Blog

Waiting for the storm


There were four of us, and we sat together in a boat on Cass Lake, catching walleyes, Minnesota’s state fish. Cass Lake is located in northern Minnesota, nestled amidst the pine trees of Chippewa National Forest, near the modest headwaters of the Mississippi River. We were having a good night. I landed a 26" walleye, a big fish but not a trophy, and my wife landed a 27" walleye shortly afterwards, both of which we photographed and released. As the sun dipped below the horizon and clouds gathered on the southwestern shore of the lake, we decided to call it a night. Unfortunately for us, the boat had different plans. The engine refused to start. The clouds drew nearer. Lightning flashed from across the lake. We hunkered in and braced ourselves for the impending storm.

As this issue of InTheFray reveals, Kyla Pasha and Sarah Suhail are bracing themselves for a storm of another variety. They are the founders of Chay Magazine, an online publication focusing on sex and sexuality in Pakistani society. Despite the inevitable criticism they expect for addressing such a controversial topic so directly, they’ve already received a host of encouraging responses. In Sex in Pakistan, Sarah Seltzer interviews Kyla Pasha about the magazine and what she’d like it to accomplish.
 
Argentina is no stranger to turmoil, either. In this month’s travel narrative Buenos Aires, ITF contributing news editor Suan Pineda takes us to the Argentinian capital, where locals and tourists alike dance the tango together. As Argentina’s economy booms and high-rise condominiums look out over slums, the clouds of social discord gather on the horizon as they have so many times before. And when the storm does strike, tango will carry Argentinians through the chaos.

In her short story The end of the song, Zdravka Evtimova considers chaos of a time gone by. The story tells the tale of Dono, the brutal chieftain of a clan of carters, and his wife, Vecka. Even as her husband beats her, Vecka draws strength from the song she sings, a song that even Dono is powerless to resist.

The birth and proliferation of the iPod has allowed the rest of us to use music to escape the tempests around us as well, even those of us who can’t sing. In In Tune with the Ipod, Amy Brozio-Andrews reviews The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. She tells how Steven Levy writes of the iPod and how, far from insulating individuals from culture, the device instead allows audiences to enjoy music, podcasts and blogs on their own terms.

The serene eye at the heart of this month’s stormy issue is Fragments of Dreams, Lianne Milton’s series of photographs shot with a small plastic Holga camera. The cheap construction, simple lens, and many light leaks produce natural vignettes and other unique effects that can’t be duplicated with Photoshop. The result is a series of photos that is both peaceful and surreal.

Just as the gathering clouds or cultural upheaval in Argentina may not portend a disaster, the storm we saw moving across the lake didn’t hold a disaster for us. A friend with a nearby boat towed us to shore, and the storm passed by to the south, sprinkling us with rain, but sparing us its more fearsome elements. Soon, we were seated around a campfire, trading fishing stories, talking and laughing. That is what’s most excruciating about anticipation: one never knows what will happen. The storm clouds that gather on the horizon might wipe out a town, leave a country’s economy in shambles and claim lives. Or they could just as easily pass by, leaving lives, homes, and countries intact. One never knows …

Aaron Richner
Editor
St. Paul, Minnesota

 

 

 

I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

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Reviews

In tune with the iPod

Steven Levy’s The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness looks at the enormous influence of this tiny portable media player.


 

There’s no denying it — those iPods and their ubiquitous white earphones have had a strong influence on the business, entertainment, technical, and cultural landscape many of us grew up knowing. The adventure of the innovative iPod, from conception to consumer, is an exciting and enlightening story, chronicled by Steven Levy, senior editor and chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, in his book The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.

Levy explores the impact of these personal digital music players on the music industry and on Apple Inc. He also delves into the idea of cool (namely, what is “cool” and how does an object get to be cool) and culture (what does it mean when we all “check out” with earphones). Levy’s affection for the object is clear — even to the point of writing each chapter as a standalone, enabling a shuffle of the book’s content in true iPod fashion, replicating the gadget’s feature that plays loaded songs in random order.

Levy’s fascinating inside look at how the iPod came to be is richer because of Apple’s cooperation with the project. The book includes numerous interviews with the people who made the iPod possible, including forerunners like Michael Robertson, the proprietor of MP3.com, one of the first efforts at legally selling music online. By covering how revolutionary the iPod was to the music industry (now selling individual songs a la carte instead of tied to albums only) and Apple (guiding the computer-maker’s foray into iPod-maker and then music-seller through iTunes), Levy sets the stage for turning the reader’s eye from the commercial to the cultural implications of the iPod.

