Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr
Last week when my two young nieces were in town, we went to a local theater to watch Jorge R. Gutierrez’s The Book of Life, an animated children’s film that is part heavy-handed love story, part love letter to Día de de los Muertos, the holiday on which those who have died are celebrated, a ritual that goes back 3,000 years. On NPR, journalist Karen Castillo Farfán wrote that the practice was developed by the Aztecs, who believed one should not grieve the loss of a beloved ancestor who passed. Instead, “the Aztecs celebrated their lives and welcomed the return of their spirits to the land of the living once a year.”
The Book of Life is one big visual representation of everything we have come to associate with the holiday: “dark” Mexican folk art, sugar skulls, papel picado in every color, and altars adorned with seven-day candles, orange marigolds, and pan dulce. The movie is bright and visually stunning, despite being about death—and the same could be said about Día de los Muertos.
A child in the movie who is unfamiliar with the holiday asks, “What’s with Mexicans and death?” As soon as the line was said, I looked over at my nieces, who I instinctively knew would be looking back at me. They were, and they had their hands over their mouths, stifling giggles.
Watching my nieces watch the movie was more interesting to me than the story line itself. My Mexican brother is out of the picture, and my nieces are being raised by their white mother and white stepfather in a white suburb in Utah. They are little brown girls who are painfully aware they are little brown girls in a sea of white faces. When they visit Los Angeles, they are hungry for ties to our culture, no matter how seemingly surface-level. Each time they are here, they want to go to Placita Olvera, the birthplace of Los Angeles. They want my dad to speak to them in Spanish. They eat menudo with my father, watching him out of the corners of their eyes; they roll up the tortilla in their hands just like he does, dipping it in the soup’s red broth.
During the movie, I watched their eyes flash with recognition every time they understood a word in Spanish or recognized the significance of a visual element. Afterwards, my nieces sat across from me at a restaurant, chatting about the movie. The oldest, who is eleven years old, said, “What is it with Mexicans and death, though?”
Growing up, the only thing I remember my dad telling me about Día de los Muertos was that Mexicans are passionate people who love in big ways, and the tradition of celebrating our dead was an extension of that. As a child, my family did not partake in any festivities.
The hunger my nieces have for Mexican culture is something I understand deeply. As a biracial Latina, I know what it feels like to have a tenuous grasp on your culture—and there are few things holier to me than culture. It encompasses family, traditions, and food, all the things that make me feel whole and human. Since the death of my mother four years ago, Día de los Muertos has become monumentally important to me and something I consider sacred, but every year there are more and more reminders that it is a tradition that belongs to Mexicans less and less.
Recently, much has been written about the appropriation and colonization of the tradition, which is increasingly treated as an extension of Halloween. There was that one time Disney tried to trademark Día de los Muertos. Each year, there are more stories of corporations promoting the co-opting and whitewashing of a sacred Mexican holiday. This year it was discovered that beauty retailer Sephora was encouraging employees to show off their “Halloween faces” using a step-by-step makeup guide for a Día de los Muertos-inspired look. This year we also saw an online petition created to stop the “Fiesta De Los Muertos Scare Zone” at Knott’s Scary Farm.
This year I saw Día de los Muertos displays for Cheetos. In Halloween stores, I saw “sexy” Día de los Muertos costumes for women, featuring a calavera mask, a sombrero, and a short dress embroidered with colorful flowers. On Halloween this year, I saw white children trick-or-treating in jeans and hoodies, their faces painted like sugar skulls. That was the entirety of their costume. Last year I walked into a local bar where white women had their faces painted similarly as they tried to talk customers into trying the pumpkin beer. I walked out.
There are many levels to the appropriation of the holiday, though generally speaking I’m most dismayed by the way white Americans pick and choose the pieces of us they want. Mass deportations in which Mexicans are the most often deported don’t seem to get a rise out of the same people painting their faces like calaveras for Halloween. When there is a mixed-status immigrant family about to be torn apart, I don’t see Disney, the supposed bastion of family values, advocating for family reunification. In my hometown of Los Angeles, white Angelenos love taco trucks, but don’t care when undocumented loncheras are targeted and criminalized for making a living. Of course, all of this is just to say that Día de los Muertos is just another instance in which white Americans want to claim the pieces of Mexican culture that appeal to them, while violently erasing its origins.
I have spent the past few days thinking of my mom. On the altar I made for her, there are flowers and candles; there are the many rings she wore and the small pumpkins she and I always bought together at this time of year. Yesterday at a panadería, I watched my aging father lovingly pick out all of my mom’s favorite pan dulce. He came home and thoughtfully arranged it on a plate, placing it on her altar and lighting a candle. Over the past couple of days, my father and I have eaten pan de muerto together, swapping funny stories about my mom. We have visited her grave, leaving bouquets of marigolds. Today, on the last day of Día de los Muertos, we will make mole together. Her favorite.
I don’t suspect I will ever stop mourning the death of my mother, but Día de los Muertos provides a rare opportunity to celebrate her in a way I’m not usually capable of. This is not a sad time of year for me. I spend these three days reflecting on how lucky I was to get such an unconventional parent who was deeply invested in my happiness. I spend these days thinking about how grateful I am that I was given twenty-five years with my mom.
I suspect this is the case for many of the Mexicans who celebrate Día de los Muertos in the US. In this celebration of those who have passed, we can reflect and honor our dead. We can feel more attuned to the ways in which they continue to make their presence known in our lives.
Everyone has traditions. Día de los Muertos just happens to be ours, and it is sacred. Please respect that.
Best of In The Fray 2014. Through photography, journalism, and social media, Onnik Krikorian is chipping away at the cross-border hatreds that once escalated into a vicious war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—one that has never really ended. Over the years he has seen little progress toward peace at the highest levels of government, but at the grassroots and among the young, he says, there is hope for change.
When the Soviet Union began to crumble a quarter-century ago, more than a dozen of its former republics gained their independence. But in the South Caucasus—that much troubled limb of land that, depending on your perspective, either connects or divides the Eurasian continent—the withering of Soviet rule meant the escalation of war. In the early nineties, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, landlocked region inhabited mainly by ethnic Armenians but recognized by the United Nations as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict left as many as 25,000 dead and a million displaced from their homes.
Since then, attempts to broker a lasting peace between the two countries have failed. Ethnic hatreds go far back, entangled as they are with Armenian hostility toward Turkic people and anti-Armenian sentiment that fuelled the Armenian genocide conducted a century ago in the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire. Although Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire in 1994, dozens continue to die each year in frontline skirmishes. And the situation has worsened in the past few months, with the fighting intensifying and the threat of a large-scale conflict becoming more palpable. “We expect war every day,” said the commander of Karabakh’s defense forces, Movses Hakobyan, in a recent interview. “And the goal of our army is to stand ready for it.”
Onnik Krikorian is a British-born journalist, photographer, and media consultant who has worked for years to promote peace between the two countries. His independent-media platform Conflict Voices brings together grassroots activists, bloggers, and citizen journalists from around the region, who use social media to challenge stereotypes and encourage dialogue between ordinary citizens of both countries.
“There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, ‘No, no, no!’ And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still.”
Normally, Azerbaijanis and Armenians have very limited contact. Armenia is an oligarchy, rife with electoral fraud and poverty; Azerbaijan is a dictatorship. Each country routinely demonizes the other in the media. Krikorian, whose ethnic surname comes from his Greek Armenian father, emphasizes the need for an alternative view of the conflict, one not swayed by the propaganda on either side. Through his work with Conflict Voices, his role as a consultant and trainer, and his own writing and photography, Krikorian has sought to build that “third narrative” piece by piece, documenting life in communities where ethnic Azeris and Armenians still live and work together peacefully.
Nowadays Krikorian is based in Georgia—a country he describes as something of a neutral ground between its two warring neighbors. He has reported extensively on his city of Tbilisi, including recent pieces on the lives of its street kids and an environmental protest camp in Vake Park devoted to stopping the construction of a hotel. Yet his work as a journalist has also taken him to the farthest corners of the region. His photography tells the stories of the forgotten people of the South Caucasus: those living in remote villages, foraging landfills, or dwelling in institutions.
In The Fray spoke with Krikorian about his days toiling on Web 1.0 websites, his first awkward but breakthrough meeting with young Azerbaijani bloggers, his hopeful pragmatism about the ongoing conflict, and why he thinks photojournalism is, at its heart, about empathy.
How did you first get into photography, and what was the process that led you to the South Caucasus, doing the kind of work that you do?
When I was in my early teens I saw the work of Don McCullin, a British war photographer, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed poverty in the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s. It just blew me away. These images for me represented what the power of photography was. They weren’t just of foreign wars, they were also of poverty in the United Kingdom, for example, and it had a major effect on me. That was what really pushed me into photography.
I started at the Bristol Evening Post doing paste-up and sub-editing. Eventually I decided to move to London. I got a job at the Independent newspaper, but again on the production side of things. It was then that I got to the South Caucasus. The ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh had just been signed, so I went to the picture editor and said, “Listen, there’s a humanitarian-aid flight going to Nagorno-Karabakh. Let me go.” And the guy said, “Sure, okay.”
