an irrelevant anecdote and an angry outcry

My friend "Giacomo" works for ICBL, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, one of the two co-winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. He doesn't get paid for this job, he does it pro-bono, but its amazing work experience and he's extremely likely to get streamlined into some other, equally great organisation, as soon as he's done with this one. About a month before I left Canberra, he asked me to do a tiny little comic/character that he could use on a bunch of business cards he was having made up. He wanted either a picture of himself with "some luggages", or perhaps a little looking land mine with an evil face, or something. I agreed, but never really got very proactive on the producin'. And then it sort of became a joke, sort of, in which I just kept alluding my promise, much to his chagrin.

Anyway, about a month ago we were sitting in a bar here in Oslo and I was drawing on this stack of napkins and we were talking about the West Wing, which "Giacomo" discovered earlier this year and became appropriately obsessed with. So, while we were talking I just started scribbling this sketchy picture of Toby Zeigler, all furrow browed and shoulder-slung jacket, a drawing that was finished in about 25 seconds. "Giacomo" took the napkin and put it in his pocket.

I was against his using it for the business cards. I thought it represented him as a short, bearded, grumpy, balding Jewish man, rather than what he really is, which is a tall, grinning, beardless, goofy-but-loveable northern Italian, with a full head of hair. But he loves Toby and he loves the West Wing and he insisted. He sent off for the business cards to be made, and they were.

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This week marks the tenth anniversary of the signing, in Ottawa, of the International Treaty banning landmines. Here is Oslo, there are celebrations going on. One of the main squares, beside the Hard Rock Cafe and the National Theatre, have been taken over by a simulation mine field, demonstration sniffer dogs and an absolute Leviathan of a truck called a "Minewolf" which looks like cross between a tank, a bulldozer and a combine harvester, and swings thick metal chains out front to detonate mines in large flat areas like fields. Throughout the week a series of conferences and events are being held, which in part commemorate the project, but also draw attention to, and prepare further for the signing, hopefully by the end of 2008, of a similar treaty against cluster munitions.

Yesterday during lunch, I put on a collared shirt and my better shoes and snuck into the afternoon session of the Civil Society Conference. "Giacomo" had been there all day, in suit and tie, schmoozing with the NGO celebrities and meeting his co-workers, previously known to him only by email and skype calls. And there he was handing out the business card, with my little Toby Zeigler scribble. To the ex-head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. To Charmaine Gooch, founder of Global Witness, who initiated, ran and pulled off the campaign to ban blood diamonds. To ICBL members Paul Hannon, director of Mines Action Canada, and Steve Goose, Director of Human Rights Watch - Arms Division. And to his wife, Jody Williams, campaign spokesperson for ICBL, recent head of mission for the UN Human Rights Council in Dafur, and joint winner in 1997 of the the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was there to see Jody speak, along with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Judge who also won the Nobel Prize, in 2003. "Giacomo" and I had told a bunch of people in our class about the talks and said how we should be able to just walk in and listen, even though we weren't officially invited, but nobody else came, citing "too much study" or "it'll probably be boring".

It wasn't boring. It was incredible. Jody Williams gave the most inspiring speech I've seen given for a long time. Probably ever. In massive contrast to the other Nobel Peace prize winner I saw this year, the Dalai Lama, there was not one platitude, not one feel-good fuzzy, not one moment of kumbai-ya. There was no apologies, and no set speech, and no big statements, and no soft forgiveness. Jody Williams is angry, she is outraged, she said so many times. She is outraged at governments, she is outraged at the UN, she is outraged at civil society for giving in, or for not pushing harder. She is outraged, and she should be, we all should be, at what has happened to humans, what has happened to the concept of the individual, to the need for human security, to the absolute common fucking sense that says that inventing, testing, producing, selling, stockpiling, threatening to use and actually using all types of purely destructive machinery, from small weapons to land mines to clusters to thermobaric bombs (like Russia's darling newbie) to nuclear monstrosities, is WRONG; that it is not just wrong but disgusting, criminal, evil. Jody Williams sat there, tired eyed and tight jawed, and she ponders these simple questions out loud, and when she asks why, it's not the sort of why you can just make up excuses to. It's the sort of why you just have to listen to, and think about. And get angry about, too.

