treball

...E quando ci domanderanno che cosa stiamo facendo,
tu potrai rispondere loro: Noi ricordiamo.
Ecco dove alla lunga avremo vinto noi.
E verrà il giorno in cui saremo in grado di ricordare
una tal quantità di cose che potremo costruire
la più grande scavatrice meccanica della storia e scavare,
in tal modo, la più grande fossa di tutti i tempi,
nella quale sotterrare la guerra.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ma noi facciamone un’altra

Postato da: treball a 25/06/2008 18:57 | link | commenti |
libri, testi, poetry, memoria, letteratura italiana, repetita iuvant, social, letterature, resistenze, unforgettable, occidente, allusioni

Parole sante

il giorno è venuto
che ricorderemo
i precari del lavoro
come alla Liberazione
con i fiori e le bandiere
i caduti della guerra
nel conflitto mondiale

Maurizio: non riconfermato
Mara: non firma la conciliazione
Alessandra: non firma la conciliazione
Christian: non firma la conciliazione
Valerio: licenziato
Cecilia: non riconfermata, con invalidità ancora non riconosciuta
Emanuela: non riconfermata
Andrea: rinuncia dopo essere finito in ospedale
Jimmy: non riconfermato
Salvatore: licenziato

Tutti gli altri: stoppati, licenziati, non riassunti

Ave ave ave ave
avevamo versato il sangue
per una Repubblica fondata sul lavoro

Lode lode lode lode
lo deve sapere il popolo che ha perso dignità e diritti
per un piatto di lenticchie

Verrà quel giorno
il giorno è venuto
che le parole
usciranno dai denti

e ricorderemo
i giorni delle barricate
come in quinta elementare
le date del Risorgimento

2005
Marzo: prima assemblea spontanea e nascita del collettivo PrecariAtesia.
Maggio: primo sciopero con adesione del 90%.
Luglio: licenziamento di 4 lavoratori
Pochi giorni dopo: presentazione dell'esposto all'ufficio provinciale del lavoro.

2006
Maggio: non riassunti 400 lavoratori.
Agosto: l'ispezione dice che i precari devono essere tutti assunti.
Autunno: articolo 178 della finanziaria e condono per le aziende.

2007
Inverno: il collettivo non accetta di firmare la conciliazione.
Tutti costretti a uscire, a rinunciare al lavoro
in estate arrivano gli avvisi di garanzia per i membri del Collettivo.

Ave ave ave ave
avevamo versato il sangue
per una Repubblica fondata sul lavoro

Lode lode lode lode
lo deve sapere il popolo che ha perso dignità e diritti
per un piatto di lenticchie

Verrà quel giorno
il giorno è venuto
che siamo stati
tutti quanti licenziati
non abbiamo mangiato
questo piatto di lenticchie
non siamo mica il Titanic
non affonderemo cantando

Parole Sante! Parole Sante! Parole Sante!

Ave ave ave ave
avevamo versato il sangue
per una Repubblica fondata sul lavoro

Lode lode lode lode
lo deve sapere il popolo che ha perso dignità e diritti
per un piatto di lenticchie

Buon 25 Aprile, comunque

Postato da: treball a 25/04/2008 15:05 | link | commenti (2) |
italia, testi, poetry, memoria, letteratura italiana, repetita iuvant, social, resistenze, unforgettable, cronache italiane

Victor Cavallo, Uno stalker a Roma

Postato da: treball a 13/03/2008 20:01 | link | commenti (22) |
italia, libri, testi, poetry, memoria, letteratura italiana, repetita iuvant, genius, unforgettable

Third Tour (Life during wartime)

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VIETNAM, 1966

by NEIL SHEEHAN
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

In early 1966, I was catching a ride on a helicopter out to a battle on the central coast of South Vietnam. Once there, I intended to hook up with an infantry battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division that was going into action. Both of the pilots were lieutenant colonels, helicopter battalion commanders in the same 1st Cav. I was sitting on the bench seat behind them, with two enlisted machine gunners on either side of me. The colonels were amusing themselves by slapping the tops of the palm trees that covered the area with the skids of the helicopter. It was dangerous play. The slightest miscalculation could send the helicopter spinning into the ground under full power and we would all die. Jesus Christ, I thought. All I want is a helicopter ride and I draw two lieutenant colonels behaving like a pair of fucking cowboys.