When I came back, Mosaic—the web browser that popularized the Internet—had been released. I took a look at this web browser and thought, Wow, I understand where this is heading, and I need to do this. So in 1994, I set up my first Internet site, on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I also became involved with the Kurdish Human Rights Project, following a chance meeting with some Kurdish activists in London.
In 1998 they asked if I’d like to go to Armenia to research the human rights situation of the Yezidis, the largest minority in Armenia [a Kurdish religious group now in the news because of their persecution in ISIS-dominated Iraq —ed.], and while there it was obvious that there was very little reliable information coming out of the country. I was struck by the poverty, the corruption, and other issues that no one was really reporting on. So that’s when I decided to write. Because ultimately, I felt that these issues need to get out there. I was offered a job with the United Nations Development Programme and moved to Armenia in 1998. That’s when the sort of work I do now started.
What languages do you speak?
I speak English and some Armenian. I learned Armenian when I was in Armenia. While my dad is ethnic Armenian from Greece, my mum is English. My parents divorced when I was about a year old, so I was never brought up by Armenians, and I never had any contact with Armenians until I was about twenty-one, when I got in touch with my father again. I don’t know what that really says. Maybe I have a different view of how identity works.
This concept of ethnicity in the South Caucasus is a concerning thing. People relate to each other here based on their ethnic group, rather than, you know, “You’ve got the same biological makeup as me.”
Children pose in an abandoned van in Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, soon after the ceasefire was signed in 1994.
How did Conflict Voices come into being?
In 2007 I was Caucasus regional editor for an organization in the United States called Global Voices. I would put together posts about issues that were underrepresented in the regional and international media from the South Caucasus—for example, about gay rights, women’s rights, or the flawed process of elections in the region. But in 2008, Facebook started to emerge in the region, and then things really got interesting. You could basically form relationships across borders online.
I was still based in Yerevan, Armenia. As the regional editor for Global Voices, how could I do anything referring to Azerbaijan without knowing what was really happening there, or without even being in contact with any Azerbaijanis? It’s just not professional, and it’s definitely not possible to have a clear view of the region if you don’t speak to people from the other countries. So I ventured up to Tbilisi and made contact with some Azerbaijani bloggers at a BarCamp. It was very interesting. You had the Armenian contingent, who would be standing about twenty meters away from the Azerbaijani contingent. They were just totally separate. I thought, Well, this is bloody stupid! So I decided to approach the Azerbaijanis. I had my camera on me. They thought, This looks like a photographer, let’s give him our cameras and ask him to take pictures of us together.
I handed them their cameras, and they said, “Thanks very much, where are you from?” I said. “I’m from England.” They said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Onnik Krikorian.” Deathly silence. But people are people, and there’s always that initial thing when you have stereotypes and whatever. You don’t know how to react in such a situation. After ten seconds, they say, “Thanks, stay in touch. Could you send some of the images you took with your camera?” So I found them on Facebook and made contact with them. Suddenly, a world in Azerbaijan through young Azerbaijanis was opened up to me. And not surprisingly, they weren’t very different from Armenian youth.
They’re not totally preoccupied with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and they have the same interests as any young person does—mainly posting about music, films, university, or whatever. I saw the potential of social media to break down stereotypes and thought, if only a young Armenian in Armenia could see what a young Azerbaijani is doing. They would see that actually each side is not a monster, each side is not perpetually thinking about armed conflict. In that sense, social media was incredibly revolutionary.
I had a foot in the door of Azerbaijani social networks. And as a journalist, the more they saw my work, the more I think they understood that I wasn’t a threat. Trust and relationships were built, and my material was shared. I thought, okay, something really has to be done now, something proper, because this is a very wonderful, personal tool for connecting people.
Has this affected your view of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?
Yes, it’s changed my view of the conflict. Don’t get me wrong—it’s also a really depressing situation, with no solution anywhere in sight. In 1994, when I returned to London from Nagorno-Karabakh, analysts were telling me, “In twenty years, the conflict will be solved.” Well, it’s now twenty years since then, and the conflict is nowhere even close to being solved. I’m not even sure it’ll be close to being resolved in another twenty years.
So do you just envision a continuing standoff, or do you think something else is going to happen?
I think the standoff continuing is, unfortunately, a safe bet. What some are concerned about, however, is whether hostilities will resume. I think the consensus is that no side will start a new war, but that there’s a danger of an accidental war when a skirmish on the border spirals out of control. But despite how depressing the situation looks, I can at least see in the interactions I have with Azerbaijanis and Armenians, that there is a—albeit small—group of progressive, open-minded people on both sides.
They communicate with each other, and some meet face-to-face. In Georgia, of course, you have ethnic Armenians and Azeris who have absolutely no problem with each other at all.
You have now been based in Georgia for two years. Was this a tactical decision?
Georgia is very different from Armenia. There’s a more liberal and freer environment here. I’d been visiting since 1999, and even then—when it was a failed state, when it was criminal, when there were problems with electricity—there was something about Tbilisi that I really loved. Yes, I knew all the problems, and it was inconceivable that the Rose Revolution would happen and things would start going in the right direction. There was something I liked about the place, and I always knew I’d probably end up here. My Armenia-Azerbaijan work is another reason. This is the center of the South Caucasus, the place where everyone can intermingle.
It’s difficult for Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan to get into Armenia, and it’s even harder for Armenians to go to Azerbaijan. It’s a horrible conflict and people don’t mix. People-to-people contact is an incredibly important—if not the most important—component of reconciling differences and finding a peaceful solution. And it’s the one thing that the citizens of both countries are prevented from doing—except in Georgia. There are Armenians from Armenia and Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan mixing here. Not thousands, but it does happen.
I think this is the strength of Georgia. It’s always been the heart and soul of the South Caucasus.
Ethnic Armenians in the Georgian village of Tsopi. Situated close to the country’s border with Armenia and Azerbaijan, the village is 70 percent ethnic Azeri. The rest of the villagers are ethnic Armenian. Integrated villages like Tsopi challenge the notion that the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is merely an ethnic one.
You know, you have this in Georgia. But when you have really intense nationalism and propaganda in Armenia and Azerbaijan, both sides cannot see eye to eye or find any common ground. Some would argue this is by design. Both governments have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because it allows them to cling onto power. They’ve come to power on the back of the Karabakh conflict, and presidents have lost power on the back of it, too. These are the things that have defined the leadership in both countries. But there are alternative voices emerging, and that’s the most important thing for me. Ten years ago these alternative voices didn’t have a space, online or off, but now you have alternative media outlets in both countries. I would even argue that despite there being more anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan than anti-Azeri sentiment in Armenia, there’s an even larger group of alternative young Azeris who are more open-minded than their counterparts in Armenia.
There could be very many reasons for this. It could be because there’s a more oppressive regime there. But the youth movements, the alternative voices in Azerbaijan are incredibly impressive—and they face the greatest risks in the entire South Caucasus for what they’re doing.
I stumble upon something and see there’s something wrong and that no one is covering it. Actually, the problem of vulnerable children in residential care started in Armenia, as part of a big project I did on poverty in Armenia. There’s a lot of poverty. I saw this and I was very shocked by it. I worked with organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], and that took me into the issue of the institutionalization of children. In 2007 I came to Georgia to look at the situation here. They had the process of de-institutionalization, so it was an interesting contrast.
Vake Park was an impressive display of a non-politically partisan social movement that managed to attract the involvement of everyone. I’m used to movements in Armenia being politicized, and for me that’s not the way you achieve social change. Maybe it’s a part of it, but you need grassroots nonpoliticized movements. Vake Park is still going on, the hotel has not been constructed, and they’ve still got their camp. It was a pleasure to document something like that, as well as an interesting story.
The street kids project is ongoing. There’s a lot of kids on the streets of Tbilisi. These kids are not necessarily sleeping on the streets. The majority do have homes, but are from poor families. They’ve got no choice but to beg on the street from early morning until late at night. The street is not a safe place for a kid. Under UNICEF’s definition, they are still street kids. They’re great kids. I really enjoy hanging out with them.
It seemed that you had a strong rapport with those kids—and, in other stories, with the people who live by salvaging from landfill sites, or who live in small villages like Tsopi and Sissian. How do you create a level of trust that allows you to take such intimate portraits?
You don’t necessarily try to gain their trust. You either have empathy with them, or you don’t. A lot of photojournalism is about empathy with a subject. Unless, of course, it’s a battle raging around you, or police beating protesters—then you don’t really have empathy with the policeman—but for those sorts of social issues, you need empathy. You can tell if someone’s being open with you or not. Also, it takes a lot of work. In some cases you have to spend days for them to get to know you. There were times documenting poverty in Armenia and especially at the landfill sites that I wouldn’t take any photographs, because they didn’t want pictures taken. Why would someone who’s taking rubbish off a landfill want their picture taken? Why would someone who’s living in extreme poverty want their picture taken? Of course they don’t want their picture taken. There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, “No, no, no!” And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still. Maybe that picture works because it shows that. I can’t go into someone’s home and intervene in their lives, then just walk out. I would also go back many times, to see if their lives had improved.
