Novo Livro sobre Kimpa Vita

 306 ANIVERSÁRIO DA MORTE DE KIMPA VITA

 PUBLICACAO DE UM NOVO ROMANCE EM PARIS

  

Numa dinâmica imparável, a capital francesa registou, há dias, o lançamento de mais uma obra literária sobre a célebre heroína africana, trabalho do médico congolês, da margem esquerda, Magloire Mpembi Nkosi, patenteada nas edições Anibwe.

 

A apresentação deste livro enquadrou-se, na comemoração da efeméride marcando a morte na fogueira, vítima da Inquisição, no dia 2 de Julho de 1706, em Evolulu, nos arredores de Mbanza Kongo, atual capital da Província angolana do Zaire.

[Continue lendo aqui]

 

 306 ANIVERSÁRIO DA MORTE DE KIMPA VITA

 PUBLICACAO DE UM NOVO ROMANCE EM PARIS

  

Numa dinâmica imparável, a capital francesa registou, há dias, o lançamento de mais uma obra literária sobre a célebre heroína africana, trabalho do médico congolês, da margem esquerda, Magloire Mpembi Nkosi, patenteada nas edições Anibwe.

 

A apresentação deste livro enquadrou-se, na comemoração da efeméride marcando a morte na fogueira, vítima da Inquisição, no dia 2 de Julho de 1706, em Evolulu, nos arredores de Mbanza Kongo, atual capital da Província angolana do Zaire.

[Continue lendo aqui]

 

ON PORNOGRAPHY AS ‘VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN’ (Revised and Updated)

On my previous post, I presented extracts from a recent interview by one of Angola’s most prominent writers, Pepetela, including one that made the local headlines where he states that “there is pornographic wealth in Angola.”

For anyone who knows the Angola of the past two or three decades, or reads articles like this one in the international media, that statement doesn’t require much of an explanation. However, the use of the word ‘pornographic’ outside a strictly sexual context may raise in some minds the question of its very definition: “what is pornography?”

For someone instinctively averse to pornography of any kind (as I noted here on the early days of this blog), the answer is straightforward: “pornography is something, anything, which intently seeks to pervert, corrupt and degrade – visually, verbally, graphically, physically, psychologically, or by any other means – the object or subject-matter to which it is inflicted upon, be it love, affection, sex, privacy, identity, or one’s own humanity... And it becomes criminal when is perpetrated against the will, without the consent and under the protest of its victim!
For others, the answers may vary according to their own philosophies of life, or just their degrees of exposure to different kinds of pornography.

Personally, although I had been pornographically attacked before on two occasions, I had never been exposed to pornography, whatever its definition, so persistently and viciously as since I started this blog … It’s a long and painful story that can be traced back to this post, reached a high with this one, then evolved to this one and this one, and this one... until exploding on this one!...

And behind it all was a white woman at the forefront (and the first post I mentioned above, preceded by this one, had on the background my questioning of her gratuitous, obscene, voyeuristic, indecent - in short: pornographic! - exposure on her blog of the most intimate sexuality of a group of Angolan female rural traditional dancers... having done so while revealing that the women in question had expressly said to her that in their culture no men should see or be informed of what they had exceptionally allowed her to see!...), with some men and women of different races and ages on the sidelines and the background - the most 'machista', misogynist, male chauvinist pig, inverted and reverted racist, obnoxious, arrogant ignorant, venal, bullish, bigot and criminal of whom eventually leading me to open this page on Facebook!

So, what do all of them have in common? The simple answer is: being from Angola or Portugal, or just from the Lusophone world in general, where the concept of ‘Black Feminism’ (and, within it, 'Post-Colonial Feminism' in particular) is virtually unheard of, except perhaps for Brazil…



And it is at this juncture – Black Feminism/Post-Colonial Feminism – that the issue of “pornography as violence against women” connects with the wider issues of sex, sexuality, sexism, race, ethnicity, gender, class and identity in social interactions.

Again: being instinctively averse to pornography, I cannot tell of the extreme violence the ordeal I have been subject to by that horrendously pervert, despicable white sorry excuse for a woman has constituted to my personal and professional life over the past 5 years!... Not the least because it came on the sequence of another pornographic attack by a black male in the work place which led me to leave a organization I worked for, as I mentioned here; not the least because, with a sordid combination of white supremacy and sexism and amidst the display of disturbing images of Nito Alves before being executed and of Jonas Savimbi dead (two political figures branded by some sectors in Angolan society as "extreme black racists"...) she obsessively targeted her vicious pornographic attacks and vitriol at what I have of most precious: my creative work, my poetry!... Which, by the way, had been from the onset of its publication, back in 1985, subject to "pornographic treatment" of all sorts, as I recalled here... So, she knew exactly what she was doing!... So much so that had no qualms about making it patently clear on her blog:

"E que a raiva do meu corpo, te deite brutalmente sobre a areia de uma praia qualquer, onde te arrancarei a roupa e os complexos, onde te amputarei o génio e a identidade, onde te extirparei a serenidade e o sorriso, para te possuir, selvagem, extinguindo-me na vontade de te engolir para sempre. Na intensidade de um orgasmo lúgubre, conseguirei então o que desejo, afinal, e que há de mais belo em ti: a tua alma pura e frágil!..."
[recorded here]



Worse than that, I cannot put into words what seeing black men and women alike siding with her, particularly when knowing that, some years ago, she had been served with a public letter subscribed by a number of prominent Angolan citizens accusing her of racist practices at the local classical ballet dance school then under her direction!... And worst of all, I’m afraid I will never come past the fact that her arrogance and blatant racism have been fuelled by state-sponsorship (to use her own words, "tenho as costas largas"!...) - not the least because she is one of the recipients of an Angolan "National Prize for Culture and the Arts"!...

And state-sponsorship led to other sponsorship - that of the corporate kind: corporate finance, corporate politics and corporate media alike all went out of their way to roll up their sleeves and get up in arms as a 'multitute of seven dwarfs' in defense and support of the “innocent Snow White in the Jungle” supposedly “molested” by a “deranged, ignorant and predatory Black Woman”!...
And to add insult to injury, through a barrage of insults, I was silenced down, humiliated, demonised, denigrated, tormented, vilified, injured, dehumanised and even received death threats, while my blog was sabotaged, my email hacked, my privacy violated and all my life invaded!
In short: I was publicly lynched in a most unbelievable orgy of hatred - all of which throwing me into a deep depression and forced exile more than ever before!...

Well, as I said, that’s a long story!...



Let’s then go back to the short story: “pornography as violence against women”…
As this year’s March – internationally devoted to Woman in all her dimensions – draws to the end, this issue takes me back to the beginning of the month, when I attended the first event the British Academy dedicated to International Women’s Day, and started an exploration of Nancy Spero’s work. In my account of that event, I briefly mentioned the issue of race: including me, there were only three black women in there and, incidentally, none of us was in the panel. And (need to say?) there were no black men to be seen...

What I didn’t mention then was that during the drinks reception following the formal talks, while the three of us were getting to know each other, one of the panellists, Lisa Tickner, who had presented Nancy Spero, approached our group and one of the other two of us, a writer, questioned her over the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of white women to represent all women, to which I said something to the effect that “maybe that is just because we, black women, are generally under-represented in the academy (noting, in passing, that when I did my MSc at the Economic History Department at the LSE I had been only the third black person, and the first black woman, to have been admitted to that department since its creation), rather than necessarily a result of a conscious unwillingness on the part of the members of the panel, or the British Academy for that matter, to be sensitive to black women’s views and accounts of their own lives, experiences and histories”.

Well, I was left under the impression that my views didn’t sink well with my sista, but I felt somehow justified when I came across this interview by Nancy Spero with Sue Williams. Through it you will be able to relate to all the questions around the issue of “pornography as violence against women” I have raised so far. You will also be able to better understand what “Black Feminism” is all about – particularly if you pay attention to what they say on Lorna Simpson’s art work.

And, hopefully, you will also understand why is it that, at least in my experience, it is from the Lusophone countries, with Portugal and Angola at the forefront, that most resistance to contemporary notions of Black Feminism (and I say this while not considering myself a “feminist tout court”, as once I’ve noted here and, as much as I sympathise with the concept, not even a "womanist" as Alice Walker would have it, but quite simply a "humanist"), or Post-Colonial Feminism, comes from: post-colonial Angola is just an offspring of the brand of absolutist and totalitarian communist amoral/immoral left, which, from Portugal, has hold sway over our shores since 1974/75 (and then 'implemented' over the years by Cuba), and now with a renewed impetus under the novel winds of “recolonisation”:

Proud of its 'lusotropicalist and assimilationist ancestry', amidst confused/confusing notions and practices of "white negritude" and the replacement of "humanist ethics" by "ideological ethics" and of the Human and Social Sciences with ideologically inspired fictional literature and poetry and vulturistic art, not to mention the 'traditional' practice established by the founding father of the nation of 'educated' black men predominantly marrying white or light-skinned women, it very simplistically and insensitively, yet totally self-righteously (as Carlos Moore put it: "with Tarzan complex"), made ‘tabua rasa’ [or to use Sue William's words on her painting, After the Revolution, at the top of this post: "After the Revolution (the 'homage to women's groups') is Viva no Differencia and the Fascists are Left"!...] of all issues that composed the various dimensions of the colonial experience (e.g., while keeping pretty much a conservative view towards women's sexuality and reproductive rights - as in here and here - it wiped off gender issues from its discourse, except to 'proclaim' that men and women "ought to be equal" from the war fields, political prison cells and "re-education camps" to the literary production... it swept all race and ethnic-related issues under the rug of "monstros raciais e taras tribais", or "complexos de colonizado"!...), even though these issues have manifestly underpinned the long protracted post-independence conflict in the country, except for the “class struggle” - and not even that it was able to "manage" to its "ultimate consequences": the old top-down class stratification has never ceased to dictate all sorts of social relations in Angola in the post-colonial period, as the existing 'pornographic wealth' mentioned at the start of this post clearly states, or indeed the entire posture of 'that white evil sorry excuse for a woman', who has allways been privileged both in the colonial and the post-colonial periods, towards me leaves no room for doubt, or as it can be gathered from this story about a "friend" that I used to have, written "at the request" of this 'new' friend of hers!...
In fact, all the MPLA history is drenched in that same old race-based class stratification of the "O Mundo Que o Portugues Criou" and has always been determined by it. Hence my questioning of the Marxist theory's empirical basis as it relates to African History, Cultures and Societies, as I have expressed a while back here.

