Kate Phillips, a nurse who works in the intensive care unit at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, is part of a group trying to form a union. “Every nurse here has talked about times where he or she felt unsafe because there was not enough staffing, not enough equipment, or medicines came late because there were not enough pharmacy techs,” she toldThe Sun. The administration, she went on, “can basically make all the decisions and they don’t look at things from the perspective of patient care like we do.” This past January in Virginia, Patty Nelson, a psychiatric nurse who is the chapter chair of her local union, called on the state’s general assembly to expand Medicaid as soon as possible, citing clients with mental illness and addiction who can’t get the treatment they need. And the California Nurses Association (CNA), the largest union of nurses in that state, has emerged as a champion of a single-payer health care system, fighting their way to their capitol. “We understand that these legislators are not going to do this on their own,” Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and executive director of the union, told California Healthline, a health care news site. “It’s going to take a movement of their constituents, nurses and other health care professionals. Legislators are going to need an intense amount of pressure, and that’s what we’re doing: We’re knocking on every door, we’re meeting and organizing.”
Nursing work, like most other health care jobs, is growing fast: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add 438,100 jobs in registered nursing by 2026. Their strength in numbers has also brought organizing power: while most of the labor movement has declined in the face of pressure from unfavorable laws and moneyed opposition, in the past decade, nurses’ unionization rates have been gaining momentum, with tens of thousands more members.
ISAF Public Affairs/ Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Maija Liuhto | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,978 words)
Late on a Thursday night in a faraway corner of Old Kabul, a community of musicians and worshippers gathers for an evening of solemn prayer, ecstatic singing, and melodies from days long forgotten.
In a small shrine rebuilt after having been destroyed during one of the worst periods in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, fires have been lit, milky tea is served, and hashish is being passed around. This shrine, called Charda Masoom (Persian for “the Fourteen Infallibles”), lies at the end of a muddy street with open gutters, lined with houses with cracked paint and tiny shops selling trinkets and household goods. On the surface, this congested alley looks like any other in this part of the city.
But what an outsider would not know is that for several hundred years, this street — known as Kucheh Kharabat, “the alley of desolation,” the word originally referring to taverns where people came to drink, dance, and listen to music — has been home to a vibrant artistic community of musicians, who now find themselves with their backs against a wall. Space for them in Afghan society continues to shrink.
Originally, many of them came to the area from India to provide entertainment in the 19th-century amir Sher Ali Khan’s court. Local Afghan musicians followed course and moved to this area to learn traditional Indian ragas from the foreigners, letting their own Afghan folk tunes mix with the melodies of the subcontinent. Day and night, singers sang songs by medieval Persian poets, full of references to wine, love, and passion. Tabla drummers gave rhythm to the heady, trance-inducing music.
This is how the music of Afghanistan was born, in this now-forgotten alley in the backstreets of Kabul.
But all of that is in the past. Tonight, one senses a feeling of dread. Only a week ago, the Islamic State attacked a Shia mosque in Kabul. The worshippers and musicians here, although not Shiite, also belong to a minority religious community despised by ISIS and the Taliban. They are Sufis, part of a mystical, tolerant, and inclusive strand of Islam practiced all over the Muslim world. Sufism, followers of which believe is the true heart of Islam, used to have a large following in Afghanistan, evident in the many shrines found all over the country. The Sufis’ love of saints, music, and tolerance was too much for the extremist Taliban regime, and so the movement was driven underground in the late ’90s.
* * *
Today, the Taliban are stronger than ever despite their regime’s fall 16 years ago.
The worshippers seem tense. Police stand guard outside the shrine while a group of men circle a tombstone inside, silently praying for the descendants of Prophet Muhammad who are believed to be buried here. Outside, another group of men huddles in a circle, wrapped in woolen shawls. Smoke rises from their midst and the heady smell of hashish wafts all the way to the street outside the gates.
Suddenly, small children who have been happily running around are gently asked to leave, guided to the gates by a malang, the caretaker of the shrine, who has messy hair and at least a dozen shiny rings on his fingers. A boy, curious to find out what happens after 10 p.m., lingers by the sturdy, carved wooden door — he hasn’t been noticed. He smiles cheekily and quickly runs after the others, fully aware that Thursday nights are not for children, only for adults.