Have there been any improvements?
A family living in a run-down hostel in the Erebuni district of Yerevan, the Armenian capital. The little girl, Isabella, sits on her mother’s lap. She died a week later, after falling seven floors in an unsafe stairwell.
The poor people, no. There is the building of the homeless shelter, but that’s not really a major success story, because the government, being the Armenian government, decided to build the homeless shelter right on the outskirts of the city, where no homeless person can actually get to. Homeless people stay around markets, and there’s a reason for this, and that’s because homeless people go through the bins later looking for discarded stuff. And buses won’t take homeless people. And taxis, even if they could pay, don’t take homeless people. So it seemed like a success, but in reality it didn’t really do much to achieve a solution.
I guess the main success story for me is the number of Armenians and Azerbaijanis that I’ve managed to connect who would never have done so without me acting as a bridge. You need someone to break the ice and to bridge that divide. I think that’s the most successful thing I’ve managed to do. Of course, the conflict is nowhere near resolution, and however many people I manage to connect, it’s still not a critical mass. I was recently at a closed meeting on Nagorno-Karabakh, and a very bright guy from Azerbaijan simply noted, “There’s no peace movement. There’s no demand for peace. And NGOs, it’s time for you to stop sitting around, patting yourselves on the back, talking about the projects that you’ve done, because they’re really not changing much. There really is no genuine grassroots peace movement in the South Caucasus, and especially Armenia and Azerbaijan, and now you guys need to work on creating one.”
Maybe that’s what I hope I can contribute to. To try and make this bigger. Obviously I can’t do it on my own, but maybe as part of a bigger process that can finally sort out the mess that is the Nagorno- Karabakh conflict. It’s a major obstacle to the development of both countries. The conflict will be over one day. It cannot last forever, and so I’d like to think that my work can be part of the process that brings that day sooner. Of course, whether I’ll see it in my lifetime is still unclear.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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After the Soviet Union collapsed, Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki left the faltering Eastern Bloc and came to Greece in pursuit of a happier life. But as the energy and promise of Greece’s once-fiery economy has dwindled away, immigrants like them have experienced homelessness and hostility—as well as a peculiar yearning for the old communist ways.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yannis Lubovicki left Poland and came to Athens in search of work. He lost his job during the Greek economic crisis and now lives on the streets.
In the Athenian neighborhood of Skouze Hill, a pair of shabbily dressed men, Polish immigrants, sit on a doorstep across the street from a supermarket, wearily asking passersby for change as they wait for store employees to throw away the day’s unsold food. Once the food has been tossed into the supermarkets’ dustbins, they will compete with the area’s other dumpster divers—ethnic Roma—for the stale bread and leftover vegetables.
When he illegally immigrated to Greece two decades ago, Yannis Lubovicki, forty-three, dreamed of a better life than what Poland—then struggling to adjust to a post-Berlin Wall world—could offer. Instead, he and his companion Christos Gabriel, fifty-three, found poverty. Now they spend their days panhandling and their nights sleeping on park benches. They survive on food from church soup kitchens and trash cans and the water from park fountains. Once a week they walk downtown to Koumoundourou Square and use the public baths there, well frequented by the homeless.
“Don’t give them any money,” says a well-dressed middle-aged woman heading into the supermarket. “They’ll spend it on wine in a split second.” If harsh, her words are perhaps true: their breath smells of alcohol, their eyes are bloodshot, and Lubovicki—the woman points to him emphatically—is timidly taking a corkscrew out of his bag.
An estimated one person in twenty is an undocumented immigrant in Greece, a country of eleven million. Many of them, like Lubovicki and Gabriel, are transplants from the former Eastern bloc. Having moved to Greece in search of the economic opportunities that an integrated, prosperous Europe once offered, they have instead struggled to survive, one of the groups hardest hit by financial crisis in Greece—itself one of the countries hardest hit by the global recession that struck in 2007. At the same time, they have been scapegoats for the country’s ongoing malaise, with high unemployment and political turmoil—along with a humiliating dose of international ridicule for the former continental success story turned basket case—feeding a brutal, anti-immigrant backlash within Greek society, just as they have in other immigrant magnets such as Italy, Malta, and Spain.
Yet in few corners of Europe have ultranationalism and xenophobia gained as much traction as they have in Greece. Golden Dawn, a far-right Greek political party, has seen tremendous growth since the economic crisis hit. In 1996, it received just 0.07 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections; in 2012, it won 7 percent. Halting immigration is the party’s chief goal. Its leaders declare that “illegal alien-invaders” amount to an irregular foreign army, one bent on attacking the country’s social fabric and corrupting its national identity. The party’s extreme rhetoric has, in turn, fed violence, from the murder of a Greek antifascist rapper by a party member, to the stunning attack that Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris unleashed on two leftist members of parliament during the live taping of a morning talk show. (After their argument grew heated, Kasidiaris—who has called Greece’s undocumented immigrants “human garbage”—punched Communist MP Liana Kanelli and threw a glass of water in the face of SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou.) Golden Dawn members have frequently harassed immigrants, going so far as to pose as police in order to intimidate street vendors.
Even in Athens, Greece’s cosmopolitan capital, Golden Dawn has substantial support. It won 16 percent of the vote in last May’s mayoral elections, a huge jump from its share of just 5 percent in 2010. “We have been swarming with Albanians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Eastern Europeans,” says the middle-aged woman at the supermarket, who did not give her name. “Now we have the Gypsy gangs, too.” Her once-affluent neighborhood used to be populated by high-ranking military officers and their families, but in recent years the poorer immigrant enclaves in the bordering downtown areas have spilled over here as well.
“That’s why they wanted us in Europe, “she adds—referring to wealthy northern European nations like France and Germany—“to keep the Third Worlders away from them so they can continue their petty little lives.”
Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki, undocumented Polish immigrants, survive by panhandling and scrounging in dustbins for food.
Gangling and gray-haired, Gabriel walks with a limp and speaks with a thick accent. In his halting Greek, he notes happily that he recently discovered a new hideout, a tiny covered alley alongside a newly built apartment building, where he lies down on the pavement at night to sleep. He and Lubovicki have spent the last five years living in close proximity to the supermarket and its surplus food. Until a few months ago, they had been squatting in a nearby abandoned house, but then the landlord drove them out.
Gabriel has been in the country for twelve years. Back in Poland, he lived through the early years of his homeland’s transition from communism. Post-Soviet Poland quickly reformed its economy to woo investors, privatizing its coal and steel industries and knocking down regulatory hurdles. Thanks to vigorous economic growth and rising standards of living, Polish households were optimistic and exuberant, and credit flowed easily. Gabriel, then a coal miner, decided to take out a loan to buy a two-story house in the southern Polish city of Katowice for himself, his wife, and four children.
The Polish “miracle,” however, failed to curb the country’s high levels of unemployment. Laid off and unable to find a new job, Gabriel struggled to pay his 50,000-euro mortgage. Desperate, he immigrated to Greece in 2002, joining a wave of illegal immigrants drawn by the global image of pre-crisis Greece as flourishing and full of promise. (Today, there are about 50,000 Polish immigrants in the country.) Gabriel has not seen his children since he left.
But today’s moribund Greek economy—now in its seventh year of recession—now offers little in the way of hope for Gabriel and immigrants like him. In Athens, about 5,000 undocumented immigrants live in derelict buildings unfit for human habitation. When they can find work, conditions are often extreme: migrant strawberry pickers, for example, earn $26 to $33 a day for about ten hours’ work, living in makeshift huts with no access to toilets. Meanwhile, government officials warn of a “public-health time bomb,” with large numbers of new immigrants not inoculated for tuberculosis, polio, measles, and other communicable diseases.
Until the 1990s, Greece was an extremely homogenous society. The wave of Eastern European immigrants that flooded Greece after the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by another wave of immigrants from Africa and Asia in subsequent years, gradually ratcheting up anti-immigrant sentiment among the broader population. Today, as unresolved economic and immigration problems worsen an already festering resentment; Greece continues to vie for the title of Europe’s “most racist” nation.
In recent years, the government has had some success in stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, which it credits in part to an eight-mile barbed-wire fence it erected along its border with Turkey, completed two years ago. The number of illegal immigrants that the government detained fell from 77,000 in 2012 to 43,000 in 2013.
These days, Gabriel stays on constant alert for police raids—not for fear of deportation (European countries, Poland and Greece included, signed the 2007 Schengen agreement that allows citizens of each country to move and work freely throughout the union), but for fear that he may be arrested for failing to pay his bank loan back in Poland. For the most part, thought, the police tend to ignore him and other homeless immigrants.
Golden Dawn wishes it were otherwise. These foreigners must be deported, the party argues, in order to save the culture and community of the “pure” Greeks. (Ironically, in spite of his slogan of “work for Greeks only,” Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, happens to own a hotel in an immigrant Athens neighborhood staffed by low-wage foreign workers.) Beyond its anti-immigration platform, Golden Dawn has argued for building closer ties with Russia at the expense of the US (particularly in regards to energy resources), erasing the “illegal” Greek debt and voiding the terms of the country’s internationally funded bailout, purging the public sector, and walling the Greek economy off from global trade.