[As Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo argues in a recent article, Social Criticism and Contestation: Reflections on the Politics of Anger and Outrage: "If one looks at the context of politics in these two countries (Angola and Mozambique) in terms of the descriptive framework suggested here, one aspect comes immediately to light. At no point in their political history did they really manage to create the conditions for moral debate to take place. While they fought the wars of independence in the name of citizenship, their post-independence policies failed to define the citizenry in ways which would have given them a stake in moral argument. The commitment to building socialist societies meant in effect that the moral obligations of individuals were defined by those wielding political power. Angolans and Mozambicans remained subjects, not citizens, of a system of domination that took the burden of moral responsibility away from the individual and invested it on a vanguard party of cadres who were held to be in a position to interpret the will of the people.]

Thus, it just has this to say to us, Black Women: “on the face of racial, ethnic, sexual, gender or any other kind of abuse and attacks on your personality, integrity, dignity, identity and humanity, be calm, cool and collected, otherwise you’ll be branded a ‘ignorant, racist, extremist, terrorist, predatory and deranged black woman’!...
And we will brand the spectra of Nito Alves and Jonas Savimbi all over you and then invoke Simone de Beauvoir to deny your 'womanhood from the birth', Gilberto Freyre to strip you of your identity and  Nelson Mandela to put you to rest once and for all!... As for your attackers, abusers and persecutors they can just get away with murder and end of story!...”

That's, after all, all they had to say along the centuries of colonial rule to all the Black Mothers of their "beloved" skin-deep, fair and straight long-haired "Creole Nation"!...

So… I’ll just shut up and leave you with extracts from that enlightening conversation (and this is not to mean that I totally subscribe to all their views) between Nancy Spero (NS) and Sue Williams (SW):



(NS) I express anger, dissatisfaction, in my art work. I also show women enjoying their own sexual pleasure. But let’s say in conversation I will not be as confidential or expose myself to the degree that I do in my art. So, with that in mind, I’ll ask you a few questions that could refer to both of us.

(SW) People think that I’m like my paintings, liberated and aggressive. When they meet me, they find that I’m shy and not too in control of my life. The work helps me to evolve.

(…)

(NS) Your work is critical of abuse of women, is it a call for action, getting out on the streets?

(SW) It’s different than wanting to do real things. They’re my babies, those paintings, so they’re not strictly teaching tools. They’re things that I create, and I like to. Somebody had told me that women thought my show was negative, which I had never heard before, since most people only want to say nice things to your face. And I thought, negative? I had always thought it was kind of happy.

(…)

(NS) Canadian law has taken over Catherine McKinnon’s definition of pornography as, “Material that subordinates or degrades women.”

We cannot ignore the threat to equality, resulting in exposure to all audiences of certain types of violent and degrading material. Material portraying women as a class, as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse, and the negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance. (from The Nation)

When you depict a baseball bat shoved up a woman’s butt, that could be vicious porn. Let’s say you are showing in a Toronto gallery—Canada is the first place in the world that says what is legally obscene and what harms women. How do they know that your piece harms women?

(SW) They lay out little doilies. (laughter)

(NS) There’s a slogan: “Pornography is violence against women.” It doesn’t say that it causes violence. If it depicts it, is that in itself, violence against women?

(SW) You can say that men cause violence to women, so they should be banned, not just the photos. The photos aren’t the violence.

(…)

(NS) In the early ‘70s that was true too, but it was more conceptual. And now, the body in art has returned. During the ‘80s, I was attacked for using images of women. This has to do with one feminist theory that women artists should avoid creating a woman’s image for men.

(SW) Right, that’s the party line.

(NS) I could not abide more limits and regulations — you and other women like Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Clarisa Sligh are all involved in the images of the female body in very different ways. Shifting times and interests.

(SW) I never thought of that, not being able to use the body, but your work is conceptual. You take from what’s already out there, don’t really alter it a lot—you’re not messing with it. The work becomes a whole new language; it’s not male art.

(NS) It’s a tool to investigate, to attack, to celebrate. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses women and their smiles, smiles to please, to accommodate. A woman has to be ready with a smile to ward off potential aggressors, not to give signals of fear.

(…)

(NS) I’m married to Leon Golub, and we have three grown sons. I would imagine that some women who don’t know me but have seen my art work wonder how I have been associated with a male artist all these years. Or male artists, or men in general wonder how he could be associated with me. It may seem illogical to them, but that’s not the point. We respect the straight forwardness of each other.

We were discussing how, in the ‘80s, a few feminists condemned the visual depiction of the female body because the woman’s image had been so subsumed under the “mastery” of the male artists’ gaze. An interesting point, but not necessarily to turn it on ourselves, once more limiting emotionally what “good girl” artists are supposed to represent. But I wanted to investigate women’s conditions from the extreme repression and torture of political prisoners to that of women as protagonist, activators freed of male control. I am trying to set things in motion, to re-inscribe women in history. We’ve always been there but we’ve been written out.

(…)

(NS) … Do you think that your work would be less appreciated by some women of color? Would there be a resentment towards your experience as a white woman? You might even still, in this terrible situation, be more privileged.

(SW) Yeah, I probably am more privileged in some ways, but then again, the system is the system. A busload of predominantly black women from Atlanta who had been abused came in to the show and wrote some comments. That’s quite a compliment for them to come and see my work, for them to see what an artist is saying about them. That made me feel really proud. At the same time, I saw Lorna Simpson’s show. It was really heavy work and it made me mad because it was true, and I don’t want to feel privileged. Maybe they had resentments because the lady was white.

(NS) Allegiances are mixed, many black women feel white women have not treated them equitably. All these differences of class, race, ethnicity, age, culture.

(SW) Males see my show and they don’t like it, they almost don’t believe it. I had the same reaction when I saw Lorna’s (Simpson) show. She was saying things as a black woman that I don’t know about. Each little thing was representative of her culture.

(…) I wanted to ask you, do you feel like you have a voice and you can speak?

(NS) It took decades but now I get my message out. I’d been working as an artist for 30 years without much response. Then around ‘83 the situation changed, or partially changed. The work reverberated, the same stuff hidden all those years. I infiltrate and subvert and celebrate, as I wish. Earlier in my career, I was excluded, ignored. I was angry and frustrated in my attempts to get some sort of dialogue going. I used fragmented writings of Antonin Artaud collaged with painted images as a means to express my rage at being silenced as an artist [1969-72, the Artaud Paintings and Codex Artaud]. Artaud’s tirades and screams of rage and anguish, his extreme introspection of physical and mental states resonated for me. If his hysterical and insane ravings would have been written by a woman, they would not have survived nor gained this recognition. Women artists are in the world too and will not be silenced.

(SW) I had no world. I could not function in the world I was in.

(NS) It’s tough entering the art world, becoming a participant. It’s a small elitist enclave—a special world, but then one may find a place.

(SW) It’s such a relief. I almost feel like a human being. I still have a prejudice against women. I mean why would I want to look at the past of women; it’s boring. They are not the ones who really did anything.

(NS) It’s a matter of learning the histories of other women—how women have been written out of history. How the struggle for equality has to be fought and won, over and over. It’s as if we always have to start from zero.

(SW) That’s what happened to all our energy. It’s gone somewhere else, not into the world.


“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them, and Black women worked for them” - Maya Angelou


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BULLIES!!!...

On my previous post, I presented extracts from a recent interview by one of Angola’s most prominent writers, Pepetela, including one that made the local headlines where he states that “there is pornographic wealth in Angola.”

For anyone who knows the Angola of the past two or three decades, or reads articles like this one in the international media, that statement doesn’t require much of an explanation. However, the use of the word ‘pornographic’ outside a strictly sexual context may raise in some minds the question of its very definition: “what is pornography?”

For someone instinctively averse to pornography of any kind (as I noted here on the early days of this blog), the answer is straightforward: “pornography is something, anything, which intently seeks to pervert, corrupt and degrade – visually, verbally, graphically, physically, psychologically, or by any other means – the object or subject-matter to which it is inflicted upon, be it love, affection, sex, privacy, identity, or one’s own humanity... And it becomes criminal when is perpetrated against the will, without the consent and under the protest of its victim!
For others, the answers may vary according to their own philosophies of life, or just their degrees of exposure to different kinds of pornography.

Personally, although I had been pornographically attacked before on two occasions, I had never been exposed to pornography, whatever its definition, so persistently and viciously as since I started this blog … It’s a long and painful story that can be traced back to this post, reached a high with this one, then evolved to this one and this one, and this one... until exploding on this one!...

And behind it all was a white woman at the forefront (and the first post I mentioned above, preceded by this one, had on the background my questioning of her gratuitous, obscene, voyeuristic, indecent - in short: pornographic! - exposure on her blog of the most intimate sexuality of a group of Angolan female rural traditional dancers... having done so while revealing that the women in question had expressly said to her that in their culture no men should see or be informed of what they had exceptionally allowed her to see!...), with some men and women of different races and ages on the sidelines and the background - the most 'machista', misogynist, male chauvinist pig, inverted and reverted racist, obnoxious, arrogant ignorant, venal, bullish, bigot and criminal of whom eventually leading me to open this page on Facebook!

So, what do all of them have in common? The simple answer is: being from Angola or Portugal, or just from the Lusophone world in general, where the concept of ‘Black Feminism’ (and, within it, 'Post-Colonial Feminism' in particular) is virtually unheard of, except perhaps for Brazil…



And it is at this juncture – Black Feminism/Post-Colonial Feminism – that the issue of “pornography as violence against women” connects with the wider issues of sex, sexuality, sexism, race, ethnicity, gender, class and identity in social interactions.

