School trip to Jebeniana

They have hardly had time to wolf down their snack when the bell, of the fire alarm type, rings to end recess. The 120 pupils at the Jberna primary school, a small village 40 km to the north of Sfax, immediately jump to line up in front of their classrooms, boys on one side, girls on the other. Almost all come from families living in poverty. “Their parents are farmers or fishermen, but mostly unemployed”, explains Amine, the youngest of the four teachers at the school. “Most of these children have never been out of the village. They’ve never even been to Jebeniana, the closest city, just eight kilometers away.”

Economically speaking, the Revolution hasn’t yet changed anything for children in villages like Jberna. The progress of the children, who learn French alongside Arabic from when they begin school, often stagnates due to a lack of support from their parents, who are unable to provide them with adequate working conditions at home.

End of recess at the Jberna primary school

A few kilometers away, in the Jebeniana establishment called Cité Jardins, one finds a completely different atmosphere. In the computer room, the pupils in first year of preparatory training (the equivalent of middle school), are working on formatting a text in French, two students per computer. Here the problems are more of a political order. “Before the Revolution the government was more interested in the private schools, because they were for the rich people”, commented Mr. Salem, the school’s new principal. “Today we’re trying to set up computer rooms and labs in schools for poorer kids.”

Mr. Salem has been principal of Cité Jardins since the fall of Ben Ali. When the events of December 2010 took place, the pupils took part in the demonstrations in Jebeniana, even though the principal at the time had forbidden it. He was a member of the RCD. “Our trade union, the UGTT, managed to get the former principal expelled during the administrative void that followed the Revolution”, explains Mohamed Zaatour, who teaches Arabic. The principal left the school when Ben Ali left the country. “Before, the principal was always chosen for political reasons. He made all decisions on his own and reported everything to the police. We told all of those people to get out.”

(CFJ/C.-H.G.)

“Most importantly, we have to prevent politics from entering the school”

The legacy left to the new principals and teachers at such schools leaves them with very little to go on; they have very little in the way of equipment or infrastructure, and difficult working conditions. “We are trying to change what we can in our country’s schools” adds Mr.Salem. We have filed requests for bigger classes, for improvements in transportation, and all the teaching material we can get. Take the library, for example, before, some books were mandatory, others were forbidden. The children never went near the library.”

The new principal’s main task is to stop politics from entering the school. “For decades, the UGTT had been demanding that school principals not be members of political parties. Today the teachers can do their jobs without any form of outside interference. The children can talk to them and make suggestions. We are trying to empower all of the students, to turn them into future citizens.” Of course it takes more than a year to change everything. This is the case with the school curricula. Schools are still using the textbooks from Ben Ali’s time, but the teachers’ trade union is working alongside the Ministry of Education to update the teaching material. “It will take time to change Tunisia,” sighs Mr. Zaatour. “For now, the Islamists cannot change the system or curriculum. They will try of course, but we will stand up to them.” Islamic initiation remains nonetheless one of the 14 courses taught at the middle school level.

(CFJ/R.J.)

In the Ellouza Youth Center

On days where there is no school, we get together at the youth center. In Ellouza, a small fishing village 15 minutes from Jebeniana, the multicoloured building welcomes young people between the ages of 6 and 28. Oisilla, who is 19 and has a diploma in Business English, has been looking for work since she finished university. “There isn’t much work around here: a lot of young people never find work after finishing their studies, so I spend time here with my girlfriends.”

The center offers artistic activities and sports facilities; girls do pottery and painting while the boys play ping pong or practice karate in the next room. “We don’t mingle. Friendship between boys and girls doesn’t happen. But I don’t mind” explains Hejer, who is 20. They all have cell phones and facebook pages, although many do not have internet access at home. They go online on the computers at the youth center, to chat or to listen to their favourite Arabic singers on MaghrebSpace, an online music site. The boys go to the café. Girls never do. At 5pm, they all go home.

