Apocalypto

Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s new thriller about the ancient Maya civilization, is exactly that: thrilling. But this entertainment comes at a price.

The Maya at the time of Spanish contact are depicted as idyllic hunters and gatherers, or as genocidal murderers, and neither of these scenarios is accurate. The film represents a step backward in our understanding of the complex cultures that existed in the New World before the Spanish invasion, and it is part of a disturbing trend re-emerging in the film industry, portraying non-Western natives as evil savages.

King Kong and Pirates of the Caribbean show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman. Apocalypto achieves similar goals, but in a much subtler fashion. As in The Passion of the Christ, Gibson utilizes native language to invoke a veneer of credibility for his story, in this case Yucatec Maya, a technique that unfortunately does much to legitimize this rather strange version of Maya history.

First, a typical Maya village is shown as an unorganized group of jungle people who appear to subsist on hunting alone. The Maya were an agricultural people with a very structured social and economic system. Even small villages in the hinterlands of large cities were connected to some political centre. The jungle people in Gibson’s movie are flabbergasted at the sight of the Maya city, exclaiming that they have never seen such buildings. The truth is, pyramids of comparable size were never more than twenty kilometres away from anywhere in the Maya world, be they occupied or abandoned.

Second, Mayan city people are shown as violent extremists bent on harvesting innocent villagers to provide flesh for sacrifice and women for slaves, leaving the children to die alone in the jungle. Hundreds of men are sacrificed on an Aztec-style sacrificial stone, their headless bodies thrown into a giant ditch reminiscent of a Holocaust documentary or a scene from The Killing Fields. However, there exists no archaeological, historic or ethno-historic data to suggest that any such mass sacrifices — numbering in the thousands, or even hundreds — took place in the Maya world.

Third, once Gibson paints this bloody picture of 15th century Maya civilization, the ultimate injustice is handed the pre-Columbian Maya. As the jungle hero escapes the evil city and is chased to the edge of the sea by his enemies, with literally nowhere else to turn, Spanish galleons appear, complete with a small, lead boat carrying a stalwart friar hoisting a crucifix. For Gibson, the so-called ‘new beginning’ for these lost Mayan people, the ‘apocalypto’, is the coming of the Spaniards and Christianity to the Americas.

Although this film will undoubtedly create interest in the field of Maya archaeology by way of its spectacular reconstructions and beautiful jungle scenes, the lasting impression of Maya and other pre-Columbian civilizations is that the Maya were simple jungle bands or bloodthirsty masses duped by false religions, resulting in the ruin of their mighty but misguided civilization, and their salvation arrived with the coming of Christian beliefs saddled on the backs of Spanish conquistadors.

As archaeologists struggle to accurately reconstruct ancient Maya society, obstructed by their decimation via Western diseases; destruction of their books, art and history by Spanish friars; and their subjugation and exploitation by the conquistadors, such films as Apocalypto represent a significant disparagement of that process. Further, inaccurate representations by Hollywood of indigenous peoples as amoral, inhuman or uncivilized can only lead to greater misunderstanding and strife in contemporary society. This may be particularly important in a modern world, where the common ground is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

waterstones: 23/11/06

On Thursday, I was invited by the lovely Shaun Levin to read from this blog at Waterstones on Oxford Street. Have a look at this.

muslims are the new jews

India Knight enters the debate on the veil.

Very little makes sense in this business about Jack Straw, Muslim women and veils. Aishah Azmi, a teaching assistant from Dewsbury in Yorkshire, was last week suspended for refusing to take her veil off in class — she was allowed to wear it everywhere else at school, but, rightly to my mind, was told by her local education authority that her pupils, who are mostly learning English as a second language, needed to see her mouth when she taught. This seems entirely sensible. The rest of the whole sorry ‘debate’ is anything but.

The white, male former foreign secretary said the veil was a ‘visible statement of separation and of difference’, and that he asks women who visit his surgery to remove it. And nuns? Does he demand to see their hair, too? It’s open season on Islam — Muslims are the new Jews. And the idea that Straw’s divisive statement should not only be tolerated but adopted on all sides, as it has been with a kind of bullying relish, troubles me.