Again: being instinctively averse to pornography, I cannot tell of the extreme violence the ordeal I have been subject to by that horrendously pervert, despicable white sorry excuse for a woman has constituted to my personal and professional life over the past 5 years!... Not the least because it came on the sequence of another pornographic attack by a black male in the work place which led me to leave a organization I worked for, as I mentioned here; not the least because, with a sordid combination of white supremacy and sexism and amidst the display of disturbing images of Nito Alves before being executed and of Jonas Savimbi dead (two political figures branded by some sectors in Angolan society as "extreme black racists"...) she obsessively targeted her vicious pornographic attacks and vitriol at what I have of most precious: my creative work, my poetry!... Which, by the way, had been from the onset of its publication, back in 1985, subject to "pornographic treatment" of all sorts, as I recalled here... So, she knew exactly what she was doing!... So much so that had no qualms about making it patently clear on her blog:

"E que a raiva do meu corpo, te deite brutalmente sobre a areia de uma praia qualquer, onde te arrancarei a roupa e os complexos, onde te amputarei o génio e a identidade, onde te extirparei a serenidade e o sorriso, para te possuir, selvagem, extinguindo-me na vontade de te engolir para sempre. Na intensidade de um orgasmo lúgubre, conseguirei então o que desejo, afinal, e que há de mais belo em ti: a tua alma pura e frágil!..."
[recorded here]



Worse than that, I cannot put into words what seeing black men and women alike siding with her, particularly when knowing that, some years ago, she had been served with a public letter subscribed by a number of prominent Angolan citizens accusing her of racist practices at the local classical ballet dance school then under her direction!... And worst of all, I’m afraid I will never come past the fact that her arrogance and blatant racism have been fuelled by state-sponsorship (to use her own words, "tenho as costas largas"!...) - not the least because she is one of the recipients of an Angolan "National Prize for Culture and the Arts"!...

And state-sponsorship led to other sponsorship - that of the corporate kind: corporate finance, corporate politics and corporate media alike all went out of their way to roll up their sleeves and get up in arms as a 'multitute of seven dwarfs' in defense and support of the “innocent Snow White in the Jungle” supposedly “molested” by a “deranged, ignorant and predatory Black Woman”!...
And to add insult to injury, through a barrage of insults, I was silenced down, humiliated, demonised, denigrated, tormented, vilified, injured, dehumanised and even received death threats, while my blog was sabotaged, my email hacked, my privacy violated and all my life invaded!
In short: I was publicly lynched in a most unbelievable orgy of hatred - all of which throwing me into a deep depression and forced exile more than ever before!...

Well, as I said, that’s a long story!...



Let’s then go back to the short story: “pornography as violence against women”…
As this year’s March – internationally devoted to Woman in all her dimensions – draws to the end, this issue takes me back to the beginning of the month, when I attended the first event the British Academy dedicated to International Women’s Day, and started an exploration of Nancy Spero’s work. In my account of that event, I briefly mentioned the issue of race: including me, there were only three black women in there and, incidentally, none of us was in the panel. And (need to say?) there were no black men to be seen...

What I didn’t mention then was that during the drinks reception following the formal talks, while the three of us were getting to know each other, one of the panellists, Lisa Tickner, who had presented Nancy Spero, approached our group and one of the other two of us, a writer, questioned her over the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of white women to represent all women, to which I said something to the effect that “maybe that is just because we, black women, are generally under-represented in the academy (noting, in passing, that when I did my MSc at the Economic History Department at the LSE I had been only the third black person, and the first black woman, to have been admitted to that department since its creation), rather than necessarily a result of a conscious unwillingness on the part of the members of the panel, or the British Academy for that matter, to be sensitive to black women’s views and accounts of their own lives, experiences and histories”.

Well, I was left under the impression that my views didn’t sink well with my sista, but I felt somehow justified when I came across this interview by Nancy Spero with Sue Williams. Through it you will be able to relate to all the questions around the issue of “pornography as violence against women” I have raised so far. You will also be able to better understand what “Black Feminism” is all about – particularly if you pay attention to what they say on Lorna Simpson’s art work.

And, hopefully, you will also understand why is it that, at least in my experience, it is from the Lusophone countries, with Portugal and Angola at the forefront, that most resistance to contemporary notions of Black Feminism (and I say this while not considering myself a “feminist tout court”, as once I’ve noted here and, as much as I sympathise with the concept, not even a "womanist" as Alice Walker would have it, but quite simply a "humanist"), or Post-Colonial Feminism, comes from: post-colonial Angola is just an offspring of the brand of absolutist and totalitarian communist amoral/immoral left, which, from Portugal, has hold sway over our shores since 1974/75 (and then 'implemented' over the years by Cuba), and now with a renewed impetus under the novel winds of “recolonisation”:

Proud of its 'lusotropicalist and assimilationist ancestry', amidst confused/confusing notions and practices of "white negritude" and the replacement of "humanist ethics" by "ideological ethics" and of the Human and Social Sciences with ideologically inspired fictional literature and poetry and vulturistic art, not to mention the 'traditional' practice established by the founding father of the nation of 'educated' black men predominantly marrying white or light-skinned women, it very simplistically and insensitively, yet totally self-righteously (as Carlos Moore put it: "with Tarzan complex"), made ‘tabua rasa’ [or to use Sue William's words on her painting, After the Revolution, at the top of this post: "After the Revolution (the 'homage to women's groups') is Viva no Differencia and the Fascists are Left"!...] of all issues that composed the various dimensions of the colonial experience (e.g., while keeping pretty much a conservative view towards women's sexuality and reproductive rights - as in here and here - it wiped off gender issues from its discourse, except to 'proclaim' that men and women "ought to be equal" from the war fields, political prison cells and "re-education camps" to the literary production... it swept all race and ethnic-related issues under the rug of "monstros raciais e taras tribais", or "complexos de colonizado"!...), even though these issues have manifestly underpinned the long protracted post-independence conflict in the country, except for the “class struggle” - and not even that it was able to "manage" to its "ultimate consequences": the old top-down class stratification has never ceased to dictate all sorts of social relations in Angola in the post-colonial period, as the existing 'pornographic wealth' mentioned at the start of this post clearly states, or indeed the entire posture of 'that white evil sorry excuse for a woman', who has allways been privileged both in the colonial and the post-colonial periods, towards me leaves no room for doubt, or as it can be gathered from this story about a "friend" that I used to have, written "at the request" of this 'new' friend of hers!...
In fact, all the MPLA history is drenched in that same old race-based class stratification of the "O Mundo Que o Portugues Criou" and has always been determined by it. Hence my questioning of the Marxist theory's empirical basis as it relates to African History, Cultures and Societies, as I have expressed a while back here.

[As Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo argues in a recent article, Social Criticism and Contestation: Reflections on the Politics of Anger and Outrage: "If one looks at the context of politics in these two countries (Angola and Mozambique) in terms of the descriptive framework suggested here, one aspect comes immediately to light. At no point in their political history did they really manage to create the conditions for moral debate to take place. While they fought the wars of independence in the name of citizenship, their post-independence policies failed to define the citizenry in ways which would have given them a stake in moral argument. The commitment to building socialist societies meant in effect that the moral obligations of individuals were defined by those wielding political power. Angolans and Mozambicans remained subjects, not citizens, of a system of domination that took the burden of moral responsibility away from the individual and invested it on a vanguard party of cadres who were held to be in a position to interpret the will of the people.]

Thus, it just has this to say to us, Black Women: “on the face of racial, ethnic, sexual, gender or any other kind of abuse and attacks on your personality, integrity, dignity, identity and humanity, be calm, cool and collected, otherwise you’ll be branded a ‘ignorant, racist, extremist, terrorist, predatory and deranged black woman’!...
And we will brand the spectra of Nito Alves and Jonas Savimbi all over you and then invoke Simone de Beauvoir to deny your 'womanhood from the birth', Gilberto Freyre to strip you of your identity and  Nelson Mandela to put you to rest once and for all!... As for your attackers, abusers and persecutors they can just get away with murder and end of story!...”

That's, after all, all they had to say along the centuries of colonial rule to all the Black Mothers of their "beloved" skin-deep, fair and straight long-haired "Creole Nation"!...

So… I’ll just shut up and leave you with extracts from that enlightening conversation (and this is not to mean that I totally subscribe to all their views) between Nancy Spero (NS) and Sue Williams (SW):



(NS) I express anger, dissatisfaction, in my art work. I also show women enjoying their own sexual pleasure. But let’s say in conversation I will not be as confidential or expose myself to the degree that I do in my art. So, with that in mind, I’ll ask you a few questions that could refer to both of us.

(SW) People think that I’m like my paintings, liberated and aggressive. When they meet me, they find that I’m shy and not too in control of my life. The work helps me to evolve.

(…)

(NS) Your work is critical of abuse of women, is it a call for action, getting out on the streets?

(SW) It’s different than wanting to do real things. They’re my babies, those paintings, so they’re not strictly teaching tools. They’re things that I create, and I like to. Somebody had told me that women thought my show was negative, which I had never heard before, since most people only want to say nice things to your face. And I thought, negative? I had always thought it was kind of happy.

(…)

(NS) Canadian law has taken over Catherine McKinnon’s definition of pornography as, “Material that subordinates or degrades women.”

We cannot ignore the threat to equality, resulting in exposure to all audiences of certain types of violent and degrading material. Material portraying women as a class, as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse, and the negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance. (from The Nation)

When you depict a baseball bat shoved up a woman’s butt, that could be vicious porn. Let’s say you are showing in a Toronto gallery—Canada is the first place in the world that says what is legally obscene and what harms women. How do they know that your piece harms women?

(SW) They lay out little doilies. (laughter)

(NS) There’s a slogan: “Pornography is violence against women.” It doesn’t say that it causes violence. If it depicts it, is that in itself, violence against women?

(SW) You can say that men cause violence to women, so they should be banned, not just the photos. The photos aren’t the violence.

(…)

(NS) In the early ‘70s that was true too, but it was more conceptual. And now, the body in art has returned. During the ‘80s, I was attacked for using images of women. This has to do with one feminist theory that women artists should avoid creating a woman’s image for men.

