SUKHUMVIT

I look down on them
from the bus
window open
red light
looking
The taxi driver
I see his face and
he sees mine
looks away
Four brown legs
one brown, slim back
and shoulders, one young
chest, breasts
pushed up,
One paunch in a checked shirt.
His fair arm
fat and foreign.
fat hand reaches, creeps
up one brown leg.
I am still looking
down on them
Green light and
Taxi moves
Bus takes me
home.

White black people

You need to be careful about creating imagery of sub-Saharan African societies for British audiences. People tend to generalise about the region and often don’t understand the differences between different African cultures, and even different African countries. During my first year at university, I discovered that around half of my housemates were unaware that Africa is a continent, and not a country.

Lazy journalists and television appeals, for their part, routinely refer to Africa as if it were one homogenous society—poor, disease-ridden, unstable, corrupt and undeveloped—with little internal differentiation save for ‘warring tribes’ and rebel armies. Our ignorance is not only embarrassing; it perpetuates stereotypes that are dangerous for those they (mis)represent.

Photographers and filmmakers also have to be sensitive to the centuries of racist representations of Africans produced by Europe and the ‘developed’ world, of which Resident Evil 5 is just the latest manifestation. Treating black Africans as part of the backdrop for a storyline centred around a white, male, protagonist has a history going back at least as far as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and undermines efforts to bring about social change based on an understanding of Africans as just as human as Europeans.

A series of photographs centred on Tanzanians suffering from albinism—the congenital condition of being born without the melanin pigment that protects our skin from the sun’s UV rays—therefore has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear. And, arresting as these images by Jackie Dewe Mathews undoubtedly are, I’m not sure they fully acknowledge this responsibility.
(http://www.jackiedewemathews.com/stories/zeru_zeru/zeru_zeru.html)

There are two main problems. Firstly, while it is the job of the images to tell the story, the captions do play their part in explaining certain information. Who are these people? Where are they? Why is this happening to them? If information is omitted, it can change the way we consume the story.

Explaining these images, the photographer barely mentions the context or the history behind them. She refers superficially to ‘ingrained prejudice’, giving us the impression that this prejudice is something inherent to Tanzanian society. She briefly mentions ‘the killings that have ravaged Tanzania’ as if they were a tornado or some other natural disaster. In fact, the images and their accompanying information provoke more questions than they answer—and not in a good way.

It is true that albinos are stigmatised throughout many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, often being shunned by their communities and relatives, having to drop out of school because of sight problems, and suffering discrimination when they seek employment. They also face a greatly increased risk of cancer and other health problems because their skin lacks the pigmentation that protects against sun damage.

However, Tanzania has become far more dangerous in recent years after Tanzanian witch doctors have increased trade in albino skin, bones, genitals and hair. These are supposed to possess magical powers and bestow luck upon others. This belief has created a demand for albino body parts, and at least 45 Tanzanian men, women and children suffering from albinism have been killed and mutilated since the beginning of 2008. According to Tanzanian police officials, the violence is worst in rural areas where people tend to be more superstitious. Fishermen reportedly weave albino hairs into their nets, hoping that they will catch more fish.

One healer in northern Tanzania denied that albino body parts form part of the witch doctor tradition in the area, saying, “Yes, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.” Indeed, it is now commonplace to hear albinos referred to as ‘deals’ because of how lucrative trading their body parts can be. Albinos in Tanzania say they are being hunted and fear for the safety of their families. Already more than 90 people, including four police officers, have been arrested on suspicion of murdering albinos.

The cause of this recent resurgence of superstition is unknown, but authorities have blamed everything from Nigerian films to rising food prices. The killings have even spread over the border into neighbouring Burundi, where at least 10 albinos have been killed and dismembered, their body parts then smuggled into Tanzania.

Government spokesman Salvator Rweyemamu has said that the killings of albinos perpetuate “perceptions of Africa that we’re trying to run away from,” pointing to the positive developments taking place in the country that the government is keen to promote.

Of course, I am not advocating that photographers seek to support government propaganda. But statements like this point to another story that is not being told: a story about uneven economic development and education; about the invention of superstition and the point at which it begins to legitimise acts of great violence. According to 49 year old Samuel Mluge, secretary-general of the grossly under-funded Tanzanian Albino Society, the recent killings are a relatively new development. While albinos in his country have long been targets of discrimination, he said, “we have never feared like we do today.”

There is another story to be told here: a story about the way people deal with physical abnormality, about how we deal with it in Britain and have dealt with it in the past, and how we consume imagery of people we find fascinating and a little frightening. This is the second problem. There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with looking at pictures of Tanzanians with albinism. But you really need to be presented with the context. Often context is all that stands between insightful commentary and pure voyeurism, as this photo essay clearly shows.

I’d like to think that the photographer’s aim was noble; that she was concerned by the stigmatisation of those born with albinism and wanted to convey this to a wider audience. Indeed, this may well have been her motivation. But somehow, I don’t think it was.