In recent months the party’s brazen militancy seems to have backfired to some extent, with two of its leaders now in jail awaiting trial—Michaloliakos for forming a “criminal organization” and a spokesperson for gun charges. Nevertheless,Nikos Kyriakidis, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from Athens, insists that Golden Dawn is the only party that will fight against Zionism, imposed multiculturalism, and the growing erosion of Greek culture. Economic anxieties also seem to be at the root of Kyriakidis’s anger. He rails against the “scumbags” of PASOK and New Democracy—the major political parties that have long run the country—that he says destroyed the Greek economy. Although he has a quarter-century worth of work experience, right now Kyriakidis is unable to support his family. They just moved to avoid living in a part of the city that has recently seen an influx of immigrants. Kyriakidis doesn’t want his children to grow up in such a rundown neighborhood, he says.
In Greece, Eastern European immigrants tend to fare better than other immigrants in one area: racist attacks. Three weeks ago Gabriel and Lubovicki witnessed a gang of thirty young men dressed in black beating Asian immigrants. “They shouldn’t have hit them, it’s not right,” says Lubovicki, a stubby and gregarious man who fills in the silences of his tall and taciturn companion. The beating took place out in the open, in a public square with numerous passersby. Four police officers were nearby but did nothing, Lubovicki claims. Fortunately, the gang did not bother the two Poles. “It is the dark ones they are after,” he notes—that is, the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Syrians, Bangladeshis, Somalis, and Eritreans who have built up the country’s largest Asian and African immigrant enclaves.
“The men were huge—real giants,” Lubovicki adds. “If one of them punched me in the face, my head would fall off.”
Lubovicki and Gabriel sit on a street corner in the Skouze Hill neighborhood of Athens.
A group of young men walk down the street, stopping when they notice Lubovicki and Gabriel—half-drunk and reeking of alcohol—sitting on the doorstep. “I’ll give you ten bottles of wine if you kick this car door,” says one of the men. He is short and fair-haired, in his early twenties.
“Ten more bottles if you sing,” says another, a hulking man with a humpback.
Lubovicki bursts into laughter and says he can’t do it. Gabriel cracks a smile.
The young men seem to know the Poles. They, too, are immigrants—second-generation Albanian Greeks. Many of their parents immigrated to Greece after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Today, those of the country’s unauthorized immigrants who hail from the former Eastern Bloc are chiefly from Albania: in 2013 they were almost a third of all illegal immigrants arrested that year, and Albanians also comprise a majority of the country’s total foreign-born population.)
Lubovicki has a daughter of his own, now seventeen years old. (Her name is Despoina, a Greek Orthodox name; Lubovicki converted to the Greek Orthodox faith after arriving in the country.) His marriage ended after his wife, who had moved out to Greece with him, found out about an affair. “We had a brawl,” he says. “My wife left Greece in the middle of the night with my daughter.”
Things really got bad when Lubovicki lost his job during the crisis. “I haven’t worked in five years … I was a construction worker,” he says. (The construction sector—which used to employ both men, and whose workforce is a third foreign-born—has shrunk by half since 2009.) “I’ve been a vagabond all these years, sleeping on the benches of the parks.” He smirks as he admits it.
Their descent into poverty has soured their attitudes toward the free market and made the two Polish immigrants nostalgic for Poland’s communist era—however repressive it was. They would never have left Poland if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, they point out. Back then, life was good, and they lacked nothing. Thanks to the government, Lubovicki adds, he attended a trade school.
These are views shared by a significant number of older Eastern Europeans, according to a 2009 Pew survey. While those under the age of forty tend to favor the economic and political reforms their countries have gone through over the past two decades, the older generations are more skeptical. Clearly, many have painful memories of the USSR: not just the absence of freedom and dissent, but also the frequent shortages of food and toilet paper, the constant lecturing about Marxist-Leninist creeds, the degrading monotony of Soviet life. But like Lubovicki and Gabriel, some of those who grew up under communism point out that unemployment and homelessness were virtually unknown back then. Their salaries were nowhere near American ones, but the cost of living was negligible. The Soviet educational system was excellent, ranking among the best in the world.
In recent years, Poland has, like Greece before it, seen rapid economic growth. While many Poles continue to go abroad in search of the higher wages to be found out west, living standards have improved back in their home country. Lubovicki points out that his mother, a professional chef, enjoys a pension and a cozy house of her own. Meanwhile, he lives on the streets.
Lubovicki misses his hometown, a village outside Warsaw. He misses his daughter, who speaks to him by phone every other week. He misses his mother’s cooking. But he does not believe he will go back to the old country anytime soon. “My mother calls me up all the time asking me to return to Poland, but I can’t because I can’t afford it. I need eighty-five euros to renew my passport and about 200 euros for travel expenses.”
It’s not just about the money, Lubovicki adds. Born “Yannus,” he has lived as “Yannis” since he came to Greece—now half his life. “If I go to Poland, I won’t know a thing. I’ll be unable to adjust there …. I have been living in Greece ever since I came of age, how am I supposed to start all over again?” Gabriel—who used to go by the name “Yaroslav”—nods in approval.
“Have I told you I am also a mechanic for all kinds of machines and can do some plumber work?” Lubovicki says, moving on to another, more hopeful, topic. “I may find a gig like this in the future. I know the tools of the trade.”
Then his eyes light up. The sliding doors of the supermarket have opened. Employees bearing huge trash bags head for the dustbins. Lubovicki walks over to find his next meal.
Correction, September 27: An earlier version of this article misidentified the man in the first photo. It is Yannis Lubovicki, not Christos Gabriel.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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Best of In The Fray 2014. Last year I visited Saur-Mogila, a burial mound in eastern Ukraine that commemorates the Soviet soldiers who died driving back the Nazis during World War II. Today it is a battleground for a new war, as separatists fight for independence and Russia moves its troops into the lands it once liberated.
Michael Long Photos by Sergei Kopylov
In the frigid autumn sunlight I climbed the stone steps of Saur-Mogila. The burial mound, located atop a bluff encircled by the bronzed steppe, covers the bones of Soviet soldiers killed during the Second World War. More than 23,000 died fighting the Germans for this hilltop along the eastern edge of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The panoramic view from the summit is coveted for reasons both aesthetic and strategic, and I could easily see why. At 277 meters, Saur-Mogila is the highest point in the region.
Dozens died in mass demonstrations earlier this year against the Venezuelan government. While the violence has subsided, the conflict continues to spill out onto the sidewalks and storefronts of urban Caracas, where opponents and supporters of the government engage in an art of war over the symbolism of the protests and the memory of the dead.
Story and photos by J. J. Gallagher
A neighborhood in central Caracas bears the marks of dueling political groups.
Armored vehicles roll down the street, ringed by dozens of police in riot gear. Further down on the palm tree-lined Avenida Francisco Miranda, one of Caracas’s main arteries, small groups of protesters clad in bicycle helmets and gas masks arm themselves with stones and hastily construct roadblocks with whatever they can find: sign posts, bits of concrete, a steel cable taken from a nearby construction site. Bags of garbage burn nearby, spewing black smoke into the air. Though it’s early on a weekday afternoon, the storefronts that line the normally busy street have already been shuttered, antigovernment graffiti scrawled on their windows and walls. A crowd of several hundred people—a mixture of peaceful demonstrators and onlookers from nearby businesses—clank guardrails amid shouts of “Resistencia!” and “Libertad!”
People gather to remember the dead in Altamira Square, the epicenter of many of Venezuela’s fiercest protests.
Slowly at first, the police lob tear gas canisters into the crowd. Protesters quickly pick them up and cast them away. Then the canisters start raining down, scattering nearly everyone. Crates full of rocks and bottles and containers filled with gasoline appear suddenly among the demonstrators. Someone hurls a firebomb, which explodes underneath a contingent of about six officers, who, seemingly unscathed, continue advancing. Marching in rows through the choking fog, the police start aiming their tear-gas guns directly at the protesters still gathered on the street. A group of teenage boys break into a furious sprint as police on motorcycles hurtle down the sidewalks after them. One of the boys, shaking with fear, frantically jabs at apartment buzzers as a group of workers nearby shout, “Let him in! Let him in!” He slips inside the apartment building’s steel gate, just out of an officer’s reach.
The April 1 demonstration in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas—a protest march that swiftly descended into an armed brawl with security forces sent out to clear the streets—is one of dozens that have taken place this year, fueling a major popular uprising against the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Since February, forty-two people have died, though the violence has tapered off in recent months. The fatalities have included both opponents and supporters of the government: José Guillén Araque, a thirty-four-year-old National Guard captain and father of two teenage daughters; twenty-two-year-old beauty queen Génesis Carmona; Adriana Urquiola, twenty-eight years old and five months pregnant; and many others, drawn from all parts of Venezuelan society.
