Strummer did his part to keep us sane. His later work moved toward humanism while remaining fiery, honest, and original. With his new band, the Mescaleros (formed in 1999), Strummer continued to entertain and educate with musical themes as diverse as globalization (“Johnny Appleseed”), ethnic tolerance (“Bhindi Baghee”), and the plight of refugees in the global economy (“Shaktar Donetsk”). He declared that his music was resistance against “the demographic fascists . . . and the political ones as well.”
On December 22, 2002, the day Joe Strummer died, the United States began dropping leaflets and making radio broadcasts over Iraq in hopes of getting people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. As they did in the first Gulf War, some U.S. fighter pilots used “Rock the Casbah” as a soundtrack as they bombed Baghdad. This was all done without any sense of irony, of course. And the day that Harraj Mann became a terror suspect while singing Joe Strummer’s song—the same day Oscar Wilde more than one hundred years earlier was arrested and charged with gross indecency—I realized what the true meaning of “London Calling” is: unity. It is up to all of us who see the light in the darkness shrouding our time to join together no matter where we come from—our lifestyles, perspectives, or experiences—because we are all in this together. That’s what Joe Strummer fought for throughout his life.
Is “London Calling” a dangerous song? I leave it to you to decide. And if you are so inclined, I encourage you to listen to the entire album. I guarantee that you too will be humming and singing these songs just as Harraj Mann was. Just be careful who hears you.
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Originally appeared in The Nation, April 20, 2006
GLOBAL CITIZENS, DANGEROUS CREATORS
Edwidge Danticat
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
Suddenly you have someone who’s speaking to the world your experience.” These are the first words author Edwidge Danticat spoke to me after she agreed to participate in my film Let Fury Have the Hour. Danticat had already expressed this idea many times in her writing. Danticat is a Haitian immigrant who once resided in Brooklyn and now lives with her family in Miami—a world away from my own experience growing up in an Italian immigrant community in the Philadelphia area. But I felt that she was “speaking to the world my experience.” It was an “experience” that I had when I read the opening lines of her family memoir Brother, I’m Dying: “I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.” Her story spoke to the loss of my own father (and grandmother). In a voice that was at once joyful and sorrowful, Danticat allows her readers to feel these highs and lows while pushing them to a timeless challenge: how do we move forward? Can we move forward?
“What’s powerful is where I tell my story and you tell your story and [where] we realize, much to our astonishment—though it shouldn’t astonish us anymore—that, oh, it’s the same story,” Danticat explains. As a global citizen engaged in creative response, Danticat displays a certain daring, a certain independence of mind in her work. The moments that she ties together in her writing offer a safe haven, a place to know that we are not alone. “Writing, it’s the place where I am probably most at home,” Danticat tells me. “Because I can bring all these other homes there.” Creating a “home” not defined by doorways or borders or countries is something that Danticat views as vitally important to human survival. “I think we’re all born citizens of the world and we proclaim it, even in the worst of times,” Danticat tells me. “We proclaim it through our being; we proclaim it through our art. So it’s all a constant struggle towards existence.”
Celebrated author Edwidge Danticat during the filming of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s Let Fury Have the Hour, November 26, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Danticat explores the struggle that many face as new millennium migrants in a time of intense economic, political, and environmental crisis. This is a worldview that ties her closely to Joe Strummer. As a global citizen engaged in creative response, Strummer displayed an ever-growing recognition and concern for what was happening around him. He mined these themes most evocatively in his later work with the Mescaleros with beautifully empathetic songs including “Bhindi Bhagee”:
Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga
Mini-cab radio, music on the go
Um, surfbeat, backbeat, frontbeat, backseat
There’s a bunch of players and they’re really letting go
We got Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop
Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road
Ah, Sunday boozers for chewing gum users
They got a crazy D.J. and she’s really letting go
Oh, welcome stranger
Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods
“When I say ‘my country’ to some Haitians they think I mean the United States,” Danticat writes. “When I say ‘my country’ to some Americans they think I mean Haiti.” But Danticat feels “her country” is a space occupied by the immigrant and artist. “Haiti had nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland,” Danticat writes. “The ideological one, which joined all Haitians living outside, in the dyaspora.” Her country is assuredly the tenth department.
Oh, welcome stranger
Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods
In Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, she presents a deeply personal “reflection on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis.” The idea for the book was inspired by Albert Camus’s last published lecture, “Create Dangerously.” We spoke extensively about the shared influence of Camus and other creative activists throughout history on our work and worldview. “Our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture,” Camus wrote. “In other words, the freedom of work and of creation.”