Does putting on the white iPod earphones equate with tuning out and withdrawing from the world, or to being a more active listener? Levy’s book demonstrates that these are questions that have been asked since the dawn of the personal music device. Since 1972, when Andreas Pavel hooked up open-air headphones to a Sony cassette player, the implications of aural withdrawal from the surrounding world have been discussed, as the Sony Walkman took hold, then MP3 players in general, and the iPod in particular.

Levy presents both sides of the argument: that people are missing out on social connections versus fully enjoying their music by focusing on it. He builds on the idea of proactive enjoyment of music by citing that iPod users are now free of the restraints once placed on them by artist or record label limits via albums and CDs. The shuffle feature means the locked-in order of CD tracks no longer governs listening; the ability to buy songs individually from iTunes frees listeners from having to buy whole CDs when they want only one or two songs.

Levy further demonstrates this consumer-centric entertainment model by discussing the evolution of the podcast — digital media files, usually audio — that are distributed by syndication feeds and played on personal media devices like the iPod. No longer do people have to hope there’s something appealing being offered by a media company of any kind. People can make it themselves and get it out there via RSS feed. Plug in your iPod and download your podcasts for easy listening on your own schedule. Like zines and blogs before it, iPods make content delivery easier, another development in DIY (do-it-yourself) culture, leveling the cultural playing field and offering niche-creators access to a broader audience than they might have otherwise had.

This freedom — to enjoy your personal music library and digital files when, where, and how you like — is the crux of Levy’s examination of the ideas of culture and the iPod. 

The Perfect Thing is a compact yet broad view of the iPod’s impact on business, entertainment, and culture in about 250 pages. Levy weaves his narrative with lots of quotes and references to academic work on the subject. The book is never dry, however; Levy’s writing style is engaging and humorous (he refers to the record companies’ instruction to listeners to not download music illegally as akin to an etiquette lesson from the Green River Killer). He reports, interviews, and provides commentary in his examination of the ideas and issues surrounding widespread use of the iPod, although it is clear his book is only a measure of the iPod’s influence to date.

As popular culture continues to be distributed in an a la carte model (as witnessed by iTunes’ current offering of television series and episodes, film rentals and purchases, and audiobooks), and since acknowledgement of the iPod’s influence cannot be denied, it is anybody’s guess how future generations will view the iPod.

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Commentary

Buenos Aires

Best of In The Fray 2008. Throughout its roller-coaster history, Argentina has counted on one constant: tango.


His rancid odor, of midnight smoke soaked in days-old liquor, broods around me. Somehow, intense smells at either end of the spectrum incite the same reaction. Heavy cologne. Sewer water. It’s the same. The man dangles a bottle in his trembling, muddy hands, and tumbles toward me. And his beard — his beard is the bearer of many wandering nights, like this one. I prepare to sidestep him as he approaches me, but the zigzagging couples shish-shinging their feet on an improvised dance floor detour his path.

“El tango te llama,” he growls as the swarm of tightly embracing dancers swallows him. The tango calls you. This tango, in Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo, Buenos Aires, nestled under the sweet daze of dim lights, is carried on the bandoneón’s (a free-reed instrument) cry through the whistling tree leaves, transpiring in the streets where Argentina recovers seven years after its gravest economic crisis.

Maybe it’s the fetor. Maybe it’s a drunkard’s aphorism. Maybe it’s the distorted lament pouring out of an old record player or the newness of my milonga (tango gathering) journey’s first stop, but here under the muted Buenos Aires sky, I feel close to the heart of tango, which perhaps beats more intensely after a testing ordeal. This tango is mortal, with flesh and sweat and stench, too human for the imagination — at least for my glamorous fantasy.

“Tango is a one-way journey,” Romina Lenci cautioned me before my trip. “You don’t come back.” Romina has surrendered to that fate; she has danced tango for more than a decade, and she sees no return. But that just emboldened me. I guess I’m just as intoxicated with the possibilities of tango — with the romanticism of surrendering to a stranger, with the relief of not knowing where I’m going and not caring — as any other rookie. But I have another morbid yearning: I want to confirm the doomed Argentine cycle, epitomized in the back-and-forth, twisting steps of tango. Tango, after all, is the well where Argentine thinkers and corner drunkards look for la argentinidad, the country’s identity. I wonder how, through all the nation’s upheavals, Argentina’s signature music and dance resonate in its people.