Especially since 7 July, it has become acceptable to say the most ignorant, degrading things about Islam. And then we all sit around wondering why young Muslim men appear to be getting angrier and more politicised, or why ‘westernised’ young Muslim women whose mothers go bare-headed are suddenly, defiantly, opting for the full-on niqab-style veil that leaves only a slit for the eyes.

I am particularly irked by old ‘feminists’ wheeling out themselves and their 30-years-out-of-date opinions to reiterate the old chestnut that Islam, by its nature, oppresses women (unlike the Bible, eh?) and that the veil compounds the blanket oppression.

In their view all Muslim women are crushed because they can’t wear visible lipstick or flash their thongs. Does it occur to these idiots that not necessarily everyone swoons with admiration at the fact that they have won the freedom to dress like 55-year-old slappers? That perhaps there exist large sections of our democratic society, veiled or otherwise, who have every right to their modesty, just as their detractors have every right to wear push-up bras?

But I’ll get to that in a minute. I should start by saying that my mother was born in Pakistan of a Hindu mother and a Muslim father. She was convent-educated and went on to marry two Catholics (not at the same time). I therefore — unlike some ‘offended’ Wasp commentators — know what I’m talking about, because of my endless ‘aunties’ and through spending much of my childhood in India and Pakistan. Given the mish-mash of my ancestry, religious bigotry brings me out in hives. And what we are witnessing is religious bigotry of the most shameful kind. The words used in the context of the veil debate — ‘strange’, ‘spooky’, ‘weird’, ‘offensive’, ‘creepy’, ‘wrong’, ‘evil-looking’, ‘sinister’ — are not words a civilised society should use about other human beings.

People are made uncomfortable by all sorts of things: I find shaven-headed, tattooed men unpleasant, especially if they’re drunk. I’m not mad keen on hooded gangs of youths at three in the morning. Facial piercings hurt my eyes.

My former husband and I once went to look at a house we were thinking of buying in a Jewish Orthodox part of London. As it happened we were the only non-Orthodox people on that bit of pavement that morning. I noticed a group of Hassidim were walking around us in a peculiar way. ‘They’re avoiding our shadows,’ the estate agent said, ‘because we’re unclean.’ I didn’t think much of that, either.

But we all need to coexist peaceably. The fact that I find the man in Camden market with bolts through his face, or the Orthodox woman dressed in a drab sack and wearing a bad wig, as ‘weird’ — weirder, actually — than a woman dressed in black with only her eyes showing is neither here nor there.

I don’t expect they think much of me, either. But I would have to be deranged, or consumed with hatred, to attribute random demerits to them on the basis of their physical appearance. A lot of people are made uncomfortable by disability, for instance — but because they live in a civilised society they don’t say it.

Imagine if Straw had said, ‘There are an awful lot of autistic people in my constituency. I tell them to look me right in the eye, otherwise I can’t help them.’ Would there not be an outcry? I’m sorry to equate Islam with disability, but I am doing so because an observant person’s religion is as integral a part of them as their genetic make-up.

Oppressed women are everywhere: there’s probably one living in your street. She may be a Muslim wearing a veil, or a white woman whose husband beats her. She may be covered from head to toe, dressed like a librarian, or fond of micro-skirts. She may be your mother or your sister. She may be you — regardless of how you dress, what you believe or where you come from. And that is the point. Unhappy, abused people come in all colours, shapes and sizes. It is absurd to suddenly, appoint ourselves moral arbiters, and decree, very loudly, that a piece of fabric is an indicator of an unhappy, down-trodden life.

Happy people come in all formats too. The concept of the men hanging out together while the women ‘work’ in the kitchen may seem peculiar to a non-Muslim — though not that peculiar, given that a less formalised version of the same thing happens whenever you have friends round — but I’ve been to many memorable, jolly parties where gangs of Muslim women ate, gossiped and laughed together without seeming overwhelmingly oppressed, or indeed, oppressed at all.

My experience of Muslim life is not that it is the patriarchal nightmare of legend, but that women are powerful, vocal and iron-fisted beneath their velvet gloves. This is a subjective viewpoint: I am not claiming that every Muslim woman in the world is gloriously carefree. They aren’t (who is?), and I am particularly offended by Straw’s comments because the women he described are by and large first-generation immigrants — ie, poor working-class women trying to get on with their lives.