Danticat looks at writing and reading as a profound act of resistance, resilience, and survival creating that space for freedom of work and of creation that Camus held as sacred. She still encounters the prejudice and the small-mindedness of folks who think nothing worthwhile comes from Haiti. “People are shocked that I write books,” Danticat tells me, laughing at the hackneyed bias that people from Haiti are “uncivilized” or worse. Undaunted, Danticat explores the power of the immigrant reader’s imagination borrowing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner: must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.” Danticat is the immigrant artist speaking our experiences, taking up space in places that cannot bear immigrants’ company. “Hamlets that need our labor but want our children banned from their school,” Danticat writes. “Villages that want our sick shut out from the hospitals, big cities that want our elderly, after a lifetime of impossible labor, to pack up and go off somewhere to die.”
Danticat’s writing displays a subtle balance between the fantastic and stark realism. Its cinematic equivalent is found in Gregory Nava’s 1983 film El Norte, where a brother and sister flee Guatemala to “el norte” (the north) looking for the promised land after their father is murdered by the government and their mother is disappeared. A scene between father and son early in the film provides the images and dialogue evocative of Danticat’s work: “I’ll tell you something life has taught me. I’ve worked in Mexico and the coastal plantation and many other places. It’s the same everywhere. For the rich, the peasant is just a pair of arms. That’s all that they think we are. Arms for work.”
Our country has no notion what it has done to itself by participating in the continued exploitation and consequent denigration of human beings. As the twenty-first century unfolds, we appear to be turning back time, indulging in long discredited theories and ideas about people and the world and fighting battles over immigration, public health
, public education, housing, civil rights that were settled amid the social conflicts of the twentieth century. Danticat’s objective is to lay bare these phony notions. Her work reveals an artist thinking about the world in beautifully crafted language that only someone who is exquisitely sensitive to the vibrations of humanity can intimately transpose in fiction and memoir. Danticat exposes the real political and human duty in our society to rebuke the institutional mechanisms that obstruct freedom and promote bias. Danticat’s books reveal how these institutions carry out political violence even though they present the illusion of being innocuous, disinterested agents in society. Pulling them out from the shadows so that we can clearly see what is occurring, Danticat allows us a chance to break their spell.
Haiti is never far from Danticat’s consciousness. The first country to have a successful slave revolt, it won its freedom in 1804, becoming the Western Hemisphere’s second republic (and its first black republic). Haiti’s independence sparked anxiety in Thomas Jefferson: “If something is not done, and soon done, we shall all be murderers of our own children.” As Danticat writes, it took “six decades for the U.S. to acknowledge Haiti’s independence” while keeping it under consideration “as a possible penal colony for the U.S.” Since then, the United States has allowed Haitian dictators to rise and fall and then be replaced by even more ruthless despots. The ruthless François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled the country from 1957 until his death in 1971. Papa Doc let loose a gang dressed in blue jeans strutting around Port-au-Prince with pistols in their waistbands and wearing black sunglasses. Known as Tonton Macoutes (bogeymen), their brutality was reminiscent of Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts. The very sight of the Tonton Macoutes terrified people and helped keep them in line.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed an estimated 316,000 people, injured 300,000 more, and left 1 million homeless. But Danitcat rejects the stereotype of Haiti as a lost country. There are lessons that Haiti taught the world in the aftermath of the earthquake. Danticat first connects the tragedy to what occurred in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina: “This was a moment [when] everyone around the world could see that there were countries within the larger country of the U.S.” New Orleans was the moment when anyone can look at a place like Haiti and no longer say that “this happens in other places but never here.” The tragedies tightened the bond we all share living on this planet with our resolute ability to get back up and start over. That’s the “quiet lesson of Haiti,” Danticat says. “We’re still going!” Danticat revels in the indefatigable nature of the human spirit. It’s where her creative inspiration emanates, this idea of the real maravilloso (real marvelous). Cuban Alejo Carpentier introduced this concept in his 1949 book The Kingdom of This World after a trip to Haiti. “I was treading earth where thousands of men eager for liberty believed” that they would be free despite the odds, Carpentier wrote. “With each step I found the real marvelous.”
The real marvelous can be described as magical realism rooted in the past and present and always in the spirit of the Haitian revolution. “The real marvelous is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken,” Danticat writes. “In spite of their slim odds, [the real marvelous] accept[s] nothing less than total freedom.” This beautiful depiction, uniting old and new ideas, words from the past and present, underscores what propels Danticat’s work, the lesson that the quiet revolution of the human spirit is forever pressing on. “Haitian art can be a dream,” Danticat tells me. “It’s someone giving themselves the liberty to reimagine the world around them in constant pursuit to create the world we want to live in.” Just as Danticat used her imagination to repatriate Camus and Sophocles as Haitians and citizens of the world, we can do the same with these dangerous creators, who counter reality by positing that the most singular story is actually the most universal. Introduced to me by Danticat in Create Dangerously, the progenitors of the real marvelous are the time travelers who live at any point in history, moving with us, encouraging us to go even farther. They include:
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, author of the trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie published with the support of Simone de Beauvoir by Gallimard Press in Paris. Papa Doc Duvailer considered the work an attack on his regime, and Vieux-Chauvet was forced into permanent exile in New York. Danticat calls the trilogy “the cornerstone of Haitian literature.”
