may be many who are pleased that Saddam is no longer toting his gun. The issue, rather, is that Mr. Bush must realize that poor public relations, in addition to completely lacking taste and savoir-faire, may have concrete and negative consequences.

    The American government is not only engaged in a heart-breaking and traditional war in Iraq, but it is also in the midst of a propaganda war. Last year, America launched Hi, a lifestyle magazine targeted at the 18- to 35-year-old age bracket for both men and women. The magazine is sponsored by the United States State Department and enjoys funding from a bill, supported by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2003, that allocated money to a variety of foreign projects in the Middle East. Buttressing this propaganda is Al-Hurra, an American-run Arabic-language television network, and Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language radio station.  

    As Samir Khader — the wry and charismatic producer for Al Jazeera, as he was portrayed in Control Room — noted, “You cannot fight a war without media … Any military that doesn’t plan for that is not a good military.”

    For all of the money that the American government has poured into its traditional and propaganda warfare, Mr. Bush is steadily and gaily working to undo his own propaganda machine and is reaffirming the image of an America that is acquisitive, gloating, and ultimately unreflective.  

    —Mimi Hanaoka

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