In the town streets unemployed youths ride around on their mopeds or kill time listening to static filled music on their cell phones, leaning against graffiti-covered walls. On all their faces I see, the same boredom as the day before, and in all probability, the same as tomorrow.

How can the current climate in Algeria be explained?

I was born in 1979, so I am myself a child of the civil war. In 1997, at the University of Béjaïa, 50 people had their throats slit, systematically. The civil war caused more than 280,000 deaths. How would you begin to build a society that has lived through this? The Algerian people are capable of the worst as well as the best. They are capable of generosity as well as extraordinary violence. It is a schizophrenic country.

Algeria is quite proud of its oil reserves and of its currency, but does not even bother to provide housing and jobs for its citizens. A young man who has no job, how can he take a girl out for a drink, and where? Young people can’t meet each other and can’t love each other; this creates frustration. An average rent today in Algiers is $25,000, and you have to pay one year or two years in advance to be able to move in.

How can the country get out of the deadlock you describe?

First and foremost, society must take charge. There is so much incompetence in this country. Quite often there are great initiatives, but society is one of such disorganisation that everything ends in collapse. The first thing that needs to be addressed is the education system, which is educating intellectual terrorists. I believe in an intellectual revolution and I think we must provoke it. We have no elites in this country anymore, except those wasting away in the bars; it’s an elite that feels abused and depressed. If we don’t undertake this intellectual revolution, a revolution of the educational system, we are doomed to remain a fragmented, divided society.

We have here the first independent press of the Arab world, with 250 dailies, but this is not enough because the press remains an instrument of the government. The history of Algeria is limited to extreme nationalism and male chauvinism. We have completely refused to build a nation. Even the history of our independence has been stolen from us: We are hostage to the story told by the FLN and by the regime in power.

Reconquering the public space remains an important issue in Algeria. For now, we do not have the right to demonstrate even though the curfew is officially over – unless you want the cops to come and get rid of everyone. In the film there is a scene in the police station where we see the portrait of Bouteflika fall from its high place on the wall. A totalitarian, completely despotic system like that cannot continue. One day someone will arrive who is enlightened enough to understand that we must take back our country.

And what is the role of cinema in all this?

The issues discussed in cinema are central. First and foremost, cinema exists to recreate images. I believe in documentaries, or documentary-style fiction. The Algerian people have to see themselves. It’s healthy, it’s necessary to see oneself. We also need to have opposition. Everyone must make a film, so that the images can be compared, so that there is a real debate, a meeting, a confrontation. If you don’t like an image it’s up to you to give us another.

The problem in Algeria is that there are no basic rules for cinema. There are no institutions, no distributors, no film schools. One could not speak of an Algerian film industry. The only cinema that really exists is the cinema run by the government, which is shown on television. In Algeria there are 5 to 6 films a year. We even had the presumption to talk about a “New Wave” of Algerian cinema, but there can’t be a New Wave if there is an ideological confrontation. The film festival in Béjaïa refused to accept Gently One Saturday Morning in Film Encounters of Béjaïa, which has always claimed to be a meeting space between filmmakers and the public, and not a place for competition.

Have Algerian people been able to see your film?

No, and that is one of the difficulties of the film: that the Algerian public cannot see it. Even though the message of the film, the transparency, is addressed to all of us, this is also a story very specific to the Algerian people. My film has a very Algerian energy about it and I made some very specific choices in Algiers that is full of inside references for the people of Algiers. At one point in the film, for example, we see a bridge that is well known as the “suicide bridge”. So many young people were killing themselves on the bridge that the city had to install gates.

Do you have any other projects in the pipeline?

I have a documentary about a group of stonemasons who play rock chaoui [a genre of Algerian music] in a village in the region of Aurès, where the first bomb in the war for independence went off. And I also hope to start writing fiction again.

Translated by Adam Dexter, edited by Helen Southcott & Aidan McMahon

Algerian director Sofia Djama’s debut short film Mollement un samedi matin (Gently One Saturday Morning) is a chronicle of a country in crisis. The film was shown on Arte last February and awarded a prize at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. Mashallah News got to speak with Sofia, who recounts her love of cinema and comments on the opposition to change within her country.