I throw a furtive look at Guillermo Segura, who, in utter contrast with the drunkard, stands stoically beside me, his tall, clean-cut silhouette squeezing through the mountains of shadows that stand shoulder to shoulder on the dusty wooden dance floor. Languid feet fly like birds over the peaks and valleys. Guillermo, eyes half-closed, remains silent, but occasionally blurts out little snippets about tango, about his life.

He started dancing tango after he separated from his partner.

He despises the old-fashioned tango rituals.

He’s just waiting for Argentina’s next crisis — economic or political.

A crisis every 10 years

Tonight, nothing seems to surprise Guillermo. Not this decaying lushness, not all the hype about his country’s miraculous recovery. In early 2002, the value of the peso dropped 75 percent. Five presidents took office in 10 days. Half the country fell below the poverty line. Five years later — an outstanding amount of time to come out of the mess that was Argentina — the new president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, seems to continue Argentina’s new chapter, which was started with her husband, Néstor Kirchner. But even this new chapter is tainted by doubt (reports about misleading inflation numbers emerge) and pessimism (economic gains still haven’t solved pivotal social issues).

And to that, Guillermo seems to stand unfazed; he submerges himself in tango and waits for the next low. “Every 10 years there’s a crisis,” he says. It’s a learned line that almost every Argentine disguises as a self-sabotaging joke. “It’s mathematical,” he grins as he counts in his head — just a couple more years. I wonder if he could smell the storm coming: In March, Argentina’s farmers went on strike — four months into the new president’s term — leaving Argentina’s stores and pantries empty.

To survive their tribulation, many Argentines are pinning their hopes on tourism to bring the country’s economy back to health. Tourism, an industry that boomed after the recession, is Argentina’s third source of revenue, bringing in more than $4 billion dollars in 2007. And in times of crisis, improvisation — as always — came in handy; the tango scene was reinvigorated with an increasing number of lessons and clubs. From three-figure tango packages at the Buenos Aires Hilton, to shows in La Ventana and Madero Tango, to low-key, low-budget classes in hostels such as Sandanzas, tango is the well Argentina is drawing from for its selling essence as well.

Its people, however, can’t help but cloud those hopeful signs with skepticism.

Here, in the half-lit Plaza Dorrego, in a culture of muffled extremes and controlled debauchery, nothing appears to have changed, yet everything has happened. Signs of the nation’s revival are clear though fragile, as they lie alongside the scars: graffiti decrying corruption and calling for presidents to step down scratch historic buildings; a beautiful boy huddling in a corner, eyes shut, lost.

Avenida Corrientes: a twilight zone

Having seen enough, Guillermo tries to figure out our way out of the labyrinthine cobblestone streets of the tango barrio (neighborhood).

“San Telmo disconcerts me,” he mutters as we dodge the cracks on the impossibly narrow sidewalks. We move swiftly, breathe in the spring’s silvery air, leave block after block behind us, cross over spilled garbage, pass the tumultuous Plaza de Mayo, where pigeons flock during the afternoon. Their flight, a mirage of lazy days, deflates the brewing intensity of innumerable protests. Then, the ever-expanding Avenida Corrientes, that decadent boulevard that harbors the porteño* sensibility and broods tango, unfolds before us.

It is around 10 o’clock; the streets are waking up for the famous Buenos Aires nightlife. There is no better stage than Corrientes to showcase its contradictions: the glitzy theater plays and hectic nocturnal revelry amid the constant rummaging of cartoneros (collectors of cartons) among the garbage. How true that old tango song, “Tristezas de la calle Corrientes,” sounds now:

¡Qué triste palidez tienen tus luces!
¡Tus letreros sueñan cruces!
¡Tus afiches carcajadas de cartón!

What sad paleness your lights bear!
Your billboards dream of crosses!
Your posters are cardboard laughter!

It’s like a twilight zone, la argetinidad and the blinding lights in an unusually deserted Corrientes. The street widens, and on its concrete horizon rests the translucent Obelisco, defiantly piercing the blue night. Guillermo is warming up to me now and is more talkative. So I ask this question, which I figure these days is as normal as asking how someone is: “How did you survive the crisis?

With a nonchalant tone, he said he was OK.

A physicist at an oil company. OK.

Did he want to leave, like the 300,000 who fled the recession?

“I like having a place to belong to.”

Buenos Aires is his home. And that’s that.