We are drawn to the weird and grotesque; the persistence of freak shows is evidence of that. Fascination with disease, deformity and physical abnormality has a history, certainly, but it also has a psychology and a politics. To be able to gaze upon the image of a person deformed by a genetic condition excites the viewer, while conferring upon him or her the peculiar privileges of distance and detachment.

These photographs are beautiful: expertly composed and thoughtfully lit. But the incredible visual appeal of the photographs actually enhances the objectification of their subjects. Tanzanians suffering from albinism are placed under the spotlight, positioned before our curious eyes while we gawp at their condition, simultaneously enthralled and repelled by the pale pinkness of their skin, mottled with sun damage, set against the healthy brown skin of those around them.

We stare, horrified, at the tumours, scabs and sores erupting on their bodies, and without the self-conscious need to politely look away we would experience in a real-life encounter. We stare unapologetically at the strange beauty contained within these images, feeling pity and concern. We probably do not feel guilty.

The photographer’s brief was to cover a story based somewhere else—not in the UK, not in the homeland of the Royal Photographic Society and the Guardian newspaper sponsoring the endeavour—and it was supposed to be a story that suggested connections between British audiences and the wider world. The winning story certainly suggests a connection, but I’m not sure that it’s the kind of connection originally envisaged.

The connection making the greatest impression on me is the connection with our racist colonial heritage; the one where we treat difference as a spectacle and see Africans as objects. I don’t doubt for a moment that this entirely contradicts the stated aims of the photographer, but I want to challenge the idea that we should be forgiven for our ignorance.

To portray people in Africa—anywhere in Africa—you have to recognise the burden of responsibility that your images will bear. At best, a series of photographs like this will tell an incomplete story. At worst, they will reinforce a dangerous and outdated way of looking at the world, gratifying our most base instincts and objectifying the very people the photographer wished to defend.

On being a transnational oversoul, or, an awkward half-soul

The following is an miniature chunk of dissertation (for the Sussex University course Landscape/Memory/Identity):

In the journal I had been keeping two summers ago whilst travelling in Malaysia, Thailand and Bali, I wrote, “Maybe I am half-not-English, half-not-Malay.” This nugget of angst reminded me of a poem I had quite uncharacteristically written, more recently, about my grandmother Mak Eng and her house in Sibu. In the poem I had supposed my sister and I to be “neither this nor that,” using the image of “other people’s bare brown feet” as a marker of those other people’s authenticity, a kind of obvious and embodied belonging which we were denied. Ranciére writes that the “process of identification is first of all a process of spatialization. The paradox of identity is that you must travel to disclose it… Spatialization presents by its own virtue the identity of the concept to its flesh”. I can’t really remember a time before I was able to observe the peculiar shift that took place as I moved between Hemel Hempstead, a new town just outside the M25 where I went to school, and Sibu, a town on the Rejang river in Sarawak where my mum was born. That movement effected a regular transformation in my sister and I: from feeling often very English in Malaysia to feeling quite foreign in England. I was born in Hemel, but when I am there people still ask me where I’m from. Here, I reply. Then they ask me awkwardly where I’m… you know… originally from. What’s my… erm… background? (Or, in other words, why is my skin brown?) When I’m in Sibu, people often refer to me as orang puteh (white person) and wonder what I’m doing with all these Malay people who are, in fact, my close family. Once, some children approached my sister and I and proceeded to inform us that I was “seventy per cent Melayu, thirty percent orang puteh” whilst my sister, whose skin and hair are a shade fairer than mine, was just “twenty percent Melayu, eighty per cent orang puteh.” They had exposed us; my sister promptly burst into tears.

*

The paradoxical position of belonging to multiple places and, consequently, to no single place entirely, tends to be associated with an uncomfortable privilege. Edward Said – whose autobiography, it should be noted, is entitled ‘Out of Place’ – has said that his various identities and the multiple ‘worlds’ to which he belongs have afforded him “an odd, not to say grotesque, double perspective”. It is this ambivalent position, paradoxically incorporating the privilege of distance with the affliction of never wholly belonging, to which Hollinshead refers in his discussion of diasporic identities. He characterises these as an uncertain, even schizophrenic way of being, somewhere between the richness of a “transnational oversoul” (a term he borrows from Wilson and Dissanayake) and an awkward, off-balance “half-soul”. His argument that such identities are “invariably protean” suggests both insecurity and an automatic worldliness not available to more stable, unambiguously territorial identities which tend to lend themselves to essentialised notions of land and belonging. Others have noted the potential in ‘diasporics’ for the realisation of radical political alternatives, advocating the deconstruction of the parochialism associated with nationalism and other politicisations of identity which bind it to particular territories. Comparisons may be drawn between the marginal space occupied by the diasporic, exiled or migrant, and the politically marginal and insecure “space of radical openness” associated with postmodern cultural politics. Would it be better, then, to resist that impulse towards an immediate and automatic localisation of identity? As Casey notes, ‘Where are you from?’ is the first thing we ask of a stranger. Instead, should we entertain that possibility of de-localisation contained in what Clifford calls the “intercultural identity question” of ‘where are you between?’