I wonder why none of the army of instant experts has pointed out that, by and large, middle and upper-middle class Muslim women do not veil themselves unless they have the misfortune to live in a country that insists on it.

So Straw and his acolytes — the self-appointed sisterhood among them — are picking on the women who are most voiceless and least able to defend themselves. They should be ashamed.

now here is a surprise

They do things differently in Bollywood. Over there, it is all about the aesthetic. The Bollywood Bible states that the heroin must never be ugly. She must never be fat. She must never be dark. Or else the viewing public will rebel in disgust. Cinemas will come to a stand-still, collapsing under the anger of the mob. There will be chaos everywhere. Money will be lost. And the largest film industry in the world will self-destruct. The heroine must be beautiful, slim and fair. Period.

Here is an interesting example. Kiranjit Ahluwalia, from Southall in west London, was convicted for the murder of her husband in 1989 despite suffering ten years of brutality at his hands. Now the Queen of Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai, is playing her in a film about her life.

In the picture above, Ms Ahluwalia is seated on your right. Her Majesty poses on your left.

let’s have an open and honest discussion about white people

On Wednesday 20th September, Corporal Donald Payne became the first Briton to admit to a war crime. Payne, 35, is accused of repeatedly banging the head of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi hotel worker, against a wall and floor until Mousa died — an accusation he denies. Payne called his Iraqi prisoners in the jail in Basra ‘the choir’, because he liked to invite friends to hear them shriek with the pain he inflicted. ‘Corporal Payne enjoyed conducting what he called the choir,’ Julian Bevan QC told the court martial, which is taking place at Bulford Camp, in Wiltshire, and is expected to last for 16 weeks. ‘It was all done very openly.’

The next day the home secretary, John Reid, went to Leyton, in east London, and told a room full of Muslims how to raise their kids so they won’t grow up hateful. ‘Look for the tell-tale signs now and talk to them before their hatred grows and you risk losing them for ever,’ he told them.

The heckler in his midst simply provided Reid with proof of his moral righteousness. ‘This is Britain,’ Reid told the Labour party conference last week. ‘We will go where we please, we will discuss what we like, and we will never be browbeaten by bullies. That’s what it means to be British.’

Reid and Payne are two sides of the same coin. The bully of Basra exercises his right to demean and degrade wherever he pleases — the longstanding hallmarks of British colonialism. The hooligan from the Home Office vaunts the fair play, decency and social liberalism that ostensibly underpin core British values — a longstanding feature of Britain’s self-delusion. Payne could have done with some parenting lessons of his own. Instead he was given a uniform and a gun. The arrogance we imbibe and the atrocities we export do not just co-exist — they are co-dependent. That’s also what it means to be British.

In Reid we find these qualities embodied in one man. Before he was the home secretary he was the defence secretary. He is set to have an impact on Britain’s racial terrain analogous to the one he has had on the killing fields of Iraq: making a fragile situation worse.

Reid is not alone in this. Last month Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary, called for a ‘new and honest debate’ about race in this country. This should not be mistaken for the ‘honest dialogue’ Peter Hain wanted to launch in 2002 or the ‘rigorously honest’ discussion David Blunkett sought to initiate in 2004. Quite what kind of deceitful debate they were engaged in back then and, given their huge parliamentary majority, what prevented their candour is not obvious. However, each followed a familiar pattern; promising blunt truths, but pandering to soft bigotry.

Kelly was no different. She insisted that it is ‘not racist’ to voice concerns about immigration and asylum — a statement as true as it is fatuous since it depends on what those concerns are and what argument you're making. ‘We must not be censored by political correctness,’ she continued. ‘And we can’t tiptoe around the issues.’ Are you thinking what I’m thinking? This was precisely the line taken by Michael Howard, the then Tory leader, before the last election. Far from being censored, the tabloids have been serving this tripe up as a staple for the past decade and New Labour has been swallowing it whole and then throwing it up whenever it gets nervous.

