For 80 seconds yesterday morning, Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the July 7 suicide bombers who killed 52 people, was seen as a loving father, cradling his daughter as he bids her farewell.

The previously unseen footage, shown at Kingston Crown Court, depicts Khan gently stroking baby Maryam’s hair, expressing his affection and explaining why he is sacrificing his life. He asks her to look after her mother, and urges her to “learn to fight” when she grows up.

“Sweetheart, not long to go now,” he says. “And I’m going to really, really, miss you a lot. I’m thinking about it already. Look, I absolutely love you to bits and you have been the happiest thing in my life. You and your mum, absolutely brilliant. I don’t know what else to say.”

Watch video here

The man who is planning to murder soon tells his daughter that he is going to miss her. The latter part I identify with, and it fills me with sadness. But it can’t change the other part, the part about the man wanting to kill and his feeling that he is justified in doing so, and it is no help my or your wanting to use the love that he is talking about, using it to reverse or change the desire to blow up a bomb in crowded place.

Those who are his enemies are filled with the same zeal. The pilots in Bush’s army dropping their bombs on Iraqi cities aren’t thinking that they are doing anything unjustifiable. Everyone is so fucking happy.

I’d like to talk to the daughter in twenty years.

mohammad-sidique-khan-maryam

A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, “but my father was.”

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It’s obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time, the old Clinton Sistah Souljah strategy borrowed from Clinton’s first presidential campaign when he traveled the country criticizing the personal morality of blacks and wooing white voters by objecting to what he considered anti -white lyrics sung by rapper Sistah Souljah.

As in Clinton’s case, Obama’s June 14th finger wagging at black men was a case of pandering to white conservative voters. This follows a pattern of using public perceptions of black men fanned by the media and Hollywood to win political favor. Bush One and his sleazy cohorts won votes by depicting black men as dangerous. After the Willie Horton ad, featuring a black rapist, was aired, support for Bush soared to 20% among southern white males, according to Willie Brown, former San Francisco mayor. Obama, by depicting them as irresponsible, saw his poll numbers climb to a 15% lead over McCain, according to a Newsweek poll. With his speech, he received a bounce in the polls that was denied to him after he gained the democrat nomination. He also enjoyed the bounce in the polls from Pennsylvania and Ohio.

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The above link was sent by my friend Jim Holstun who has a hard-hitting review of the other Darwish’s work–Nonie Darwish, “born an Egyptian Muslim, now an American Evangelical Christian, is one of the most energetic. She manages the website Arabs for Israel and has appeared on FOX News, on the website Frontpage Magazine, and in the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. She is also the author of Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror.”

Day 15 of the hunger strike - June 24, 2008

Jantar Mantar, New Delhi

When your body starts producing ketones (and it will after 15 days without food), a peculiar smell gets emitted in your breath, very much like over-ripe pears. If it wasn’t for the pollution in Delhi, in particular in Central Delhi where we are lodged on a busy roadway, our dharna sthal would be reeking of it. Ketoacidosis, the condition caused by an excess of ketone bodies, is a real danger for Sanjay and Rachna, and hovering around the corner for the rest.

This is heart-wrenching to report, and I cannot imagine how scary it is to endure. I don’t need to say that we need to mount the pressure even higher, ratchet up the phone calls, whatever it takes – surgically implant a heart into the maddeningly silent Prime Minister. Saving Bhopal, indeed the world, from corporate greed and government corruption is a heavy burden, and our friends are slowly fading under the weight of it. Please double, triple the effort you are making in support – the government is making encouraging noises, but we need the pressure to be critically painful at this point.

Each day I have been reading about the hunger strike in Delhi.

The International Campaign For Justice in Bhopal has also planned a “Global Hunger Fast for Bhopal” on Saturday, June 28. Please join if you can, and try to register your protest on the site linked above.

If you want the Indian government to demand greater accountability from international corporations and, in addition, treat its own citizens democratically, send a free fax to the Prime Minister.