Unseen Scenes in Singapore

by Pia Muzaffar and Olly Laughland 

pictures by Alex Jimenez

This article was first published in Poda Poda in December 2007




‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’.

We wrench loose an MDF board covering the once grand entrance, before slipping inside, avoiding the rusty nails. Our feet crunch over broken glass as we peer into the gloom. The ticket booths, smashed to shit, still welcome Mastercard and Visa and still dispense mouldy, discoloured maps. Plastic statues slump, their plastic heads scattered on the floor. ‘I love sex’. ‘Get out’. ‘Bobby and Pris wuz here 99’. The ceiling is falling in, the lights exploded. The tropical undergrowth is slowly reclaiming this misguided business venture. The mosquitos have returned to these stagnant lakes. Giant pink paper horses and blue paper elephants, frozen mid-motion, aflame and collapsing in on themselves.

Perhaps this freakish fairytale was doomed to fail from the start. A tourist attraction designed for Chinese tourism and themed around ancient Chinese imperial history, elaborately carved from plaster of paris and plywood, built in 1980s Singapore, now stands closed a decade later and erased from the national memory.


Like so many Singaporean transgressions, ‘Tang Dynasty City’ remains very much present, but obscured from public view. On the surface, this highly successful city-state embodies the image its government seeks to project: it is clean and clean-living, obedient, polite, orderly and well-planned. Gays, prostitutes, transvestites, the homeless, political dissidents, governmental corruption and national failures – all these get swept under the carpet of state-sanctioned discourse.

The same may be said of the higher education system. When we first started studying here, we were shocked and bemused by the attitudes of the Singaporean students. The learning culture is totally at odds with what we’ve come to expect from our experiences at a British university. In Singapore, we said to each other with a mixture of bemusement and reproach, the students just don’t question anything. They don’t question their lecturers and they don’t question the way the university is run. They don’t question the texts they read, and they shy away from questioning each other. They are excessively respectful of authority, they study way too hard and hardly ever go out, and they ‘strive for excellence’ rather than seeking to critically interrogate established modes of thinking. Dr Chee Soon Juan, a former neuropsychology lecturer at NUS, recalls his frustration with his students. On one occasion he came to class and told them that he was just going to stare at them. So he sat there, and stared. After fifteen minutes of uncomfortable silence, in which not one student challenged him or asked him to begin teaching, he simply got up and left.

Of course, having been in Singapore for over three months now, this characterisation of ‘the Singaporean Student’ – as compliant, submissive and unquestioning – has revealed itself to be somewhat simplistic. In the terminology of James Scott, there are definitely both ‘public transcripts’ and ‘hidden transcripts’ at work here, as there are in Singaporean society more broadly. In public, we think it’s fair to say that the majority of Singaporeans are passive and conformist. Decades of authoritarian rule combined with generally decent standards of living and state-controlled media will tend to do that to a society. But in private spaces, Singaporeans still think; they still feel discontent and have that nagging sensation that all is not quite as it appears. However, these hidden transcripts of dissent tend not to manifest themselves in immediately visible ways. Thus our new self-appointed task has been to delve under the carpet and search out this undercurrent of opposition.


Our clandestine visit to ‘Tang Dynasty City’ was just one stop on an alternative 24-hour tour of Singapore, run by a PhD student here who delights in showing both foreigners and young Singaporeans alike the ‘seedier’ sides of the city. Most of our activities were illegal. We spent a couple of hours in a gay club, snuck around a disused, haunted hospital, wandered through a Chinese burial ground, discovered the red-light district, and broke into an indestructible house with a mysterious curse hanging over it – all in the dead of night. Aside from being fun (and pretty scary at times), it opened our eyes to the kinds of alternative narratives hidden under Singapore’s carpet of orthodoxy. The gay bar was far more open and ‘mainstream’ than we had expected – considering homosexuality is illegal in Singapore – and the haunted houses we visited were clearly also frequented by local ghost-hunting enthusiasts and grafitti-spraying youth. We realised there is unorthodox activity going on here but it has its designated place, out of the sight of foreign visitors, and indeed, of many Singaporeans.


What we saw on the tour seemed an apt metaphor for Singaporean ‘resistance’. As we were shocked to discover upon our arrival here, public protest, spontaneous gatherings and political dissent are among those things illegal under Singaporean law. Furthermore, the government invests significant time and resources in manufacturing and maintaining a climate of fear, ensuring that all but a few dissenters are either too scared or too apathetic to voice their dissent. People are unhappy with how their government runs the country, but virtually no one is willing to speak up. We have been incredibly fortunate to meet with one of the few Singaporeans who does speak out, at great personal cost, whenever he can.