Tango: resignation and rebellion

We leave Corrientes and descend into the dim grotto of the subte, the metro. Our next milonga is several stations away. Encased in this metallic worm, blank stares and lifeless expressions seem to fade in the fluorescent daze as time creeps by with each lulling revolution. A slender Asian girl sits across from us, her black-tight legs crossed, her hair entangled in a bun, and in her lap, a tango-shoes bag. I can’t wait to get out.

As the train makes a stumping stop, Guillermo points out that just a few blocks away are the villas miseria (slums), which ironically are what the most luxurious buildings look out over. After the crisis, many moved into shantytowns and have not come out.

He falls silent, again.

I wonder if Guillermo’s deadpan expression and sporadic blasts of laughter are a disguise for that ingrained melancholy so well known in tango, an amalgam of resignation and rebellion to a condemned cycle: 1966 — rise of military dictatorship; 1976 — dirty war; 1989 — economy melts down; 2002 — half the population falls below the poverty line after years of illusory bonanza.

“Every 10 years there’s a crisis,” I remind myself; I’ve heard it so many times.

That roller coaster of a history resembles the ocho (figure eight) that milongueros (tango dancers) draw on the dance floor. With each dip it confirms what writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada once said: “[Tango is] the dance of pessimism … the dance of the monotonous great valleys, of an overwhelmed race who, enslaved, walk these valleys endlessly, aimlessly, in the eternity of its present that repeats itself. The melancholy comes from that repetition.”

La Glorieta: scene of contradictions

Ten blocks and a subte ride later, we arrive at La Glorieta, a pavilion in Barrancas de Belgrano, one of the well-off parts of town. La Glorieta is a milonga hot spot during summer and spring. On this late October night, it’s packed. A nerdy-looking guy twirls his partner, the girl from the metro, counterclockwise. She does the caminado (walking) with her eyes closed and the side of her head glued to her partner’s.

I look around. It’s fair ground: all ages, nationalities, and skill levels. Amateurs, who stay in the middle, to veteran tangueros, who loop the outskirts of the round pavilion — and all with baggage, with something they need to forget.

“The milonga is a place that gathers very special people, lonely people, whose heads are a quilombo [mess],” says Romina, whose ancestors have danced tango for as far as she can remember. “Some people go to therapy, others go to milongas.”

In the months after the latest crisis, Romina noticed differences in the milonga scene: some perfunctory, some profound. To dance, people didn’t fix up as nicely as before. But they would go to the milonga after a cacerolazo, where, banging pots and pans, they would protest against the government.

La Glorieta is getting crowded. I huddle in a corner, still insecure of my tango skills and still rusty with the do-you-want-to-dance rituals. Guillermo has already done a few rounds. From one end, he spots me, and with an energy I haven’t seen before, he walks toward me grinning and introduces me to Regina Alleman. Poised as a delicate tulip, Regina talks with that Argentine cadence and glides her slim frame in the arms of a milonguero. I think Regina is porteña* until she says she moved here from Switzerland two years ago, following the call of tango.

It was the paradigm that attracted her. “The city, like tango, has this contradiction: joy and sadness, people that are open and people who are mistrustful [living in the same place and time].” Though she arrived three years after the economic meltdown, Regina can still perceive the fear in people. “However, [the crisis] did yield something positive: People live in the moment.”

In this moment, beads of sweat glide down foreheads, heels and sneakers mingle in a poetry of movement. It’s been almost an hour since I arrived at La Glorieta, and the crowd is overflowing. The music — a mix of old and new tango — fills the plaza: Los Reyes del Tango, Juan D’Arienzo, Orquesta Fernández Fierro, Osvaldo Pugliese, and an occasional batch of salsa, rock, or swing between rounds of tango.

My eyes sweep through the swarm of milongueros, and suddenly they meet with the stare of a woman leaning on the fence. Señora Ramona, a 50-something porteña who lives nearby, frequents La Glorieta, but not as often as before, she tells me. She fears for her safety; the streets of Buenos Aires have roughened up. I ask for her last name. She declines. And then she hugs me, tells me to take care, and walks away. I grin as I begin to savor the charm of tango’s contradiction.

“Yo soy el tango de ayer…” I’m the tango of yesteryear, an old man sings.

The last note dies away, but lingers in memory. The crowd spreads to all directions, and I reunite with Guillermo at the foot of the stairs where a line of girls are taking off their heels and changing into tennis shoes. Sandra, a petit brunette with a quick smile, packs up her tango shoes and pulls out a map from her bag. We join her and agree to go to Porteño y Bailarín, in Riobamba.

The night is young.