I remembered some advice that the great war correspondent Homer Bigart had once given me. Homer had covered every war from the Second World War to the Greek civil war, the Korean War, and sundry other conflicts, earning two Pulitzer Prizes along the way. He was in his mid-fifties by the time of Vietnam and, although fiercely competitive, he took pity on a kid reporter and let me follow him around like a puppy dog. One day in 1962, I asked him how he’d managed to stay alive through so many wars. “Take what risks you need to get the story, but don’t take any foolish ones,” he said. “Never play tourist.”

Back in November, I had nearly been killed playing reluctant tourist with a senior officer of the 1st Cavalry, a colonel who was the division engineer. It was the end of the third day of the battle of Ia Drang, the first ferocious clash between the American and the North Vietnamese Armies in the mountains of South Vietnam. I needed to get to brigade headquarters to finish up my reporting before returning to the main air base, at Pleiku, to file my story. The colonel was headed there, and I asked if I could hitch a ride on his helicopter. On the way, he decided to have a look at the effects of a B-52 strike on a suspected concentration of North Vietnamese troops. He had his pilots hover at several thousand feet while he looked at the scene below, where hundreds of bombs had splintered the massive teak and mahogany trees of the rain forest into kindling. A division engineer had no professional need to inspect a B-52 strike, and the colonel and his helicopter pilots failed to notice that the Air Force was following up with strikes by individual jet fighter-bombers, apparently trying to finish off any North Vietnamese who might still be alive.

All of a sudden, the silvered fuselage of a tactical jet flashed down in a dive beneath us. The pilot released a bomb, then pulled the jet straight up at several hundred miles an hour. The helicopter pilots shifted frantically to one side to try to get out of the way. At the last moment, the pilot of the jet saw us hanging in the air above him and swerved. He was so close as he passed that I could see his face. Playing tourist, I immediately thought, hearing Homer’s words.

Now, what to do about these cowboy lieutenant colonels playing tourist with their helicopter. A reporter does not give instructions to officers of the United States Army, let alone reprimand them for flying like maniacs. He keeps his mouth shut. He is their guest. I picked up the headphones that would put me into the helicopter’s intercom system.

“Why are you slapping the palm trees?” I asked.

“Just having fun,” one of them replied.

“How long have you gentlemen been in the country?”

“About a month.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m in my third year in Vietnam. I’ve got a twenty-seven-year-old bride back in Saigon, and I’d like to live to sleep with her again. How about leaving the palm trees alone?”

There was no response. When the next palm tree loomed, they pulled away.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact

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ANTARCTICA, 1958

by ROBERT STONE
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

In 1958, I was a duty helmsman on the bridge of the U.S.S. Arneb, an ungainly naval transport ship with the lines of a tramp steamer. The Arneb had entertained kamikazes at Okinawa, and veterans of Normandy and the South Pacific ran many of the ship’s divisions. But that quarter—spring in the northern calendar, darkening autumn in the southern ocean—we had been given a kind of pass from the alerts of the Cold War. We were, among other things, tracking electrical activity on the surface of the sun, from the far south of the Indian Ocean. On board was a team of astrophysicists, biologists, and other savants. It was the last of the Antarctic expeditions mapped out by Admiral Richard Byrd, and it was known as Operation Deep Freeze III.

One day, we were steaming on the northern edge of the ice floes at the latitude where the seasonal oscillations of the Antarctic Convergence determine the weather. I was standing the 2400-0400 watch at the helm. I liked having the wheel far out at sea. I was twenty years old. I had gone into the Navy at seventeen, skipping my last year of high school, and I was due for discharge that July. The wheel watch allowed for some daydreaming, and I was speculating on the prospect of actual adult life when the port lookout reported what he thought was another vessel. For the next fifteen minutes, we watched a long blue-black line stretch out at a slight angle of interception to our course. It seemed to extend without limit, as far as the after-horizon, where the sun was threatening to disappear.

Presently, the captain appeared on the bridge, and I handed over the wheel to the quartermaster of the watch. “Unidentified vessel,” the quartermaster declared, “proceeding west on bearing two niner zero.” Our skipper was a gloomy man, a disappointed career officer lacking any sense of what European social critics call “deep play.” But apparently the great beast on the horizon intrigued him, too. He ordered the ship to port. Splendid in his bridge coat, he raised his binoculars and studied the vessel, which was keeping speed with us at a mile’s distance. It was low in the water and was certainly proceeding west. But whatever engine powered it was mysterious to me; it seemed to throb, a distinctly unstable mass. At this distance, we could see that there were flights of predatory birds attending it, mainly the terrible buzzard gulls called skuas.