(SW) Right, that’s the party line.

(NS) I could not abide more limits and regulations — you and other women like Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Clarisa Sligh are all involved in the images of the female body in very different ways. Shifting times and interests.

(SW) I never thought of that, not being able to use the body, but your work is conceptual. You take from what’s already out there, don’t really alter it a lot—you’re not messing with it. The work becomes a whole new language; it’s not male art.

(NS) It’s a tool to investigate, to attack, to celebrate. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses women and their smiles, smiles to please, to accommodate. A woman has to be ready with a smile to ward off potential aggressors, not to give signals of fear.

(…)

(NS) I’m married to Leon Golub, and we have three grown sons. I would imagine that some women who don’t know me but have seen my art work wonder how I have been associated with a male artist all these years. Or male artists, or men in general wonder how he could be associated with me. It may seem illogical to them, but that’s not the point. We respect the straight forwardness of each other.

We were discussing how, in the ‘80s, a few feminists condemned the visual depiction of the female body because the woman’s image had been so subsumed under the “mastery” of the male artists’ gaze. An interesting point, but not necessarily to turn it on ourselves, once more limiting emotionally what “good girl” artists are supposed to represent. But I wanted to investigate women’s conditions from the extreme repression and torture of political prisoners to that of women as protagonist, activators freed of male control. I am trying to set things in motion, to re-inscribe women in history. We’ve always been there but we’ve been written out.

(…)

(NS) … Do you think that your work would be less appreciated by some women of color? Would there be a resentment towards your experience as a white woman? You might even still, in this terrible situation, be more privileged.

(SW) Yeah, I probably am more privileged in some ways, but then again, the system is the system. A busload of predominantly black women from Atlanta who had been abused came in to the show and wrote some comments. That’s quite a compliment for them to come and see my work, for them to see what an artist is saying about them. That made me feel really proud. At the same time, I saw Lorna Simpson’s show. It was really heavy work and it made me mad because it was true, and I don’t want to feel privileged. Maybe they had resentments because the lady was white.

(NS) Allegiances are mixed, many black women feel white women have not treated them equitably. All these differences of class, race, ethnicity, age, culture.

(SW) Males see my show and they don’t like it, they almost don’t believe it. I had the same reaction when I saw Lorna’s (Simpson) show. She was saying things as a black woman that I don’t know about. Each little thing was representative of her culture.

(…) I wanted to ask you, do you feel like you have a voice and you can speak?

(NS) It took decades but now I get my message out. I’d been working as an artist for 30 years without much response. Then around ‘83 the situation changed, or partially changed. The work reverberated, the same stuff hidden all those years. I infiltrate and subvert and celebrate, as I wish. Earlier in my career, I was excluded, ignored. I was angry and frustrated in my attempts to get some sort of dialogue going. I used fragmented writings of Antonin Artaud collaged with painted images as a means to express my rage at being silenced as an artist [1969-72, the Artaud Paintings and Codex Artaud]. Artaud’s tirades and screams of rage and anguish, his extreme introspection of physical and mental states resonated for me. If his hysterical and insane ravings would have been written by a woman, they would not have survived nor gained this recognition. Women artists are in the world too and will not be silenced.

(SW) I had no world. I could not function in the world I was in.

(NS) It’s tough entering the art world, becoming a participant. It’s a small elitist enclave—a special world, but then one may find a place.

(SW) It’s such a relief. I almost feel like a human being. I still have a prejudice against women. I mean why would I want to look at the past of women; it’s boring. They are not the ones who really did anything.

(NS) It’s a matter of learning the histories of other women—how women have been written out of history. How the struggle for equality has to be fought and won, over and over. It’s as if we always have to start from zero.

(SW) That’s what happened to all our energy. It’s gone somewhere else, not into the world.


“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them, and Black women worked for them” - Maya Angelou


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BULLIES!!!...

As “Maravilhas” do Facebook…

Havera’ muitas certamente, mas para quem, como eu, apenas la’ entrou ha’ pouco mais de um mes, elas constituem ainda todo um mundo por descobrir. Mas, da infinitesima parte do que ate’ agora la’ pude descobrir, nao posso deixar de assinalar aqui um verdadeiro “acontecimento” para mim: ficar a saber que o meu filho tem uma pagina no Facebook (descobrio-o este fim de semana) e… ve-lo pela primeira vez… dancar!



E’ verdade: nunca tinha visto o meu filho dancar… ate’ ontem no Facebook. E para mim, para todos os efeitos e propositos, ate’ ontem ele “nao sabia dancar”, porque assim me indicaram todas as tentativas que fiz de com ele dar uns passos de danca, tendo a ultima sido na festa de passagem de ano de que aqui postei duas fotos…



Mas, eis que ontem descubro atraves do Facebook que… nao so’ ele danca, como… danca kizomba e… sei la’ mais o que!...



Uma verdadeira DESCOBERTA para mim! E nao tenho duvidas de que para ele proprio tambem, uma vez que teve que ir a aulas desses generos de musica/danca para finalmente se “soltar” e “dar uma de mwangole”!...



Nao tenho nada contra, antes pelo contrario, ate’ acho saudavel, mesmo porque conheco o meu filho suficientemente bem para saber que essa e’ apenas, tal como o que ate’ agora pude descobrir no Facebook, uma infinitesima parte da sua vida, interesses e inclinacoes pessoais – e’ tal e qual como a infinitesima proporcao de kuduro que nas ultimas semanas se conseguiu infiltrar na BBC Radio 3: nao mudou a sua feicao nem o seu caracter. Pelo contrario, apenas os enriqueceu!



So’ que… no seu entusiasmo pela “socializacao ‘a mwangole’”, ele esta’ completamente unaware (... tal como eu estava ate’ muito recentemente...) da existencia de uns certos “patrulheiros” do Facebook, que nunca o conheceram de parte nenhuma, mas que nao se coibem de ir debitar "bocas" destas, destas e destas nos ‘novos jornais’ da banda…



E ainda bem que assim e’ porque, perante o pesadelo de ele poder ter sido vitima das “medidas de caracter profilatico” (ou "pornografico"?) para as “classes mais baixas” que resultam em casos como este… prefiro milhoes de vezes ve-lo dancar pela primeira vez na vida, descontraida e alegremente, sem kijila, com jovens raparigas de todas as racas e culturas e… ainda por cima… kizomba e sei la’ mais o que!!!



A unica coisa que talvez lamente e’ que, por um lado, no geral se tenda a tomar uma pagina no Facebook e as fotos nele postadas como um “retrato fiel e integral” do que as pessoas verdadeiramente sao e do que e’ o seu lifestyle e, por outro lado, que o meu filho, no seu ‘afa’ de “socializacao ‘a mwangole’” e de se tentar tornar “popular” junto da sua geracao, tenha “priorizado” alguns dos seus “interesses mais apelativos e mediaticos” em detrimento de outros que sao seguramente mais reveladores da sua forma de ser e estar na vida, e.g.: os livros que le/leu, o facto de ele ouvir, tocar e ter mais discos de musica classica do que todas as pessoas que conheco, excepto uma (o Rainer), ou o facto de desde a infancia ele ter ido (comigo) a mais concertos de jazz e de conhecer melhor a musica dos Beatles, Pink Floyd, Oasis ou REM do que a media dos jovens da sua idade, ou ainda o facto de ha’ muitos anos ele circular pela cidade mais de bicicleta do que por qualquer outro meio de transporte…



Enfim, questoes de “gestao de imagem” que, manifestamente, nao constituem a sua preocupacao central no putting together da sua pagina no Facebook… o que nao lamento de todo, quanto mais nao seja porque o que a descoberta dessa sua “imagem” no facebook me revelou foi algo de perfeitamente natural, por que regra geral os jovens passam de uma maneira ou de outra em algum momento das suas vidas: no processo de afirmacao de e por si proprios, ou seja, da sua propria identidade e personalidade, tenderem a “renegar” aquilo que sabem que os seus pais (neste caso a sua mae) mais gostariam de ver neles, ou de ve-los expressar e valorizar…



... Ou talvez seja a revelacao de algo mais natural ainda: o fading do lado “introvertido” herdado da sua mae e a emergencia do lado “extrovertido” que era a 'trademark' do seu pai, particularmente quando tinha a idade que ele tem agora…



In any case… gostei de “descobrir”!



Ah!... Mas, sobretudo, gostei de ver o video do Tupac que ele dedicou "to all mothers out there" - que me transportou ao nosso "rough encounter" nos meus primeiros anos londrinos que acabou com ele a ensinar-me a pronunciar correctamente hiphop... Appreciated!

Havera’ muitas certamente, mas para quem, como eu, apenas la’ entrou ha’ pouco mais de um mes, elas constituem ainda todo um mundo por descobrir. Mas, da infinitesima parte do que ate’ agora la’ pude descobrir, nao posso deixar de assinalar aqui um verdadeiro “acontecimento” para mim: ficar a saber que o meu filho tem uma pagina no Facebook (descobrio-o este fim de semana) e… ve-lo pela primeira vez… dancar!



E’ verdade: nunca tinha visto o meu filho dancar… ate’ ontem no Facebook. E para mim, para todos os efeitos e propositos, ate’ ontem ele “nao sabia dancar”, porque assim me indicaram todas as tentativas que fiz de com ele dar uns passos de danca, tendo a ultima sido na festa de passagem de ano de que aqui postei duas fotos…



Mas, eis que ontem descubro atraves do Facebook que… nao so’ ele danca, como… danca kizomba e… sei la’ mais o que!...



Uma verdadeira DESCOBERTA para mim! E nao tenho duvidas de que para ele proprio tambem, uma vez que teve que ir a aulas desses generos de musica/danca para finalmente se “soltar” e “dar uma de mwangole”!...



Nao tenho nada contra, antes pelo contrario, ate’ acho saudavel, mesmo porque conheco o meu filho suficientemente bem para saber que essa e’ apenas, tal como o que ate’ agora pude descobrir no Facebook, uma infinitesima parte da sua vida, interesses e inclinacoes pessoais – e’ tal e qual como a infinitesima proporcao de kuduro que nas ultimas semanas se conseguiu infiltrar na BBC Radio 3: nao mudou a sua feicao nem o seu caracter. Pelo contrario, apenas os enriqueceu!