A sad thought danced

On the meandering route 29 bus, our newly formed trio navigates the clogged veins of a proud, bruised Buenos Aires, the city of Jorge Luis Borges, of “the uncertain yesterday and different today,” the home of 11 million souls. A bump, a turn, a stop. I begin to feel Buenos Aires’ beat. Through the fingerprint-stained window, I see patches of light and darkness; European-style buildings and unassuming houses; shadows swallowed by the light of a night lived as day.

Porteño y Bailarín bears a more formal demeanor than La Glorieta. Guillermo is not fond of this smoky place: He doesn’t like the old rituals, like the cabeceo (when a man asks a woman to dance with a head movement), that are still practiced in traditional milongas, and the two dance floors — one for veterans (all dressed in dark attires, sitting stoically at minimalist tables) and another for the younger, rookie crowd, squeezed in the back.

Sweet cologne, aired wine, used air. We make our way through the hall. I’m smelling smelled odors; I’m seeing seen scenes. A few heads turn, murmurs tickle our ears as we scurry among tables. I’m walking walked paths, of immigrants, of prostitutes, of taxi drivers, of pathologists, of seized memories. In the back, we find a spot. Is this la argentinidad? Squeezed between social lines, among the cracks of a tired valley, walked over time and again? Reinventing, reducing, resuming the journey to a known end?

Extremes, in the end, meet at the same place.

“Do you tango?” a man asks me from his corner, skipping the cabeceo ritual, breaking conventions.

“No,” I say from my end. I’m tired. I’m afraid. I’m not ready to plunge into the endless walk of tango. Not tonight.

But Guillermo, despite his reservations about the place, lunges into a tango with Sandra. It’s better to dance than to stand still.

“Tango is a sad thought you dance,” Enrique Santos Discépolo once said. The venerated tango lyricist’s simple definition is in each step Guillermo propels and Sandra anchors — two shadows merged in their solitude, furling, breaking the monotony of the green walls that shelter their ephemeral escape from reality.

I silently count the number of years to the next crisis. Five or four. That omen invariably hangs over every Argentine’s head. But this night is old and tango is alive in Buenos Aires.

Guillermo walks me to a corner and helps me grab a cab back to my hostel. We promise to see each other the next day; we’d never fulfill it. I hop in the taxi. The city shines through the cab’s window. The humid streets emanate a heavy, fishy mist, and once in a while I’d see dead pigeons on the sidewalks.

* Porteño/portena refer to an inhabitant native to Buenos Aires.

 

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Fiction & Poetry

The end of the song

I was sly to tie him; I was strong to hide him ...


The men from Dono’s clan, broad-shouldered and surly, squashed the words between their teeth, and the mere hissing sound left others guessing what had to be obeyed. But they all obeyed Dono. His wish was law. Everyone was shattered under it. At the age of 25, he became the chieftain of the carters of the whole district, and made it clear that he would not endure dissension or disturbance. Dono gathered all his men and, watched by hundreds of eyes, broke the former chieftain’s right hand. The thieves who terrorized the caravans of carts in the Slavic gorge near Sofia were scared out of their wits; a day later, Dono set fire to their homes.
   
One of the thieves, thin and tall like a lamp post and nicknamed Hunchback, became Dono’s groom. The man’s back was crooked; his shoulders were bony and drooping. Hunchback was Dono’s servant and had sufficient nerve to stare at his patron’s face, flooding it with hatred of his black, glowing eyes. Dono found perverse pleasure in egging on Hunchback’s venom; it bespoke weakness, so apparent and tangible, that it had driven Hunchback’s eyes deep into his skull; a thick and lasting impotence that the chieftain could play with.

Woe to Hunchback if Lisso, Dono’s horse, did not jump when the patron caught sunbeams in a mirror and sent them to the shining back of the stallion. Woe to the servant if a single hair of the horse’s tail was entangled with another. Dono knew that his servant’s name was Boris, but never called him by it. “Hunchback!” he shouted, and while the long scraggly man shuffled his bones to answer the call, the chieftain beat the heel of his shoe with a thin willow branch. Black would turn the day for Hunchback if the branch hit the heel of the shoe more than three times.
   
For the past two months, Boris had taken care of Vecka, the chieftain’s wife. She couldn’t stand on her feet. All women from Dono’s clan became ugly a year or two after their weddings. They turned into speechless brooms; canvas sacks from which the young carters elbowed their way into the world. Dono had chosen motherless Vecka on purpose, so that no one would ask after her. For who, Dono thought, would care anything about one snotty brat among 11 others? Her father? Not likely. The old pouch would kiss his feet if the chieftain threw him a coin.
   