Watching the captain, on whose decisions we all depended, I suddenly suspected that he was going to give the order to fire. Not that we had much to fire with: a five-inch deck gun and a couple of anti-aircraft guns. And not that the captain was some kind of trigger-happy savage compelled to shoot at anything that could float. Still, the destroyer sailor’s impulse was, at least, to line up unidentified craft as targets.

I shared a pair of binoculars with the bridge messenger and watched the mass in front of us change shape and direction as we adjusted our course to make way for it. The longer I looked at the thing, the more awesome it seemed. In my mind, anyway, it assumed a sort of monstrousness, as if it were a living thing, huge and unrecognizable.

“Penguins,” someone said. One of our learned scientists, perhaps, who had wandered up from his stateroom. And penguins they were, Adélie penguins, the little hooded characters who waddle clownishly around their breeding colonies. For an hour, the men on the bridge of the U.S.S. Arneb watched the enormous colony of birds swim, porpoising, in long, graceful curves. Later that morning, as the sun cleared the tips of the nearest icebergs, the winds picked up, and by 0600 they were near the top of the revised Beaufort scale, Force 10 or higher. The penguins stayed with us, sharing passages between the floes. When I went below to crash, taking to my rack, which was at the top of a four-high tier, I lay down to read with my pocket flashlight. I had “Ulysses” checked out of the Norfolk, Virginia, public library, and plenty of time to be patient with it. When we started sliding to port, I’d stay with Leopold Bloom for as long as I could tough it out, waiting for the big lumbering ship to arrest its roll and come back to starboard. At times, in rough weather, it seemed as if we’d never make it back, as if we were about to slide down the whole deep six. Then I’d set my book aside and ponder my fortune. An old master-at-arms I once knew had advice for sinking sailors: “Be grateful you’re not burning.” A little gratitude would ease one’s passage, the old man thought. But the U.S.S. Arneb came back every time, popping up to ride the next forward motion. It occurred to me at one of those moments that I was happier than I had ever been before—with the penguins, the icebergs, the Beaufort scale, and the celestial nimbus clouds cruising above the wind. Happier, I suspected, than I would ever be again.
   
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact1

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NEW YORK, 1967

by ROGER ANGELL
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

By October of 1965, I could watch the opposition to the war in Vietnam forming up outside my bedroom window. Nearly a thousand American troops had already died in the faraway fighting, which looked so close on our TV screens every night, and upward of a hundred and forty thousand—drafted inner-city blacks and down-home white country boys, by the look of them—were there, without notable result. A month later, my wife, Carol, and I joined friends and strangers aboard a bus that took us in a caravan to Washington, where we became part of twenty-five thousand antiwar demonstrators outside the White House and then over on the lawns sloping up toward the Capitol, where we cheered speeches by Bella Abzug and Benjamin Spock and others, and even slipped away for a furtive cultural visit to the Smithsonian. We hated this blood-soaked war—for weeks at a stretch it seemed as if nothing else were on our minds—but the tone aboard the bus trip and during that long day’s outing was upbeat, almost lighthearted. Our companions—my old college pal Spencer Klaw (he’d been the editor of the Harvard Crimson) and his wife, Bobbie, who was Carol’s associate at American Heritage, and the Klaws’ youngest daughter, Margy—were friends we sometimes joined in November for football games in New Haven and Cambridge, and this embarrassing sense of overlap and gala middle-class smugness about our protest was something we noticed and, in our ironic self-awareness, remarked on. War protesting was more fun than Ivy League football. When our bus stopped at one of the mall-like gas stations on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was a big laugh when the women aboard (who outnumbered us men by about three to one) liberated the men’s rest room. If we sound naïve now, it would be easy to assume that the most pathetic thing about us was our notion that we might make a difference, and change things. Only we did.

Caring about Vietnam made you feel good, and it brought you closer to your kids, as well. My older daughter, Callie, was a student at Goucher College, outside Baltimore, just then, and she came along on another weekend, when we joined a crowd of picketers walking slowly around the White House and chanting, “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids have you killed today?” We’d voted for Johnson, of course, and had been big fans of his, going back to his time as Senate Majority Leader, but all that was gone now. At some point that day, our slovenly bunch came close to a trail of sightseers, docilely lined up to visit the White House, and Callie suddenly found herself face to face with a long bygone schoolmate.