How did you start working with film?

I was born in Oran in 1979 and raised in Béjaïa. I studied there for two years at university, at the Foreign Languages and Literature Department, before I finally left for Algiers. When I arrived in Algiers in 2000, the land was coming out of more than ten years of civil war. People assumed the war was over even though there were terrorist attacks all around the capital. So people were leaving in large numbers then, and expatriates had also started arriving during that time; you would meet them in the nightclubs. It was a period of decadence, of tearful reunions with life.

I always wanted to make films. But because of the civil war, there were no more film schools in Algeria. So I became a publicist. I worked for Publicis and other multinationals. In fact, there were very few films being made at that time, especially films set in places like Tunisia or Libya. It was a very exciting time in the beginning, but it wasn’t encouraging.

So I did what I did best: I went to see films, especially at the film club of Algiers’ cultural association called Chrysalide. In 2003, I wrote a group of short stories bringing together several titles which portray different characters during their nightly tribulations. The film is called Wednesday and a half, A Quarter To Thursday, A Perfect Friday. Then, Gently One Saturday Morning, which I adapted into a screenplay, came in 2006. At that time, a wall of silence had once again fallen on Algiers. Within two years the city had become oppressive.

Where did this change come from?

A new social morality has been established. A strong sense of guilt began to emerge in one’s relationship with pleasure. Algerians are very austere people. This can be explained by a frustration which is generated by politics. From 1962 until today, Algeria as a country has never broken with religion. Our society has taken as a reference point religious archaism, and fits that into a patriarchal regime. The civil war was a war against Islamism, sure, but not against this idea of religious archaism, which the state wants to maintain. The Algerian state has at its disposal the Ministry of Religious Affairs, a state institution that is being used for preaching. The imams are workers of the state, charged with fighting against Islamism.

For example, to not observe Ramadan is not actually punished by law here. The beaches remain open and there are lifeguards. But the Ministry of Religious Affairs nevertheless announced that it was not desirable to go to the beach during Ramadan – the same way one should not question the price of greens during this period. This is a way for the state to completely put a sense of guilt in people. It’s the use of religion as an instrument.

Because the Islamists in Algeria, they no longer cut people’s throats. They sell underwear [this is in reference to a scene in Gently One Saturday Morning in which a bearded man in djellaba vends underwear in the street]. By now, we have so absorbed Islamism that it has become part of us. The worst of all is the man who taps me on the shoulder and asks: “So, are we going to fuck?” because for him, I’m a “liberated” woman. These are the people who are the most dangerous, those who give grand speeches on women’s rights but don’t let their sisters leave the house.

It is incidentally this frustration that your film discusses.

Yes, there is an enormous feeling of frustration in Algeria. Algerian society is a suppressed society which is terrified of love stories. Even without religion, no one here takes pleasure anymore, except in the renunciation of pleasure. We renounce things little by little, we shut ourselves off. It’s about trying to be self-sufficient, but bitterness takes the upper hand and we become hardened. Everything becomes weak and unclear – even the opposition. You have to find a taxi driver who won’t make rude comments because you are going home so late at night. Young people in the street treat you like a whore. Every weekend is death, is gloomy.

So, by the sheer strength of things, I found myself doing what I had always denounced: living a life completely on the inside. In my film, Gently One Saturday Morning, we see no public spaces. The only glimpse of that comes at the very end, when we can see the sea and the horizon. Algiers is a city which has turned its back on the sea – you can see it from high up but you can’t touch it.

Gently One Saturday Morning is a film about society, a society in which everyone is unhappy – even the men. Myassa must fight every day just to exist. The young man who insults her in the street, how can you expect him to be an adult, a man, when he has no perspective of a future? He has no job, no place to stay, only misery on the horizon. Algerian society envies but it does not desire. People cannot touch one another, so they start hating each other. Even if you attack and entrap the other, the encounter is not possible. It’s a vicious circle that must be broken.