Dr Chee Soon Juan used to teach here at NUS. As soon as he became involved in opposition politics, however, he was fired on tenuous grounds. But this, after all, is the National University – the University where ex-Prime Minister (and now ‘Minister Mentor’, a position of authority without precedent in any other professed democracy) Lee Kuan Yew has an entire school named in his honour; where his son (and current Prime Minister) Lee Hsien Loong studied; and where his son in turn and countless other state officials studied. Criticism of the government has been erased from the curriculum. Since his dismissal, Dr Chee has not relented in his mission to make Singapore the functioning democracy its leaders claim it to be. His party, the Singapore Democratic Party, is marginalised from mainstream politics despite having considerable (though often covert) support; he has personally suffered the abrupt ending of his academic career, repeated imprisonment, bankruptcy and continued fines for his political activity, and total demonisation and ridicule by the state-controlled media. Through making such an example of one man (and similar persecution has been acted out on a number of other dissenters in other contexts), the Singaporean government is able to maintain its society in a state of fear.

Even more frightening than this, however, is that the generation who have grown up in Singapore during the last quarter of the twentieth century have no living memory of what society was like before. They don’t remember the 60s and 70s, when student rallies could number in their thousands and to question the government was natural rather than prohibited. One twenty-something Singaporean friend of ours recalls that her uncle was once involved in some kind of activism many years ago, before being getting arrested. She doesn’t know what happened to him whilst he was in custody, and he doesn’t really speak about it, but says he was “changed” after it happened. An atmosphere of fear, secrecy and restraint pervades many popular recollections of this period. Or, even more alarmingly, activism is seen as a joke. The leftist nationalist movements that undeniably played a part in Singapore’s formal independence are reduced to comedic asides in lectures.

By now, the focus of civil society has shifted – and education is a prime example. As Dr Chee noted, the point of education is to question. And yet students in Singapore are programmed from an early age to compete with each other in the quest for ‘excellence’, rather than question authority. This can lead to some paradoxical scenarios: in one of our lectures (a Political Science class no less), the lecturer at one point broke away from the topic to state: “I’m sorry to break it to you, but Singapore is another example of an authoritarian government.” Whilst this might not appear a particularly controversial claim, it is extremely unusual in Singapore to hear such a sentiment expressed by a person in a position of authority – especially at NUS. We were surprised, then, to find that the class spontaneously burst into applause. Clearly such political sentiments are widely-held, but can’t be expressed without first being sanctioned by a figure of authority.

The paradoxical character of dissent here demonstrates that when conventional protest is proscribed, most people seek other ways of expressing their politics. What might seem like a taxi driver merely bemoaning his lot, takes on new significance given the fact that thousands of taxi drivers have had to attend a government training course instructing them to have neat hair, no BO, and to not talk to customers about “sensitive issues” such as race or state policy. A sarcastic aside by an NUS lecturer carries great weight in an academic environment that stifles the free exchange of opinion. What might seem a slight matter, of whether or not to turn up to a peaceful vigil held outside the Burmese embassy in solidarity with the monks and civilians making a stand against a military regime, becomes a decision of great consequence, between silence and massive social transgression. Our experience in Singapore has made meaningful certain academic debates emphasising the myriad, everyday forms ‘resistance’ may take. Small acts may have enormous consequences, and the fact that much discontent is hidden does not mean it isn’t there. It only means you have to spend a bit of time unearthing and exposing it.

Compassion Fatigue and Palestinian Walks

Here’s a phenomenon quite particular to our late-capitalist modernity: Compassion Fatigue, the unwanted offspring of middle-class postcolonial guilt. So significant that it even has its own wikipedia entry.

What is described by this phrase? I characterise it as the process by which our attentions are constantly drawn to – that is to say, by which we are made Aware of – a multitude of Issues about which we subsequently express Concern, and the eventual weariness that accompanies repetition.

This concept should not serve to veil a negative judgement on those whose compassion reserves become exhausted, nor should it be seen as a derisive retort to those who annoy us with (some would say) sanctimonious appeals to our goodwill.

No, we can say with confidence that people are genuinely Concerned about Issues and believe that raising Awareness can help in some small way. We are convinced, perhaps, that if everyone knew what atrocities and indignities were suffered daily by our fellow men and women, such suffering would surely have to cease.

And yet this is, of course, the central fallacy that is both exposed and sustained by Compassion Fatigue. We are in fact experiencing exposure to an overabundance of Issues; an Awareness glut. Through consuming newspapers and magazines, documentary and television, charity appeals and the advice of Concerned friends, we bear witness to an extraordinary exhibition of mistreatment, conflict and disaster – to the extent that whole regions or even continents can become identifiable by a single image of human misery.

Just as poverty, famine and malnutrition appear as native products of sub-Saharan Africa, so Israel/Palestine is imagined as a conflict zone and nothing more. We cannot permit such anomalies, such divergent interests as the Jerusalemite heavy-metaller or the love story between two young people from Jenin, or indeed, the lawyer from Ramallah who enjoys nothing more than a ramble in his homeland’s historic hills.

It’s harsh, but true: when you utter the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’ – or worse, combine the two – and if your voice should betray the barest trace of self-righteousness, or even mere earnestness, the people you are trying to reach are fairly likely to just switch off.