Dono did not need a wife’s love; he had squandered passion and jealousy on numerous beauties in Sofia, and got tired of it. He did not need a wife for his bed; the carters’ chieftain could have the best girl in the district. Yet Dono wanted a wife for his house — to make the windows shine and to remove every speck of dust from the floor. He wanted a son from her. He wanted her hands to sweep his stables and her eyes to smile at his guests. He had no relish for talking with her. His wife had to resemble the thieves from the Slavic gorge at whom he took shots with his gun; eight feet away from them he stood, aiming at the forehead. Then Dono could feel his power, which was enormous and straight, like a road without an end.
     
He could never feel that way when Vecka was near him. Coming back home every day, her voice rolled over him: “I was sly to tie him; I was strong to hide him …” It didn’t sound like a song; it did not utter words like a human voice. Not a song, but a tremendous roaring whirlwind threshed through his yard, dashed down the hill, tearing away the roofs of his cousins’ houses, jarring upon his ears, setting his thoughts on fire. He wriggled like a worm with shame. Shame! She made him ashamed! He, Dono, the boss, before whom all carters knelt dumb and tractable! The chieftain, whose word was stronger than the law, the man who possessed more power than the mayor, was made into a fool and a laughingstock. His father had bequeathed all the land of the family to Dono, though he was the youngest of the five brothers. Vecka, his wife … At the very sound of her name he seethed with anger. Year in, year out, she gave birth to girls and filled his house with female rubbish. Whenever he approached his home he could hear her shouting that goddamn song.
   
Rarely, Dono got so enraged that he beat her with his belt. At such moments he tried to imagine her shrieks flooding the quiet houses of his native hamlet and all his cousins would be convinced that he wore the trousers, not Vecka. She thrust her apron in her mouth to stifle the sounds of pain, so he tore up the apron. She then bit the hems of her skirt; he tore up the skirt as well. She learned to bite her fists. Dono could not make her scream. It was the swishing of the belt and Hunchback’s bent figure by the door that gave the sign to the villagers that Dono was teaching his wife to respect silence. And always when the swishing ceased, broken and smashed, as slowly as an ant, a song clambered through the window: “I was sly to tie him; I was strong to hide him …” Then Hunchback’s shallow eyes burned.

Dono didn’t strike his wife beyond a certain point, for he did not wish to waste his youth in jail. When he went out, the noise of his steps still echoing in the lane, his four daughters quietly crooned “I was sly to tie him …,” their voices twisted into a rope that knotted the whole house. At such times, Dono did not feel like lingering at home. He caught sunbeams in a mirror and sent them to the back of the horse, then master and stallion vanished down the road to the pub. Hunchback stood motionless at the door.
   
Once, as Vecka’s stifled sobs made the house split with pain, the servant approached her and offered her some wet rags. He was ashamed to watch how the woman put them on her bruised shoulders. He had seen only her naked arm. It did not look like an arm of a woman; its skin resembled a dry stick with a peeled bark. Yet his shallow eyes saw it otherwise; they swept away the scars, and Vecka’s hand appeared tender and white: the fingers that gave him lunch every day swam before Hunchback, enveloping him with fragrance and peace. Every single patch of land where the woman had stepped seemed to whisper her name.
   
Dono’s mother was never young. When his father got on for 50, he imagined he was no good as a carter anymore and sold his horses. But instead of buying a chandler’s shop as he had hinted earlier, the old goat took a young girl and disappeared. It was rumored that the couple escaped to Greece, and when Dono’s father came back dragging the girl after him and looking boldly at people who lowered their eyes, Dono thought he would kill him. His mother died shortly after that, and Dono could not learn the end of the tale she had begun telling him in his childhood, the only tale he had ever heard.
   
The chieftain detested his memories because every time he let them flood back, he compared Vecka to his mother. Well, his mother was never beaten; she was a drooping heap of decay by the fireplace, and the only sound that compelled her to stir and move about uneasily was the delicate tap-tap of his father’s fingers on the table. “I was sly to tie him; I was strong to hide him …” Was it so? Against his own will, Dono sometimes crooned that song. Vecka’s voice was stronger than his hatred. He never listened further, for that would mean he was an inferior man.
   