Continue reading #2 here.

Translated by Adam Dexter

In the luxurious surroundings of Tunis’ Majestic hotel, five people listen attentively to Pete Tridish around a table covered with electronic parts, circuit boards and soldering irons. A former cyber activist, this native of Philadelphia teaches them how to assemble a pirate radio transmitter, used to “chop” the FM band and appropriate a radio frequency. The students participating in this workshop are members of the Worldwide Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC).‬ ‪There are Tunisians, but also some Moroccans like Mohamed, who works for the web portal e-joussour, and Egyptians such as Fatemah, who launched a local and citizens’ media project last September.‬

‪The scene is somewhat surprising in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, where hopes were high for the liberalisation of a media landscape that had long been muzzled. And yet, it is clear that the revolution has not fully succeeded in freeing the airwaves.‬ ‪Before January 14, the market was shared between the publicly owned Radio Tunis and four private stations viewed favourably by the regime: Shems FM, Mosaique FM, Express FM and Jawhara FM.

Five months after the fall of the dictator, the National Forum for Information and Communication Reform (INRIC), established by the new authorities, decided in favour of the authorisation of twelve private radio stations. Many of them, however, have still not received the licenses granting them a frequency. Among the stations in waiting are Sawt El Manajem (“the ‬Voice of Mines”) and Radio 6.
‪
Launched online in 2007, Radio 6 calls itself “the first independent radio project” in the country.‬ ‪Because of its rebellious tone, its location had been a carefully guarded secret [under the regime of Ben Ali] and its reporters were subjected to police surveillance and summary arrests.‬ ‪And now, with Ben Ali ousted from power, Radio 6 has fallen silent on the FM band.

“The problem is that Tunisia’s new laws do not differentiate between commercial and community radio. To obtain a frequency, the ONT [the national broadcasting office] demands 120,000 dinars [60,000 euros] per year from each station”, says Mohamed Ben Nozha, the co-founder of Radio 6, along with Sala Fourti, a human rights activist. “It’s a legacy of Ben Ali’s laws preventing media proliferation.” Rather than pay the exorbitant sum, the Radio 6 team opted for pirate broadcasting beginning February 14, 2012. Today, it is based in a small apartment in the Tunis neighbourhood of Menzah VII and is broadcast via an old transmitter purchased in France.‬

In the studio of Radio 6, one of the first independent radio stations in the country.

Learning how to make a pirate transmitter at the Majestic hotel, Tunis.

For its part, Radio Kalima chose to follow the legal route. Founded in 2008 by a couple, Sihem Ben Sedrine and Omar Mestiri – both human rights activists – during the reign of Ben Ali, it ceaselessly denounced the regime’s abuses and corruption on its website, based in Marseille.‬ ‪Its coverage of the revolution confirmed its status as a voice of the protesters.‬ ‪But transition also brought with it professionalisation.‬ ‪

“Originally, we were a community radio station. But after January 14 2011, to ensure our independence, we chose to become a commercial station”, admits Mestiri, Radio Kalima‘s director. It is a decision that does not, however, mean the station has been allowed to skip steps. Convinced of its legitimacy, it waited months for its broadcasting license to be issued.‬ ‪Due to a lack of technical capacity, it is still not on the airwaves today.‬ ‪Only a playlist loops on 90.7, the frequency it has been assigned.‬

‪Legislative obstacles, financial impediments; all these difficulties have not necessarily served to discourage Tunisia’s youth.‬ ‪Najib Abidi, a 27-year-old blogger, is poised to build the country’s third pirate radio station, Radio Chaabi (chaabi means “popular” in Arabic).‬ ‪The name is well suited to the cyber activist’s bohemian style and hippie beard.‬ ‪As he awaits the official launch, later this month, of his project – which he defines as tongue-in-cheek, culture-focused radio produced by and for youth –Najib’s team prepares programming and jingles in premises they have been loaned by Thawrah TV, the web-television station of the revolution. Radio Chaabi‘s technical equipment may be makeshift, but its team does not lack for enthusiasm.‬ ‪Najib’s dream is “for Tunisia to follow the examples of South Africa and Mali, where community radio stations are not counted with the fingers of one hand, but by the hundreds.”‬