“Callie, what are you doing here?” the young woman cried.

“No, what are you doing there?” Callie said.

As was happening in many multigenerational families just then, I believe, Callie became our delegate at the spilling-over and increasingly bitter demonstrations. She was there in October of 1967, when the Yippies attempted to levitate the Pentagon, and she told us that night that she’d seen men in the first row of marchers placing flowers inside the barrels of the fixed-bayonet rifles presented by the front row of scared M.P.s. Another time, she joined a line of candle-bearing demonstrators walking slowly around the outskirts of Washington, each with the name of a dead G.I.—dead in Vietnam—hung around his or her neck.

Back to that window. Our apartment was a cheerful third-floor walkup in a brownstone between Fifth and Madison Avenues, on Ninety-fourth Street—a quiet block that unexpectedly became one of the forming-up side streets for marchers heading down Fifth. On the morning of the great ten-thousand-strong parade, Carol and I had a front-row perch looking down at the jammed-together, button- and ribbon-bearing citizenry below. Somewhere a band was playing “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” the Country Joe and the Fish classic everybody knew by heart. The gigantic skulls and caricatures of the Bread and Puppet Theatre tottered and swayed at the top of the block, and we waited while the various group banners—S.D.S. and others—went slowly past, until our own bunch, Veterans for Peace (I was a veteran), came along and we went downstairs and out into the sunshine and marched away, too.

Two weeks later, there was a counter-demonstration, this one in support of the troops in Vietnam, and when I looked out our window the street was full of cops and firemen and union guys, all waving American flags. I found an old shirt cardboard and wrote “STOP THE BOMBING!” on it with a red felt-tip pen, and stuck it up on the window, and at first did not connect this mild message with some deeper new sounds that now came from outside and rose to a roar. A beer can banged off our windowpane in a sudden splatter, and when I looked outside I found a mass of angry, congested faces and brandished fists, all aimed at me. More beer cans were launched, some of them unopened, and some eggs as well. Our landlady, Mrs. Giurgiu, rang our bell and came in, waving her arms. “My God,” she said. “What have you done? Whatever it is, stop.”

I took down the sign but shot a finger at the triumphant crowd, to more shouts and curses. My face was a mirror of theirs by now: the American look. The war had come home.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact2

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YUGOSLAVIA, 1991

by ALEKSANDAR HEMON
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

In February, 1991, I got an editorial job with the magazine Naši Dani (Our Days), and instantly left my parents’ house, where I had, embarrassingly, lived until the age of twenty-seven. I rented a place in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Kovaci with Davor and Pedja, two friends who also worked for Naši Dani. Our previous experience was in radio, so we had to learn quickly how to bring a jolt of immediacy to a biweekly magazine. Alas, we soon had a chance: one of our first issues was devoted largely to the demonstrations in Belgrade, which Slobodan Milosevic crushed with tanks. It was the first blood spilled by the Yugoslav People’s Army, and we knew that the flow would not stop there. By spring, the war in Croatia was well on its way. We received reports of atrocities; we published photos of decapitated corpses, and an interview with a Serbian militia leader, now awaiting trial in The Hague, who once promised to gouge out Croatian eyes with rusty spoons—as though regular spoons were not bad enough. At first, such horrors could be treated as exceptions to the rules by which we lived our lives, particularly since the Yugoslav-Serbian and Croatian authorities kept promising that everything would return to normal. But we soon began reporting on Army trucks transporting arms (their cargo officially registered as “bananas”) to the parts of Bosnia where Serbs were the majority. We covered parliament sessions and attended press conferences at which Radovan Karadzic and his henchmen made not so veiled threats. Everyone but us was preparing for an all-out war.

The more we knew, the less we wanted to know. Convinced that we were merely trying to live our lives normally, we embarked on a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion. We danced a lot. We dropped enormous amounts of money into slot machines, which were rigged so as to preclude even a statistical possibility of our winning. One of my favorite methods of denial was to get stoned and watch Vincente Minnelli’s “Gigi,” often bellowing along (“Gigi, am I a fool without a mind or have I really been too blind”). Pedja and I got drunk and crooned along with Dean Martin, one of the great practitioners of international hedonism. We spent one splendid spring Saturday in our garden, devouring spit-roasted lamb and smoking superb hashish, until we were so high we would have floated away like balloons had we not been ballasted with the meat.

