The Mevlevi Sufi Whirling Dervishes

Amazing evening at the National Cathedral tonight: Faruk Celebi Efendi, the twenty-second great- grandson of Rumi (Who does not feel a chill along one's spine at the idea that they are meeting or seeing or hearing or all of the above the actual descendant of an actual confirmed mystic such as Rumi? Do we even think that prophets have descendants?), Rumi's poetry declaimed out loud in Farsi and in English, and the Mevlevi Sufi Whirling Dervishes' Sema Ceremony.

It was soothing in the way only Sufi music and Rumi's words can bring internal peace to someone, with such a simple sentence as "Open your chest like a window and let the spirit in". Soothing in the way the sound of the reed calms the anxieties of the day (the panic attack of the 9th hour, 3:00pm, when I realized all I still have to do before Friday, or before Saturday and even before next Tuesday, before I can breathe out, exhale, stop holding it all together)...

The whirling dervishes spread out like beautiful white flying doves, bringing with their trance, the offering of peace. They became a living image of the Spirit, their arms His wings, their bent heads the image of the Beloved's Suffering. I was mesmerized.

I will research more their traditions: there were so many convergences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Sufism, it was surreal. They bow in the way we bow, they kiss the hands of their spiritual leader in the way we do, they cross their arms before the whirling just like we do in Church before Communion and for the same reason: unity with God; their chant for the repose of the Souls sound exactly like an Eastern Orthodox panekhida and they come from this place called Konia which happened to be named Ikonia in the Byzantium Empire (as in: icon, the image of God). 

Beyond DSK's sexual affairs...

Whatever DSK's reputation or his life style (only those who have not sinned can throw the first stone, remember?), I am more than intrigued at the fact that the whistle-blower may have had unavowed motives.
Indeed, if one considers the fact that DSK is Jewish and that A. Shakour Shaalan is Egyptian but also represents other Arab countries within the IMF, one can wonder whether this is not a premeditated campaign to get rid of DSK in the never ending enmity opposing Jews to Arabs.

Would by any chance Arab and/or Muslim countries be weary that the cash flow would stop flowing to their countries because DSK is heading the IMF?One will never know...

Religulous

Bill Maher's documentary about religions and religious people was very disappointing. I expected a deeper approach and not this simplistic Borat-like version. To tell the truth, it was so repetitive that i almost fell asleep!

It is so easy to take as targets people who are less educated, whose educational ignorance accompanies a simple and sincere faith. Such is the first group of truck-drivers he teases in their little roadside trailer-chapel in North Carolina. Now when it comes to a US Senator who is bold enough to tell him (and therefore us, electors who brought him where he now sits!) that ""one does not need to take an IQ test to become a US Senator", there is indeed value in underlining the crass ignorance (because in the long term it is more expensive than education) or even worse the state of intellectual denial that one adheres to in the name of religion. Another example is the ex-gay Reverend.... Sad! Very sad! And scary too.

The only "worthy" opponent was the Vatican astronomer. Interestingly, the more "fanatical" branches of Christianity in this documentary were the Protestant ones, whilst the more "open-minded" were the Catholics. Maher did not interview any Christian Eastern Orthodox (maybe he does not know about us?). In any case, this brings to mind the fact that for some Protestant sects, the Catholics are nothing but Satan's sons... You see, the catholic Church has long decided to repent for what it did to Galileo and now admits that the world was only metaphorically created in 7 days...while the Protestant "low" churches (Baptists and other funny evangelical denominations that only exist in the United States) as opposed to "high" churches (Lutherans, Anglicans Episcopalians, apologies if I forget anyone) still stick to the book, to the letter of the book that is, not to its spirit!

De l'Art du Dialogue

Parmi les livres que j’ai lus récemment, il en est quatre qui m’ont surprise par leur traitement à la fois similaire et différent du dialogue.