A protester hurls a tear-gas canister back at advancing riot police.
As in many of the popular uprisings that have broken out in places like Syria and the Ukraine in recent years, repressive tactics intended to quash the protests have only served to inflame them. And as they have elsewhere, Venezuela’s artists have been a driving force within the opposition movement, crafting a compelling narrative to motivate resistance.
Since the killings began, street artists have memorialized the dead in spray paint, tagging walls and sidewalks throughout the city with their faces and names. “[The government] has all the power. They do whatever they want, and they are extremely violent,” says Marina, a twenty-seven-year-old English teacher and a member of anti-Maduro student artist collective called Stencil Resistencia. (Because of fear of government reprisals, the protesters I spoke to asked me to withhold their last names.) “That’s the idea of painting the faces of the dead, to remind everyone of who we are dealing with. They are the violent ones.”
The demonstrations began in February, over local issues. College students in the western city of San Cristóbal turned out to protest a sexual assault that had occurred on campus. The resistance quickly snowballed into a national movement. Angered and aggrieved, thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets since then to decry the government’s failure to deal with a raft of problems.
A protest barricade, one of the opposition’s favored tactics, completely blocks a major artery in southern Caracas.
Despite having the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela has struggled economically, and in the past two years its fiscal woes have reached crisis levels. During his fourteen years of increasingly unrestrained rule, the late president Hugo Chavez succeeded in rearranging the country’s power structure and lowering the poverty rate, mainly by allocating more of the country’s oil wealth to programs for the poor. But he also left the legacy of an isolated and sputtering economy, as well as a byzantinecurrency-control systemunder which, critics say, tens of billions of dollars in public funds have gone missing.
Today, the country consistently ranks near the bottom of global measures of freedom of the pressand theease of doing business. It boasts one of the highest inflation rates in the world—more than 60 percent annually—as well as an increasingly exorbitant cost of living. Basic necessities like toilet paper, cooking oil, and flour, nearly all of which are imported, have become scarce. Alarmingly, the number of murders has also surged over the past decade: according to the United Nations, Venezuela now has the second-highest murder rate in the world.
Meanwhile, government repression of dissent has been at times brutal. The first protester fatality occurred on February 12. Bassil Alejandro Dacosta Frías, a twenty-three-year-old carpenter, left his home in the nearby city of Guatire to join two of his cousins in a protest march in Caracas. An estimated 10,000 people took to the streets that day. In a scene that would become familiar, the demonstration ended in chaos. Once the police came out in force, most of the protesters filtered out into nearby streets, but small groups stayed behind or were diverted by the security forces.
In the confusion that ensued, at least one member of the security forces opened fire into the crowd, using live ammunition. The protesters fled. A video released later showed Dacosta running and then falling to the sidewalk, struck from behind by a bullet to the head. (A forty-two-year old member of Venezuela’s national intelligence agency is now in jail awaiting trial for firing the fatal shot.) The night before he was killed, Dacosta announced on Facebook that he was going to “go out and march tomorrow without fear of anything, with the hope of finding a better future.”
Members of a group of street artists calling themselves Stencil Resistencia adorn a wall with the faces of people killed in the protests.
In the weeks that followed, the country’s fractured politics continued to play out bloodily on its city streets, with dozens more dying in the violence. Remembering the dead became an act of resistance that united the opposition. In the outpouring of emotion following Dacosta’s death, his face became ubiquitous, popping up on T-shirts and placards, painted onto walls and sidewalks.
The activists I interviewed have helped blanket the city with his likeness, along with those of the unrest’s many other victims. “These people who died gave their lives for the country. We must not forget them,” says Alejandro, a twenty-five-year-old economics student who has dedicated much of his free time since the protests began to the opposition movement. Using digital photos published in local media and shared on social networks, he and other artists create images in Photoshop that are then cut into stencils and spray-painted onto surfaces.
Antigovernment street art carries with it some irony in Venezuela. Chavez popularized graffiti and murals as political statements, and the government still hires artist collectives to work on public projects, which often carry stronganticapitalistandanti-American messages. Chavez often mocked the highbrow sensibilities of Venezuela’s elite and sought to empower the country’s poor by celebrating their culture. But now the government-sponsored street art has become an institution as well as a propaganda tool. After his death, Chavez’s image has become omnipresent, with his face, his recognizable signature, and evenhis eyes occupying the sides of buildings and billboards. In Caracas, the writing on the wall is usually a good indicator of whether you are walking through an opposition or government stronghold.
Police begin firing a barrage of tear gas at the protesters who remain on the street.
The government has also organized marches of its own and rallied an army of pro-government musicians and street artists to its side. They depict a world dominated by Yankee imperialists, allied with Venezuela’s wealthy elites, who threaten to subjugate the poor. With America’ record of meddling in the affairs of Latin American countries, Venezuela’s history of entrenched inequality, and the country’s persistent political instability—punctuated by upheaval and coups—this message resonates with the government’s supporters, who have vowed to continue the populist political agenda championed by Chavez, who died in 2013 after a prolonged fight with cancer.
Since he took office, Maduro—Chavez’s handpicked successor and the leader of the country’s ruling socialist party—has drawn heavily from his predecessor’s playbook. He has claimed to be the target of frequent coup attempts and made vague accusations of interference from US-backed militants. Amid the recent wave of protests, the president, his supporters, and the state-run media have sought to portray the opposition as bent on conflict and destruction. (Maduro has even taken to calling the protesters “Chuckies,” in reference to the ginger-haired, knife-wielding doll of 1980s horror-movie fame.)
Demonstrators vie for the attention of passersby at one of the many peaceful protests that took place in Caracas.
Government forces have come under gunfire in several of the confrontations, and the protesters have on numerous occasions tussled with them and set fire to buildings and vehicles. Because of the international media’s focus on the street battles that have led to deaths like Dacosta’s, masked young men have come to symbolize Venezuela’s protest movement to the outside world, even though their groups generally number in the dozens, compared to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators who turn up at major opposition marches and rallies. The protesters—many of them in their teens and early twenties—complain, in turn, about the police’s heavy-handed tactics, which they say are employed even when the demonstrations are nonviolent. (A number of protesters claim the police often incite the violence and viciously beat them even when they do not resist arrest.) Images purporting to show the bloodied and bruised bodies of demonstrators circulate widely on Twitter and other social media networks, fueling the outrage.
The government has deftly used the street skirmishes to justify its crackdown. Maduro recently vowed to bring to justice “criminals who seek to fill our country with chaos and violence.” In May, his forces raided a protest camp outside of the UN office in Caracas, even as the government engaged in internationally mediated peace talks with the opposition.
More than 3,000 people were detained in connection with the protests earlier this year, according to the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal Venezolano; seventy-five remain jailed today. The group also says it has documented instances of beatings and torture. Beyond its violent crackdowns on demonstrations, the government has hounded opposition politicians and media outlets that it accuses of fomenting the hostilities. In June, imagesof Leopoldo Lopez, the former mayor of the Chacao district in central Caracas and the government’s most famous prisoner, were leaked, showing him bearded and gaunt after spending more than a hundred days in detention under charges of instigating violence and damaging property. (With his pugnacious rhetoric and overt support of the fighting in the streets, Lopez played a critical role in sparking the protest movement.) Lopez’s trial finally began in late July. His lawyers say he could face up to ten years in prison if convicted.
The April 1 protest in Caracas was set in motion by Maria Corina Machado, another vehement critic of the Maduro government, who urged her supporters to come out for a political rally and march. Machado had just been accused of treason and ousted from her seat in Venezuela’s parliament after denouncing, at a Washington meeting of the Organization for American States, human rights abuses allegedly committed by the regime. (In Venezuela Machado is a controversial figure, whose political organizations have in the past received financing from the US government. The government has long called her a puppet of the Americans, and in late May she, the US ambassador, and several other opposition politicians were publicly accused of organizing an assassination plot against President Maduro.) Thousands turned up to hear her speak at a plaza in downtown Caracas, but when it came time for the symbolic walk to the steps of the National Assembly, many of the demonstrators found themselves face-to-face with police and National Guard troops, who shut down metro stations and blocked major avenues.
A view of police gathering in the distance, from the protesters’ vantage point.
While they don’t agree with using violence, the protesters I spoke to see the street demonstrations as a necessary and effective tactic. Instead of addressing the country’s problems, they say, the government has marginalized legitimate political dissent and attempted to silence criticism. Beyond their hostility to the government, however, the protestors have little in the way of a unified agenda. Their demands range widely—from moderate policy reforms to regime change.
Like many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans, the activists I interviewed complain that their day-to-day lives have rapidly deteriorated over the past few years, as crime has grown and the economy worsened. “The situation is as bad as it’s been in the past fifteen years,” said Alejandro, the economics student. “The [government] officials can’t go on denying the weakest currency in the world, the lowest minimum wage in the world. We are demanding a change—not necessarily in the government, but in the policies that they are carrying out.”
