The Republic of Dissent

L’Empreinte des Choses Brisées

I have a good reason not to have blogged for the last few days: my first book got published in France last week. Its title is L’Empreinte des Choses Brisées (roughly translated the imprint of broken things). It's a novel, which resembles me, but which isn't about me. It's about identity, culture, culturalism, gender, magic, and love.

I'm amazed that my first published book is in French, but I'm also excited and incredibly proud for French is not only my language, but the language.

My book is available on Amazon.fr , Chapitre.com and FNAC. I don't know if it will be translated in English. My only hope right now is that it finds an audience!

I'm a published author (a published author on vacation)!!!!!!! That is what matters the most to me including the fact that I have had the luck to have my favorite character come to life, but that's another story.

14 Juillet

It's Bastille Day ! Today, it is just a good excuse to shut my yap, relax and enjoy my free time.

The romantic Mannschaft

Alexander Osang on the Mannschaft, German football team at the South African World Cup and why its players were the ambassadors of a new Germany:

There was something soothing and liberating about watching this team play, and it was even more soothing and liberating to see the expressions of joy on the players' faces. They embraced each other when Klose, who had been out of form all season at Bayern Munich, finally scored a goal again in the first World Cup match, and the team hugged him as if he had just recovered from a long, serious illness. Klose later said that Podolski wouldn't let him go -- and that it was a nice feeling. They all seemed like boys having a fantastic time on a school outing. Löw thanked the players he substituted, and they thanked him, an act that was not a gesture but an expression of need. Everyone trusted everyone else. The most German of feelings that this team triggered was romanticism.

Having read and listened everything that was written and said about les Bleus, French football team and its South African debacle, I have realized that it is always easy to made footballers representatives/scapegoat of their country's successes or its ills because it is easy and because in both cases, the analogy and the analysis are convenient and so pleasurable for the ones making it weather their intent is to praise or to criticize violently and too often unfairly.

To come back to the Mannschaft, it is undoubtedly that its image is new and young, but I wonder whether that visible change is indicative of lasting and profound social transformations within Germany, in other words, if the Mannschaft different because Germany is different or just because it had to change and to adapt to the realities of football to remain the Mannshaft, that is a consistently good national football team.

Happy without an exclamation point

The dreadful world Cup (I'm complaining here about the quality of the matches not anything else) ended with a positive outcome after the worst final I ever watched. In any case, fifty years from now, the sole thing that I will remember is that Spain won and that Ghana crumbled under the intolerable pressure of something that doesn't exist: Africanity.

Obama as the Philosopher King without philosophy

I agree withl the following assessment of Obama by Peter Wehner but disagree about the effect of this assessment on the US-Israel relationship:

Obama regards himself much like a teacher who oversees a classroom of sometimes unruly, sometimes dim-witted children. His magnificence is sometimes hidden from them. And so it is left for America’s philosopher-king to explain — in simply, easy-to-understand words — why things are the way they are.

I'm still waiting for Obama to show that he is what he believes that he is that is better than the ones that came before him not just as a politician. but as a leader. I'm realizing that hope is his chosen word for the simple fact that he is convinced that what matters is identity and not much else and that therefore since he is an American with a rich history and diversified experience, having a political philosophy and an unshakable belief system, which remains steady in trouble waters does not matter.

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

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Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

Playing dumb to ignore the context

I agree with Joel Meares's assessment of the latest media controversy in the US involving Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican party, and his assertion that Afghanistan is Obama's war:

It is a case in point of something the political press does all the time: latch on to the words or phrases that are sure to provoke, and play dumb i n terms of the fuller context or the speaker’s obvious intent.

This age is one where the media and the majority love to beat people up for the littlest thing just to be able enjoy another morbid spectacle of public apologies and shaming for misspeaking or for forgetting that nowadays finesse and complexities are out of style.

Quand ça ne change pas, le hic est ailleurs

My reaction to reading this from Paul Sagar is no, you don't say!:

The claim or insinuation that campaigns for women’s rights and equality are rooted in a lack of family to cater for (“no homes”), rejection by men (“no husbands”) and infertility or barrenness (“no children”) are apparently as old as the hills yet very much alive and kicking.

Unfortunately, Sagar misses the mark by focusing on the omnipresent reality without asking the key questions about the the issues 'women's right' and feminism and what it says about them that they haven't been revolutionary or even solely effective in accomplishing their aims! To be blunt, I'm tired of the same realities being examined as if the convenient acknowledgment of their unsavoriness were enough to change it or to make one feel good for not being part, at first glance, of the problematic and everlasting statu quo. Assez de bons sentiments et un peu d'actions please!

