UNCG - MLS610C Global Arts Unit 4 - Middle East
Comments under the title of this post are responses required in Unit 4.
Iraq MediaNet
Licensed Iranian Media & Policy
Iraq MediaNet
Licensed Iranian Media & Policy
No matter how many times I flip the mirror this week, it has my reflection in it every single time!
posted by Y @ 10:34 AM
6 Comments:
Blog assignment: First, before you proceed with this lesson, please respond to the following questions.
If I were to ask you to conjure images of India or China, what comes to mind?
For India, I think of absolutely jam packed urbanite Calcutta residents, or at least the impression of them that I’ve gotten from movies and National Geographic articles.
I see the color orange, saffron – taste and color, people taking baths in public and beating the dirt out of their clothes, washing their rainbow colored or pure white garments under unadorned water spigots, eating food served in of what seems like hundreds of little tiny dishes.
There aren’t any chairs. People squat flat-footed to reach the low flat surfaces used for everything from jewelry making to writing.
Every abode has an open store front to the street. Some of the younger residents are wearing Western style clothing but only if it’s the hours of Monday thru Friday workweek. White cows saunter through the crowds.
People who speak English have British accents. Overall there’s a feeling that there’s a growing affluence. Cars are new models.
For China, the density of people, the shops and abodes, are about the same as in India but the clothing is less colorful. There’s a stench rather than savory scents in the air, which is sooty in texture and taste.
Any Westerners seem to be tourists on their way to the Great Wall or chatter loudly about having already been.
There’s lots of misplaced people who look like farmers with bundles tied to their backs. They amble, endlessly, just to keep moving.
There’s lots of young men trying to attach themselves as day guides for anyone who speaks English. Electricity is undependable. It gets dark earlier in China than in India.
Take a moment to say to yourself “the Middle East”—what are the images, feelings and words that follow?
Desert, no man’s land, secretive, unfathomable for Westerners. Long history of fighting infidels. Aljazeera news whose visuals and set backdrops look like 1950s U.S. TV. CNN reporters broadcasting their stories against a backdrop of street fighting or rubble. Minarets. Frequent calls to worship. One step forward; two steps back.
Tiny Kuwait as the most affluent per capita nation in the world. Iraq. The ransacked Baghdad Museum, a picture of the 3,000 B.C.E. Sumerian gold harp that was taken.
Short women trundling under head-to-toe black canopy shrouds,like little pacman figures, covered up like they are the assistants and part of the trick in some magician’s act which requires that they carry huge baskets of goods on top of their heads.
Dust. Precious water. Ancient, ancient, ancient land. Hotbed of discontent. One religion ruling several governments and millions of people.
After reading the folktales on e-reserve, do they remind you of any western tales? What do they reveal to you about Turkey and Afghanistan?
[Note: Also, I'm going to post this response as a comment under the "Unit 4 - Text" title and add any further discussion there. This comment, in other words, is my assignment answer.]
Yolen, Jane. “What Happened to Hadji.” In Favorite Folktales From Around the World. New York: Pantheon, 1986. pp. 85-87.
This folktale is from Turkey; it’s about a married man – a practicing Muslim -- who becomes obsessed with amorously meeting one of his coy female customers, a hanum*. He tells his wife. She helps him decipher several clues the customer communicates. The result is the wife enables the husband to privately meet and talk to the woman and then has them both arrested, mid-conversation. The wife makes a deal with the woman and figures out how to drop charges of adultery against the offenders. The wife evidently lives happily-ever-after with her husband.
What this folktale reveals about Turkey is that, surprisingly, the society respects intelligent, resourceful, wise women -- even if they work against their husbands – and finds it acceptable to immortalize them in an enduring folktale. The story also reveals how the government and religion in Turkey is really one and the same entity, something that I find sinister and horrifying.
On the other hand, (big light bulb moment), adultery in the U.S. is also a crime, albeit minor, but nonetheless admissible evidence in deciding divorce court complaints. Does this mean that the U.S. government has been enforcing religious dogma/codes all along? Of course they have! I’m laughing at my own revelation! However, at the moment I don’t recall another folktale that parallels or resembles this one but in tone and theme it reads like one of Aesop’s fables.
* hanum – Spot check on Web as well as Babelfish: no answer to what does this word mean?
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Yolen, Jane. “What Melody is the Sweetest?” In Favorite Folktales from Around the World. New York: Pantheon, 1986. p. 413.
I have not read a fable or parable in a long time that has made me laugh at the lesson revealed. This story is about a Shah who tests the knowledge and wisdom of his ministers by asking them, What melody is the sweetest? The ministers get a bit off-track when they answer the question with the names of different instruments. One minister doesn’t say anything but days later, he invites the shah and ministers to a banquet where there are lots of musicians playing many different instruments but contrary to normal, there is no food on the tables. The guests don’t want to embarrass their host by asking where is the food, so they sit until midnight listening to the variety of musical instruments. Then the host minister orders food brought into the room much to the pleasure of the hungry guests but before serving the food, the host minister, “who understood parables very well,” orders his server to play the sweetest melody for the hungry guests – and the server beats on the lid of the food pot with a big spoon.
What this parable tells me about Afghan culture is that a banquet is one place where excess (food) is expected, anticipated, and customary; that wisdom comes from observing the simplest of demonstrations; that guests are extremely polite; would never embarrass a host (not like in U.S.) who failed to provide an appropriate spread; shahs may be more caring and patient that I thought. VIOLINS are familiar instruments in Afghanistan?!!?
