Isak

Superheroes for Vibrant and Fair Media

 

One great mentor in my early journalism days was the community of the Center for New Words, which soon morphed into Women, Action, & the Media. Whether at its national conference, or working in its office, or connecting with others one on one, I learned an enormous amount about the basics of the work I was moving into: how to pitch, who to pitch to, and what to do after the "yes" came. The embarrassing mistake of sending out a hard-copy "To whom it may concern" letter (which I did, in my very first pitch) soon became illuminated. I also found a thriving community interested in discussing -- and acting -- on the larger issues in journalism, from false balance to media ownership. To this day, WAM's dynamic listserv and live events bring together a tremendous set of thinkers, writers, editors, producers, advocates, and reporters working in all levels and types of media. It's a potent group, which is why it's newest initiative -- a direct action network for gender justice in media -- needs to happen.

Here is part of WAM's pitch to us:

With your help, Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) is raising funds to build a grassroots direct-action network dedicated to creating gender justice in media at all levels, including ownership, employment, representation and access.

When you back this project, you're creating a network that will connect you with people around the country and the world who share your concern about the state of our media. You'll join activists, media professionals, artists, performers, academics, and people from all walks of life in taking action to create the media ecosystem we deserve.

Poke around the page. See what this will look like on the ground. Check out the cute animated video picturing us as superheroes. (Did I mention cartoonists, designers, and directors are part of the WAM community? You really need to get in on this.) Skeptics, you are officially directed to the new FAQ video. And after you go exploring, pitch in: your support will go a long way, and not just because it will be matched dollar-for-dollar by another generous supporter. It will go a long way because talented people are behind this who are absolutely committed to doing right by you. I know these people -- hell, I am these people -- and you can count this as a promise.

Origin of Language

Amid so much death, birth survived.

Guarani, the original language of Paraguay, survived, and with it the certainty that words are sacred.

The oldest of traditions has it that on this earth the red cicada sang, the grasshopper sang, the partridge sang, and then the cedar sang: from the soul of the cedar burst forth the song which in Guarani called the first Paraguayans into being.

They did not exist yet.

They were born from the word that named them.

 

-- From Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano (tr. Mark Fried). Listen, also, to his treasure of an interview on KCRW's Bookworm.

Tell Me a Savage Story

Why has the narrative about Africa not changed much since Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness? Jina Moore explores the dangerously narrow storyline in The Boston Review, in a piece that is your must-read of the day. It begins:

In 1906, the readers of The New York Times opened their papers to a story about the Bronx Zoo’s latest attraction: Ota Benga, a 22-year-old Mutwa from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Ota Benga let some of the savage nature of the African forest come out yesterday,” began the story, in which Benga is drenched with a hose in the zoo’s monkey cage.

Today, the “savage nature” of Africa is still on display, in American headlines: “Uganda’s rebels in murderous spree,” “Congo a country of rape and ruin” “Africa’s Forever Wars.” Sometimes the savagery doesn’t come from the “savages” themselves. It comes from poverty—“NIGERIA: Focus on the scourge of poverty”—or disease—“AIDS at 30: Killer has been tamed, but not conquered.” Other times, all the savagery blends together: “Starving Babies, Raped Mommies, Famine in Africa—Do you care?”

All I can imagine from these headlines is that Africa—all 54 countries, all 11.7 million square miles of it—must be a very deadly place.

But I’ve lived there. It’s not. Or rather, it can be, in certain places, at certain times. Far more often, and across most of the continent, it isn’t. Not even in its most infamous “war-torn” countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Goma, part of a region the United Nations’ special representative on sexual violence in conflict Margot Wallström two years ago dubbed “the rape capital of the world,” I went to an impromptu hip-hop show, full of dancing Congolese. In Kinshasa, nearly a thousand miles away on the other side of the country, I met an oboist for the city’s symphony orchestra.

Congo, like America, is very many things, all at the same time. This should be obvious. Why would a foreign country be any less complex than our own? So why, then, if you’re reading or watching most American news, do you tend to see the same simplified stories over and over again?

So, what's going on? How do editors, journalists, and readers contribute to the exclusion of diverse and interesting stories? Moore does an excellent job of walking through this without getting mired in anecdote ("X does this kind of good work, but Y does that kind of bad work.") In railing against the simple story about Africa that we seem to cling to, this essay manifests the very complexity and nuance that it is championing. This is not about "Afro-pessimists vs. Afro-optimists," as Moore explains, or even a false binary about "authenticity" (typically boiled down to foreign vs. native journalists). This is a deeper matter that gets at what we need -- or think we need -- in stories about suffering, and why Africa is used to fit that frame.

This is tricky terrain, of course, marked by a very long history of the suffering that colonialism and slavery caused in Africa, and today's complicated politics of development aid and missionary work. What we do and do not pay attention to, as both individuals and as a public, is telling. Compassion can be the first step on the way to understanding "the other" as a full-bodied being that contains multitudes. But when it isn't a step forward, when instead the narrative stagnates there at level-one compassion, the being-with-multitudes becomes a vessel for our emotional needs, rather than a person who is by turns boring, fascinating, challenging, hilarious, obnoxious, talented, and rational. In journalism, you'd think this wouldn't be that hard: who doesn't want to write, or read, or watch, or listen to, an interesting story? So, if that's not there, what is the potent force pushing it back?

