Nearly ninety years of solitude: Magical realism and the United Nations

“Last night the UN rebuked the Zimbabwean government”

(Quoted from front page article, The Guardian, 24th June 2008)

When I ask my daughter about the literature module she’s been studying on the works of Gabriel García Marquez, Mikhail Bulgakov and Salman Rushdie, she replies: “But, mum, I think the whole of life is magical realism!” And thus she gifts me the language by which I can begin to translate the fantastic narrative of the United Nations.

Just a quick recap of the main aspects of the genre: time passes and yet stands still; events repeat themselves, but nothing is resolved; cause and effect are inverted while the characters - resembling each other and even having similar names - accept rather than question the logic of the magical element. In general, the story holds a dreamlike quality with heightened sensory details, emotions and symbolism all of which work to seduce and confuse the reader.

Is the magical or the mundane rendering of the plot more truthful to the world as it is?
Here it goes…

The forefather of the United Nations was the League of Nations - conceived during the first world war and established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, “to promote international cooperation and achieve peace and security”. Twenty years before, its existence was heralded by the first international peace conference, hosted in Den Hag, to elaborate common instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare. The weakling League of Nations was disowned in 1942 for having failed to prevent the second world war. So, in 1945, fifty countries came together in San Francisco to celebrate the birth of the newly proposed United Nations and to baptise the Security Council - the body with primary responsibility for preserving peace - which held its first meeting in January 1946.

“Unlike the UN General Assembly, the Security Council was given power to enforce measures (on any danger to world peace) and was organized as a compact executive organ. Also unlike the assembly, it in theory functions continuously... However, on substantive matters, the nine affirmative votes required under the charter must include the five permanent members. This requirement of ‘Big Five’ unanimity embodies the so-called veto. The veto has prevented much substantive action of the UN but it embodies the reality that resolution of major crises requires the agreement of major powers” (US, UK, France, Russia and China).”

Almost lost in translation here: the Security Council as an entity was never given the power to avert crises or to exert sanctions – but the five major powers gave themselves (and each other) a licence to wage war (although of course Russia and China were never meant to use this). How many times during the 1980s did the UN General Assembly condemn US interference in the domestic affairs of Nicaragua (for example) while the US arrogantly shrugged off the ruling of the International Court of Justice in Den Hag? In more recent times, how often has the toothless Security Council vacillated over relationships in the Middle East, before and after, in all impotence, watching as the US and UK invade Iraq?

As I float back through the nebulous history of the UN family, I can recount how Iraqi oil was an issue that arose during the first world war: the archives show that the British government rushed troops to Mosul in 1918 to gain control of the northern oil fields. Britain and France clashed over Iraq's oil during and after the Versailles Conference, but Britain eventually took the lion’s share by turning its military victories into colonial rule. The powerful Iraq Petroleum Company acted always in the cartel interests of the Anglo-American companies. To the fury of the Iraqis and the French, the IPC held down production to maximize profits elsewhere, keeping a monopoly of Iraq’s oil sector until nationalization in 1972 (see Global Policy Forum).

During the final years of the Saddam era, envied companies from France, Russia, China and elsewhere obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions were kept in place by the US and the UK, making those contracts inoperable. Since the occupation of Iraq in 2003, have things changed? The Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies in the forthcoming decades. But it is not yet a done deal - the Iraqi parliament has balked at the legislation; most Iraqis favour continued control by a national company and the powerful oil workers union strongly opposes de-nationalization. This is another thread in the nylon stocking of the storyline that will run and run.

Meanwhile, the UN flounders incomprehensibly across the globe, as ‘breaking news’ (UN News Centre ) eerily echoes both past and future:

“Settlement in Cyprus ‘not a foregone conclusion’ says envoy”

“UNICEF reports rising trend of violence against children in strife-torn countries”

“Ban calls for ‘redoubled’ efforts on causes and consequences of forced displacement”

“Kosovo plan is a ‘practical and workable solution’”

“UN chief says more women need to be involved in peace negotiations and recovery.”

In Africa conflict, food insecurity, poor health and inequality prosper. Help is at hand, however, according to ‘musician and humanitarian’ Bob Geldof who raised money through the Live Aid concerts of 1985 in response to famine and drought in northeast Africa (the UN estimated 160m people were still affected after nine months) .