Jan J. Dominique, author of Memoir of an Amnesiac, which explores exile, loss, and memory. “It demands a preponderant place for social and political problems in literary texts,” Dominique explained. But rather than being presented by an omniscient narrator, reality “is viewed partially through the eyes and feelings of a little girl.”
Haitian physician-novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, “Who wrote such beautiful prose that the first time I read his description of freshly baked bread,” Danticat writes, “I raised the book closer to my nose to sniff it.” In 1961 Alexis was tortured and killed by the Tontons Macoutes. “The trees fall from time to time, but the voice of the forest never loses its power,” Alexis wrote. “Life begins.”
Assassinated Haitian journalist and radio commentator Jean Dominique, who spoke out against various Haitian dictators. He was one of the first to broadcast in Creole. Filmmaker Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist suggests that Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government orchestrated Dominique’s assassination. Demme recalls: “I remember thinking at the time how poignant this self-image was: the mercurial man of the world, poet/genius analyst of the microphone, crusader for democracy in his beloved nation—and he likes to picture himself as the country mouse, never more true to himself than when he’s shooting the shit about rainfall and the next mango crop with the other farm boys down in the boondocks.”
Haitian novelist Dany Laferrière’s 2009 book L’énigme du retour received the French literary award Prix Médicis, which is given to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent.” A mixture of poetry and prose, the book follows Laferrière’s return to Haiti after a thirty-three-year absence. “Laferrière proves himself to be one of the finest North American literary provocateurs,” the Toronto Quarterly writes. Citing the likes of Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac, and James Baldwin as major influences on his writing, Laferrière explains: “I can not say that any of these writers have influenced me back then or today. I simply noticed that many of them viewed life the same way I did. My world became more complicated when I began writing of my Haitian experiences in my books. At that point, I was far from writing like Bukowski or Kerouac. Or even Baldwin. However, with Baldwin I walked alongside him the longest.”
Haitian photographer Daniel Morel explains his work: “Our role is important as independent photojournalists to tell the story as it is. I was there to document accurately this tremendous tragedy [Haiti earthquake] for future generations.” His photos depicting the effects of the earthquake on Haiti offered a starkly different image than what the majority of the Western mainstream presented. “CNN is playing with people,” Morel said after the earthquake. “They are doing show business with people’s lives here.”
Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite, A lifelong sevite, a disciple of Vodou, Hyppolite was known for his aesthetically intricate yet instinctive paintings. French surrealist André Breton, who purchased five Hyppolite paintings in 1920, declared that the artist’s work would revolutionize modern painting because “it needs a revolution.” The Haitian government declared 2008 as the year of Hector Hyppolite.
Danticat’s work has helped me become a more involved citizen, not just in the places where I live, but also in the world in general. With this as my guide, I leave you, dear reader, with words by Edwidge Danticat from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. I introduce it by borrowing the dedication from her book Create Dangerously: For the “two hundred thousand and more . . .”
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may
seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.
This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture.
“THE ONLY BAND THAT MATTERED” “STILL DOES
The Story of the Clash As Told by the Clash
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
I wanted to be Pete Townshend, the bloke who throws his arms and jumps up and down.
—PAUL SIMONON, THE CLASH
The year 2008 was the thirtieth anniversary of the American release of the Clash’s self-titled first album, which at the time became the highest selling import in American history. To celebrate the anniversary, the former members of the Clash put out a coffee table book simply titled The Clash. Here it all is, packed in tight between bright pink covers, the Clash’s story told in their own words with stunning photos and original art (some of the best ever created in music). The book does much to stress the significance of the Clash as a transformative and invigorating force in political popular culture. With a reflective, documentary-like presentation, The Clash presents the unique moment in history that was the Clash. It proves that the hallmark of any great artist is to create work that is timeless and wholly original. The book is at its best when it recounts how the band grew from various musical influences—internalizing them, making them wholly their own. In the end, what was produced was purely the Clash (Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Duke Ellington are examples of artists who did the same), a band that ultimately found a sense a redemption in a musical career that lasted less than a decade, with only five of those years with the lineup that mattered: Joe Strummer on guitar and lead vocals; Mick Jones on lead guitar and vocals; Paul Simonon on bass; and Topper Headon on drums.
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