España, mi corazón

Quick and useless thought: there is nothing as fun when you are on vacation as seeing a team that you enjoy watching get to the final game of the World Cup. I was afraid that the Germans were going to win and that the last match of this dreadful competition would thus become unwatchable. Thus, I am happy to see Spain win today because while watching its team, one still feels that soccer, football is a game that must be fun instead of battle that has to be won. I don't know if Spain is going to win Sunday, but I hope that they try to play their football instead of playing solely strategically and trying to outsmart the Netherlands instead of just outplaying them, which should be enough to win.  In short, I believe that Spain will win Sunday if it isn't afraid of losing its first World Cup final by letting itself believe that it can't win with its football.

Colored and different realities

Worrisome:

For most of George W. Bush's two terms, a majority of Republicans thought America's economy was in good or excellent shape. Less than one-quarter of Democrats agreed. Today Hispanics and blacks are more optimistic than whites, and Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans, even though Democrats have lower income and have suffered more job-related losses.

Isn't Postracial Obama's America awesome !!

Sick of seeing grown men cry

 Gideon Rachman who was in South Africa for the World Cup on how pathetic it is to seen grown men cry over a game:

I am sick of seeing grown men cry. Asamoah Gyan of Ghana was in floods, after missing that crucial penalty against Uruguay. Last night, it was Cardozo of Paraguay who missed a vital spot-kick and then left the field, blubbing. Really chaps - it’s only a game.

My take on the whole thing is that football has stopped being a game long ago to become the last 'hope' or rather the new opiate of the masses especially in countries where politics seem to lead to a dead end and economics is about everything but merit and effort.

In awe of Nadal !

Nadal made my summer !!! That's all I have to say.

Satan and Soccer

The hilarious sentence of the day is from Alex Massie bashing Marc Thiessen's anti-soccerfootball and stupid tirade:

Like Satan, Sodomy and Socialism, Soccer begins with an S. Obviously, then, it's un-American and likely to corrupt these great United States.

Ghana not Africa

Ghana lost yesterday. I had predicted that the Black stars would win if they were capable of ignoring the symbolic "crap" about Ghana representing the whole African continent and some type of imaginary "Africanity." Ghana lost yesterday mostly because the pressure of representing something other than itself crushed its players. Asamoah Gyan, the poor guy who missed the penalty that would have sent his country to the semi-final, thought undoubtedly about all the fluff, about the idiotic and anti-intellectual notion that he was carrying the hopes of 'Africa' on his shoulders instead of calming himself down to remember that Ghana isn't 'Africa'  and the game against Uruguay wasn't another absurd and futile identity struggle.
Next time, because there will be a next time for Ghana, its players should just think of themselves, their country, and ignore the burden of a nonexistent common identity and of a idealized history. Ghana isn't 'Africa' and remembering it can only be productive for it is a liberating reality.

Before or after whatever

Scenery: It's hot, humid, and quiet, but this calme trompeur will not last for it is less than an hour from the game between Ghana and Uruguay... It's amazing to see how all-encompassing sports can be when it becomes about something other than fun, but about identity. I'm sports fanatic, but I wouldn't die for it. In any case, I'm not watching the game for I'm going to bed. I watched too much tennis (Nadal  won!!!) and Brazil lost, which made my day. Besides I know the outcome of the game already: Ghana is going to win. The Black stars will win because they are the better team and because the only thing that can stop them is all the fluff and the burdensome symbolic noise, which may paralyze them and make them believe that they are fighting for something bigger and that football is an identity struggle which can repair injustices or rather fix a country's and  a continent's ills. Thus, Ghana will win if the Black Stars make the temperate choice to play just football and to ignore the chatter about its meaning.

Eternal damnation

Sugary excerpt of the day from Carole Enahoro:

If you write political fiction then you must expect complete strangers to grill you on any subject that crosses the collective transom. And if you’re carrying any African DNA, you’re doomed to read newspapers on a daily basis.
I noted this with the sad life of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s 1986 Nobel Prize-winning writer. His eyes are hooded with fatigue. For any incident on which every vital and important person in Nigeria has already commented, the media hurries off to Wole for a quick quote. He is the voice of progressive Africa, whether or not progressive Africans agree with him.