This gentle knight accompanied the US president on his journey round Africa recently and records the experience without irony:

“On Air Force One, the President and I discussed this Luminous Continent, drenched in light and hope, grace and spirit…” (No! How could I make it up? This is from Time magazine, March 3rd 2008) “…The great unacknowledged story of America in Africa didn’t immediately originate with this President. But it was accelerated hugely by him, increased by him and monitored by him… I look forward to seeing exactly what the next President will do to continue this great untold and secret story. The story of the African Bush.” (No! seriously!) “The quiet triumph of America’s foreign policy.”

In the same issue of Time, ‘last true movie star’ George Clooney has an alternative perspective. Founder of a Darfur support organisation Not on Our Watch, he has a UN passport bearing the legend ‘Messenger of Peace’ (“it’s very cool”) which allows him to visit. “I’ve been very depressed since I got back. I’m terrified that it isn’t in any way helping. That bringing attention can cause more damage. You dig a well or build a health centre and they’re a target for someone… A lot more people know about Darfur but nothing is different. Absolutely nothing.”

Travelling to conflict areas of Sierra Leone and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, we next find goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commission for Refugees, Hollywood actress and ‘earth mother’ Angelina Jolie (with adopted children from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Cambodia she has said she would like to create her own UN family) (Scotland on Sunday, 22nd June 2008).

Still active in the story from time to time is ‘international entertainment personality’ Geri Halliwell, who as goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Population Fund since 1998, draws on her ‘girl power’ persona to promote women’s sexual and reproductive health rights not only in countries like the Philippines and Zambia, but also in the US (speaking to Congress - and respect to her).

Stop press for 18th June 2008:

At roundtable discussions at UN headquarters in New York, US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice raises the issue of war rape and joins calls for an end to sexual violence in armed conflict. She also presses the UN to weigh in on Zimbabwe’s rising violence: “the UN must act.” A UN food survey warns of impending food crisis in Zimbabwe. Neighbouring Malawi (where pop singer Madonna adopted her son) can help out because bumper harvests last year have provided a surplus, so the government is selling maize to Zimbabwe while the poorest Malawians are unable to buy sufficient food for their own families.

Violence and discrimination have marked Mugabe’s reign since he was first elected in 1980. However, during the first ten years, a commitment to social programmes brought real changes in the areas of health and education. From 1990 there followed austerity measures (it’s the same old story) imposed by the World Bank and IMF (both members of the UN family) - which have drastically affected social development in Zimbabwe.

So, here is the UN Security Council’s first direct involvement in the Zimbabwean crisis: mundane, magic or meaningful? Compare with the (still unsuccessful) nearly fifty-year-old US trade embargo on Cuba which continues despite the fact that, in the annual UN General Assembly, all of the USA’s closest allies vote against it. But no surprises there, especially as the term ‘magical realism’ was originally coined in 1949 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier : he called it “lo real maravilloso” in his novel The Kingdom of this World.


Note
In 1967, The New York Times hailed One Hundred Years of Solitude as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Read more
The new International Journal of Cuban Studies is now online at http://www.cubastudiesjournal.org/

And all my posts under Conflict and Africa!

Spotlight on the Cuban experience

Sometimes I have good news to report. On 20th October – which is Cuba’s national day - I attended a prestigious event at Clwyd Theatre in Flintshire celebrating 25 years of solidarity between Cuba and Wales (Cymru Cuba).

“We’re proud that the Welsh Assembly has official government links with Cuba,” emphasised MP Elfyn Llwyd, highlighting the memorandum of understanding for cooperation in higher education, which has been developed by Welsh Minister for Education Jane Davidson in collaboration with Silvia Nogales, First Secretary of the Cuban embassy.

In contrast, explained Rob Miller, Director of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, our UK central government still does not have normalised relations with Cuba. Trade amounts to less than £4 million a year, despite assurances of “supporting open communications with Cuba rather than using an isolationist approach to influencing change” (Angela Smith). The impact on the Cuban people of the 40-year old US economic blockade continues to be officially ignored. In addition, international banks and other companies operating in Britain have been forced by the US to stop trading with Cuba – an act which both contravenes UK law and compromises our own sovereignty.

In spite of negative images of Cuba in the media, over 100,000 British tourists visit the island annually - not counting exchange visits, study tours and delegations of parliamentarians, trade unionists, academics and others. What do they find there? “People like us,” says Tyrone O’Sullivan, ex-miner chair of the worker-owned Tower Colliery in south Wales, “hard-working, good-natured, good at fixing things. Cuba still remains the example of what can be achieved by putting people first, of how ordinary people can change their own destiny.”