Related:

• Good News from Africa - follow-up post on Jina Moore's blog, rich with links and inviting your contributions of well-done stories
  "The positive-stories agenda is not mine ... 'How far Africa has come' stories still use suffering, poverty and our other least-favorite cliches as their baseline. Besides that, stories about violence and conflict in Africa can be extraordinarily well done, and stories about 'good news' in Africa can be sloppy and irresponsible. It isn't the topic that defines the kind of good news I'm interested in; it's the quality of the journalism."

Literary & Media Indulgences - 8/1/2012

 

 

-- Portraits of vanishing languages, via a gorgeous National Geographic gallery that reminds us that one language dies every fourteen days. Above is an image of a Punta Chueca teenager named Deborah Anabel Herrera Moreno, who dropped out of school and is learning to write the Seri language. The word for "writer" in Seri is "caasipl," which translates to "one who makes marks."

--- And then, what happened? Emily Nussbaum has a great piece in The New Yorker about the power of a cliffhanger. While she focuses on television storytelling, there's a long look at literary counterparts in disparate genres.

-- Where Daisy Buchanan lived. (Hint: it's not what you think.)

-- "They’re thinking of a token of recognition—they want to exist, as writers." Tim Parks on money and writing in the New York Review of Books.

-- What happened when W.B. Yeats tilted toward the occult, via the "magic shows" issue of Lapham's Quarterly. See also an early Hungarian account of vampires and an essay on the uncomfortable relationship between medicine, magic, and miracle.

-- Used to be, not that long ago, you could compete in the Olympics for medals in literature, sculpture, and music.

-- Scholastic's Weekly Reader, a longtime classroom favorite, hangs it up after 84 years.

-- Not just the facts, but the truth: Linda Greenhouse has a great piece at Nieman Reports that challenges "he said she said" journalism.

-- On the "bilious bravado" of Ambrose Bierce, and anger in journalism.

-- What a poorly-handled story in Ebony can teach journalists about covering sexual assault.

-- “'For her to compare me to Margaret Sanger,' he told me, 'it’s beyond the pale.'” Outstanding nuanced story on what the heck's going on in Texas, and how it ties into women's health madness more broadly.

-- "The Man Segregation Built." From one of the most brilliant young narrative journalists around, here is a can't-look-away story on the "fall and rise of the new black leadership in Jackson" by my pal Ingrid Norton. She also has a short piece that is on fire (in more ways the one) in Detroit.

-- Heart melt! A nine-year-old heard Detroit has money trouble, and opened a lemonade stand to help it out. His flier: "May you please help the City of Detroit. Please buy this popcorn and drinks. It's not so expensive. I didn't make it expensive so you would have to spend all your money. The money will help clean up trash on the ground and cut the grass in the parks." Turns out the kid's getting the attention of the mayor, and the world.

-- "Batman's Gun: Why the comic-book hero was disarmed in 1939."

-- Letters for kids! There are about six bright and bookish kids I want to give this marvelous ongoing literary gift to. (There is also an adult version.)

-- Gore Vidal, a most complicated man of letters, has died. A frequent essayist in the New York Review of Books, you might want to explore his pieces on "the romance of Sinclair Lewis," the life and art of Orson Welles, the comic novels of Dawn Powell (who he almost singlehandedly brought back to the fore), and the sparking mind of Italo Calvino. Chris M. also points us to Vidal's New Yorker essays.

-- "Adventures in Depression." The funniest comic/story hybrid about sadness that I know. Via Mark B.

-- "Dreams about mice bode despair." An old pal of mine translates Marina Eskina in that essential journal, Asymptote.

-- What's that? You haven't read Edith Wharton's erotica lately?

-- "Searching for Sugar Man" is a new film about one of the strangest stories in music history, stretching from Detroit to South Africa. It's getting a ton of high profile press and rave reviews, plus the championing of Chris M., who first alerted me to it.

-- Nadine Gordimer is recovering after breaking a rib (my god, she's 88 years old already!), but she's still speaking her mind. (""Our education system is a wreck. It's a shambles.")

-- Exciting new translations are coming out of Brazil soon.

-- World Literature Today picks out some of the best of migration narratives.

-- A very interesting take on the dreadful straits that the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is spinning in.

-- On liking Stephen King novels, and being a fluid, dynamic reader.

-- Carl Sagan's reading list.

-- This is pretty much why I gave up feeling like I had a duty to finish every book I began, or that seemed "important."

-- I'm a new subscriber to The New Yorker and between Junot Diaz's devastating story ("The Cheater's Guide to Love") and this week's publication of a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that it rejected 75 years ago, it's really working out for me. The magazine also revived its 1926 profile of Fitzgerald: "Very deliberately he has taken as the field for his talent the great story of American wealth." Last link via Chris M.

-- And finally, let us say good night with "The Museum of Endangered Sounds."