so much joy it hurts

katewalton:

M.I.A. released a video on Monday (April 26) for her new single ‘Born Free’. Taking the form of a nine-minute short film, the video depicts the rounding-up and murder of a group of young red-headed boys in a desert somewhere in the USA.

It’s violent, gory, definitely NSFW, and deserving of discussion on so many levels.

To start with, it’s a brilliant piece of political commentary. By setting the video in an average-looking, if rather bleak, American town, M.I.A. and director Romain Gavras ensure that those of us living in the West imagine ourselves in the position of the film’s characters. The scenes of US policemen (soldiers?) invading apartments in a block of flats and barging in upon very private moments (smoking drugs, having sex) force us to consider how we’d react to such intrusions, as well as making us realise how all-encompassing a war-like situation can be. No-one is safe; everyone is at risk. One wrong move and you, too, could be hit over the head with a gun in your own home by the law enforcement officials of your own nation.

It’s a pretty clever premise - the idea of what many have semi-ironically termed a ‘ginger genocide’. And it certainly works to great effect in the video. The boys and young men all look vulnerable, oddly ethereal and other-worldly. And they certainly stand out against the grey town, the sandy desert, and the harsh black uniforms of the American policemen. Which, I suppose, is the point - their easily-identifiable characteristic makes them the target.

Some commentators have suggested that the video is connected to the new anti-immigration laws in Arizona. Personally, I think it’s unlikely, and is merely a coincidence. I think the American setting is primarily a way of bringing the video’s message (that genocide is often baseless or is at least founded on a constructed threat) into closer comparison with viewers’ lives. It’s much more likely to be a statement on the situation of the Tamil population in Sri Lanka, especially considering M.I.A.’s background and previous work. The ‘Born Free’ single cover makes the link clearer, incorporating an image of a 2009 extrajudicial killing of Tamil men in Sri Lanka. Other incidents are obviously likely to have had an influence, however, too, such as the debate over the Armenian genocide and the treatment of prisoners by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I like that we don’t know why red-headed people are being targeted. Giving the audience no background information on the situation is a smart directorial decision. It plays off the fact that real life security threats are often constructed by governments and militaries, with little to no grounding in any biological fact. That is, there is no intrinsic link between a minority group’s primary identifier - in this case, red hair - and the threat they apparently pose.

Zach Baron at The Village Voice comments that he can think of “no goofier political allegory than the persecution, abuse and murder of redheads”. I think he’s missing the point.

I agree that the targetted minority’s identifying trait of red hair means the situation in the video is very unlikely to actually occur in real life. However, I feel that this makes the premise all the more effective, because we recognise that despite the ribbing red-heads often receive in the West, no-one would actually go so far as to carry out a genocide against them. The very idea of a red-headed genocide seems ridiculous to us, because we know that having red hair does not the same character traits or political leanings make.

Yet this is exactly what genocide is based upon: the theory that certain ethnic, racial, religious or other minority identifiers indicate some intrinsic group likeness. Genocide is about the division of people into ‘us’ and ‘them’, whether ‘them’ be Tamil, Hazara, Armenian, Kurdish, Karen, Timorese, communist, non-communist, the intelligenstia, or the red-headed.

The brilliance of ‘Born Free’ is precisely the fact that it is unimaginable. A genocide against red-headed people is unthinkable to us. What we need to remember is that once upon a time, genocides against Tamils, Armenians and Timorese were unthinkable for members of those groups, too.

I was looking for analysis on this video and Kate kindly linked me to her Tumblr (I’m a few days behind on Tumblr reading). I asked on Twitter why all the default responses I saw to this video were “HAHA RANGAS”. Are we that unsophisticated? Is it easier to turn this into a Summer Heights High episode, than confront issues of apartheid, genocide and racism? I’m disappointed that anyone could respond with apathy or humour after this powerful video. 

Thanks Kate for such a great analysis.

See also: M.I.A.’s ‘Born Free’ / Suicide’s 1977 ‘Ghost Rider’ from claytoncubitt

and Redheads Strike Back in M.I.A. Director’s Feature - TheWrap.com via monocle pop soff

Alone behind the wheel
half-stupid with fatigue
I fell briefly asleep
on the Midland Highway. God
or someone slapped my life
back in my empty hands
before metal shaped my ends.
Now there’s iron in my soul.
Iron in my tongue, too,
clapping against the skull.
Somebody, something loves me
enough to keep me here.
Let my enemies take care.

(via letmyenemiestakecare)

I
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes
rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve  
wild for life, relentless and acquisitive  
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.
A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson  
recalled in me forever
like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep  
etched into my visions
food for dragonfish that learn
to live upon whatever they must eat
fused images beneath my pain.