In summer of 2006 I got a little frustrated with the press coverage about Castro and wrote an article, archived on the Cynefin Y Werin (Wales Common Ground) website, called Cuba Sí: Let’s dream the impossible which began:

‘Cuba seems to be easy target practice for journalists these days: Fidel is dying, the revolutionary ideal is dead, communism is rotten and the vultures are circling. Soon the US will overrun the island, capitalism will be reinstated and the paradox which is Cuba will finally be resolved.’

Well, according to the speakers at Theatr Clwyd - and as I predicted - none of that has happened yet.



But what do the rest of us have to learn from the Cuban experience?

On October 10th London Metropolitan University saw the successful launch of the new International Institute for the Study of Cuba (IISC). At a time when Cuba is certainly facing a period of change, the IISC aims to provide an in-depth objective appraisal of the ‘social experience’ and to examine its holistic approach to development, particularly in the fields of education and health. IISC executive director, Professor Patrick Pietroni, former Dean of General Practice, who started mobilising resources for the institute just over a year ago, describes to me how ‘academics, managers and scientists in Cuba all seem to have an understanding of the social dimension of their work; an ability to link the macro to the micro and vice versa.’



The online, open-access International Journal of Cuban Studies - first issue due out in spring 2008 - will publish scholarly work on Cuba (and related topics) in all disciplines including science and medicine. So here’s the opportunity to develop some interesting ideas, for example: If the Cuban approach to development had been used in Africa rather than the World Bank model, would the continent be in much better shape? How is a caring holistic approach to housekeeping feasible when prevailing wisdom tells us that only market-oriented policies can bring prosperity? And how to explain the apparent contradiction that women are highly educated, economically independent and equally involved in community decision-making in Cuba, but not in so-called democracies like Mali?

His Excellency René Mujica Cantelar, Cuban ambassador to Britain, concluded his speech at Theatr Clwyd:

'We all need to address the issues of war, poverty, ecological disaster facing the world today, but it is not through weapons or market forces that we will overcome these challenges: it is through cooperation and solidarity.'

Read Cuba Sí. Let’s dream the impossible

Also read about the Caring Economy in Venezuela



human rights

Women, socialism and language

“ Taking part is not enough, you have to express your opinion.”

I found this quote on a card from Puntos de Encuentros
the leading women’s advocacy organisation in Nicaragua. What they say is true, but I know it’s not easy because it took me a long time to find my own voice as a writer. And like many other women I have found blogging a creative and empowering means of expressing my opinions and at the same time helping to raise other women’s voices.

I blogged live from the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January, and from the G8 alternative summit in Rostock in June. Now I’m grounded for a while in north Wales experiencing withdrawal symptoms. But fortunately the world keeps on spinning and the social movement keeps on moving. So in August musicians and political activists from the Americas and Europe descended on the tiny Welsh town of Machynlleth, home to the Centre for Alternative Technology for a Latino-Welsh extravaganza. They came to celebrate the living inspiration of the Chilean musician Victor Jara and discuss common environmental concerns – thus proving yet again that the sweet old-fashioned dream of socialism succeeds in eluding eradication and can be found bringing people together happily in what may seem the most unlikely of locations.

In fact, for me, the event is not surprising because there is a tradition of connection between Wales and Latin America which goes back to the first Welsh settlers to Patagonia in Argentina in 1865. More recently, solidarity groups in Wales have regularly exchanged visitors with Nicaragua and organised bilateral conferences on Cuba . This is the second Victor Jara festival in Machynlleth, and now links are being developed with Venezuela, since Cesar Aponte from the ministry for the environment was at the festival to talk about oil, equity and biosphere.



The reason for today’s connections, of course, is the common experience of oppression: Wales by the English kings, landlords, law, church and language; Latin American countries by dictators at home supported by successive greedy US regimes equally violating human rights including the right of free expression. The connection means that both Welsh civil society and politicians are active in LA solidarity: Jane Davidson, minister for education in the Wales Assembly, has visited Cuba on official business and Eluned Morgan (now Labour MEP) worked on the Nicaraguan coffee harvest. LA links are particularly strong among members of the Welsh Language Society : poets, musicians, writers like Angharad Tomos or educationalists like Branwen Niclas who have in their time been held in English prisons over Welsh language rights.