Israel/Palestine is one of those Issues that both bores and divides, because people are either tired of hearing about a problem that appears so intractable, or they are pretty much fixed in their view on the situation. The task of recruiting new Concerned people, or shaking others out of their preconceptions and prejudices, can seem impossible.



Which is why a book like Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks deserves consideration. Structured around six walks in the hills of the West Bank undertaken by the author over a period of many years, this book provides an unorthodox route into Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and may thus avoid the shortcomings of more overtly polemical, historical or legal accounts and their tendency to ‘preach to the converted’.

Shehadeh intersperses rather straightforward accounts of his journeys through the landscape with memories from his childhood, past conversations, details from legal cases in his professional work, autobiographical reflections and more random observations. These aren’t woven together by any means seamlessly, but the narrative’s sometime awkwardness is all the more charming for it. Its strength is the author’s flatly descriptive style which belies a kind of restraint, a reluctance to sermonise uncommon in other writings set in the same political geography.



The subtitle of the book is Notes on a vanishing landscape, and at a reading this week in Stratford’s St John’s Church, Shehadeh confirmed that his efforts may be understood as an attempt to chronicle a pastime that is becoming increasingly constricted in an environment that is ever more degraded and forcibly fragmented. The six walks – the six sarhat, an Arabic word connoting freedom and lack of restraint – map the shift that has taken place over the last twenty-five years as Israeli settlements have expanded, land appropriation has continued, military checkpoints have multiplied, and the Separation or Apartheid Wall has been built. It is a shift “from sarha to suffocation”, as the author puts it, away from “a land that was open and free” to one in which the simple urge to leave one’s house and walk into surrounding hills must be stifled. We need not speculate about the psychological effects of such physical confinement; they are manifest in the frustration, weariness and occasional auto-destructive violence exhibited by Palestinians living in the West Bank.

*

As an aside, Palestinian Walks is a particularly interesting text to read in conjunction with Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. A central theme that emerges from Benvenisti’s book is the importance of the cult of ‘knowing the land’, knowing Eretz Yisrael. Its physical occupation through settlement is incomplete if there is not a simultaneous appropriation of the knowledge of that landscape; its symbols, its histories, its names. He describes the process by which the Palestinians’ local knowledge – which recognised every wadi, every stream and every tree – has been systematically erased as a key strategy in reducing the Palestinians’ claims to the land. First the Zionist cartographers renamed and Hebraeised these features of the landscape, and then the inhabitants of the land were increasingly denied access to it, through massacres, expulsions, or the physical strangulation that the checkpoints embody today.

In this context, Shehadeh’s attempt to record (in walks and words) a direct connection with precisely located, identifiable parts of the landscape, must be understood as an important political exercise, and one with considerable potential for empowerment. The youth at present have little memory of the relative freedom Shehadeh is able to remember, and cannot imagine the natural beauty that surrounds their towns and villages since they have such limited access to it – they are more accustomed to seeing the hills as a place of danger and insecurity. For Palestinians to retain their claim to the land, even as the population may be growing faster among the diaspora than within Palestine itself, it is this identification with the physical landscape that must be promoted and maintained if ‘Palestine’ is to be anything more than an ethnic marker or origin myth.

On travel; and the dangers of the non-place

This article was first published in Poda Poda. I'm not sure I still agree with what I wrote...

I

It’s pretty much taken for granted that to travel is to enrich the mind and soul; to create a more sophisticated, more open-minded kind of person; and to enable a better understanding between people of diverse cultures.

II

Yet I fear that the reality of travel may be far more sinister than the individual traveller may have cause to suspect – and that the very developments which have brought human beings into greater contact with each other are in fact the symptoms of a supermodernity which will only    i s o l a t e   us further.

* My contention is this:
it is possible to travel – to Cairo, Siem Reap, Goa, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Santiago – all without once setting foot in a real place.

III

This requires some explanation. I use the word place in the anthropological sense, to denote an organically social space, existing in a historical and spatial context of its own. The proliferation of non-places, endemic in our time, is the inverse of this – the negation of place.

[For example, a grocer’s or local butcher in a small English town is a place; it naturally engenders social interaction, and possesses its own identity which is distinct from other shops in other small English towns. Regular customers come to recognise and know each other, as well as the staff and owner of the shop. A visit to a Tesco superstore, by contrast, seems to prohibit social contact by using text to instruct, direct, and attract the customer, and by using technology to mediate all monetary transactions. Customers become familiar not with the staff, who appear interchangeable, nor with the owner, which is some remote and impersonal entity. Rather the customer becomes familiar with logos, text, brands. The enforced solitude of this experience makes Tesco a non-place.]

These non-places exist as you stand passively before an ATM machine, as you insert your ticket passing through the barriers at a London Underground station, as you seek the symbols of instruction in an airport, and as you wait to board your plane. In each of these situations your identity has been reduced to simply one among many users of a particular service; the texts you see are addressed directly to you, and yet directly to all other potential users. Meaningful social interaction is discouraged.
Such space is the antithesis of place.