With the potent symbolism of their street graffiti, artists like Alejandro have helped the dead protesters achieve a near-mythic status in Venezuela. Sympathizers often refer to them as “los caídos,” or the fallen ones. Even as tensions in the street have calmed in recent months, with no new deaths being reported, the activists say their acts of remembrance will go on. “We have to continue struggling,” says Marina. “If we go back to our daily lives, they will have died in vain.”
J. J. Gallagher is a freelance writer based in New York. Twitter: @jayjgal
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In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | August-September 2014: Frenemies
“Frenemies”: friends with fewer benefits. It’s often an apt term to describe our working lives, where polite interactions mask fierce competition. But it applies to other domains as well: from the love-hate relationships of siblings and lovers, to the tangled web of international relations (take, for example, longtime allies Germany and the US, recently in a bitter spat over American espionage). Yet having a frenemy is not necessarily a bad thing. Musical rivalries produce great songs (see the hit musical Beautiful). One-time political opponents sometimes become the most formidable of allies (see Bush v. Gore veterans/gay-marriage crusaders David Boies and Ted Olson).
In The Fray magazine is looking for profiles, essays, and photo essays that have something to say about friendly rivals, and rival friends. Tell us about the struggles that ensued, and the regrets and resolutions that followed. Tell us about battles between best friends, reluctant enemies, or best and worst selves.
Please review our submissions guidelines and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN OCTOBER 1, 2014. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.
We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.
Yesterday, the world lost one of its great talents. Robin Williams was found dead in his home Monday from an apparent suicide. The sadness of his loss is matched only by the joy he brought the world over his life.
While early obituaries I’ve read have lauded his acting triumphs (i.e., Good Will Hunting, Dead Poet’s Society), equally important to my childhood were Robin Williams’ less acclaimed works, from Jumanji (50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) to Hook (31 percent) to Flubber (23 percent). Few actors have achieved such generational impact, making his death all the more painful.
After I heard the news of his death last night, I was filled with a deep anger at the selfishness and pointlessness of the act. Salmon Rushdie wrote, “Murder is an act of violence against the dead. Suicide is an act of violence against the living.” But Williams was just a man, one of the millions in America fighting depression on a daily basis. The sad fact is, suicide is endemic in our society, especially among men.
Williams’ fame and wealth made him seem larger-than-life. But, like the successful but tortured man in Simon and Garfunkel’s song “Richard Cory,” it is important to remember that wealth and fame are not panaceas for depression. If anything, they can create undue pressure and prevent those in need from seeking help.
Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot By Masha Gessen
Riverhead. 320 pages.
Journalist Masha Gessen wrote a well-received biography of Russian president Vladimir Putin two years ago. In her new book Words Will Break Cement, she profiles Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk activist group whose members have become the international faces of anti-Putin protest.
In recent years the group has won a global following—including the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney—for their offbeat acts of civil disobedience against the Russian government. One of their best-known protests—a controversial “punk prayer” performance in a Moscow cathedral in 2012—eventually landed three of its members in jail. Gessen, a Russian American journalist and herself a critic of Putin, follows the personal histories of these three members: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya), Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Stanislavovna Samutsevich (Kat). Most of the book was culled from Gessen’s reporting from their trial and her correspondence with Nadya and Maria while they were in prison.
Nadya, we learn, grew up with a love for philosophy. One of her heroes was Anatoly Marchenko, a Soviet dissident who wrote about the experiences of political prisoners in Soviet camps. Bookish Maria long felt herself to be an outsider, and yet, as one of her friends put it, she also “had this idea that she would change the world.” Kat was trained as a computer engineer. Gessen describes her as cerebral, sometimes too much so: “Her word choice was always intentional, but she seemed unaware of images or associations that her words called forth in others, and as a result her speech often served to obscure rather than to illuminate.”
Before Pussy Riot, Nadya was involved with an art collective called Voina (roughly translated as “War”). Formed in 2007, the group used street art to criticize corrupt politicians, police, and clergy, staging colorfully named (if somewhat clumsily executed) protest pieces throughout Russia that involved a wide range of illegality: from vandalizing police vehicles (“F*** the FSB”), to stealing groceries while wearing priestly robes and a police officer’s hat (“Cop in a Priest’s Cassock”). After Voina split in 2009, the faction based in Moscow eventually became Pussy Riot.
What set Pussy Riot apart from their earlier incarnation was their deliberate strategy to steer clear of “Art with a Capital A,” Gessen writes:
Indeed, the fact that it was art should be concealed by a spirit of fun and mischief. Whatever they did should be easily understood, and if it was not, it should be simply explained. It should be as accessible as the Guerrilla Girls and as irreverent as Bikini Kill. If only Russia had something like these groups, or anything of Riot Grrrl culture, or, really, any legacy of twentieth‐century feminism in its cultural background! But it did not. They had to make it up.
Pussy Riot soon developed their own style of protest: donning multicolored balaclavas and playing loud punk rock. Other than that, they seemed to make it up as they went along—storming designer boutiques, practicing on playgrounds, climbing atop buses. Once, they unintentionally set a fashion show on fire, and later called it “Pussy Riot Burns Down Putin’s Glamour.” On another occasion, they performed in Red Square to protest the detainment of three gay activists.
Even after the three members were hauled into court for their “punk prayer” at a Moscow cathedral, they remained—poetically—defiant. Plodding in its first half, the book takes off once Gessen gets to the trial, a dramatic media event that crystallized many of the reasons that the young women have become an international phenomenon. In her closing statement, Nadya invoked a quote from the Soviet dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement.”
All three of the women were convicted and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Kat’s sentence was later reduced on appeal. As for Nadya and Maria, Gessen writes, “forty seconds of lip-synching cost them around 660 days behind bars.”
Cornelius Fortune is a journalist whose work has appeared in theAdvocate,Citizen Brooklyn, theChicago Defender,Yahoo News, and other publications.
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Since I was a child, I knew I was going to be a writer. Early on, though, I was ruined by the romanticism surrounding the craft. I’d read too much Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles Bukowski. I did drugs. I drank. I wandered. At first it may have been to emulate my idols, but eventually it became about survival: running fast and hard from the horrors of an abusive home.
I don’t recall ever making the connection that all of my literary heroes were straight white men, but in the back of my head I knew that so much of how the world opened up for them would never be in the cards for me. But I kept writing, filling up composition books, not thinking about getting published so much as trying, word by word, to patch up my life.
In high school, several teachers took an interest in me, despite the fact I was a miserable fuckup who barely showed up to class. I read all of the writers they believed a girl like me should read. The men gave me Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus. The women gave me Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Not once did any teacher ever hand me a book by a writer of color.
I now understand this experience is hardly unique to me. If it weren’t for one of my oldest friends, Jessica Rodriguez, loaning me Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros in high school, I would have never known a Latina could be a writer. I mean, I knew Latina writers existed—they were my friends, fellow notebook scribblers—but I don’t think it ever occurred to us that one day we could hold each other’s books in our hands.
Diversity in literature is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. Last month I attended a workshop run by the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), which sponsors programs for writers of color working in a variety of genres. I sat at the orientation looking around in disbelief at more than 150 writers crammed into a room at UC Berkeley, thinking, “Holy fuck, I had no idea there were so many of us.”
I was there because of the weekly comic strip I write with my best friend Julio Salgado. Liberty For All is his baby. In its early days, the queer, undocumented artist drew and wrote it himself and posted it on his Facebook page. When the comic was picked up by CultureStrike, I was brought on as the writer, giving the two of us the opportunity to work on our first project together after nearly ten years of friendship.
Liberty, the strip’s main character, is a writer without much of a filter. She is sometimes Salgado. Sometimes me. Sometimes our friends, lovers, or family members. She is never a stranger to us. By featuring her story, week after week, we hope she is seen as the quirky, complicated, sometimes problematic character we know her to be, rather than a laundry list of oppressions. But because of those less-than-conventional details of who she is—chubby, brown, undocumented, queer, feminist—I worry that mainstream audiences aren’t capable of recognizing her humanity.
Junot Díaz, the celebrated Dominican American author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and one of VONA’s founders, has spoken out about the tough environment writers of color face. In a recent New Yorker piece—an excerpt from an anthology of writing from VONA attendees and instructors—Díaz describes his particularly miserable experience studying in an MFA program: “That shit was too white.” It’s the “standard problem” of MFA programs everywhere, he adds. Díaz brings up the story of Athena, a Caribbean American woman he praises as a “truly gifted writer.” She dropped out of his program because it was simply too challenging to be a woman of color in that space. Over the years, he looked for Athena’s work, but it appeared that she had chosen not to pursue writing. Díaz seems to recognize the tragedy of this, if only in the distant way a man who “made it” can.
How much better are things today? The women’s literary group VIDA does a yearly tally of the number of women writers in various mainstream literary publications, from the Atlantic to the New Republic—both of whose bylines were more than two-thirds male in 2013. Inspired by this hard-numbers approach, Roxane Gay set out to find out where things stood for writers of color. She found that nearly 90 percent of the books reviewed by the New York Times in 2011 were written by white writers. (Today, few writers of color can be found even in the pages of liberal magazines, which may laud diversity in theory, but do not actually practice it.)