Mother tongue

Language was one of several themes of commonality in a cross-cultural initiative between women in Wales and women in Nicaragua last century (1995-6). This was a particular link with the multilingual Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, where, as in Wales, it is women who have been instrumental in maintaining indigenous language in the face of oppression by conquistadores, government, society or husbands. They have kept the mother tongue alive at home, in community life (especially Sunday school) in bringing up their own children, through stories, oral history, shared childcare and the development of a bilingual education programme.

At the conference in Bangor we discussed the paradox that while women are keepers of the language we are not always encouraged to use it ourselves in public. For this reason some researchers suggest that women’s speech is associated with powerlessness and can be characterised by over-politeness, hedging and hyper-correct grammar. Jennifer Coates has argued that these features do not actually correlate with the sex of the speaker but with social status, linked to previous experience and confidence in the context. “Powerless language has been confused with women’s language because in societies like ours women are usually less powerful than men.”

In mixed communication men are observed to interrupt three times as often as women, thus violating the rules of turn-taking. Conversely, women tend to act as facilitators, doing more of the interactive work and respecting others’ turns. Coates points out that “both men and women are disadvantaged by the existence of these two different models of conversation: women because their style leads to their being dominated (by men) in mixed groups and men because they lack competence in co-operative interaction.”

Angelica Brown, then councillor for the southern Atlantic coast region of Nicaragua highlighted: “Problems arise when it is a question of women taking on a public role because we underestimate our abilities of management and communication. For women in bilingual communities there is the additional worry of having to speak in public in your second or even third language.”


I have to keep on fighting

“Pay attention to the way you construct the present. It should look like the future that you dream of” (Alice Walker) is the message on another card from Puntos de Encuentro. Although the socialist experiment hasn’t always been so good for women, it has only been made possible by their active participation. While the reality may not live up to the dream, socialism in different Latin American contexts has opened up a space where women can raise their voice, take part in decision-making and are able to move, influence or inspire others. And, as Amanda Hopkinson says, ‘If you want to make a protest in Central America, you write a poem.’ The following two poems are not new but their writers’ dreams live on.

Firstly, the Creole painter Joan Beer, who died in 1984 not long after writing Love Poem, talks about the reality of personal relationships at a time when the Sandinistas (named after the anti-US-imperialism fighter, Sandino) were working for a greater love - for the sunrise, as the liberation of Nicaragua was called. The poignancy of ‘trying to keep back the night from falling’ is even greater in retrospect, given the World Bank’s dismantling of developments in health, education and equality during the 1990s.

Oscar, yuh surprise me
assin for a love poem

Ah sing a song a love fa meh contry
small contry, big lite
Hope for de po’, big headache fa de rich
Mo’ po’ dan rich in de worl
mo’ people love fah meh contry

Fa meh contry name Nicaragua
Fa meh people ah love dem all
Black, Miskito, Sumo, Rama, Mestizo
So yuh see fa me, love poem complete
‘cause ah love you too.

Dat no mek me erase de moon
an de star fran de firmament.

Only somehow wen ah rememba
how you bussin yo ass
To defend dis sunrise, an keep back
de night fran falling
Ah know dat tomara we will have time
fa walk under de moon an stars
Dignify an free, sovereign
children a Sandino.

In the conclusion of the second poem, the recently deceased Claribel Alegria expresses her choice more starkly:

Because I want peace and not war
I want to keep on fighting.
Because there are liberated territories
Where people learn to read
And the sick are cured
And the fruits of the earth belong to all,
I have to keep on fighting.

Note:
Creole is one of the languages used in Bluefields on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. As a community they were socialised to believe that Creole is just ‘bad’ English, not a real language, especially by the powerful Moravian church and its schools. Comments from afro-caribbean activists:

“The church teaches us women to be humble – that is, stupid!” Marjorie McKenzie.

‘When my husband is at home, we all speak Spanish. When he’s away, we speak bad Creole.’ Shorlaine Howard.


Further links

OpenDreams live on blog

El sueno existe

History is a weapon, Joan Jara (downloadable)

Lovers and Comrades, Women’s resistance poetry, edited by Amanda Hopkinson, The Women’s Press, 1989
Welsh Writing 1960-1985, Ned Thomas, 1996

We share the same struggle, edited by Patricia Daniel, 1996 (downloadable)