IV

As the anthropologist Marc Augé suggests, “the traveller’s space may be the archetype of non-place”. Consider, if you will, the archetypal traveller of our time. He/she is invariably Western (Western being the paradigm of wealth and ‘development’, i.e. Japanese counts too), and will have selected their destination(s) based on a combination of personal ambition; the recommendations of others; and the prerequisite Rough Guide or Lonely Planet advice. His/her expedition is contextualised within specific life-circumstances: the well-spent gap year, the well-deserved holiday, etc. “Places” and events are recorded on camera, and completion of the itinerary is accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment, a satisfaction at knowing one more “place” which had previously meant no more to him/her than any other random name on a map. In other words: the experience is a manifestation of the traveller’s EGO, rather than being a meaningful, equal encounter with another culture. This relationship is one inevitable consequence of a skewed global tourist industry (how many Indian youths do you see backpacking around Devon, taking in the local sites of interest?). Our traveller is encouraged to avoid place.

Yet this is not an indictment of the individual traveller, who means well, who means to immerse himself in a strange civilisation not like his own. It’s not all his fault!!! It is hard for him to encounter the other on the other’s own terms.
The problem is partly structural.

V

Late-capitalist society has constructed a means (the international tourist INDUSTRY) by which people from Europe and North America pass through foreign spaces whilst transforming these spaces into spectacle, to be itemised, viewed, consumed, and discarded, like so many baked bean tins. [In extreme cases, foreign societies begin to construct themselves in accordance with Western conceptualisations, dictated by economic necessity. When we think of Thailand we probably conjure up images of temples, stunning island beaches and seedy red-light sex tourists, rather than the predominantly rural, 66 million-strong padi-growing population. Yet this fantasy, this imagined place, is gradually becoming more accurate as reality adapts to imagined reality.] The opportunities for travel, like the capital to do so, are concentrated in the hands of a few. This global framework denies us the mechanisms by which we can encounter the other on equal terms; it inhibits our capabilities to truly experience another place.

VI

HOWEVER: the scenario described above is a horrible paradigm, and no traveller travels solely through non-place. It is easy to skip from airport to hotel to train station to bus station to church to temple to other “local sites of interest”. But organic, meaningful place has a habit of creating itself within non-place; when you get off the tour bus and befriend the noodle vendor because she reminds you of your mum; or when you discard your plans and end up smoking weed with a Balinese surfer boy on the floor of his one-room apartment…

Yes, we may be inhibited by the inequity of the global system, but WE ARE AGENTS within this structure – we can choose to reproduce it or to rebel against it. So go! Go away, but seek out place when you get there, make no plans, discard your EGO, and realign yourself to another rhythm.

Kampung Dato, Sibu

These pictures were taken by Carl in my mum's home town, Sibu, in Sarawak. Carl's pictures are really awesome, look at www.carlbigmore.co.uk

Mak Eng

Tom in Burma after the cyclone

Tom went to Burma during the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis with the intention of being of some assistance, particularly in the worst-hit rural areas. Being quite visibly English, he wasn't able to access those areas but spent some time working for a local NGO engaged in relief work in Rangoon. Here is his report, edited by me.

My first foray into Burma has been emotional, to say the least. Initially, I felt that life was ticking along normally; Rangoon seemed to be like many other third world cities, the streets alive with food stalls and child beggars, with rubbish cluttering the gutters. The desecrated landscape and rigid tree branches jutting from sidewalks were the only evidence of an environmental disaster. People in Rangoon were relaxed – to the point of appearing blasé – about the effects of Cyclone Nargis and the encroaching monsoon season. An early chat with a Burmese man revealed that when it rains through his decrepit roof he simply gets out of bed, sits on the floor and drinks hot tea under an umbrella. Perhaps, it seemed to me, people here should be more worried about sleep deprivation than the onslaught of a ‘second wave’ of disaster.

These perceptions have been proven to be grossly miscalculated. The suburbs of Rangoon reveal a darker picture, whilst the storm-affected regions are suffering from starvation and disease.

On a rickety bus ride through Rangoon I met Kyaw Aung Aung, an off-duty shipman heavily involved in aid work. On Friday I met with Aung very early, intending to proceed to a refugee camp to hand out supplies. This ended in disappointment for me. "No Foreigners" is the message drilled into the officers, so despite my cunning disguise in green longjee, a sarong worn by Burmese men for generations, I was politely sent packing along with the bureaucratic formalities.

Disappointed, but not downcast, we returned to Aung's house, from which he proceeded to show me around a neighbouring village in living abject poverty. The dividing line between these polarised habitats was so sudden that this village could conceivably have been someone’s bedraggled garden. Each household we went to delivered the same message: the government are corrupt, terrible human rights abusers and totally inept in this climate of disaster. People want to fight but have no provisions and no training. They are in limbo.