So’ que… no seu entusiasmo pela “socializacao ‘a mwangole’”, ele esta’ completamente unaware (... tal como eu estava ate’ muito recentemente...) da existencia de uns certos “patrulheiros” do Facebook, que nunca o conheceram de parte nenhuma, mas que nao se coibem de ir debitar "bocas" destas, destas e destas nos ‘novos jornais’ da banda…



E ainda bem que assim e’ porque, perante o pesadelo de ele poder ter sido vitima das “medidas de caracter profilatico” (ou "pornografico"?) para as “classes mais baixas” que resultam em casos como este… prefiro milhoes de vezes ve-lo dancar pela primeira vez na vida, descontraida e alegremente, sem kijila, com jovens raparigas de todas as racas e culturas e… ainda por cima… kizomba e sei la’ mais o que!!!



A unica coisa que talvez lamente e’ que, por um lado, no geral se tenda a tomar uma pagina no Facebook e as fotos nele postadas como um “retrato fiel e integral” do que as pessoas verdadeiramente sao e do que e’ o seu lifestyle e, por outro lado, que o meu filho, no seu ‘afa’ de “socializacao ‘a mwangole’” e de se tentar tornar “popular” junto da sua geracao, tenha “priorizado” alguns dos seus “interesses mais apelativos e mediaticos” em detrimento de outros que sao seguramente mais reveladores da sua forma de ser e estar na vida, e.g.: os livros que le/leu, o facto de ele ouvir, tocar e ter mais discos de musica classica do que todas as pessoas que conheco, excepto uma (o Rainer), ou o facto de desde a infancia ele ter ido (comigo) a mais concertos de jazz e de conhecer melhor a musica dos Beatles, Pink Floyd, Oasis ou REM do que a media dos jovens da sua idade, ou ainda o facto de ha’ muitos anos ele circular pela cidade mais de bicicleta do que por qualquer outro meio de transporte…



Enfim, questoes de “gestao de imagem” que, manifestamente, nao constituem a sua preocupacao central no putting together da sua pagina no Facebook… o que nao lamento de todo, quanto mais nao seja porque o que a descoberta dessa sua “imagem” no facebook me revelou foi algo de perfeitamente natural, por que regra geral os jovens passam de uma maneira ou de outra em algum momento das suas vidas: no processo de afirmacao de e por si proprios, ou seja, da sua propria identidade e personalidade, tenderem a “renegar” aquilo que sabem que os seus pais (neste caso a sua mae) mais gostariam de ver neles, ou de ve-los expressar e valorizar…



... Ou talvez seja a revelacao de algo mais natural ainda: o fading do lado “introvertido” herdado da sua mae e a emergencia do lado “extrovertido” que era a 'trademark' do seu pai, particularmente quando tinha a idade que ele tem agora…



In any case… gostei de “descobrir”!



Ah!... Mas, sobretudo, gostei de ver o video do Tupac que ele dedicou "to all mothers out there" - que me transportou ao nosso "rough encounter" nos meus primeiros anos londrinos que acabou com ele a ensinar-me a pronunciar correctamente hiphop... Appreciated!

Da "ditadura da idade" e outros mambos enferrujados nao reciclaveis [*] - (actualizado)

Pior do que envelhecer, e' nao saber (ou nao querer, ou nao ser capaz de) envelhecer com dignidade, verticalidade, integridade e graciosidade e ter inteligencia, sensibilidade, responsabilidade e coragem suficientes para tentar deixar um 'legado' , humilde e diminuto que seja, digno desse nome as geracoes seguintes e vindouras, fazendo sempre questao de respeitar 'todo o mundo' - quem quer que seja e qualquer que seja a sua idade e sobretudo em publico (!) - para nao passar pela "humilhacao" de se ser desrespeitada/o...


Enfim, nao ter a minima nocao do que significa ser-se um/a "role model"!...


E isso e' tao valido para as pessoas - homens ou mulheres - como para as ideias, de esquerda ou de direita, ou para as instituicoes, e entre estas especialmente os partidos politicos, da situacao ou da oposicao!...





'A Mesa de um Café Londrino…


… Sentei-me, no sabado antepassado (portanto, antes de ter lido o artigo que motivou esta mukanda), com a minha amiga Zheena – uma Mulher da Etiopia (pais reputado como sendo produtor de algum do melhor cafe do mundo) nos seus 65-70 anos, mas muito confortavel com a sua idade, o seu corpo e a sua sexualidade.

Ela encomendou um pote de cha’ e eu um café macchiato. Olhamos deliciadas para os bolos – nao do tipo bolos de arroz ou pasteis de nata, mas bolos mesmo, feitos em casa, handmade, dos quais se pode pedir uma ou duas fatias – mas decidimos nao indulgir na gulodice… Enquanto esperavamos que nos viessem servir a uma das mesas de real wood (reciclavel), sentadas em cadeiras tradicionalmente estofadas, ‘enjoyamos’ o espaco que nos rodeava: uma exposicao de ceramica artesanal contemporanea nas prateleiras ao lado da nossa mesa, numa das paredes um ‘fresco’ em tamanho gigante retratando algumas das figuras maiores da musica anglosaxonica com destaque para Louis Armstrong e noutras paredes fotos autografadas de artistas que por ali passaram, posters e cartazes de eventos culturais e mais, muito mais!...

Ah, e tudo isso enquanto nos chegavam aos ouvidos acordes vindos de uma outra sala onde um grupo de musicos ensaiava – na noite anterior, disseram-nos, tinha la’ estado a actuar um dos melhores pianistas contemporaneos deste pais… e nao, nao era nenhum upper class café numa qualquer rua ou bairro upmarket de Londres – tratava-se apenas de um cafe'-estudio-galeria numa back street de uma area de Londres nao particularmente trendy: Kentish Town!


Depois de servidas por dois extremamente afaveis empregados, um Eritreu e uma Irlandesa, entre os nossos cha’ e café, a Zheena, sem nunca mencionar a sua idade, falou-me do seu processo de envelhecimento: da mudanca gradual dos seus habitos alimentares e do seu efeito no seu metabolismo; de como precisava de voltar ao gym que ela deixou de frequentar ha’ cerca de um ano, onde depois do exercicio fisico relaxava na spa – e nao, tal como eu, ela nao e’ rica!

Bom, claro que nem todos os cafes de Londres sao assim, mas este e’ apenas um de muitos exemplos do que esta cidade tem para oferecer em materia de cafes, que ja’ vao sendo mais do que os pubs, os quais, tal como varias outras instituicoes tradicionais ("velhas") deste pais, teem vindo gradualmente a fechar, ou a reconverter-se (reciclar-se). E mesmo que nao sejam em tao grande numero como, por exemplo, os de Paris, sei, por experiencia propria, que aquele precioso fim de tarde naquele café de Londres com a Zheena ter-nos-ia custado os olhos da cara em Paris – e isto se nao nos impedissem de la’ entrar, senao ostensivamente (afinal os parisienses sao supostamente peritos em “finesse”…), muito provavelmente, dada a sua igualmente famosa snobbery, pela frieza do tratamento que (nao) nos dispensariam!...

E isto apenas para dar a quem “nao conhece muitos mundos fora dos livros”, a ‘dica’ (ou 'bica' se preferir...) de que nao sao so’ os "Europeus" (continentais) que 'enjoyam' a cultura do café (‘o espaco’) e que… no mundo anglofono, para alem de Londres, talvez alguns dos melhores cafes do mundo se situam em cidades Americanas como New York!... Alias, so' com um grande stretch of the imagination se pode considerar a "cultura do cafe'" como uma "marca civilizacional" da Europa tao 'longeva' quanto a Grecia Antiga: isso porque o cafe' (tanto o espaco como o produto) e' pretty much um produto da colonizacao da Africa pela Europa... da qual, diga-se, a Grecia de 500 nao participou, ou seja, o seu PIB nunca foi alimentado por nenhuma colonia ou ex-colonia - o que tambem podera' ter algo a ver com o desespero em que se encontra neste momento porque, ao contrario de Portugal, por exemplo, nao tem uma "antiga joia da coroa" em Africa a que recorrer!...

E… porque, desde que a conheco, ela tem sabido granjear o meu respeito, eu jamais chamaria ‘a Zheena, nos seus sabios, sadios e confortaveis cerca de 70 anos de idade, “velhota, velhaca e bruaca”… beyond repair!...


"O MIT QUE CONHECO"

Podera' nao ser exactamente "a prova de balas", mas...

... E' um MIT que sabe que nao se pode permitir "envelhecer desgracadamente" sob pena de perder as suas credibilidade e respeitabilidade...

... E' um MIT que sabe que tem que respeitar e integrar o "sangue novo" da "juventude" para que nao falte vida 'as ideias que nele nascem, se desenvolvem e se reproduzem e para que estas nao morram de "morte matada"!...

... E' um MIT que nao tolera a arrogancia ignorante, nem a desonestidade intelectual, ou a cobardia, o plagiarismo e/ou o mimetismo, o oportunismo e menos ainda a total falta de etica e deontologia profissionais!!!...

...E', acima de tudo, um MIT suficientemente forte, robusto, maduro, idoneo, democratico e civilizado, para albergar e acomodar academicos dos mais diversos espectros politico-ideologicos!...


Esse e' o MIT do Chomsky (o linguista, filosofo, cognicientista e historiador - aquele que diz que "o papel historico dos intelectuais, se olharmos tao longe quanto pudermos no passado, infelizmente tem sido o de apoiar os sistemas de poder e justificar as suas atrocidades"... - nao necessariamente o 'activista politico-ideologico de esquerda' que, manifestamente, e' o unico que a "nossa catedratica-cientista" conhece!...) - digno, responsavel, respeitavel e perfeitamente reciclavel!



[*] 'Mukanda' a proposito de algumas passagens de um artigo publicado a paginas tantas da edicao do Semanario Angolense da semana passada, da autoria de alguem, certamente pertencente a geracao Y, mas definitivamente nao 'a minha e muito menos ao meu "espaco geo-politico" - este, o meu, pode encontrar-se mais facilmente aqui, do que em qualquer "ideia da Europa"!...