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Vecka cut Lisso’s tail. The horse’s tail that no money could buy! That horse was the only living thing Dono had ever prayed for in his life; Lisso was his friend, the only being that could understand him. The stallion knew everything: Dono’s disgrace in having no son; his panic that some day his chieftain’s hand would not hold firm, and a pert youngster would come and break it, as Dono himself had done to the former chieftain. And his vixen wife had stunted his best friend; the horse with a velvety hide and deep brown eyes that spoke to Dono’s soul, “You are not only a master to me. You are my road, my water, my life. No foul money stands between us. No lies.”
        
Vecka had cut Lisso’s tail! She had destroyed that wild silver whirlwind. No, Dono would never forgive her.
   
How could his father order around his mother, the old grey woman, forcing her to work and toil until every single saucer and piece of furniture shone? When the house was clean, she would squat in the corner, mute and unnecessary like a pair of old shoes. Dono was richer than his father, 10 times richer. So why didn’t the carter break the brown porcelain cup from which his wife drank milk in the morning? Why, Lisso?
   
He’d show her!

The moment before the iron clasp of the belt hit Vecka’s grey dress, someone clutched at Dono’s throat. “I cut the tail!” Hunchback, the servant, was looking at him with his shallow wild eyes.

“You?” the carter hissed back, “You?”

“I cut it.” said the hunchback.

“No!” Vecka shouted. “I did it.”

“Who cut Lisso’s tail!” Dono demanded.

“I!”

“I!”

The voices of his wife and Hunchback roared out together. Dono could hear nothing more. His four daughters were looking through the window like four drab mice. Dono didn’t care. He could hear Hunchback’s husky voice singing: “I was sly to tie him, I was strong to …”

“Stop, please, Boris, stop!” his wife shouted.    What? What did she call him? Boris? That hunchback! That wretch! Boris!

Vecka began singing again. The bitch. The bitch! Her grey dress. Her loathsome dress. Hit it! Trample on it!

Don’t sing any more, eh? What about you, little Boris? You rag!
   
When Dono approached the pub, he imagined he could hear their voices twisted into a knot: “I was sly to tie him …” The song pressed down on him, his breath rasped on his lips. The carter let his horse go and lay down on the yellow grass in the sunburnt field. The hot noon sky reeled and touched the earth that was scorching in the late yellow summer.

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Interviews

Sex in Pakistan

Best of In The Fray 2008. A new magazine is breaking down local taboos and entering the global feminist fray.


Kyla Pasha and Sarah Suhail have stirred up the blogosphere with the launch of Chay magazine — a publication about sex in Pakistani society, from a feminist and gender-inclusive perspective. “We at Chay magazine endeavor to bring to the Pakistani reading public a place to converse about those things we are most shy of,” reads the magazine’s mission statement. ITF chatted with Pasha about taboos, international feminism, and the reclaiming of pejorative words (“chay” is a polite euphemism for “chootia,” an equivalent to “cunt”).

Interviewer: Sarah Seltzer
Interviewee: Kyla Pasha

Tell me a little bit about the personal journey or set of beliefs that led you to found Chay. Has this been something you’ve wanted to do for a while?

Not as such. I’ve always wanted to have a magazine or a writing concern of some kind. I met Sarah Suhail about a year ago, and in the time that we’ve known each other, a lot of things have happened in Pakistan: there’s conflict around the sacking of the judiciary last year by the president; there have been media freedom issues and protests; the marriage between a transgender man and a woman was dissolved and reviled in the press.

Sarah introduced me to the protest circuit, and I found myself getting a little more politically active than I’d originally planned. A couple of months ago, we were having a conversation about what we thought was missing from public discourse. We came up with Chay.

How do you envision a magazine like this can change the public discourse in Pakistani communities? Does it come down to the fact that for women worldwide, the “personal is political”?

“Personal is political” informs a great deal of our approach here. We’re both products of feminist education in one way or another. But more than that, we realized when the Shamail and Shahzina case happened [the transgender man and his wife who were imprisoned] that Pakistani don’t have a way in which to talk about sex that is not derogatory, abusive, or silencing. Far from sex ed [sex education] in school or even the home, straight, young people aren’t even comfortable talking about being in relationships.

The perils of that kind of silence are great. We’re hoping that Chay will provide a platform on which people can talk about their experiences and concerns, and listen in to what others are saying.

Do you worry about being pigeonholed as either a fluffy women’s magazine or alternately, a radical feminist magazine?

We anticipate being pigeonholed as something sinful.

But you feel the power of your collective voices can help break down some of these notions of sin and taboo?

Can help, yes. “Help break down” is sort of the key here. It’s an uphill battle at best, and we’re aware of the unpopularity of the idea — we have been made aware by folks writing in and by conversations on other sites discussing Chay. Mostly, we’d just like to have the conversation.