And then there was rampant, ecstatic promiscuity. The whole institution of dating seemed indefinitely suspended; it was no longer necessary to go out before hopping into bed. A few exchanged glances were sufficient to arrange intercourse. Indeed, there was no need for a bed: hallways, park benches, the back seats of cars, bathtubs, and floors were just fine. There was no time for relationships on our Titanic. Those days of disaster euphoria were a great fucking time, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

By late May, however, it had become difficult to maintain this state of hysterical oblivion. A dealer we’d used as a source for a story on the Sarajevo drug market had gone home to Croatia, got conscripted, and then called us, somehow, from the front line, leaving a frenzied message: “You cannot imagine what is happening here!” He didn’t leave his number in the trenches, and I don’t think we would have called him if he had. Then Pedja went to report from the front, only to be arrested and tortured by Croatian forces. After his release, he moped around for days, his bruises slowly changing from deep blue to shallow yellow. Finally, I sat him down, pushed a tape recorder in front of his face, and made him tell me about his experience: the humiliatingly stupid good-cop, bad-cop routine, the twisted testicles, the gun in his mouth, etc. When he finished, I ritualistically handed the tape over to him and said, “Now put it away and let’s move on.”

But there was nowhere to go. In July, I quit my job and went to Ukraine, just in time for the August putsch, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent declaration of Ukrainian independence. When I came home in early September, Sarajevo was deflated, the euphoria exhausted. One night, I went to the Olympic Museum café, where my friends and I had often hung out, and watched glassy-eyed people stare into the distance, barely speaking, some of them drugged, some of them naturally paralyzed, all of them terrified by what was now undeniable: the war had arrived, and we were just waiting for death. Soon, that war assumed positions in the mountains around the city. By the time the siege started, I was in Chicago, dealing with the American version of oblivion. But that is another story.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact5

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SIERRA LEONE, 1997

by CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

It was a Saturday in 1984. I was playing with my little brother, Kenechukwu, near the water tank in our large, flower-filled compound in Nsukka—the dusty, serene university town in eastern Nigeria where I grew up. My mother stood by the back door and said, “Bianu kene mmadu.” Come and greet somebody. Our new houseboy had arrived. He was sitting on a sofa in the living room, his legs cradling a black plastic bag that held his belongings.

“Good afternoon,” Kenechukwu and I said. “Nno.” Welcome.

Later, after my mother showed Fide his room, in the detached boys’ quarters behind the house, she told us, “Fide has come from the village and he has never seen a telephone or a gas cooker. So we will all help teach him and get him settled.”

I stared at Fide, fascinated. Our former houseboy, who had left the week before after stealing some money from my father’s study, had been knowingly urban; he had sometimes even fixed the stereo. Fide had never seen a refrigerator. He was light-skinned, and his lips were so thick and wide they took up most of his face. He spoke a rural dialect of Igbo that was not Anglicized, like ours, and he chewed rice with his mouth open—you could see the rice, soggy like old cereal, until he swallowed. When he answered the phone, he said, “Hold on,” as we had taught him to, but then he dropped the receiver back on the cradle. He washed our clothes in metal basins, and pegged them on the line tied from the mango to the guava tree in the back yard. It took him hours. At first, my mother shouted, “Don’t stop your work to stare at every single lizard that goes by!” Later, she left him alone until he was done.

Kenechukwu and I sat on the steps while he worked. On hot afternoons when the sun made topaz patterns on the glass louvres of the kitchen, Fide told us stories about birds—folk stories in which birds flew up to the sky to ask God for rain, and nature stories in which birds made their nests with bits of hair they had picked up outside the barber’s hut in his village. “I can catch some birds for you,” he said. And he dropped bread crumbs in a staggered line from the dustbin outside, up the short steps that led to the house, through the open back door, and into the kitchen. He crouched behind the door. When the birds arrived in the kitchen, he slammed the door and dashed after them. Once, he cracked a louvre; once, he tore the mosquito netting on the window; once, he broke a bowl. But he always caught the birds. He put them in punctured cartons for us and we fed them bread and garri. The birds died after a day or two. One lasted four days, and when, finally, it died Fide held its rigid feathery form in his hand and said, joking, “It’s in the sky now, asking God for bread.” Years later, after Fide died, I would think about this: a bird raising a stiff wing to ask God for bread.