How, she ponders, can a country like Sweden, with all its platitudes to peace and freedom, how can it still be the leading producer of small arms and clusters per capita in the world? How can the Russians and the Americans produce bombs of massive destruction and then release statements to the world's media about their "pride" and "excitement" at the success? How can government's like Frances - smart men like Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières - how can they seriously even consider the possibility of war with Iran? How can Western governments continuously backflip and pander and smooth over the truth in Dafur when every day people are being slashed to death and women are raped and there's just not enough food and shade and water and medicines, and they say they want reports that everybody is happy with? How does one act in such a way, when we know the full extent of the destruction our act is causing, but we do it anyway?

And the beauty is that she wonders all this without leftist cliche, without flimsy grand statements about the brotherhood of humans, without inane gestures towards the strength of the human spirit, without always blaming someone else, without using just words. In order to wonder all of this aloud, to cry out about all this she uses truth, she uses outrage, she uses logic, she uses the painful fact that we are all to blame, but that we also all have the capacity to make noise, to learn more, to care.

It's an odd feeling, being filled up with a sad flame of fury, and a hot flame of excitement and energy at the same time. To walk out of a room with a new hero.

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After the speeches "Giacomo" was approached by Paul Hannon, asking whether the balding bearded guy on the business card was meant to be him or Steve Goose. "Oh no, it's meant to be me when I'm older and balder" he said. "But it doesn't look like you at all" replied Paul, "although, it does sort of look like a... fictonal character". Hahaha.

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STOP CLUSTER MUNITIONS, NOW.

http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/
http://www.icbl.org/
Jody Williams' Nobel Lecture, 1997

Oslo

Oslo. I walk your quiet streets flanked by quiet houses capped with handsome mansard roofs, these quiet, neat streets, with autumn trees holding green, the quiet skies darkening earlier and earlier. The soft moaning sigh of a passing tram, the harmony of a raw wind from off the fjord, a wind danced by seabirds. A trio of Swedish girls, teenagers, all matching in Helly Hansen puffy parkas and dusty foundation and jingling charms, their hair fashioned wet and swept sideways (as though licked by a large horse), their mouths stuck in scowling singsong and dipthongs. Street corners colonised by 7-Elevens, by Narvesens, by Delis-de-Luca. A sound, a silence, a sound.

Home is the border line between Grünerløkka and Grønland, between hipsterdom and the migrant quarter. Along the Aker river African men stand in position making hissing noises and whispering hash? hash?, their hands clenched around tiny parcels, while the water gushes and trickles towards the fjord. Blond men pushing strollers. Bass guitar from the warehouses. The two sides of the Anker bridge, guarded by statues of human-animal teams from Norwegian fairy tales - Per Gynt and the reindeer, Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon with requisite bear, Veslefrikk med fela and Kari Trestakk - and in the middle, a Roma couple playing accordion and tambourine. My apartment is part of a massive complex, eleven connected buildings round a central square, where Somali women talk to friends through ground level curtained windows, where bored looking Kurdish teens hang out by the little playground, where white students pass by, heads down, where Arab men stand against the wall listening to Arab pop songs on the fuzzy speaker of their mobile phones. From Anker: down Torggata, the Turkish and Vietnamese grocers, the Kurdish kebab and pizza shops, the cobbled squares, the worn out, greybearded gypsy beggar, always in the same doorway with his paper cup. Up Markveien, the second hand stores, the keffiyahed indie kids, the bars with antique furniture, the smell of coffee, the ghosts of industry.

I spend a lot of afternoons in the Nasjonalbiblioteket, the National Library, in its big reading room, rimmed by bookshelves, under disc shaped ceiling lights that look like UFOs, listening to the symphony of paper shuffling, zips, computer keys, the tap and squeak of stepping shoes and the occasional punctuation of sniffs or coughs. I spend a lot of nights in bed, under the doona with my back against the window sill, reading Sigrid Undset or my Ethics textbook and listening to Efterklang or Pärt. I spend the mornings sitting naked, mindlessly trawling the internet for items updated while I was sleeping. I spend the other mornings in class, in which I am one of 16 students from seven countries. I spend the darkness dreaming about people I have never met, and of hideous circumstances. I spend most breakfasts eating ICA muesli clusters with dehydrated strawberries and dried yogurt clumps. I spend a lot of my time thinking about one person, one girl, one smile, one set of eyes, one city, south of here, a city that feels as much like home as any other at this point.


But, Oslo, you hold me safe for now, you appease me for now, you with your rolling skies and cold sea air and colourful streets and lanterns and fountains and construction sites and drug addicts and freckled girls and accordion players and sighing trams and oil-proud Hummers and sad looking trees and street-corner berry sellers and graffiti and nervousness and wooden houses and hills; you with your song.

You smug city, Oslo; you'll do for now.