Embora nao possa deixar de notar a "coincidencia" das afirmacoes feitas nesse artigo com alguns dos argumentos mais "profundos" dos "eurocepticos" da direita Britanica que agora, perante o "colapso" da Grecia - e, dizem eles, for that matter da propria "ideia da Europa", qualquer que ela seja - proclamam: "nos bem vos avisamos!"...

E mais perturbador ainda do que isso e', para alem da "endogeneizacao" do euro-centrismo no mundo ocidental (e global?... muito proprio de uma mui zelosa "mae da negritude branca pos-colonial"!...), o "greci-centrismo" no mundo europeu (e ocidental?...) patenteado nesse artigo: e' que a Grecia Antiga pode bem ser "o berco (ou mae, se se preferir) da civilizacao europeia", mas a Europa Contemporanea ja' e' "o berco" de varias geracoes de cidadaos ("barbaros"?) das mais variadas origens civilizacionais de todo o mundo (... Portugal e'-o de certeza, sempre o foi e continuara' a se-lo, particularmente desde que se viu forcado a recorrer a sua "velha" joia da coroa em Africa, Angola, para se salvar da "tragedia Grega"... pelo que, se alguns politicos Portugueses dizem que "nos nao somos a Grecia!", terao certamente as suas (muitas, boas e novas) razoes!...) - e a assumpcao dessa realidade tambem faz parte de uma "ideia da Europa" inclusiva, multi-cultural, multi-etnica e multi-racial, que nao se ve retratada nas ideias de Steiner copied and pasted para esse artigo!... O que talvez se perceba com um melhor conhecimento da biografia e bibliografia de Steiner (e, em particular, o que Assaf Sagiv designou “George Steiner’s Jewish Problem”) e porque que ele considera a “ideia da Europa” como “um conto de duas cidades: Atenas e Jerusalém”...


POST RELACIONADO:

When Wise Women Grow Old

Pior do que envelhecer, e' nao saber (ou nao querer, ou nao ser capaz de) envelhecer com dignidade, verticalidade, integridade e graciosidade e ter inteligencia, sensibilidade, responsabilidade e coragem suficientes para tentar deixar um 'legado' , humilde e diminuto que seja, digno desse nome as geracoes seguintes e vindouras, fazendo sempre questao de respeitar 'todo o mundo' - quem quer que seja e qualquer que seja a sua idade e sobretudo em publico (!) - para nao passar pela "humilhacao" de se ser desrespeitada/o...


Enfim, nao ter a minima nocao do que significa ser-se um/a "role model"!...


E isso e' tao valido para as pessoas - homens ou mulheres - como para as ideias, de esquerda ou de direita, ou para as instituicoes, e entre estas especialmente os partidos politicos, da situacao ou da oposicao!...





'A Mesa de um Café Londrino…


… Sentei-me, no sabado antepassado (portanto, antes de ter lido o artigo que motivou esta mukanda), com a minha amiga Zheena – uma Mulher da Etiopia (pais reputado como sendo produtor de algum do melhor cafe do mundo) nos seus 65-70 anos, mas muito confortavel com a sua idade, o seu corpo e a sua sexualidade.

Ela encomendou um pote de cha’ e eu um café macchiato. Olhamos deliciadas para os bolos – nao do tipo bolos de arroz ou pasteis de nata, mas bolos mesmo, feitos em casa, handmade, dos quais se pode pedir uma ou duas fatias – mas decidimos nao indulgir na gulodice… Enquanto esperavamos que nos viessem servir a uma das mesas de real wood (reciclavel), sentadas em cadeiras tradicionalmente estofadas, ‘enjoyamos’ o espaco que nos rodeava: uma exposicao de ceramica artesanal contemporanea nas prateleiras ao lado da nossa mesa, numa das paredes um ‘fresco’ em tamanho gigante retratando algumas das figuras maiores da musica anglosaxonica com destaque para Louis Armstrong e noutras paredes fotos autografadas de artistas que por ali passaram, posters e cartazes de eventos culturais e mais, muito mais!...

Ah, e tudo isso enquanto nos chegavam aos ouvidos acordes vindos de uma outra sala onde um grupo de musicos ensaiava – na noite anterior, disseram-nos, tinha la’ estado a actuar um dos melhores pianistas contemporaneos deste pais… e nao, nao era nenhum upper class café numa qualquer rua ou bairro upmarket de Londres – tratava-se apenas de um cafe'-estudio-galeria numa back street de uma area de Londres nao particularmente trendy: Kentish Town!


Depois de servidas por dois extremamente afaveis empregados, um Eritreu e uma Irlandesa, entre os nossos cha’ e café, a Zheena, sem nunca mencionar a sua idade, falou-me do seu processo de envelhecimento: da mudanca gradual dos seus habitos alimentares e do seu efeito no seu metabolismo; de como precisava de voltar ao gym que ela deixou de frequentar ha’ cerca de um ano, onde depois do exercicio fisico relaxava na spa – e nao, tal como eu, ela nao e’ rica!

Bom, claro que nem todos os cafes de Londres sao assim, mas este e’ apenas um de muitos exemplos do que esta cidade tem para oferecer em materia de cafes, que ja’ vao sendo mais do que os pubs, os quais, tal como varias outras instituicoes tradicionais ("velhas") deste pais, teem vindo gradualmente a fechar, ou a reconverter-se (reciclar-se). E mesmo que nao sejam em tao grande numero como, por exemplo, os de Paris, sei, por experiencia propria, que aquele precioso fim de tarde naquele café de Londres com a Zheena ter-nos-ia custado os olhos da cara em Paris – e isto se nao nos impedissem de la’ entrar, senao ostensivamente (afinal os parisienses sao supostamente peritos em “finesse”…), muito provavelmente, dada a sua igualmente famosa snobbery, pela frieza do tratamento que (nao) nos dispensariam!...

E isto apenas para dar a quem “nao conhece muitos mundos fora dos livros”, a ‘dica’ (ou 'bica' se preferir...) de que nao sao so’ os "Europeus" (continentais) que 'enjoyam' a cultura do café (‘o espaco’) e que… no mundo anglofono, para alem de Londres, talvez alguns dos melhores cafes do mundo se situam em cidades Americanas como New York!... Alias, so' com um grande stretch of the imagination se pode considerar a "cultura do cafe'" como uma "marca civilizacional" da Europa tao 'longeva' quanto a Grecia Antiga: isso porque o cafe' (tanto o espaco como o produto) e' pretty much um produto da colonizacao da Africa pela Europa... da qual, diga-se, a Grecia de 500 nao participou, ou seja, o seu PIB nunca foi alimentado por nenhuma colonia ou ex-colonia - o que tambem podera' ter algo a ver com o desespero em que se encontra neste momento porque, ao contrario de Portugal, por exemplo, nao tem uma "antiga joia da coroa" em Africa a que recorrer!...

E… porque, desde que a conheco, ela tem sabido granjear o meu respeito, eu jamais chamaria ‘a Zheena, nos seus sabios, sadios e confortaveis cerca de 70 anos de idade, “velhota, velhaca e bruaca”… beyond repair!...


"O MIT QUE CONHECO"

Podera' nao ser exactamente "a prova de balas", mas...

... E' um MIT que sabe que nao se pode permitir "envelhecer desgracadamente" sob pena de perder as suas credibilidade e respeitabilidade...

... E' um MIT que sabe que tem que respeitar e integrar o "sangue novo" da "juventude" para que nao falte vida 'as ideias que nele nascem, se desenvolvem e se reproduzem e para que estas nao morram de "morte matada"!...

... E' um MIT que nao tolera a arrogancia ignorante, nem a desonestidade intelectual, ou a cobardia, o plagiarismo e/ou o mimetismo, o oportunismo e menos ainda a total falta de etica e deontologia profissionais!!!...

...E', acima de tudo, um MIT suficientemente forte, robusto, maduro, idoneo, democratico e civilizado, para albergar e acomodar academicos dos mais diversos espectros politico-ideologicos!...


Esse e' o MIT do Chomsky (o linguista, filosofo, cognicientista e historiador - aquele que diz que "o papel historico dos intelectuais, se olharmos tao longe quanto pudermos no passado, infelizmente tem sido o de apoiar os sistemas de poder e justificar as suas atrocidades"... - nao necessariamente o 'activista politico-ideologico de esquerda' que, manifestamente, e' o unico que a "nossa catedratica-cientista" conhece!...) - digno, responsavel, respeitavel e perfeitamente reciclavel!



[*] 'Mukanda' a proposito de algumas passagens de um artigo publicado a paginas tantas da edicao do Semanario Angolense da semana passada, da autoria de alguem, certamente pertencente a geracao Y, mas definitivamente nao 'a minha e muito menos ao meu "espaco geo-politico" - este, o meu, pode encontrar-se mais facilmente aqui, do que em qualquer "ideia da Europa"!...

Embora nao possa deixar de notar a "coincidencia" das afirmacoes feitas nesse artigo com alguns dos argumentos mais "profundos" dos "eurocepticos" da direita Britanica que agora, perante o "colapso" da Grecia - e, dizem eles, for that matter da propria "ideia da Europa", qualquer que ela seja - proclamam: "nos bem vos avisamos!"...

E mais perturbador ainda do que isso e', para alem da "endogeneizacao" do euro-centrismo no mundo ocidental (e global?... muito proprio de uma mui zelosa "mae da negritude branca pos-colonial"!...), o "greci-centrismo" no mundo europeu (e ocidental?...) patenteado nesse artigo: e' que a Grecia Antiga pode bem ser "o berco (ou mae, se se preferir) da civilizacao europeia", mas a Europa Contemporanea ja' e' "o berco" de varias geracoes de cidadaos ("barbaros"?) das mais variadas origens civilizacionais de todo o mundo (... Portugal e'-o de certeza, sempre o foi e continuara' a se-lo, particularmente desde que se viu forcado a recorrer a sua "velha" joia da coroa em Africa, Angola, para se salvar da "tragedia Grega"... pelo que, se alguns politicos Portugueses dizem que "nos nao somos a Grecia!", terao certamente as suas (muitas, boas e novas) razoes!...) - e a assumpcao dessa realidade tambem faz parte de uma "ideia da Europa" inclusiva, multi-cultural, multi-etnica e multi-racial, que nao se ve retratada nas ideias de Steiner copied and pasted para esse artigo!... O que talvez se perceba com um melhor conhecimento da biografia e bibliografia de Steiner (e, em particular, o que Assaf Sagiv designou “George Steiner’s Jewish Problem”) e porque que ele considera a “ideia da Europa” como “um conto de duas cidades: Atenas e Jerusalém”...