Le tout dernier livre d’Amélie Nothomb, (la reine du dialogue, s’il en est!), Le fait du prince, décontenance le lecteur dès la première page. En effet, le premier chapitre est un dialogue, entamé dès la phrase d’accroche, elle-même une répartie, la toute première de ce livre qui abonde à ce point en échanges plus ou moins spirituels, qu’on se croirait au mieux au théâtre…au pire spectateur d’un match de tennis ou de ping-pong. Entendez-moi bien: je suis un aficionado d’Amélie Nothomb que j’ai eue le plaisir d’entendre et de rencontrer à San Francisco en mai 2006; mais alors que je m’apprête à déguster son cru annuel avec une anticipation à peine contenue, je dois avouer que cette année je suis restée sur ma faim. Le dialogue en soi ne m’a pas gênée et l’échange originel sert de point de départ original à une histoire qui mérite une fin moins bâclée, moins rapidement bouclée, et plus dans la lignée un peu surréaliste du reste de l’ouvrage. Ma moisson de citations « nothombiennes » se limite à la phrase retenue par l’éditeur pour la quatrième de couverture: « Il y a un instant, entre la quinzième et la seizième gorgée de champagne, où tout homme est un aristocrate. » D’ailleurs tout l’intérêt du livre repose sur l’analyse minutieuse que le narrateur fait du champagne: de la cave à champagne, véritable piscine scientifique sur ordinateur, à sa description « Le champagne est si froid que les bulles ont durci (…). On a l’impression de boire de la poussière de diamants », le lecteur finit par se demander si le but caché de l’auteure n’est pas de le rendre dépendant du champagne bien qu’elle fasse dire au narrateur qu’ «on ne peut pas être alcoolique en ne buvant que du champagne ».

Simonetta Greggio est Italienne, mais écrit en français. Son livre La douceur des hommes, est un dialogue dans lequel la narratrice, Constance, écoute plus qu’elle ne parle. Constance recueille les dernières confidences de Fosca, une autre adepte du champagne, vieille dame excentrique dont la vie a tourné autour de cette douceur des hommes qui est le titre de ce roman intimiste. Voyage dans le temps et l’espace et dialogue vont de pair dans ce livre: des multiples vies de Fosca à la vie monotone que Constance connaît jusqu’à sa rencontre avec Fosca, le lecteur traverse les époques (guerres mondiales) et les lieux (Paris, Italie, nouvelles « niches » touristiques), recueillant cette fois une moisson digne de ce nom de mots d’esprit et de vérités bien dites, comme celle-ci qui m’a fait sourire et m’exclamer: « Les Français sont comme ça! Ils vendraient père et mère pour un bon mot. Ils confondent intelligence et méchanceté, aussi… En même temps, l’art de la conversation, cette courtoisie de l’esprit français, est inéluctablement en train de disparaître ». Or Fosca est italienne, tout comme l’auteur du livre et s’il est une chose que revendiquent les Italiens, c’est bien l’art de « la bella figura » (le bon mot, la belle figure de style, de rhétorique) comme l’a si bien démontré Beppe Severgnini, auteur de Ciao America et La Bella Figura.

Tout le monde a maintenant entendu parler du Prix des Libraires 2007, L’élégance du hérisson, de Muriel Barbéry. Le Prix des Libraires 2008 rend hommage cette fois encore à une auteure, Delphine de Vigan, pour son quatrième livre, No et moi. Il y a nombre de similitudes entre ces deux livres. L’un et l’autre ont une narratrice adolescente et surdouée : Paloma chez Muriel Barbéry et Lou chez Delphine de Vigan (Le lecteur se pose d’ailleurs la question de savoir si cette Lou est liée de près ou de loin à l’auteure dans la mesure où l’un de ses premiers livres fut publié sous le nom de plume de Lou Delvig). Mais si Lou est narratrice principale d’un dialogue émouvant entre elle et No (Nolwenn, la jeune SDF : l’abréviation du prénom breton en une négation absolue évoque la devise punk « NO Future »), Paloma n’est que l’une des deux narratrices du très beau livre de Muriel Barbéry, l’autre étant plus âgée (54 ans), mais tout aussi surdouée, « plus lettrée que tous ces riches suffisants », bien que simple concierge. Le dialogue entre Paloma et Renée est mené sur le terrain de la polyphonie. L’une comme l’autre mène une riche vie intérieure et les écrits de Paloma, apparaissant sous une autre graphie que le roman général, tout comme les réflexions intérieures de Renée, font écho aux réflexions intérieures de Lou. Cependant, Renée dialogue aussi avec son défunt mari, avec son chat, avec Manuela et éventuellement avec Kakuro. Elle nomme toutes les personnes qui illuminent ainsi sa vie « mes camélias ». Lou développe lentement l’art du dialogue avec autrui, toute traumatisée qu’elle est de sa propre histoire familiale, de la souffrance née du non-dit dans sa famille, et de sa prise de conscience de sa différence intellectuelle. Si Lou s’ouvre au dialogue, si elle surmonte sa peur, c’est grâce à No, la jeune SDF elle-même mise à l’écart du dialogue maternel et familial par des circonstances encore plus dramatiques que celles de Lou.