Looking into the Eyes of Others

In his book Totality and Infinity Emanuell Levinas makes a distinction between rhetoric and conversation (or dialogue). Rhetoric resists dialogue and corrupts the freedom of the Other not to become the Same. For that reason it is violence par excellence and thus injustice. Levinas talks about violence as interrupting humans' continuity. It is tempting to see our lives as lived narrative in that connection. For Levinas the face of the other speaks to us and its manifestation is already conversation or dialogue. The face opens for the original conversation. We do not fuse with the other or become like her, but interact. The ethical is for Levinas then taking consideration for the irreducibility of the Other. The way the face of the Other presents itself to me is, he writes, non-violence par excellence because it does not violate my freedom but instead calls my freedom to responsibility. As nonviolence it maintains the plurality of the Same and the Other.

Ref: Erik Cleven, "Between Stories and Faces: Facilitating Dialogue Through Narratives and Relationship Building"

just a song

Ukelele: The camp ended. There wasn't many tears, except when Joanna left. There were, of course, hugs and notes: hugs that spoke louder than words had been able to do in three weeks, as well as uncomfortable hugs, hugs by expectation, hugs of severance. Notes containing compliments and platitudes, silent notes speaking carefully, notes with outpourings of almost desperate love. A note declaring the recipient as grossly self-centered, honest. His back was a voice bubble saying "Rock On" which is about as much a sidestep as you can get and still have pen on paper. It appears the people of France and I might need to spend a bit of time on patching our relationship.

Voice: I do feel bad that I didn't really try very hard. I tried but I couldn't find it. This will be my last international CISV program for a while - I think I get it now, I think it's time for me to do something else. Mosaic, for one thing, and other things, other things entirely. Which is certainly not to say I have regrets: No. Wheat fields, capoed guitar on hilltop, Amella (as a symbol), Magdalena, Jo, the looking beyond, the smell of rain and fire; no.

Accordion: She is only seven, and she is waiting and she will keep on waiting and she has been waiting all of her life, and she is unknowing, she is defined by unknowing. Here I am in Sweden, so easily in Sweden. That's something.

Percussion: The Dane, Kierkegaard, asks if despair is a merit or a defect. He proposes that it is both. "It is infinite merit to be able to despair. And yet not only is it the greatest misfortune and misery actually to be in despair; no it is ruin...Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which relates to itself. But the synthesis is not the imbalance, the synthesis is ust the possibility; or, the possibility of the imbalance lies in the synthesis. If the synthesis were itself the imbalance, there would be no despair; it would be something that lay in human nature itself, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something that happened to a person, something he suffered, like a sickness he succumbs to, or like death, which is the fate of everyone. No, despair lies in the person himself. But if he were not a synthesis there would be no question of his despairing; nor could he despair unless the synthesis were originally in the right relationship from the hand of God."

Trumpets: You are so beautiful when you are shy.

Stories from Svogerslev

Tonight we were in the fields, waist deep in grain, and suddenly, thirty metres away there was a young deer, bucking and leaping through the wheat. I yelped "ET RÅDYR" which is how you say it in Danish, and stooped and sprinted along the tractor path, thinking I could catch it up and surprise it. Unfortunately a leaping deer is faster than I am and it got away. Still, it was a beautiful moment, the sky of milk being pierced by a disappearing cardinal sun and the wind mills whipping and our movement making tracks of crushed cereal stalks. It was always gonna be beautiful, but the addition of a solitary leaping deer? I mean, come on.

Also there are hundreds of very very large slugs, often in clumps.





The school we are staying in is peculiar in that it has a Lord of the Rings theme, and has meeting rooms with runes on the wall, and hallways with murals on the walls which depict different bits of the story, kind of like a Catholic church might have depictions of the twelve stations of the cross. At night local kids play on the sloping tin roof and spy on us through the skylight as have our discussions. While exploring the adjacent forest today I found a series of paths which lead to a mini climbing wall in a little clearing in the trees, on which I plan to hang a white sheet, and to which I will run a very very long electrical cord to power a projector and computer and I will take mattresses and couches and citronella lanterns and tea lights in brown paper bags and set up a little outdoor cinema. This I will do in secret and then I will lead the other participants to it in the dark, and we will come to the clearing and they will be shocked and enchanted. There we will sit and we will watch the film Voces Innocentes which is about a very good film about child soldiers in El Salvador and then we will be discuss child soldiers and everybody will be very engaged and interested and even emotionally affected. But shhh, I said it´s a secret.

I leave you with a humorous company logo from the side of a plastic food delivery tray.