13th of June 2011, marks the day which has changed my life and my perception of the world in many ways. On this date, along with over 60 students, I got a final dismissal letter from Bahrain Polytechnic and was banned from applying to any other university in my country. I wasn’t dismissed because I had low grades, high absent percentage, or because I violated the institute’s code of conduct. In fact, not so long before I was expelled, the Chief Executive Officer of the Polytechnic said publicly during a staff meeting ‘Eman exemplifies the type of student that Bahrain Polytechnic is endeavoring to produce.’

So why would they dismiss such students?

As bizarre as it may sound, I was expelled because of my pro-democracy posts on my private Facebook account after the regime’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters. In a country which claims it respects and acknowledges that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, students get dismissed merely because of their political views.

My family and friends tried so hard to convince me to complete my studies abroad, and although studying abroad has always been a dream of mine, at that point in time, it didn’t feel right to me. I didn’t like the idea of being denied from education in my own country and the idea that many of the other students stopped sharing their political views in fear of getting dismissed the same way. For those reasons, I chose to stay and fight to get my right back.

To keep myself focused and motivated, I’ve put four frames on my room’s wall, one for the acceptance letter which I received back in 2010, the other for the dismissal letter, and the other two I kept them empty, one for the reinstatement letter and the other for my graduation certificate. Every night before I go to sleep, I used to look at them and think that the day will come and I’ll fill the empty frames. As I struggled to cope with my suddenly unclear and blurry future, I came to see and understand the world clearer than ever before. And although they have prevented me from attending classes, I’ve learnt greater lessons, ones that cannot be taught but only experienced.

After 8 months of struggle, spent in contacting local and international human rights organizations, protesting, and implementing every little idea that might help with our case, all the dismissed students were reinstated to complete their studies. And finally, I got to put the long awaited reinstatement letter in the frame, leaving me with one more to fill, the graduation certificate. Till then, I might face more obstacles, and I might even need more frames to put in between. I’m not sure of what I will have to face in the future, but there’s one thing I’m now certain of; at all costs, I’ll always stand for what I believe in.

Eman Oun, Bahreini student activist

The text was first published on Nazra for Feminist Studies

]]> http://mashallahnews.com/?feed=rss2&p=8021 0 http://mashallahnews.com/?p=8003 http://mashallahnews.com/?p=8003#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 15:43:14 +0000 Jay Cassano http://mashallahnews.com/?p=8003

Presented as a fragmented mechanical assemblage, Sibel Horada’s most recent video installation is named Untitled Machine. The name accurately captures the impression a viewer has upon first glance: that these decontextualised close-ups of gears and chains spread across several dilapidated television sets could be one machine as much as any other.

It is, however, a specific machine: the centerpiece of the Istanbul Jewish community’s now-defunct matzoh factory. The factory, located in Istanbul’s Galata neighborhood, was closed in 2007 when the community began importing its Matzoh from Israel.

Horada’s piece tackles the effects of neoliberalism on a Turkish minority community and provides a compelling meditation on remembrance and loss.

The work was part of an exhibit, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place, which ran from March 29 to April 20. Housed on the second floor of the old matzoh factory, the exhibit was a collaboration between Horada and three other Turkish Jewish artists, co-curated by Lara Fresko and Jasmine Taranto.

“It’s about breaking the linearity of the machine, of the assembly line,” Horada remarks as she gestures toward the nearby televisions.

Each of the 14 televisions displays a similar loop of some mechanical piece. Since the individual mechanical components are removed from their place in the larger machine and reordered on the various screens, one cannot understand the function of each individual piece.