My mother often shouted at Fide. She was creative with her Igbo insults. “You are a fat millipede, nnukwu esu!” she’d say when he took too long with a task. “Look at him, ike akpi, with the buttocks of a scorpion,” when he forgot yet another thing she’d asked him to do. Or, “May dogs lick your eyes!” when he didn’t tell the truth. She asked Fide to start dinner in the afternoon because it took him so long—jollof rice alone kept him busy for four hours. One afternoon stands out in my mind. Fide was at the Formica-topped kitchen table, scraping the scales off a tilapia with a knife. He worked with slow, deliberate motions—scrape, pause, scrape, pause. There were transparent scales on his chin, on his arms, on the floor. “You’re taking forever to do that!” I said. “It’s like preparing a body for a funeral,” Fide said. “You take your time to do it well.” It was a joke, and he was laughing. But, after he died, I would think about this, too.

Fide was enrolled in a commercial school, the Universal Secretarial Academy, a grand name for a small building that had four rooms and rusty typewriters, and a grander abbreviation. On his schoolbooks, beneath “Fide Abonyi,” Fide wrote, in bold, proud letters, “U.S.A.”

When my brothers borrowed videotapes of British and American films from friends, Fide watched them with us. When we borrowed books from the library, Fide would hold them and move his lips. When there were military coups in faraway Lagos, my father placed the radio on the dining table and Fide joined us as we crowded around and listened to announcements spoken in English with a northern Nigerian accent, interspersed with stretches of melancholy martial music. The coup in 1993 happened on a blustery Harmattan day. General Sani Abacha had taken over the government. “Fellow-Nigerians,” he began, and already we were numb. Coup announcements made you numb: the choicelessness, the fact that you were being told just for your information, just so that you would not be surprised to see a different portrait on the walls of airports and government offices. Because there was nothing you could do about it.

It was the custom to “start a life” for your houseboy or housegirl, after he or she had been with you long enough. Fide was with us for twelve years. When my parents asked him what he wanted to do after he left us, they hoped that he would want to continue his secretarial studies. But Fide wanted to join the Army, and did so.

At first, he wrote excited letters, and sent pictures of himself in camouflage holding a long, gleaming gun. He took special pride in his boots and wrote about how he polished them with Kiwi polish, the way he had polished the shoes my father wore to his lectures. His handwriting was barely legible and his English was comic. “Hungry is killing me,” he said. He wrote about the poor state of the barracks. He wrote about not being paid. Slowly, the letters cooled. Then, in a hasty letter, he wrote that he might be sent to Liberia, as part of the Nigerian Peacekeeping Force. Civil war was raging there. People were being skinned alive, he wrote. People were being dragged to their deaths.

“He won’t go to Liberia,” my father said. “He’ll be fine.”

Fide did not go to Liberia. Months later, a military coup took place in Sierra Leone. And General Sani Abacha, who routinely killed activists, who routinely shut down the media, who routinely jailed opponents, decided to send in Nigerian troops to restore democracy.

When my parents told me that Fide had died—he was blown up by a land mine in Sierra Leone, on September 3, 1997—I stared at them for a while and then started to smile because I knew that they were wrong.

“Which Fide?” I asked, as if he were not the only Fide we knew.

“Our own Fide,” my mother said, and those words will never leave me, because even as grief enveloped me I realized how lovely they were. Our own Fide. He was our own.
   
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact3

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IVORY COAST, 2000

by TONY D’SOUZA
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

I was in Abidjan in 2000, shortly after General Robert Guei’s bloodless Christmas Eve coup, which eventually helped to usher in the bloodshed of the past six years in Ivory Coast. At the time, there was a small contingent of United States Marines in the city—the U.S. Embassy Guard. They were housed in a spacious apartment in a downtown high-rise in the Plateau district. I was in my first year with the Peace Corps, and whenever I was granted a break from my posting in the bush I’d travel to the city, to a Peace Corps-run hostel that was always crowded with volunteers. Now and again, eager to spend time with the white women among us, the marines would invite us over. They were well provisioned: alcohol, air-conditioning, and all the latest magazines, CDs, and DVDs. When they called, we’d round up a couple of cabfuls of the willing, and then happily dig into the marines’ top-shelf goods. The women needed little coercing—they enjoyed the Snickers bars, People magazines, and Bacardi as much as anybody.