POST RELACIONADO:

When Wise Women Grow Old

Opera: 'Most Frequent Questions'

Q.: What is it?
A.: Just Like Classical Ballett, A European Art Form

"Opera is the European art form par excellence, because it overcomes national and linguistic barriers through the universal language of music. Its core values and themes are central to European culture, which is part of our common identity. For this reason, the European Opera Days are celebrated on the weekend closest to 9 May, Europe Day.



Over time Opera has become an emblem of European culture. Its creation and performance are a prime focus of a nation’s cultural identity, but one which communicates internationally. An opera house belongs to its own town and region, but it is visible to the world."

here



Q.: What's at it's core?
A.: The Aria

"Tom Sutcliffe has a long pedigree when it comes to opera. He was hooked at the age of four. It's given him plenty of time to fathom what it is that makes this theatrical form impinge so powerfully. He argues that while it might seem grand, flamboyant, passionate and overtly emotional, when you look more closely it's the intimacy of it that counts.



The aria, and Tom believes these are at its core, is a confessional form. It might be launched into a huge auditorium with gut-busting zeal and massive vocal projection, but what it does is to open the character's emotions up to the audience by way of the music. The music, the singing, is everything, and it's why the aria, which Tom believes is opera's version of the cinematic close-up, is so important.
There are plenty of other elements that contribute. Relevance in setting and substance can be too slavishly observed but they matter as well. Laced with his recollections of the good and the bad in his many years as a critic, Tom makes the case for opera by going beyond the usual cliche's and enthusiasms for grandeur and beauty."

here



Q.: Is it "for the masses" and 'all that important'?
A.: Well... Just read this:

How I fell out of love with opera

"I've been writing about opera for about a decade now, and over the years, as I've watched one companion after another's eyes glaze over, or close gently, during a show, I have begun to wonder: what if I'm wrong about this? What if it actually is all rubbish, self-indulgent, glittery, adolescent, incontinent, with a vastly inflated view of its own importance? Can opera ever be more than a diversion for people with too much money and too little taste? And was it ever intended to be, anyway?
You hardly need me to tell you that opera is pretty stupid. Ask the audience: plenty of them will tell you the same – if you can get them to wake up. Is there any other form of entertainment so frequented by people who do not like it? This notion – that opera is not actually all that much fun – is hardly new; that's why it comes all dollied up in red velvet, snobbery, fancy dress and vats of alcohol – sops to the considerable sections of the audience who are there for reasons not associated with aesthetic pleasure: the socially ambitious, the conspicuous spenders, those trying to beguile clients or spouses or potential mistresses.



The opera festival is the ne plus ultra of this: an affair where the supposed main event is actually a sideshow to a rigmarole of Issey Miyake shawls, mud-caked mules, champagne and salmon on the lawn. Opera's apologists and the publicity departments of state-funded houses will tell you that it isn't really like that at all, that opera is an art form for the people, that there is no class or age barrier, that indeed the audience are almost entirely first-timers, all under 30, as diverse as the day is long. Five minutes' research will tell you the facts: 6% of the adult population has been to an operatic event of some sort. As a reward for this, 11% of the arts council's entire funding is awarded to opera – and more than 90% of that goes to the national companies, who between them put on fewer than half of the opera performances in the country.
[…]
You will sometimes hear people say opera was intended as an entertainment for the masses, and it is true that at certain periods in 19th-century Italy it seems to have been immensely popular with all classes (or at least all classes that were worth mentioning, which may not be exactly the same thing). Your Italian bourgeois was presumably no more keen than any other nation's on hanging out with the unwashed. In any event, opera was about the closest thing the country had then to a mass media, a phenomenon put to good use by Giuseppe Verdi, who used his operas as a means of promoting the cause of Italian unity.
Nonetheless, this was an aberration. Opera was created in the late 16th century as entertainment for the rich, and for most of its history has remained just that. Whenever it has threatened to become too popular, its plutocratic patrons have done everything in their power to stop it: in 1733, the Prince of Wales set up his own company, tellingly named Opera of the Nobility, to rival Handel's company when that was thought to be getting a bit common; and you don't have to think nearly that far back to remember outbreaks of horror at Covent Garden over relaxations in codes of dress and deportment, and regular contumely is still thrown at directors who threaten to do anything interesting with their shows, or open them up in any way to people not already profoundly versed in the arcana of opera.
[…]
Operatic beginnings owed everything to ancient Greece and young men prancing about with enormous flapping leather phalluses. These Dionysiac roots soon gave way to something altogether more puritanical, so that by the 19th century, far from being a celebration of the anarchic power of sex, opera was mostly concerned with killing off women in big dresses who transgressed against the terrifically hypocritical, misogynistic mores of the time."




Related Posts:

Aria by Grover Washington Jr.

Burrice e/ou Ignorancia, Ou Seria o Contrario?

Q.: What is it?
A.: Just Like Classical Ballett, A European Art Form

"Opera is the European art form par excellence, because it overcomes national and linguistic barriers through the universal language of music. Its core values and themes are central to European culture, which is part of our common identity. For this reason, the European Opera Days are celebrated on the weekend closest to 9 May, Europe Day.



Over time Opera has become an emblem of European culture. Its creation and performance are a prime focus of a nation’s cultural identity, but one which communicates internationally. An opera house belongs to its own town and region, but it is visible to the world."

here



Q.: What's at it's core?
A.: The Aria

"Tom Sutcliffe has a long pedigree when it comes to opera. He was hooked at the age of four. It's given him plenty of time to fathom what it is that makes this theatrical form impinge so powerfully. He argues that while it might seem grand, flamboyant, passionate and overtly emotional, when you look more closely it's the intimacy of it that counts.



The aria, and Tom believes these are at its core, is a confessional form. It might be launched into a huge auditorium with gut-busting zeal and massive vocal projection, but what it does is to open the character's emotions up to the audience by way of the music. The music, the singing, is everything, and it's why the aria, which Tom believes is opera's version of the cinematic close-up, is so important.
There are plenty of other elements that contribute. Relevance in setting and substance can be too slavishly observed but they matter as well. Laced with his recollections of the good and the bad in his many years as a critic, Tom makes the case for opera by going beyond the usual cliche's and enthusiasms for grandeur and beauty."

here



Q.: Is it "for the masses" and 'all that important'?
A.: Well... Just read this:

How I fell out of love with opera

"I've been writing about opera for about a decade now, and over the years, as I've watched one companion after another's eyes glaze over, or close gently, during a show, I have begun to wonder: what if I'm wrong about this? What if it actually is all rubbish, self-indulgent, glittery, adolescent, incontinent, with a vastly inflated view of its own importance? Can opera ever be more than a diversion for people with too much money and too little taste? And was it ever intended to be, anyway?
You hardly need me to tell you that opera is pretty stupid. Ask the audience: plenty of them will tell you the same – if you can get them to wake up. Is there any other form of entertainment so frequented by people who do not like it? This notion – that opera is not actually all that much fun – is hardly new; that's why it comes all dollied up in red velvet, snobbery, fancy dress and vats of alcohol – sops to the considerable sections of the audience who are there for reasons not associated with aesthetic pleasure: the socially ambitious, the conspicuous spenders, those trying to beguile clients or spouses or potential mistresses.



The opera festival is the ne plus ultra of this: an affair where the supposed main event is actually a sideshow to a rigmarole of Issey Miyake shawls, mud-caked mules, champagne and salmon on the lawn. Opera's apologists and the publicity departments of state-funded houses will tell you that it isn't really like that at all, that opera is an art form for the people, that there is no class or age barrier, that indeed the audience are almost entirely first-timers, all under 30, as diverse as the day is long. Five minutes' research will tell you the facts: 6% of the adult population has been to an operatic event of some sort. As a reward for this, 11% of the arts council's entire funding is awarded to opera – and more than 90% of that goes to the national companies, who between them put on fewer than half of the opera performances in the country.
[…]
You will sometimes hear people say opera was intended as an entertainment for the masses, and it is true that at certain periods in 19th-century Italy it seems to have been immensely popular with all classes (or at least all classes that were worth mentioning, which may not be exactly the same thing). Your Italian bourgeois was presumably no more keen than any other nation's on hanging out with the unwashed. In any event, opera was about the closest thing the country had then to a mass media, a phenomenon put to good use by Giuseppe Verdi, who used his operas as a means of promoting the cause of Italian unity.
Nonetheless, this was an aberration. Opera was created in the late 16th century as entertainment for the rich, and for most of its history has remained just that. Whenever it has threatened to become too popular, its plutocratic patrons have done everything in their power to stop it: in 1733, the Prince of Wales set up his own company, tellingly named Opera of the Nobility, to rival Handel's company when that was thought to be getting a bit common; and you don't have to think nearly that far back to remember outbreaks of horror at Covent Garden over relaxations in codes of dress and deportment, and regular contumely is still thrown at directors who threaten to do anything interesting with their shows, or open them up in any way to people not already profoundly versed in the arcana of opera.
[…]
Operatic beginnings owed everything to ancient Greece and young men prancing about with enormous flapping leather phalluses. These Dionysiac roots soon gave way to something altogether more puritanical, so that by the 19th century, far from being a celebration of the anarchic power of sex, opera was mostly concerned with killing off women in big dresses who transgressed against the terrifically hypocritical, misogynistic mores of the time."




Related Posts:

Aria by Grover Washington Jr.

Burrice e/ou Ignorancia, Ou Seria o Contrario?