No et Renée mènent leur participation effective au dialogue de ces deux romans jusqu’à une fin insupportable d’émotion et de tristesse. Je crois bien ne jamais autant avoir pleuré à la lecture d’un livre que lors des 20 dernières pages de L’élégance du hérisson, ni ne m’être tant remise en cause à la lecture d’un autre qu’avec les perspectives nouvelles que m’a offert No et Moi.

"Writing must be an act devoid of will.'' Henry Miller

Comme il a raison, Miller ! Cette seule petite phrase au milieu des centaines de pages de Sexus, ce fut mon épiphanie. Qu’écrire me soit une passion, que tout me pousse à écrire, à des heures indues et n’importe où, que je sente, que j’entende en moi ces milliers de mots, de phrases, d’idées, n’est pas une maladie, mais l’expression de ma volonté subconsciente, prête à exploser si je ne lui donne pas bientôt libre cours, si je n’accorde pas à cette machine qu’est mon cerveau, le temps minimal de liberté créative qu’il réclame en sourdine depuis des années, et depuis quelques mois, presque un an, comme un grondement souterrain, le ronflement que personne n’entend sauf la terre lorsqu’elle sait que le volcan va enfin se réveiller. C’est comme un reflux de mon être intime et profond, enfoui, dompté, non domestiqué, non oublié mais tu, et qui réclame son dû, sa part de vie.

Vocation rejetée, reniée, en souffrance, au bord de l’état d’urgence. Si écrire est ma vocation, alors je veux entrer en écriture, me soumettre aux exigences de la discipline.

Ce qui m’a retenue jusqu’à maintenant, ce sont toutes les velléités qui font la vie quotidienne : travail, et surtout famille. Je ne peux m’abstenir du premier pour les besoins de la seconde, mais comment faire comprendre à ma famille qu’écrire m’est respirer et que m’abstenir d’écrire m’est une torture mentale et physique. Comme je le disais hier encore à quelqu’un qui me comprend un peu plus chaque fois que nous nous voyons, en anglais, parce qu’il est américain : « The state of matrimony does not agree with creativity ».

A Very Good New York Times Article

June 17, 2008
For Blacks in France, Obama’s Rise Is Reason to Rejoice, and to Hope
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

PARIS — When Youssoupha, a black rapper here, was asked the other day what was on his mind, a grin spread across his face. “Barack Obama,” he said. “Obama tells us everything is possible.”

A new black consciousness is emerging in France, lately hastened by, of all things, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. An article in Le Monde a few days ago described how Mr. Obama is “stirring up high hopes” among blacks here. Even seeing the word “noir” (“black”) in a French newspaper was an occasion for surprise until recently.

Meanwhile, this past weekend, 60 cars were burned and some 50 young people scuffled with police and firemen, injuring several of them, in a poor minority suburb of Vitry-le-François, in the Marne region of northeast France.

Americans, who have debated race relations since the dawn of the Republic, may find it hard to grasp the degree to which race, like religion, remains a taboo topic in France. While Mr. Obama talks about running a campaign transcending race, an increasing number of French blacks are pushing for, in effect, the reverse.

Having always thought it was more racially enlightened than strife-torn America, France finds itself facing the prospect that it has actually fallen behind on that score. Incidents like the ones over the weekend bring to mind the rioting that exploded across France three years ago. Since it abolished slavery 160 years ago, the country has officially declared itself to be colorblind — but seeing Mr. Obama, a new generation of French blacks is arguing that it’s high time here for precisely the sort of frank discussions that in America have preceded the nomination of a major black candidate.

This black consciousness is reflected not just in daily conversation, but also in a dawning culture of books and music by young French blacks like Youssoupha, a cheerful, toothy 28-year-old, who was sent here from Congo by his parents to get an education at 10, raised by an aunt who worked in a school cafeteria in a poor suburb, and told by guidance counselors that he shouldn’t be too ambitious. Instead, he earned a master’s degree from the Sorbonne.

Then, like many well-educated blacks in this country, he hit a brick wall. “I found myself working in fast-food places with people who had the equivalent of a 15-year-old’s level of education,” he recalled.

So he turned to rap, out of frustration as much as anything, finding inspiration in “négritude,” an ideology of black pride conceived in Paris during the 1920s and 30s by Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician from Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became Senegal’s first president. Its philosophy, as Sartre once put it, was a kind of “antiracist racism,” a celebration of shared black heritage.

Négritude and Césaire are back. When Césaire died in April, at 94, his funeral in Fort-de-France, Martinique, was broadcast live on French television. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his rival Ségolène Royal both attended. Just three years ago, Mr. Sarkozy, as head of a center-right party and not yet president, supported a law (repealed after much protest) that compelled French schools to teach the “positive” aspects of colonialism. The next year, Césaire refused to meet with him. Now here was Mr. Sarkozy flying to the former French colony (today one of the country’s overseas departments, meaning he could troll for votes) to pay tribute to the poet laureate of négritude.