The marines’ apartment—leather couches, tiled bathrooms, and a big-screen TV—was spotless, and they ferried between it and the Embassy in black armored S.U.V.s. They lived a life so sheltered and insular that they could have been anywhere. At the Embassy, they spent their shifts behind bulletproof glass, using an intercom to command visitors to present their papers through a narrow slot. They left the confines of partition and machine only on Sundays, when they would jog together through the leafy and exclusive Riviera district, to the delight of the few gardeners and shoeshine boys allowed in. Even then, they kept a tight phalanx: large, well-muscled white men rising and falling in sonorous unison in brand-new combat boots.

The marines also maintained a shelf of bottles at the Grand Bleu, a small night club in Deux Plateaux, with velvet couches, a cozy parquet dance floor, and a house stable of the finest prostitutes in West Africa. It was a de-facto social club for the white invested male—C.I.A. and Mossad agents, American timber and rubber men, Embassy functionaries, tenured teachers from the International School—and a definite no-go for unwashed Peace Corps volunteers. But, one night, that’s where we went—Albert and I. Albert was a fellow-volunteer, and famous among us for once having walked across the border into Mali to try to buy a camel. At the Grand Bleu, we shook cigarettes out of the mangled packs in the breast pockets of our crumpled shirts, and ordered neat whiskeys. Then we rolled our shoulders and sipped those whiskeys like two cowboys in Manhattan. All around us, conversation stopped just long enough to let us know we’d been noticed. Then we were ignored.

The marines were there, doing shots of Grey Goose, and they were animated and loud. We pieced together from their conversation that they had been invited to train some Ivorian commandos in sharpshooting at the military range, and that the Ivorians had closed their eyes as they shot, their bullets raising puffs of dirt from the turf.

“Can you believe these people?” one of the marines said, laughing, and shook his head. “They closed their fucking eyes.”

Albert and I leaned back against the bar to watch the women on the dance floor. They all wore long braids and hoop earrings, and were shuffling their feet as though half asleep. No one was dancing with them, so, after another whiskey, we went out to them. We held the girls close. Soon, we were kissing them. Then the club’s bouncers put us into headlocks with such force that we could feel ourselves beginning to pass out, and tossed us onto the street. We didn’t go to the Grand Bleu again.

A few weeks later, a story about the marines began to circulate. One night, they were watching a new DVD together—my guess is porn, but who knows—when the doorbell rang. The marines were not alarmed, because they had African security-service guards screening visitors down in the lobby. So one of the marines set down his bottle of beer on the glass coffee table and went to answer it. At the door was a gang of African bandits with AK-47s.

The marines jumped up from the couch and put up their hands, and, for whatever reason, the bandits made them strip down to their briefs. The bandits went into the marines’ closets, got out their uniforms, put them on, and began to sing and dance. Then they stubbed out their cigarettes on the floor, stuffed their pockets with liquor bottles and DVDs, and left. They didn’t steal anything major—just sang and danced in the uniforms while the marines held their balls and shivered.

The next morning, the marines canned their security guards, and the story got out. Soon, they moved from Plateau into a three-story maximum-security mansion with a metal detector and cameras, in Riviera, which was probably where they’d belonged in the first place. They kept a lower profile then. But the story remained popular, maybe because the only Ivorians with access to AK-47s then were government soldiers.

Here’s another story: During my Peace Corps training, I lived with a cocoa-growing family in a village in the south of the country. My host father, Donatien, was the choir director at the village’s Catholic church. He had two wives, and how that blended with Catholicism I don’t know. He liked me and wanted me to learn as much as I could about his people, the Ghwa. He showed me the tribe’s sacred tree, a towering thing in the forest with gris-gris tied like ornaments in its highest branches, and he taught me a few words of the tribe’s secret language, which was only for men. One day, he took me to the edge of the village, to an overgrown stretch of bracken on the bank of the Comoe River. He poked about in the elephant grass with a stick, pointing out thick cement slabs that were once the foundations of huts. Donatien said, “This is where the Dioula used to live.”

The Dioula were Muslim people from the north whom I’d soon be sent to serve. “What happened to them?” I asked.

Donatien stared at the foundations as though he were searching his memory. Then he said, “The price of cocoa fell, times became hard. We told the Dioula to go, but they refused.”

“What did you do?”

“We came in the night and killed them.”

Back at his compound, his many children ran to greet me, as they always did. Three of the little boys had their mouths stuffed with something, and they groaned and rolled their eyes with happiness as they tugged at my hands to make me notice.

“What do you have in your mouths?” I asked.