Gay also pointed out another issue: the identity hierarchy. “Race often gets lost in the gender conversation as if it’s an issue we’ll get to later,” she wrote. Yes, progress is slow, but it’s always the most needed voices that are forced to wait. And as we push for a racial mix that better represents the world we live in, does that mean we’ll also need to “get to” queer and transgender writers later?
At least people today are more willing to speak out about these issues—on social media, in particular. In May, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag went viral after it was announced only white writers would be featured at BookCon, a new reader-focused book festival held in conjunction with the annual trade show BookExpo America. It wasn’t the first time BookCon organizers had come under fire. A month earlier, they had put together a panel on young-adult literature composed solely of white men.
Another diversity-related dustup blew up on Twitter in Maywhen writer Daniel José Older reacted to criticism of a story in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, an anthology he co-edited. A review chided one of the anthology’s writers, Troy L. Wiggins, for relying too heavily on “phonetic dialect,” calling it a “literary trick” that rarely works. Older tweeted that the reviewer was unfairly coming at a black writer for using AAVE (African American Vernacular English), even though critics have long called white writers—from Joyce to Shakespeare—“brilliant” for using vernacular in their prose. He and Wiggins, Older wrote, are “trying to stay true to our voices in a white ass world.”
In the comic strip Julio and I work on, many of the characters are queer, undocumented, body positive, sex positive, transgender, and people of color. They suffer from mental health issues. They live below the poverty line. They do bad things. In other words, they are messy and beautiful, just like our real-life communities.
Julio and I never had a conversation about being all-inclusive, but sometimes we get commended for our “diverse” comic. No doubt the nine other people in my graphic novel writing workshop—eight of whom were women—encounter the same weird praise. And that’s just it, really. When you give people at the margins the opportunity and platform to tell their own stories, what is reflected will look like intentional pushback against mainstream narratives. Our stories only seem revolutionary because they so often go untold.
At VONA, our instructor Mat Johnson told us we can’t hide behind our oppressions. We have to be good writers. Our only hope of getting mainstream readers to take interest in stories featuring people of color is by tapping into the human condition, those seemingly mundane and yet monumentally important life events that connect us all—and that magically render gender, race, culture, and class unimportant.
The Heart of Everything That Is tells the little-known story of Red Cloud, a ruthless Lakota chief who brought together the warring tribes of the Great Plains to fight the US government and halt its relentless westward expansion.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend By Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Simon & Schuster. 432 pages.
For nearly three hundred years, white settlers and American Indians engaged in mutually destructive warfare. The bloodshed followed the path of white Western migration—from the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, where colonists coming ashore in 1607 were met with a volley of the Powhatan’s arrows, to far Western lands like the Montana territory, where General Custer and his soldiers made their last stand in 1876, overrun by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.
Their stunning victory in the Battle of the Little Bighorn immortalized the names of great Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. But in The Heart of Everything That Is, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make the case that a relatively obscure Oglala Lakota chief called Red Cloud was actually the era’s most fearsome and effective Indian leader, a brilliant tactician of guerrilla warfare who a decade before Little Bighorn had beaten the US Army in a bloody conflict known as “Red Cloud’s War.”
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich and Russian president Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin last December, three months before popular protests ousted Yanukovich. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich and Russian president Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin last December, three months before popular protests ousted Yanukovich. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru
Speaking at West Point on Wednesday, President Obama touted his administration’s response to Russia’s recent belligerence in Ukraine. “Our ability to shape world opinion helped isolate Russia right away,” he said. The public outcry and the pressure exerted by international institutions, he added, have served as an effective “counterweight” to “Russian propaganda and Russian troops on the border and armed militias in ski masks.” In spite of the crisis Ukraine has gone on to hold elections—“without us firing a shot.”
Unfortunately, Obama is mistaken. The momentum is still on Russia’s side. It has forcibly seized and annexed the strategically valuable peninsula of Crimea. It has succeeded in destabilizing eastern Ukraine through a proxy war—secretively supporting ethnic Russian rebellions against the Ukrainian government there. It is quite possible Ukraine will end up losing more of its territory.
For years now, America and the international community have underestimated Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ruthless and unpredictable leader. Obama, for example, has dismissed Russia as a mere “regional power.” And so far the global response to Putin’s latest aggression has been tepid. But this is a serious miscalculation, and it betrays a deep ignorance of Russian power and the dangers it presents.
Obama and other world leaders may excoriate Russia’s actions in their speeches, but Putin clearly cares little for what they say. At home his popularity and political capital have only grown, thanks to a state-run propaganda machine that relentlessly praises and “whitewashes” his foreign policy. And while the US and Europe have levied trade sanctions and other punishments on his regime, these have had limited effect.
Given their dependence on Russian energy and trade, European countries are unwilling to break their ties with Russia in any meaningful way. And in the ongoing trade war that the sanctions unleashed, Russia is clearly willing and able to endure the economic damage—much more so than its opponents. Apparently, Putin has a higher pain threshold than his counterparts on the other side.
Russia has also proven itself more adept in using trade as a weapon. Ukraine’s new president knows this well. Dubbed the “Chocolate King,” Poroshenko made his fortune with the confectioner Roshen, which exports candy to over thirty countries. Last summer, the Russian government banned all imports of Roshen sweets, citing safety concerns. The move was clearly an act of retaliation against Poroshenko, who had helped lead efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s ties to Europe. Months later—in the same week that the Ukrainian government caved to Russian pressure and abandoned a proposed trade deal with the EU—Russia lifted the ban. But this was only a temporary ceasefire in the so-called “chocolate war”: in March, a month after mass demonstrations in Ukraine toppled a regime more favorable to it, Russia seized and closed a Roshen factory in one of its cities, Lipetsk. These targeted reprisals, which have personally cost Poroshenko millions, remind us how inseparable Russia’s trade and business decisions are from its political ambitions—and how brazen Putin can be in getting what he wants.
Currently, Poroshenko faces far bigger challenges than sinking candy profits. Ukraine is suffering from deep economic woes, entrenched corruption and cronyism, and fragmented and sluggish political leadership. It is engaged in what at this point amounts to a small-scale civil war against the separatist rebels in the east. And the conflict seems to be intensifying. A day after the Ukrainian army engaged in a fierce battle to retake the Donetsk airport, separatists in eastern Ukraine shot down a Ukrainian military helicopter, killing thirteen soldiers and a general. This week, several Russian nationals were revealed to be among those wounded in the recent fighting. In spite of its routine denials, the evidence suggests that Russia has been deeply involved in funding and fomenting the unrest.
It appears that Putin has no intention of withdrawing his support of the separatists anytime soon. But given that the conflict has already inflamed sectarian passions and emboldened separatist hopes, Russia would have a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle even if it wanted to.
Having faced two brutal wars in Chechnya and a string of terrorist atrocities committed by Russia’s own separatist enemies, Putin must surely appreciate how difficult it can be to predict or control hostilities once they have begun. It’s more likely he intends to play both sides against the middle: working with Ukraine’s newly formed government to encourage greater autonomy for certain regions in eastern Ukraine, while continuing to secretly foment unrest there—thus ensuring his smaller neighbor is weak and distracted.
Poroshenko now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to negotiate with, and somehow outmaneuver, Russia’s shrewd and unscrupulous leader. But given his ample experience playing Putin’s game, there is hope that he at least will not underestimate his enemy—as the rest of the world continues to do.
Best of In The Fray 2014. Once thought cured by modern medicine, tuberculosis is making a global comeback. Rampant misuse of antibiotics and broken health-care systems have spawned deadly, drug-resistant strains that are now present in virtually every country.
By Octavio Raygoza
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen that causes TB. NIAID
She looks like a child: a baby face and large, round eyes, long and thin arms that make her seem gawky. When she sees me, her eyes brighten, and she struggles to sit up in her hospital bed. The blanket covering her drops, revealing a frail and gaunt body—a nineteen-year-old’s body. Five feet, four inches, she weighs only eighty pounds.
Sonam Yambhare is dying, and there is little modern medicine can do for her. Two years ago, she contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis in her lungs. The bacteria that cause the disease have destroyed her macrophages, the body’s first defenders against foreign invasion. Constant nausea, loss of appetite, and vomiting—symptoms of the disease—have emaciated her. All medications have been infective. In her weakened state, another serious infection will likely kill her.
Ward Number Eight of the Sewri Tuberculosis Hospital is a silent room with gray concrete walls. It is a world away from the chaotic streets of Mumbai. And it is a world away from the rest of Indian society. With nowhere else to go, neglected and stigmatized TB patients like Yambhare come here—even from towns and villages hundreds of miles away—to wait out the last stages of the disease, sometimes alone.
“Everyone is depressed here,” says Chandge Mokshada, a young doctor on her rounds. In the crumbling ward, dozens of women lay quietly on their beds. There is little chance they will recover, Mokshada says. “We mostly lose our patients.”