The worst news was painfully obvious to a trained eye. In the markets around downtown Rangoon there are inordinate amounts of warm weather clothing and ponchos, usually spread out over tarpaulins on the ground. These are exactly the same types of donated clothing I saw cluttering the corner of the Myanmar Buddhist Temple in Singapore, from where I flew to Burma. It has been explained to me that supplies sent from abroad have been surreptitiously stolen by soldiers to be sold on the black market. The aid is not reaching the needy. Moreover, corrugated iron sheets are not being administered properly. One small sheet is being sold for 5000 Kyats (five US dollars) a piece – utter corruption. Meanwhile, civilians are receiving only half a litre of water as their ration per day, queuing for hours to receive it. Funerals are further contaminating the water supply around the suburbs, as these traditionally take place in the rivers. All these factors illustrate one common necessity: deliver resources to the right people.

The good news is that local civil society groups, such as Aung's, are allowed to deliver supplies to their people. The other cars in our convoy went in without a problem – it was the foreigner’s vehicle that was held back! Aung says there are 7000 people in his group, but they are not a fully fledged NGO, as this would place them under the scope of the government, effectively making it a GO (Governmental Organisation). They have around 1000 monks on board, but, incidentally, monks are not allowed into the refugee camps. The government are afraid of the blurring of religious and political lines.

Saturday was quite a harrowing ride. My walk with Aung through the destitute village, where we handed water sterilising tablets to a local Red Cross branch, became deeply upsetting. Aung had had too many heartfelt conversations, the longest with some increasingly impassioned monks in a Buddhist monastery, and was clearly shaken by the end. Part of me dre not imagine how horrific conditions in the refugee camp would have been.

Unfortunately, so far as personal endeavours go, there is not much I can accomplish with Aung at the moment, since my foreigner status imposes inevitable limitations. To stay true to my commitment to helping these people, I now work as journalist/editor and website whipping-chief for Nargis Action Group, a local NGO in Rangoon, far from the cyclone-affected Ayeyarwady Delta but close to the present state of affairs. As I am the only native English speaker, my responsibilities have spanned to thank you letters, international requests and yesterday I helped an elderly gentleman down the stairs. It's all go, go, go!

Nargis Action Group has been a reliable presence in the Ayeyarwady Delta. We have a strong infrastructure in the field, with our own Regional Health Centre, clinics, temporary shelters and roaming medics. Swarms of yellow-emblazoned volunteers toil in Pyapon, Bogalay, Dedaye, Labutta and beyond, receiving and distributing supplies every day. Our registered volunteers are accompanied by countless other helpers who are crucial to the relief effort. They have a valuable knowledge of the area and a thirst for work, which we repay with cash-for-work.

The Delta regions are still in a dire state, while aid distribution has struggled to reach some of the remote villages. The news that foreign aid workers had finally been granted access to the disaster-hit areas was met with great enthusiasm (not least by me, as I have thus far been desk-bound), but also scepticism. The latter sentiment has since come to the fore, as General Than Shwe's promise has proved to be another bureaucratic hash-up, even affecting our efforts as a local organisation; the government checkpoints barricading the disaster-zones have become more stringent and time-consuming for our supply-laden trucks.

However, we are not a political organisation! Far from it: since the establishment of Nargis Action Group we have prized the benefits of staying on the right side of the intrusive military force. That is not to say we are pro-government here – no one is pro-government in Burma – but it makes sense to be mindful of our words in this time of urgency. I have had a sentence or two deleted on the grounds that they are too subtly provocative for our website. But I have learnt my lessons – I have to be more subtle! – and have concentrated on writing empathetic pieces to grapple with the conscience of potential donors, seduce their sympathy glands and encourage them to help.

The foreigners, computer geeks and businessmen (I stake a claim to all of these) man our headquarters in Rangoon; maintaining the website and accounts, contacting donors, etc. The office is always a hub of activity, with frequent donors coming by to drop off packages (ranging in size from teeny to titanic), funds, or simply to seek some further information on our organisation. My boss, a German lady named Kerstin, is lovely, brassy and tempestuous all at once. Just what is needed around here, as the Burmese are never shy of a tea break. Perhaps the same would go for me if the tea wasn't so god-awful.

It can be a saddening process at times, and not just because of bad tea. The number of heartbreaking stories that reach my ears and storm-ravaged pictures I must sift through can engender a sorrowful mood. In one instance, I had to choose the 'best' photograph from a whole folder of dead naked figures strewn across landscapes and on riverbanks, leaving me subdued and ponderous for the afternoon. My personality has taken a swift beating, and I have since become a bit of an emotional wreck.

Some of the tales from the night of the storm are nothing short of breathtaking. It is difficult not to enjoy such accounts of daring-do and resourcefulness, although, as with many of these things, they are not devoid of a sombre note. I relish (and simultaneously anguish over) the visual image of an entire village huddling together in a monastery, only to find the next morning that it is the only construction still standing. Meanwhile (I say meanwhile as this was not an isolated case), villagers in a brick nogg building, its roof blown clean off, stood up for almost twelve hours straight, covered up to the neck in water. As the water level rose rapidly in the building, these Burmese people summoned great initiative by placing their children in plastic buckets. The nippers bobbed incessantly through the night, only to emerge the following morning once the water had receded. This image is such a poignant one: babies bobbing in bright buckets around the heads of their grown-up saviours. And all this in the midst of a thunderous cyclone plundering through the sky.