Any candid discussion of race, immigration and asylum that was not racist would not just acknowledge fear and prejudice but challenge them both. Since ministers are not able to do that about ethnic minorities, maybe they should start off with a subject with which they are more familiar. Let’s have an open and honest discussion about white people.

Let’s start by talking about how they don’t want to integrate. The stubborn rump of around 10% of whites who, according to a 2002 Mori poll, are hostile to racial equality and antagonistic to the very existence of non-white people in this country. Given a percentage point either way, that is the consistent figure who believe that to be truly British you must be white and who do not believe it is important to respect the rights of minority groups.

Let’s discuss their inability to choose moderate leaders and the propensity of the leaders they do choose to murder innocent civilians abroad by their thousands. Let’s analyse their vulnerability to extremists such as the British National Party, not to mention elsewhere in Europe, where fascism is once again a mainstream ideology.

Let’s talk about the religious intolerance that rages in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and can be found in the highest levels of the state, where only Protestants can marry into royalty. And let’s not forget the terrorists white people have been rearing at home for years, whether they are bombing Brick Lane, parliament or shopping centres in Manchester, and the no-go areas in housing estates, football terraces and boardrooms.

Only then perhaps will it become sufficiently apparent for those with insufficient imagination just how crude and crass the framing of the debate about Muslims has been. Any group of people will rightly bristle at the demand to answer collectively for the acts of individuals with whom they share an identity but over whom they have no control.

The tolerant, secular, liberal society into which Muslims are being asked to integrate lies somewhere between mythology and a work in progress and, the responsibility for transforming it into a lived reality lies with all of us. When it comes to poor whites lured by organised racism, Labour makes allowances.

‘It is the poorest whites who feel the greatest anger because there is no way out for them,’ said Margaret Hodge about some of her constituents in Barking in east London earlier this year. ‘The Labour party hasn’t talked to these people. Part of the reason they switch to the BNP is they feel no one else is listening to them.’ When it comes to Muslims lured by fundamentalism, they make threats: but no one is listening to them either.

We should not be in denial that some young Muslims have become attracted to extremism and fundamentalism in recent years, but nor should we be in denial about why that should be. Muslims did not invent terrorism, nor did they introduce it to this country. Indeed, so long as Britain has occupied foreign lands, it has been vulnerable to sporadic acts of violence on its own soil.

Which brings us back to Payne, Reid and Kelly. For there is no honest conversation you can have about the strained racial fabric of this country at present without talking about the war. Once branded left-wing heresy, this truism is now intelligence-service orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been ‘a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world’, according to a leaked document allegedly written by a British MI6 officer attached to the Ministry of Defence; and a ‘cause célèbre for jihadists’, in the words of the US National Intelligence Estimate.

The war didn’t invent fundamentalism; nor did it introduce it into Britain. But it has clearly exacerbated it. So long as the likes of Corporal Payne can conduct their torture choirs abroad, our racial landscape will be scarred; so long as the likes of Reid are preaching to the racist choir at home, it will never heal.

decisions, decisions...

Superman suggested we check out the Kandinsky exhibition this evening at the Tate Modern. My line manager lent me her membership card, which allows free entry so we save £10. I suggested we have dinner afterwards. Superman said: ‘Fine, babe. You pick a restaurant.’ So, being a Virgoan and terribly organised about these things, I consulted a directory that lists all the restaurants in London by area. I made a list of ten restaurants, which I narrowed down to five. And, with some difficulty, I’ve managed to get it down to three. Imli (an Indian Tapas bar on Wardour Street). Mr Jerk (Caribbean soul food on Wardour Street). And Shanghai (a Chinese restaurant on the Kingsland Road). I’m quite intrigued by the menu at Imli, but I love Caribbean food. (We’ve been to Indian restaurants before and nothing has ever matched our expectations.) On the other hand, Superman prefers Chinese. In fact, that’s all he ever suggests when we eat out. When I presented the list to him the other night, he said, ‘I don’t mind where we eat. So you decide.’ He isn’t making this easy! I wish I could be more decisive...

happy birthday to me

As it is my twenty-seventh birthday, I thought I would plaigiarise one of Milton’s sonnets (written to lament his twenty-third birthday).

On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-[seven]

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my [sev’n] and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits indu’th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-master’s eye.