They threw back their heads and opened their jaws. Out flew three birds—a dash of yellow, two dashes of blue—and there was barely time for me to recognize what had happened before the colors had already disappeared in the sky.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact4

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IRAQ, 2004

by WENDELL STEAVENSON
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-06-12

The hotel’s elevator shaft was next to my room, and when the elevator hit the ground floor it made a muffled echo boom that sounded exactly like a bomb. The elevator sounded like a bomb; thunder sounded like a bomb; construction clangs sounded like a bomb; a door slam sounded like a bomb; bombs sounded like bombs. Firecrackers thrown by kids sounded like sharp, close Kalashnikov fire; a car backfiring sounded like a single shot, unanswered, and nothing to turn your head about.

I had been in Baghdad for six months straight. Every month, the situation got worse, but it crept worse, incrementally, so that it was hard to register, like boiling a lobster in tepid water. It produced not fear, exactly, but an ache, a deep fatigue. My friend Dan told me, “Jesus, you look like shit, get out to Amman for a week.” But the rest of the world seemed very far away—almost unimaginable. In any case, at the end of March four American contractors were hanged, burned, and dismembered, in Falluja, and, a few days later, the authorities announced their intention to arrest the Shiite “firebrand” Moqtada al-Sadr for the murder of a Shiite cleric in 2003. There were uprisings in Kufa and Kut, fighting in Sadr City, and more dead American soldiers overnight in Ramadi. Falluja was surrounded; apparently, the Marines were advancing in armor, getting rocketed, and withdrawing. There were gunfights on the road and the highway to Jordan was closed.

We journalists sat around the hotel coffee shop, swapping nasty stories. There was a rumor that the hotel was going to be attacked. “It’s like a whirlpool going down the plug hole,” one of them said. Then, “No, pretend I didn’t say that.” Discussions went back and forth with the whiskey bottle. The Spanish were pulling their troops out; translators were getting gunned down on the highway; there were death threats, gunmen on the roofs in Sadr City. An American soldier had shot over Molly’s and Steve’s heads in Adhamiya. Did you hear that Burns got detained by the Mahdi Army outside Kufa? Later, drunker, the conversation slipped into fucking jihadis and blood-preaching imams and those God-crazed idiots cutting people’s heads off. Did you see they’ve got beheadings as mobile-phone screens now? Stop: let’s talk about Coetzee and Orwell and V. S. Naipaul and why Chalabi is such a chump. A political discussion ensued, and it struck me that we foreigners understood very little.

The next day, I drove out to the western suburbs and saw a tank on fire under an underpass, two Black Hawk helicopters circling like flies after carrion. The day after that, I woke at five. It was a silvery opaque dawn, and I dreamed that an explosion had woken me up. The city was on a three-day holiday, but it was unclear to me why the streets were not just empty but deserted. It felt as if something were about to happen. I looked at the stretch of Karrada that I could see from my balcony, a main road toward the Al Jadriyah Bridge, and could see no flicker of life. It was so early that my mind was still fuzzy, full of night demons. I thought, The mujahideen are going to advance straight into the city and come down this road and storm the hotel. The thickset British security guys, who all claimed to be ex-S.A.S., with tattoos on their forearms and pistols in their fanny packs, and who guarded the American TV crews in the hotel, said they had it all figured out. They’d lock themselves behind the cages they’d installed at the entrance to each floor and throw hand grenades down the stairwell.

Was there a curfew? Why this preternatural calm? Sirens went off in the Green Zone; I could just hear them across the river. The dawn brightened like a pale wash and the birds in the tree next to my balcony went crazy with song. A column of American vehicles rumbled into view, two Bradleys, a Humvee, and a troop truck. Where the hell were they going? To defend the bridge? In my disoriented panic, I packed a grab bag. I thought I would have to run through the back streets toward the American checkpoint, where there were signs saying, “Do Not Stop. Vehicles Will Be Shot At.” After a few minutes, a foot patrol went past. This was something very unusual. I hadn’t seen an American foot patrol in Baghdad in months. But here it was, the soldiers fanned out in formation, advancing slowly up the main road, past the ice-cream parlor and the hedges clipped into elaborate topiary. They appeared to be walking normally, easily. They did not turn their heads and peer nervously into the side streets. They stared ahead and moved with a certain prowling, hip-laden grace. Quite alone, awake, and reasonably freaked out, all I had to make me feel better was their steady gait.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact6

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Postato da: treball a 07/06/2006 15:38 | link | commenti |
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