But Horada takes this disassembling a step further. The video loops themselves are composed in such a fashion that it is impossible to discern the beginning or end of each video. The result is a never-ending cycle of mechanical parts in motion for some unknown greater purpose or, perhaps, for no purpose at all.

This effect makes it impossible for the viewer to mentally reconstruct the forward movement of the assembly line. Thus, Horada manages to disrupt the linearity of the machine in terms of both space and time. In the same gesture, the artist emphasizes the repetitive, never-ending production process of the assembly line itself.

The overall effect of the myriad televisions, themselves worn-down and nearly obsolete machines, is to emphasize the mechanical complexity of the matzoh machine itself. Taken together, the images and sounds form a mechanical symphony lacking a conductor.

“How can something so simple to make involve such a difficult process?” Horada asks. “Matzoh is something our ancestors made in a hurry while fleeing from the pharaohs. My work shows how a simple thing became a complex thing.”

Most probably built in the early 70s, this ‘chalet’ in Faraya, a village 42 km away from Beirut known for its ski resort was designed by Maurice Hindié. The Lebanese architect is known for also having designed the (in)famous Holiday Inn. Hindié had ambitious dreams for his architecture. For him, just like most of his modernist contemporaries, making buildings went hand-in-hand with creating proper living environments, fostering functioning societies, and ultimately, building the nation.

Hindié’s chalet was the first ‘pre-fab’ house built in Lebanon. His original plan was to build these chalets in a series that would follow the descending slope of the mountain. But the plan was interrupted by the eruption of the Civil War. Deeply disheartened he fled to Paris, never to return. People who have tried to contact him say that he still refuses to talk about his life and work in Lebanon.

]]> http://mashallahnews.com/?feed=rss2&p=7983 2 http://mashallahnews.com/?p=7978 http://mashallahnews.com/?p=7978#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:40:58 +0000 Mashallah Team http://mashallahnews.com/?p=7978 Hedi is a Tunisian man in his thirties. He has a good career in a private company, he is happy with his life and is just about to move in to a new flat. In the living room is a picture with Adam eating the forbidden fruit while Eve is looking at him, shocked. Soon after moving in, Hedi discovers a red button hidden behind the frame of the picture. Hedi, growing obsessed by the button, stops going about his normal life and enters a world of fantasies.

Obsession is a short film from 2009 directed by Amine Chiboub, a young Tunisian film director who studied at the ESRA school in Paris. Obsession is his third short movie, released after Contretemps in 2006 and Pourquoi Moi? in 2011.

One of them is the newfound political discourse and open discussions that are taking place – non-existent before the revolution. Libya today has hundreds of new media, from local newspapers and new TV-channels to numerous citizen initiatives. One of them is Libya Times a youth-run magazine that carries stories from different parts of the country, as well as from abroad. 20-years-old architect student Zainab Tarbah from Tripoli is editor in chief.

“Everything began last year by a group of young people in Benghazi. Then, we started in Tripoli also. Now, we’re 14 people here and 16 or 17 in Benghazi. All of us are students and we run the magazine totally on a voluntary basis,” says Zainab when we meet at Libya Times’ offices in a Tripoli neighbourhood. The space is new, and they share it with a language school where people come to learn English. Quite a good representation of new Libya, where very much is about building anew and reaching out across borders.

“You know the expression ‘the walls have ears’? That’s how it used to be in Libya before. We could’ve never started the project under the previous regime. I never thought I could write, for example. Young people were never encouraged to do things. They intended us to have boring lives, to keep us apathetic.”

For Zainab and the other team members, last year provided the occasion to create something completely on their own. The magazine is unique in one aspect – it’s published entirely in English. Zeinab describes why.

“We wanted to put Libya more in touch with the rest of the world. To send a message from here to abroad. Also, we want Libyans to read more in English. The English language has been more or less dead here. There was even a time when Gaddafi banned all teaching in English. And the teaching in schools – you would laugh if you saw the books we use. Libyans who speak English do so entirely through their own efforts: they’ve learned it through music and films. For the old regime, this was a way of keeping us isolated from the world.”