FESPAM: Festival Panafricain de Musique

Le Festival Panafricain de Musique (FESPAM) est une grande manifestation culturelle et scientifique biennale qui vise essentiellement la promotion de la musique du continent africain et de sa diaspora dans sa triple dimension traditionnelle, moderne et religieuse.



“A indústria criativa sul-africana e a renascença das músicas bantu” é o tema de uma palestra dada pelo historiador Simão Souindoula, esta quinta-feira, no Palácio dos Congressos de Brazzaville.

Realizada no âmbito do VIII Festival Panafricano de Música (FESPAM), que termina amanhã, em Brazzaville, na República do Congo, vai servir para o historiador analisar a actual renascença da música africana, a partir da expansão do mercado discográfico nacional e a abrangência dos ritmos sul-africanos.

Para Simão Souindoula, o crescimento económico, industrial e cultural da África do Sul é um elemento chave na regeneração da música tradicional e moderna do continente e das línguas bantu. Esta nova dinâmica, argumenta, é completada por muitos músicos e promotores dos países membros da Comunidade de Desenvolvimento da África Austral (SADC) que têm realizado espectáculos regulares em palcos europeus e americanos.
“É a cultura e os valores africanos que são levados além fronteiras em cada uma destas actuações”, disse. O facto do mercado discográfico da África do Sul ser um dos mais produtivos e menos caros do continente surge como um ponto decisivo no actual renascimento da música africana, por oferecer custos de produção competitivos, apoio técnico de alto nível e uma qualidade de serviços bastante atractiva.

A oitava edição do FESPAM realiza-se este ano sob o lema “Compromissos artísticos e inovações estéticas para o Renascimento Africano”. “A intenção é chamar a atenção para a arte africana e o papel dos músicos no processo de regeneração. A ideia é, ainda, fazer uma homenagem à história do continente e contribuir efectivamente para o seu renascimento”, disse o ministro da Cultura e Artes do Congo, Jean Claude Gakosso. “É altura dos africanos olharem para o futuro através da salvaguarda do seu património cultural, que actualmente enfrenta os desafios da globalização”, acrescentou.



The organisers of the KORA All Africa Music Awards created a unique partnership with the Ministry of Tourism and Culture in Congo (Brazzaville), and staged the Pan African Music Festival in Brazzaville during 2003 and 2005. Le Festival Panafricain de Musique or FESPAM is an important cultural event on the African continent for it belongs to the OAU-AFRICAN UNION and showcases musical artists from all parts of Africa. The Festival takes place every two years.
According to Mr. Ernest Coovi Adjovi, “This agreement is an important step along the KORA journey and recognises the contribution that KORA has made to music of African Origin. I am honoured that our expertise and strengths have been recognised through this unique agreement and we look forward to the impact that FESPAM will have in Africa this year.”


[More details here]


Related Post:

Hugh Masekela on African Music

Le Festival Panafricain de Musique (FESPAM) est une grande manifestation culturelle et scientifique biennale qui vise essentiellement la promotion de la musique du continent africain et de sa diaspora dans sa triple dimension traditionnelle, moderne et religieuse.



“A indústria criativa sul-africana e a renascença das músicas bantu” é o tema de uma palestra dada pelo historiador Simão Souindoula, esta quinta-feira, no Palácio dos Congressos de Brazzaville.

Realizada no âmbito do VIII Festival Panafricano de Música (FESPAM), que termina amanhã, em Brazzaville, na República do Congo, vai servir para o historiador analisar a actual renascença da música africana, a partir da expansão do mercado discográfico nacional e a abrangência dos ritmos sul-africanos.

Para Simão Souindoula, o crescimento económico, industrial e cultural da África do Sul é um elemento chave na regeneração da música tradicional e moderna do continente e das línguas bantu. Esta nova dinâmica, argumenta, é completada por muitos músicos e promotores dos países membros da Comunidade de Desenvolvimento da África Austral (SADC) que têm realizado espectáculos regulares em palcos europeus e americanos.
“É a cultura e os valores africanos que são levados além fronteiras em cada uma destas actuações”, disse. O facto do mercado discográfico da África do Sul ser um dos mais produtivos e menos caros do continente surge como um ponto decisivo no actual renascimento da música africana, por oferecer custos de produção competitivos, apoio técnico de alto nível e uma qualidade de serviços bastante atractiva.

A oitava edição do FESPAM realiza-se este ano sob o lema “Compromissos artísticos e inovações estéticas para o Renascimento Africano”. “A intenção é chamar a atenção para a arte africana e o papel dos músicos no processo de regeneração. A ideia é, ainda, fazer uma homenagem à história do continente e contribuir efectivamente para o seu renascimento”, disse o ministro da Cultura e Artes do Congo, Jean Claude Gakosso. “É altura dos africanos olharem para o futuro através da salvaguarda do seu património cultural, que actualmente enfrenta os desafios da globalização”, acrescentou.



The organisers of the KORA All Africa Music Awards created a unique partnership with the Ministry of Tourism and Culture in Congo (Brazzaville), and staged the Pan African Music Festival in Brazzaville during 2003 and 2005. Le Festival Panafricain de Musique or FESPAM is an important cultural event on the African continent for it belongs to the OAU-AFRICAN UNION and showcases musical artists from all parts of Africa. The Festival takes place every two years.
According to Mr. Ernest Coovi Adjovi, “This agreement is an important step along the KORA journey and recognises the contribution that KORA has made to music of African Origin. I am honoured that our expertise and strengths have been recognised through this unique agreement and we look forward to the impact that FESPAM will have in Africa this year.”


[More details here]


Related Post:

Hugh Masekela on African Music

Patrocinio... Para Que Te Quero?! [R]*

Gosh... O que muito boa gente ("servidores do poder" incluidos...) por esse mundo fora nao daria por e faria com tanto sponsorship!

(eu ca' por mim, of course just in my wildest dreams, financiaria o meu PhD, o Masters do meu filho e a "minha nova casa em Angola"... depois metia uma boa sabatica para "me organizar", "me elegantar como manda o figurino e comme il faut, i.e. como se aprende nas passerelles de misses, passagens de modelos e saloes de ballet classico europeu..." e, se ainda me sobrasse tempo, reunir/compilar/editar para publicacao os escritos que venho acumulando ao longo dos anos e escrever outros tantos livros que me pudessem tornar "merecedora" de ser considerada no "meu pais e de todos os meus ancestrais" uma "rica e significante criatura" e... quica tambem "imprescindivel e insubstituivel"! )

Mas, como alias sempre o foi, "isto nao e' para quem quer, nem para quem merece... e' para quem p(h)ode - em particular, ser suficientemente "criativa" para copianços como estes... e vulturacoes e violacoes como estas!!!...

Pois... e com tantas criancas a morrer de p(h)ome!...

Prioridades... prioridades... para que vos quero?!

(Onde e' que eu ja' ouvi falar de "intelectuais que nao se devem deixar cooptar por governos ou corporacoes?" e gritar "abaixo o capitalismo, o imperialismo, a globalizacao e o neoliberalismo" e falar de "ricos cada vez mais ricos e pobres cada vez mais pobres"?

... shhhhh... tal e qual como o Kota Marx vaticinou... shhhhh)

LOL. LOLADA. LOLÃO!!!!!!!

E' como diz o outro: "ja' fiz o meu suicidio de classe, mas tambem ja' ressuscitei!"

*****

BY THE WAY, ALL THIS GIVES ME AN IDEA:

= As From Today This Blog Accepts Social, Institutional and Corporate Sponsorship =

= A Partir De Hoje Este Blog Aceita Patrocinios Sociais, Institucionais e Empresariais =

THANK YOU

OBRIGADA

*[First posted 14/11/09]


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Kwando a Arte Kontemporanea

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(H)A (S)SUM(IND)O?...

Como Fabricar Um Monstro Pos-Colonial

Gosh... O que muito boa gente ("servidores do poder" incluidos...) por esse mundo fora nao daria por e faria com tanto sponsorship!

(eu ca' por mim, of course just in my wildest dreams, financiaria o meu PhD, o Masters do meu filho e a "minha nova casa em Angola"... depois metia uma boa sabatica para "me organizar", "me elegantar como manda o figurino e comme il faut, i.e. como se aprende nas passerelles de misses, passagens de modelos e saloes de ballet classico europeu..." e, se ainda me sobrasse tempo, reunir/compilar/editar para publicacao os escritos que venho acumulando ao longo dos anos e escrever outros tantos livros que me pudessem tornar "merecedora" de ser considerada no "meu pais e de todos os meus ancestrais" uma "rica e significante criatura" e... quica tambem "imprescindivel e insubstituivel"! )

Mas, como alias sempre o foi, "isto nao e' para quem quer, nem para quem merece... e' para quem p(h)ode - em particular, ser suficientemente "criativa" para copianços como estes... e vulturacoes e violacoes como estas!!!...

Pois... e com tantas criancas a morrer de p(h)ome!...

Prioridades... prioridades... para que vos quero?!

(Onde e' que eu ja' ouvi falar de "intelectuais que nao se devem deixar cooptar por governos ou corporacoes?" e gritar "abaixo o capitalismo, o imperialismo, a globalizacao e o neoliberalismo" e falar de "ricos cada vez mais ricos e pobres cada vez mais pobres"?

... shhhhh... tal e qual como o Kota Marx vaticinou... shhhhh)

LOL. LOLADA. LOLÃO!!!!!!!

E' como diz o outro: "ja' fiz o meu suicidio de classe, mas tambem ja' ressuscitei!"

*****

BY THE WAY, ALL THIS GIVES ME AN IDEA:

= As From Today This Blog Accepts Social, Institutional and Corporate Sponsorship =

= A Partir De Hoje Este Blog Aceita Patrocinios Sociais, Institucionais e Empresariais =

THANK YOU

OBRIGADA

*[First posted 14/11/09]


Posts Relacionados:


Kwando a Arte Kontemporanea

Ainda Sobre Aquele Meu Curso em Portugal

(H)A (S)SUM(IND)O?...

Como Fabricar Um Monstro Pos-Colonial