    II
The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson  
A Mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain
a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat  
her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney  
now awash
tearless and no longer young, she holds  
a tattered baby’s blanket in her arms.
In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain  
a microphone
thrust up against her flat bewildered words
          “we jest come from the bank yestiddy  
                   borrowing money to pay the income tax  
                   now everything’s gone. I never knew  
                   it could be so hard.”
Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud  
caked around the edges
her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation
unanswered
she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed  
                   “hard, but not this hard.”
Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her  
hanging upon her coat like mirrors
until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside  
snarling “She ain’t got nothing more to say!”
and that lie hangs in his mouth
like a shred of rotting meat.

    III
I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till  
his 15 years puffed out like bruises  
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street  
and he was baptized my son forever  
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner’s photographies  
newspapers protest posters magazines  
Police Story, Confidential, True  
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy’s loins
his grieving mother’s lamentation  
the severed lips, how many burns  
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers  
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish  
of a black child’s mutilated body  
fingered by street-corner eyes  
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children’s blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh  
used, crumpled, and discarded  
lying amid the sidewalk refuse  
like a raped woman’s face.

A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he’d been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.

    IV
    “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are
      we to refuse a crust of bread?”
     
Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl, whistling
24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman  
and a white girl has grown older in costly honor  
(what did she pay to never know its price?)
now the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment  
and I can withhold my pity and my bread.

            “Hard, but not this hard.”
Her face is flat with resignation and despair  
with ancient and familiar sorrows
a woman surveying her crumpled future
as the white girl besmirched by Emmett’s whistle  
never allowed her own tongue
without power or conclusion
unvoiced
she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor  
and a man with an executioner’s face
pulls her away.

Within my eyes
the flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain
a woman wrings her hands
beneath the weight of agonies remembered
I wade through summer ghosts  
betrayed by vision
hers and my own
becoming dragonfish to survive  
the horrors we are living
with tortured lungs
adapting to breathe blood.

A woman measures her life’s damage
my eyes are caves, chunks of etched rock
tied to the ghost of a black boy  
whistling
crying and frightened
her tow-headed children cluster  
like little mirrors of despair  
their father’s hands upon them  
and soundlessly
a woman begins to weep.

After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones had grown

something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

(via youarebonbon)

My life has been so much better without you, I want you to know this. Now that you’re back I’m falling apart.

I feel like the past is spilling out of me.

no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk
and foraging for small seeds
My mother was the clouded-over night
a moon swims through, the dark against which stars
switch themselves on, so many already dead
by now (stars switch themselves off
and are my mother, she was never
so celestial, so clearly seen)

My mother was a murder of crows
stilled, black plumage gleaming
among black branches, taken
for nocturnal leaves, the difference
between two darks:

a cacophony of needs
in the bare tree silhouette,
a flight of feathers, scattering
black. She was the night
streetlights oppose (perch
for the crows, their purchase on sight),
obscure bruise across the sky
making up names for rain

My mother always falling
was never snow, no kind
of bird, pigeon or crow

(via poetry365)

loganantill:

Very few materials make the world. Several things really. Over your life you will touch most of them. You get to know what to expect. Any new place is new in other ways but not by the surfaces except maybe how they are put together. Your hands remember the weight and grain of things they have held. A ceramic bowl, a silver knife. A stone taken from the midday sun. The materials are always the same but you see them used in new ways. Then you think how new and strange a place must be, while all the while your hands remember the sameness of touch from old touches and really you are only lost by your eyes and maybe your nose and ears, but a pair of hands will call all things old.  

Clouds docking in this sunset like ships. I anchor my heart in the river. A sailor buys me a drink; the colour of the sky is my undoing.

You don’t have to
be afraid
anymore

His superoutfit is made out of handfuls of shit and garbage blood

   and pinned together by stars

Flying around
the room
like a mos-
quito

Drinking all the blood
or whatever we
have

to save us
who

need to be saved

*


I whispered To the rescue
and sat
on the dead edge
of my bed
all night
and

all morning

My feet did not touch the floor

My heart raced

I counted my breath like small white sheep and pinned

   my eyes open and stared at the door

Any second now, any
second

now

*

He saved my brain
from its burning
building

He stopped and started the bullet in my heart
with his teeth

Just like that

He looked down from outer space through all the clouds, the birds

  dropping like weights

He looked out
from the center of the earth
through the fire
he was

becoming

His cape
sweeping the floor

He stood in the doorway and closed his eyes