One of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases is making a comeback. Two centuries ago, tuberculosis was responsible for a quarter of all deaths in parts of Europe and the US. Known as the “white plague” or “white death” due to the way it blanched the skin, the disease left a deep imprint on the culture. Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about it. Emily Brontë and Henry David Thoreau died from it.
After the development of effective antibiotics in the 1940s, deaths from tuberculosis plummeted. But TB remains a formidable killer in many parts of the world. And in recent years, it has evolved in frightening ways. Its virulent new strains now defy many or all known antibiotics. And while they have ravaged Asian countries in particular, these deadlier forms of the disease are spreading everywhere.
Last month, the World Health Organization released a report about the surge in infectious diseases that are fast becoming untreatable. “A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—is a very real possibility for the 21st century,“ the report read. The WHO singled out drug-resistant tuberculosis as one of the greatest dangers. In 2012, it accounted for 450,000 new cases and 170,000 deaths—that is, less than 4 percent of those newly infected with TB, but 13 percent of those the disease killed. The total number of confirmed cases has grown sevenfold over seven years, with India, China, and Russia accounting for more than half of new infections. (The official statistics also understate the size of the problem, since many of the hardest-hit countries report bogus numbers.)
New strains of TB arise when the old ones are not properly treated. Not taking a full course of antibiotics, for example, can merely weaken, rather than eradicate, the bacteria that cause the disease. The remaining bacteria evolve to adapt to the drug, turning a treatable strain of TB into a resistant one.
The problem has gotten progressively worse. At one point, health officials believed TB could be eliminated. But in the 1980s, tuberculosis strains emerged that resisted the most common and safe anti-TB drugs. In the past decade, even second-line treatments have become ineffective against certain tough strains that fall under the category of “extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis” (about 10 percent of drug-resistant TB cases). To deal with them, doctors will put patients on more than one of these toxic drugs. Their side effects, however, can be severe, ranging from acne, weight loss, and skin discoloration to hepatitis, depression, and hallucinations.
For the hardest-to-treat strains, doctors are now forced to use so-called third-line drugs, an even more toxic regimen whose effects have yet to be fully tested.
Today, resistant strains can be found virtually everywhere, including the United States and Europe. But perhaps nowhere is the crisis more real than in India. The world’s second most populous country has a quarter of its TB cases—and now, many of the hardest ones to treat. While the number of Indians suffering from the disease has actually gone down in recent years, thanks in part to widespread vaccination, the WHO estimates that in 2012 the country had 21,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB of the lungs—an exponential increase from the few dozen cases the government had been reporting just six years earlier.
India also has the dubious distinction of being one of three countries—Iran and Italy being the others—where certain strains of TB have resisted every drug used against them. Four years ago, Zarir Udwadia, a noted pulmonologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, identified twelve patients suffering from untreatable TB infections. (Three of the twelve have since died; the others have been taken into isolation by the government.) Udwadia and other researchers have described these kinds of cases as “totally drug-resistant.”
The Indian government disputes the categorization, arguing that these strains have not been tested against all of the experimental third-line drugs. Another term, “extremely drug-resistant TB,” gets around the worry of some experts that classifying such a common disease as untreatable may cause panic.
Regardless of what they are called, these hardy strains have the power to push societies back to a time before antibiotics, when the “white plague” was all but unstoppable. “If not contained,” says infectious disease specialist Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, “it poses a big problem to the world.”
In India, those infected with TB tend to be the most vulnerable people in society. Yambhare was born into a low caste. She lived in a cramped apartment, where she shared a room with her mother and two sisters. Every day she took overcrowded trains from her home in the countryside to Mumbai, where she helped her mother clean houses. In other words, her poverty made it far more likely that she would be exposed to TB, which often (though not always) settles in the lungs and can be transmitted through the air.
Two years ago, Yambhare developed a persistent cough. She visited one of the private medical clinics that line the teeming streets of the western suburb of Bandra. There, a doctor diagnosed her with tuberculosis, and Yambhare began taking antibiotics. When her family saw no improvement over two years, they switched doctors. The new doctor prescribed more drugs.
No one bothered to give her a drug-sensitivity test. The test would have revealed what strain of TB she had, and a competent doctor could have then prescribed the correct drug. Instead, the incomplete and inept treatment that Yambhare received gave the bacteria the chance to adapt and become stronger. It soon developed a resistance to all four of the first-line drugs used to treat TB.
In Yambhare’s case and thousands of others, a broken health-care system has made the problem of drug-resistant TB much worse. Hospitals are overcrowded, and the services provided are minimal. So Indians—rich and poor—flock to private doctors. But the slapdash treatment they tend to provide, with laxly administered drugs and inadequate follow-up care, has allowed drug-resistant TB to spread wildly.
Udwadia, the Mumbai pulmonologist, says that many of these doctors are unscrupulous, and most are uninformed. In 2010, he conducted a study in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, one of Asia’s largest and the origin of many of the city’s most severe TB cases. He asked more than a hundred doctors in the area to “write a prescription for a common TB patient.” Only six were able to do it correctly. Half of the doctors he surveyed were practitioners of alternative therapies with no grounding in modern science.
Udwadia argues that India needs a law that will let only designated specialists treat drug-resistant tuberculosis patients. But at the moment the government does not bother keeping detailed records on the many private doctors now operating, much less ensuring they provide adequate care.
“The government has no control over private practitioners,” says an official in the health ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to talk to the media. “They require only once-in-a-lifetime registration, and there is no chance for them to lose their license.”
Calls for regulation by experts like Udwadia, the official says, are silenced, ridiculed, or ignored. Meanwhile, the government has been accused of underreporting the number of new cases of drug-resistant TB every year. In 2011 the official count was 4,200 cases; the next year, the government began adjusting its figures to resemble the WHO’s estimates, and the number of reported cases quadrupled. (Indian health ministry officials did not respond to emails asking for comment.)
In terms of its anti-TB spending, however, the government has been devoting more resources. In 2013 it budgeted $182 million to fight the epidemic.
Some of this money will go toward upgrading the 103-year-old Sewri hospital, which could use it. In its ward for drug-resistant patients, there is no medical equipment in sight; records are kept in rusted metal cabinets. The most pernicious forms of TB are hitting a health-care infrastructure poorly equipped to deal with them.
Every year, more than eight million people fall ill with tuberculosis. More than a million die from it, placing TB just a notch below AIDS in its globe-spanning lethality. And a whopping one-third of the world’s population has what is called “latent TB”: they are infected by the bacteria, and a tenth of them will go on to develop the disease at some point in their lifetimes. Drug-resistant TB, in other words, is just one part of a global health emergency.
Meanwhile, the problem goes ignored in rich countries. Antibiotic treatments for TB have been so successful there that most people’s experience with the disease today is limited to works of literature: novels and poems with archaic references to “consumption” and TB sanatoriums. But that may change someday soon. In the United States, a hundred new cases of drug-resistant TB are diagnosed every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases of extensively drug-resistant TB have already been reported.
Paul Nunn, the WHO’s TB coordinator, says that these deadly strains have cropped up in certain European countries, too, though the reports have yet to be published. “If the health system of the world fails, the highly resistant strains will replace the old,” he adds. “We’ll see a worsening of the situation if nothing is done.” On the other hand, it may be only when the resistant strains become a major problem in rich countries that the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry will take notice and pour real money into the development of potent new treatments.
Without effective drugs to combat the most resistant strains, doctors may have to revert to remedies from an earlier era. Udwadia recalls his first patient with untreatable TB. Twenty-six years old, she had spent the last five years trying a variety of anti-TB drugs, all of which had failed. As a last resort, she underwent a pneumonectomy, a high-risk medical procedure to remove a lung. The woman later died of complications from the surgery. The procedure had not been used on tuberculosis patients since the introduction of antibiotic treatments six decades ago.
Even though so many people are infected, TB still carries a terrible stigma in Indian culture. “People treat you with disgust,” Yambhare says. As she grew sicker, she became more isolated. Her sisters were told to stay away. Her friends stopped visiting. Finding a partner or even a job was impossible. She sunk into a depression.
Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay for her treatment. Their monthly household income was just $100—not uncommon in a country where one in three people lives on less than $1.25 a day. But the expensive second-line drugs cost $80 a month. And once she began taking them, the side effects kicked in. Her skin became discolored. Her muscles atrophied. Her weight dropped.
Eventually, Yambhare’s family could no longer care for her. They sent her to the Sewri hospital.
When I visit her in the ward, orderlies are carrying out the infected mattresses of previous patients. In a nearby courtyard, they set the mattresses afire.
Yambhare watches the smoke curl past the window near her bed. Below her, in the courtyard, stray dogs fight over bones.
Yambhare turns to me, an eerie shine in her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says through her mask. “I want to go home and help mother.”
Octavio Raygoza is a video journalist who covers sports, news, and culture. Twitter: @olraygoza
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, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make the case that a relatively obscure Oglala Lakota chief called Red Cloud was actually the era’s most fearsome and effective Indian leader, a brilliant tactician of guerrilla warfare who a decade before Little Bighorn had beaten the US Army in a bloody conflict known as “Red Cloud’s War.”
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