That said, as a country France definitely sends out mixed messages. “Négritude is a concept they just don’t want to hear about,” Youssoupha raps in “Render Unto Césaire” on his latest album, “À Chaque Frère” (“To Each Brother”). A regular short feature on French public television, “Citoyens Visibles,” hosted by a young actress, Hafsia Herzi, celebrates French artists with foreign origins.

At the same time, it’s against the rules for the government to conduct official surveys according to race. Consequently, nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Estimates vary between 3 million and 5 million out of a population of more than 61 million.
“Can you imagine if French officials said, ‘Well, we’re not sure, the population of France may be 65 million, or maybe it’s 30 million’?” declared a somewhat exasperated Patrick Lozès, founder of Cran, a black organization devised not long ago partly to gather statistics the government won’t.

When he sat down to talk the other morning, the first two words out of his mouth were Barack Obama. “The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal,” he said. “But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal.”
He ticked off some obvious numbers: one black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs.

To this may be added Cran’s findings that the percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

“There’s total hypocrisy here,” Léonora Miano said. She’s a black author, 37, originally from Cameroon, whose recent novel “Tels des Astres Éteints” (“Like Extinguished Stars”) is about race relations as seen through the eyes of three black immigrants.

“For me it was really strange when I arrived 17 years ago to find people here never used the word race,” Ms. Miano said over coffee one afternoon at Café Beaubourg. Outside, African immigrants hawked sunglasses to tourists. “French universalism, the whole French republican ideal, proposes that if you embrace French values, the French language, French culture, then race doesn’t exist and it won’t matter if you’re black. But of course it does. So we need to have a conversation, and slowly it is coming: not a conversation about guilt or history, but about now.”
“The Black Condition: An Essay on a French Minority” by Pap N’Diaye, a 42-year-old historian at the School for Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, is another much-talked-about new book here. “We are witnessing a renaissance of the négritude movement,” Mr. N’Diaye declared the other day.

The surge in popularity of Mr. Obama among French blacks partly stems from the hope that his rise “will highlight our lack of diversity and put pressure on French politicians who say they favor him to open politics up more to minorities,” Mr. N’Diaye said. “We in France are, in terms of race, where we were in terms of gender 40 years ago.”

He laid out some history: French decolonization during the 1960s pretty much pushed the original négritude movement to the back burner, at the same time that it inspired a wave of immigrants from the Caribbean to come here and fill low-ranking civil service jobs. From sub-Saharan Africa, another wave of laborers gravitated to private industry. The two populations didn’t communicate much.

But their children, raised here, have grown up together. “Mutually discovered discrimination,” as Mr. N’Diaye put it, has forged a bond out of which négritude is being revived.
The watershed event was the rioting in poor French suburbs three years ago. Among its cultural consequences: Aimé Césaire “started to be rediscovered by young people who found in his work things germane to the current situation,” Mr. N’Diaye said.

Youssoupha is one of those people. He was nursing a Coke recently at Top Kafé, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant in Créteil, just outside Paris, where he lives. Nearby, two waiters in yarmulkes sat watching Rafael Nadal play tennis on television beneath dusty framed pictures of Las Vegas and Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. A clutch of Arab teenagers smoked outside. In modest neighborhoods like this, France can look remarkably harmonious.

“Césaire is in my lyrics, and I was upset when people misinterpreted what I wrote as anti-white because négritude is the affirmation of our common black roots,” Youssoupha said.

Ms. Miano, the novelist, made a similar point. “There is no such thing as a black ‘community’ in France — yet — partly because we have such different histories,” she said. “An immigrant woman from Mali and another from Cameroon view the world in completely different ways. You also shouldn’t think there isn’t racism among blacks in France, between West Indians and Africans. There is. But ultimately we’re all black in the face of discrimination.”

Then she smiled: “Too bad I forgot to wear my Obama T-shirt.”

HOORAH FOR OBAMA!

He made it! Thus History is made too: I am trying hard to juggle my memory and find another Western / First World country in which there would have been a non-White person running for presidency, but I can't find any.

Hopefully, this will be proof to some embittered, anti-American, inhabitants of old Europe that the American dream is still alive and that this nation, like every other nation, can produce its worst and its best in the same decade.

I can't resist but to share two of Tom Toles' Washington Post cartoons. I did put MLK's speech on this blog a couple of months ago. Tom Toles' cartoon is MLK's dream answer come true...

Sometimes words are less powerful than drawings.