Can you elaborate on some of the positive and negative responses you’ve been getting so far?

We’ve received a lot of encouraging responses from people who are interested in writing for us. They call it “a breath of fresh air” and just what was needed, which is very gratifying. We’re particularly hearing from queer women and some queer men on how much they’re looking forward to the forum.

We’ve had negative responses on the title of the magazine. The letter “chay” in Urdu stands for a curse word, chootia, which means something close to “dumb ass,” but by calling it “cunty.” “Chay” is used as a euphemism among polite folk who don’t want to say the whole word, but mean it. We’re reclaiming “chay” to mean all the things that we’re supposedly not allowed to say. The negative feedback in one particular case was that we’re not reclaiming it successfully and are being derogatory toward women.

In your mission statement, you note that while the magazine is primarily aimed at the Pakistani community, the online aspect will help bring you into the global feminist conversation as well.

That’s the idea. We’ve been researching major feminist blogs as well as sexual and queer rights issues in our neighboring countries. India is particularly interesting in that regard, and we’ve had some contributions from there already.

As you research global feminism, does it frustrate you to continually see ignorant western journalists throw up their hands and moan about “where are the Muslim feminists?”

Firstly, if I got frustrated by ignorance in the media, of anywhere, I’d have died of [an] aneurism by now. Secondly, for me, the conversation is not really with people who can’t see past the end of their noses.

There are lot of people who say “Where are the Muslim feminists?” who haven’t looked very hard. And there are a lot of people for whom feminism does not include veiling yourself voluntarily or taking your clothes off for Playboy if you want to, or exercising your choice and agency in other ways. If I start a conversation, invite everybody, and 10 people don’t come because they think I’m not feminist enough, or Muslim enough, or straight enough, or gay enough, then they missed out.

For us, this is about conversations in Pakistan. Other people can talk about us as objects if they want, but it’s of limited relevance. I’d rather they talked to us. But, you know …

What about western feminists, who can also be ignorant about global feminism? Do you hope that Chay can be part of a new movement to make the face of feminism more inclusive and worldwide?

The idea of inclusivity to me is a bit false. It suggests that I, as a Pakistani Muslim Feminist — which is not an identity I carry around all time, but just for the example — would like a seat at some bigger United Nations of Feminism table.

There’s a table right here. There’s a lot of us already sitting at it. Moreover, there are a bunch of other tables. And people wander from conversation to conversation. That’s my ideal. There is, out there, a certain capital “F” feminism that has achieved that status because it’s white-skinned and “mainstream” US. But it has that status from a particular privilege. It does not reflect everyone’s reality.

Are you planning to be an online-only magazine, or are you going to have print issues as well?

For now, we’re online-only. We’ll see if there’s a market for print in due course and maybe go into print as well.

You have a poetic and artistic background as well as a literary journalistic one, right? You’re going to be publishing creative work as well as journalism?

Yeah, I’m a poet myself. And we’re open to fiction, nonfiction, poetry — all kinds of work. Creative expression is cathartic and part of political work, so we didn’t want to just do journalism and commentary.

Can you elaborate on how you think creative expression can help achieve political ends? Are there any examples of creative work that have inspired you politically, or political moments that have inspired you as a poet?

Visual art in the Pakistan in and since the ’80s has been extremely political and feminist. It responded to the brutal dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq, who promulgated many misogynist and bigoted laws in the name of Islam. Many artists, mostly women, responded in their work, and it has served as one of the major avenues of empowerment and feminist expression in Pakistan.

So you’re working within an established tradition?

Absolutely. That tradition has not touched on sexuality in quite the way we would like, but we are in no way reinventing the wheel here. We’re taking our cue from our parents’ generation.

Are there any articles in the first issue that you’re particularly excited about?

There’s an article about homoeroticism and masculinity in the public spaces of Lahore that I’m excited about. There’s some great poetry and artwork. And there’s an article in the pipeline about sex work and HIV [the AIDS virus]. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m totally psyched.

Do you think it’s difficult for people to see a magazine about sex as informative rather than titillating?

I think it might be. It’s definitely a danger. But I’m confident that we’ll clear the bar with room to spare. Again, if someone looks at it, sees that we’re talking about sexual rights and marginalization, education, and the law, and still feels we’re here to titillate, then we’re not sitting at the same table. That’s fine, so long as no one throws stuff at us over it.

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personal stories. global issues.