Another similar parable/tale? I read this tale having a Chinese or Zen tone to it; the clink of dishes as the sweetest melody provokes the “one hand in the forest” lesson about hearing.
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Yolen, Jane. “Youth Without Age and Life Without Death.” In Favorite Folktales from Around the World. New York: Pantheon, 1986. p. 457.
This is a chilling folktale from Turkey. It’s concise, short, packed with meaning and chilling because it’s message is that acting against and contrary to wise, strong warnings, you may get what you think you want, but when someone is of the disposition to scream, no amount of worldly promises will satiate the screamer. This may destroy a kingdom.
Again, I’m at a loss to think of a similar story that punches so much meaning into so few words or that communicates this particular lesson. But I'll keep thinking!
This is our Unit 4 Lesson 2 Discussion Question:
How can Rūmī’s poetry help us humanize our impressions of the “Middle East”? Use examples from his poetry in your discussion.
I titled my discussion forum post:
Subject: We're like p. 316 "The Drunken Gnat"
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How can Rūmī’s poetry help us humanize our impressions of the “Middle East”?
The Spanish word, Ojala, is the equivalent of the American phrase, OMG! The origin of Ojala is O, Allah, which entered the Spanish language during the time of the Moor's occupation of pre-colonial period Spain.
We aren't ready yet with even an etherially vague impression of the "Middle East" that Rumi's poems could help us humanize. Is Konya, Turkey really a part of the present day Middle East? Are the Dervishes really a part of Islam? Can you walk up to a man on his way to Friday noon prayers at the Mosque and school complex next to NCSU in Raleigh and begin a conversation with him about the themes and topics and types of Rumi's poetry? I need to remember to ask somebody when I'm waiting at the bus stop there: Is this mosque Sunni or Shia?
We can converse easily among ourselves, swap accolades to Rumi/Barks for writing in simple words, our thoughts and feelings that are vast, overwhelming, longing, swirling in the ether, hoping somehow to reach into a metaphysical perfection and return, be intimate, calm, small.
Look at the translations of others. This Rumi we know of is Barks' version, it's beautiful stuff but it reads like Marshall McLuhan on ecstasy.
Even after our exposure to some Middle Eastern culture that is not about bombing and war, it's going to take more than exposure to Rumi to tick even a nano-second off the 180 degrees out of sync impression that WASP-type American news, war, religion has indelibly carved into our brains. Ojala! Whose message are you ready to receive?
Use examples from his poetry in your discussion.
page 244:
I have phrases and whole pages memorized,
but nothing can be told of love.
You must wait until you and I
are living together.
In the conversation we'll have
then...be patient...then.
~
Unit 4, Lesson 2 Blog assignment: Find three Rūmī poems that speak to you and write your response to each poem drawing on personal references. You may include images (photos, clip art, images from the internet) that come to mind to accompany your reflections.
[The poem in my prior comment is one of my answers to this assignment.]
Barks' palimpsest number 26 "Evolutionary Intelligence: Say I am You"
Untitled on p. 270 The Essential Rumi
I have had two different friends in two very different years of my life with whom I've experienced the expansion of being when ideas are given flight with words, and fear is overcome to both enter and exit, intact, from thinking into nothingness.
This Rumi verse almost sounds like a transcript of one friend's voice saying:
"We have this way of talking, and we have another.
Apart from what we wish and what we fear may happen,
we are alive with other life, as clear stones
take form in the mountain."
It doesn't hurt to think about my two friends being sick or ill but it does hurt when I think without them.
Unit 4, Lesson 2 Blog assignment: Find three Rūmī poems...
I can claim coinage of the term, "Century Straddler," but I won't be credited with the coinage until someone quotes me in an academic essay. That's one world.
Over in cyberspace, I've been the Century Straddler in at least a dozen posts, some my own and some by others.
Point is, Century Straddlers are people who have spent more of their years in the 20th century than they are likely to spend in the 21st, i.e. they're Baby Boomers with the attitude that "Baby" is not a term that should be applied to anybody over 50 years of a age. "Boomers" okay. "Babies?" Indeed not.
A slogan for Century Straddlers might be, "It ain't how old your computer is, it's how many gigs you've got and can you use 'em."
So, the third Rumi poem that I especially relate to in Barks' translation is also under no. 26, "Evolutionary Intelligence: Say I am You." Somewhere in this poem I think there's a "Baby Boomer" epitheton necessarium waiting to be born.
So, look on page 273 for:
"The Milk of Millennia"
I am part of the load
not rightly balanced.
I drop off in the grass,
like the old cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.
For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time-and-space cross,
this waiting room.
I walk into a huge pasture.
I nurse the milk of millennia.
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.
-end-
Do an Internet research on Rumi and one other Middle East poet
While our class lectures, discussions, and texts focused on Afghanistan and Turkey, I tried to theme my Unit 4 blog posts around Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. So, when I went looking for the last half of this assignment (the first half being shown in the "Links" column of my blog), I searched under Iran, Iraq, Saudi poets. I found lists of centuries of poets and in all kinds of Middle East countries. However, when I clicked on links to their poetry, and I did this for about an hour on a highspeed ISP, I didn't find any poems translated to English.
I decided to go ahead and search on "middle east poets." Now, remember that up to this point, I haven't seen a single person's name that I knew before we started this unit. And with that in mind, and with no time left on the week's clock, here is the link I hit and scrolled on...
http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/arablit.htm
...to find the name of a poet I've always considered to be American and whose name certainly hasn't come up as a mention in our discussion!!! LLLLOL...but of course: http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/gibrn.htm
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