Amitav Ghosh, author of the recently published Sea of Poppies, tells Jabberwock about lascars, the sailors who were the forerunners of today’s globalized work-force:

[L]ascars – they were absolute pioneers, in that they were the first Asians to work in a western industrial process. The sailing ship was an extremely complex machine, technically speaking, much more so than the fairly simple ships that we had in India. And nautical engineering was really the cutting-edge technology of the 19th century; it was like aerospace today. The lascars were the first Asians to work in a cutting-edge modern technology, the first to acquire a colloquial familiarity with European languages, the first to work with the European rhythms of time (the western-style ship was run on four-hour watches), and they were also the first Asians to set up settlements in London – Shoreditch, for example.

So in every sense, the lascars were the equivalent of today’s IT workers.

Go here for an account of the book launch in Mumbai

amitav-ghosh-sea-of-poppies

The downside of conference life is that you’re expected to say something intelligent. I spend most of the sessions constructing sentences in my head and then swallowing them for fear of sounding stupid. There is much talk of birdsong, the nightingale’s in particular

Because I never have any original thoughts, because I don’t have a brain, only a precursor of a Google search engine, I scramble through my mental archives trying to remember relevant quotes…

The reason I was nervous was because JM Coetzee was in the audience. That’s right, he came all the way from Australia to hear me - and to take part in the conference.

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ON RESERVE AT THE LIBRARY

Miss Hilton’s jail time journals
may be read in this syllabus along
with the Diary of Anne Frank and
human landscapes described
on cigarette papers by Turkish
poet Nazim, not to mention U’s…

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From a poem by Indran Amirthanayagam

Yesterday, Scott McLemee blogged on Critical Mass in favor of a certain Amazon reviewer who writes under the moniker “Jonathan Swift.” His (or her) witty reviews are boastful of their ignorance, more original humor than criticism, and, thus, routinely removed by Amazon quality control. Take, for example, Swift’s reply to James Frey’s infamous memoir:

I have not actually read this book but James Frey says that only 12 pages of his book are untrue and I think that’s a pretty good average. I think it’s a great and compelling book and recommend it highly. Only 12 words of this review are untrue. Can you guess which ones they are?

The immodest impostor is but a drop in the bucket of opinionated readers on Amazon, where a consumer can vet a book purchase the way you might a desk fan: by scanning only the most negative reviews. Whereas a desk fan may or may not generate cold air, classic literature generates a lot of the hot variety. Of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” “zed102” asks, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I Am!” while “esonde 1” deems the writer “as bad as Faulkner.” Speaking of Faulkner, one reviewer had this to say of “The Sound and the Fury”:

Maybe if I read novels for a living I would appreciate the challenge, but this book is like an ungreatful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return.

Jenna Krajeski points us to the good, the bad, and the ugly, on the Amazon website. The reviews one mostly finds on Amazon offer a false consolation about democracy–that the most aggrieved get their voices heard in the public square.

From the machine that cuts ice to the machine that cuts human beings
against the bright, inhuman glamour
my poetry passes through the middle of burning villages
with rapid fire and sharp shrieks
near the burnt woman
it is my poetry that reaches first;
when while doing this my poetry gets burnt in different places.
And there are those who are even today using poetry for carrying corpses,
filling the oxygen of new metaphors in the lungs of words,
but for him who has been born during the curfew,
whose breath is hot like the summer wind
in the mind of that young coal-miner
it is like a brand new gun that my poetry is recalled.

Hindi lovers, you can listen to a poem by Alokdhanwa, “Goli Dago Poster” here. Thanks to my old friend and comrade, Irfan.

I have written about Alok’s poetry before–if you scroll down on this site, you can find a piece I did for Himal, there’s a related essay I did for Cultural Logic, and here’s the link where you can find my translations of several of Alok’s poems for Critical Inquiry. The above excerpt is from the poem “Janta Ka Aadmi.”

As in the past years, I’ll be conducting a workshop on long-form writing at the SAJA convention. This year, I intend to use a 1958 report on a stoning to death in Jeddah and, to contrast with it, a 2001 report from Afghanistan by John Sifton; a brief foray into the book-length essay from Hiroshima by John Hersey and then the long report on the tsunami aftermath by Barry Bearak. I also want to share a scene or two from Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, and, in order to highlight the differences between a writer and a journalist presenting a shorter, and also straighter, report, take a close look at Somini Sengupta’s recent piece from Gurgaon. And, finally, an interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lawrence Wright.

Also check out Neiman Narrative Digest –for example, this piece that offers “six tips for crafting scenes.”