We have had a good deal of success here in the offices of Nargis Action Group, initially with our relief aid distribution, and since with building and reconstruction. This latter initiative is a pressing concern, with both the rains and the postponed first day of school fast approaching. Are lessons to take place in temporary shelters or under individual umbrellas, with students sheltering from the monsoon downpours?

Schools must be rebuilt, especially as village schools in Burma serve many purposes besides education. To any new visitor, they might appear to function as a community hall, kindergarten and hotel all at once; children play, villagers congregate to have meetings, while guests even sleep and eat there in the right circumstances. Unsurprisingly, these villages are desperate to have their schools back, so, for now at least, we are looking to build temporary constructions to function as schools and housing whilst also planning for long-term buildings. We are aiming to construct cyclone shelters like, for example, the ones already existing in Bangladesh, built in the aftermath of their Cyclone Sidr. These would be constructed in areas close to the Bay of Bengal, as that is the area most prone to future storms and flooding.

As for aid relief, we have focused on food distribution, providing shelter materials and water purification measures, and medical care. Rice, noodles, potatoes and oil make up the culinary pongs currently wafting through the delta (Burmese cooking notoriously uses copious amounts of oil - good for killing bugs in the pan but a danger for romantic dinners..). For shelter, we distribute plastic tarpaulins and corrugated galvanised iron sheets to help build temporary shelters, while handing out blankets, candles, flip flops, mosquito nets, etc. Flip flops might seem a curious one, but the number of patients turning up at our clinics with wounded feet created the necessity, as it was further burdening the over-worked nurses and doctors who are busy with tetanus vaccinations, first aid and ad hoc psychological support. Meanwhile, our volunteers have been working with villagers to clean and clear water ponds (large tanks for harvesting rainwater) and also provide for a future chlorinated water supply. As most of the water had been contaminated by flooding and disease, the need for renovation of water purification procedures and a distribution of Aluminium Sulphate tablets was paramount.

A lot of our work in the delta focuses on needs assessment, since it is important to identify the most desperate villages whilst, as much as possible, helping everyone. Some of the more remote villages are extremely difficult to reach in the current climate of destruction so are in grave need of attention. Once our roaming volunteers have allocated a spot, they then determine to whom they should give the food and other supplies for distribution within the village; should it be a monk, the chief or a teacher? We then send out a monitor, who scurries from village to village, making sure that everything is being administered justly. What a lot to think about!

Frustratingly, although we have the most personnel in the delta, plus countless local volunteers, we lack sufficient funding for our substantial plans. We receive donations in kind at all times of the day, but, thus far, hard cash has been thin on the ground. UNICEF and Oxfam, among others, have since sent us supplies, while Action Aid, an international non-governmental fellowship programme, has channelled funds through us from the offset, providing their own volunteers to accompany ours in the field.

This has been a thoroughly interesting and enlightening experience for me so far. It illustrates the necessity of carefully researching where to send aid contributions. A case in point: the reconstruction of new schools is imperative in lieu of the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis. The new term was due to begin on June 2nd but this has been postponed because most villages in the Ayeyarwady Delta lack temporary shelters, let alone school buildings, to conduct classes. Corrupt construction businesses have grasped a unique opportunity here, and are charging unreasonable prices for building works. The experienced local businessmen here scream, 'Foul Play!', and use their grassroots know-how and connections to seek out cheaper, but equally effectual, options. We have alerted other NGOs to more realistic prices and companies, while continuing our own initiatives.

The future for cyclone-affected families looks bleak. Millions of people have been displaced from their homes, squeezing under flailing plastic tarpaulins in alien villages, their possessions and loved ones nowhere to be found. Households and livelihoods have been shattered. While these people beg for food and plead for work to repair their lives, the desecration of their countryside is visible all around. Paddy fields and farm land are a mess, with contorted water lilies and decaying animal carcasses dotted around the landscape. Most of the Delta’s buffalos and cows were slaughtered by Cyclone Nargis, machinery damaged beyond repair, while stockpiles of seeds were cleared and scattered by the storm and flooding. Even if the resources were still available to toil the land, there would only be a fifty-fifty per cent chance of a decent harvest due to the contaminated, salted water supply. The circumstances look desperate; farmers could toil for months with sub-standard resources and eventually yield an unusable harvest of rice. Farmers have two weeks – the situation is urgent.

The international community seems to have forgotten about Burma. Cyclone Nargis is not news anymore, displaced in peoples’ consciousnesses by earthquakes, typhoons and European football, but it is still news out here. It is still big news. Money is needed, and needed fast, because we can help these people to survive and repair their lives.

See for yourself at www.nargisaction.org. (It's probably still under construction – some of these computer buffs have no appreciation of aesthetics – but if you read any flowery puff pieces with the occasional empathetic detail, it's most likely to be written by me.)