generic pop and the bushmen: blues for allah

If Nelly Furtado, Mariah Carey and Usher can perform for Gaddafi at the late clans family gatherings under the big tent, then what about ambitious kidnappers from the backwoods of Nigeria….

From the Globe and Mail:

Canadian diplomat knew his unpredictable captors could kill him at any time — and there was no apparent solution in sight. In his new book, A Season in Hell, Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler recounts how he and fellow envoy Louis Guay were abducted by a terrorist faction known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.One hundred-thirty days in captivity…. Fowler: As an experienced geopolitical analyst it, was well nigh impossible not to conclude we were in deep shit. There was no obvious solution to our predicament .…

Colonial possibilities. Extracting the soul of the object and then doing a literary murder for his won pleasure. Maybe. He murders his own whiteness and then extenuates it at the same time. A reassertion of imperialist attitudes and racial significance. Fowler’s “subjects” exist for the possibility of their invention- the dark other territory serving as a base for their own discovery. The dark other being the resistance to Western imperialism. Derrida would call this the invention of truth that never stops accentuating what separates them. The imperial attitude resides under the logic that placement of racial forms within a literary context denotes some level of racial tolerance.

…Using the traditional and mandatory Islamic opening, a voice intoned in Arabic, “In the name of Allah the most merciful,” and the centre of the screen began to fill with vignettes of all kinds of horrors: those aircraft slamming into the twin towers, U.S. and allied vehicles being destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan by IEDs … Dragunov sniper rifles blasting the heads off GIs and then murdering those who came to their assistance, suicide bombers driving explosive-laden trucks through fences and into buildings or crowds immediately followed by massive explosions.…Each time an episode of mayhem and destruction occurred on the screen, the crowd pressing around Louis and me shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” and immediately swivelled their eyes to watch how we were enjoying the show….

There is a white supreme, economic patriarchy at work here, a point of view rarely from the captors counter-hegemonic gaze of the situation which would serve to expose Western violence through assigning the abductors some identity, to un-de-people them. Instead its the re-cycling, a re-invoking of the white West sustaining a romantic fantasy of the primitive and the subtext of the search for a real, authentic primitive paradise as an embodiment, a Lost Horizon, as an embodiment of that possibility and the deception when those expectations clash with the contradictory nature of bourgeois values. There is always the feeling that the white narrator can alleviate the symptoms of his middle-aged, white, affluent, intellectual identity crisis through an encounter with the destitute and desperate. Nostalgic yearnings of a resplendent past?

…They were fit. Hassan would escort the half-dozen younger ones on training missions at the run and they practised small-unit tactics, slithering around the rocks and dunes for hours in the blistering sun. They ran up and down mountains and did sentry duty at least twice each day, in addition to performing their various chores and going on missions….Our captors would spend the day repairing trucks or tires, sleeping when coming off sentry duty, or praying, chanting and reading the Qur’an. …

…Omar was a Malian Arab who had travelled widely as an itinerant Islamic preacher.… Despite his extensive travels, he had no real understanding of the complex, contradictory reality of life in the West, no

d he have any significant intellectual experience outside his narrow Islamist milieu.…

Race and color are still exotic. Savage. A fetish. Like something out of a Hemingway journal or Teddy Roosevelt on the Savannah: tropical countries, backward tribal regions, are for one thing- killing animals. Cultural oppression becomes something almost natural, unreflective, and necessary, from the Western perspective, given its multifarious nature.

…He was an animated and compelling raconteur but he was incapable of adapting the circumstances and meaning of those divine words spoken and written 15 centuries ago to encompass any kind of 21st century reality. The words in which he had invested his entire life were precisely those that that been dictated over 23 years by the Prophet in the seventh century as he received God’s revelations from the Angel Gabriel. Nothing that had occurred since had any relevance to Omar’s being, purpose, or direction in life.… His preaching was very much oriented to his jihadi vocation. He regularly offered proof of Allah’s support for their cause by citing instances in which angels, clad in radiant white, accompanied the mujahideen in battle, which enabled them to overcome impossible odds.… The eyes of the young acolytes would grow bright and round as Omar described such battlefields, which, he breathlessly insisted, had been strewn with the dismembered corpses of the apostate enemy, blackened stumps evident where the avenging angels had smitten off limbs with fiery swords.…

Ibrahim, “le Senegalais,” was, of course, one of the original abductors. Most memorably he had given me the news that we had been taken by al-Qaeda and then, some hours later, confided in a hushed whisper how much he admired Céline Dion.… He never explained what had caused him to take up the path of jihad, but at one point I was in a truck with him when, out of the blue, he told me he had a sister in Montreal who had been continually after him to immigrate to Canada to join her. He then turned to me, guilelessly, and asked, “I guess it’s a little late now?” Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/excerpt-captives-days-filled-with-tedium-and-fear/article2224921/