The musicians have arrived. Inside the shrine, a stage waits for nights like these. A harmonium, tabla drums, and a chimta (jingling tongs) are ready for the men to start playing.
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But this is no concert or performance. This is a religious ceremony called sama, practiced by some Sufi orders, where music, dance, and chanting are used as a means to get closer to God. In Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the devotional music played at sama ceremonies is known as qawwali, made famous by the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the ’80s and ’90s.
It is time to begin. Abdul Waheed Shaidayi, a middle-aged man wearing a red Kandahari cap climbs on the stage, greets everyone, and starts playing the harmonium. While he sings the introductory verses in Persian, his voice slowly soars higher and higher, picking up the pace. The tabla and chimta players join in, drumming and jingling their instruments to an intoxicating, fast-paced rhythm. The worshippers gradually fall into a trance — some aided by the hashish they have been smoking — and shake their heads while clapping furiously. When the music stops for a while, they recite prayers.
These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.
These days, the sama nights are Shaidaiyi’s only chance to play the harmonium for an appreciative audience. Otherwise, he’s mostly idle, his work having long since dried up, save for occasional wedding parties where he is asked to perform. Even there, respect is hard to find, with wedding guests whispering behind the musicians’ backs, accusing them of being pimps and infidels because over the years of war people started believing music is prohibited in Islam.
These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.
In Kucheh Kharabat, however, Shaidayi commands respect. Everyone greets him as he walks down the street the next day. In the local attorney’s office, a congested room where an electric guitar hangs on the wall, Shaidayi is joined by another well-known character in Kharabat: Naseer Hamahang, an imposing man in his 50s. His black hair is combed back and colorful rings decorate his fingers. Hamahang is Shaidayi’s nephew, but he is only two years younger than his uncle.
Hamahang lights a cigarette and takes a slow drag, enjoying this long-time habit that doesn’t seem to affect his singing. The two men, both native to this area, can trace their bloodlines 150 years back to all the famous musical masters of the past. Together, they have lived through days of glory, the horrors of war, and Afghanistan’s beleaguered present.
“People from other areas have come here, bad people,” Shaidayi says as he pours fragrant saffron tea for his guests. “They are insulting the street by calling it Kharabat.” In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.
* * *
During the 1990s there was war and years of religious extremism that turned people against this musical community and almost wiped out the culture of Kharabat. When Shaidayi and Hamahang were children in the ’60s and ’70s, their fathers Ustad Shaida and Ustad Hamahang were famous, admired musicians — so much so that most Afghans remember their names with fondness, even while musicians are simultaneously believed to be bad people by the strictly religious.
In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.
When the two men were little, Afghanistan hadn’t yet been through the four decades of war and political instability that changed the entire cultural and social fabric of the country. Before the communists, Soviets, and religious extremists came, the kings who ruled Afghanistan acted as patrons of the musicians of Kharabat.
As a boy, Shaidayi often accompanied his father to the royal palace where he performed for the then-king Zahir Shah. It was the king himself who would come and pick them up from Kharabat in one of his armored cars now on display in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul — now riddled with bullet holes, because the Taliban would decades later use them for target practice.
“My father would be shaving and the king would wait,” he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.
“One night I went with [my father] to the palace. I was about eight or nine years old. My father and the other musicians were singing in the king’s salon and I fell asleep. The queen came and took me to her son’s room and put a blanket on me.”
There were no formalities in the relationship between the royal family and the Kharabatis — they would all sit next to one another, enjoying the poetry and melodies of the songs.
‘My father would be shaving and the king would wait,’ he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.
Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers. “All the palace’s workers came out and wondered what had happened. The king said, ‘Don’t touch them — it is just because of the music.’ When the music stopped, the birds came back to their senses,” Shaidayi recalls.
Even women in Kharabat used to sing, dance, and play instruments. Today, this is not possible anymore — it would be considered equal to prostitution and pimping.
“People think that we send our wives to perform at parties. But our wives are not artists, they wear headscarves,” Hamahang says, raising his voice.
Abdul Waheed Shaidayi and Naseer Hamahang. Photos by Maija Liuhto.
Back in the more tolerant days, all the great musicians of Afghanistan proudly called Kharabat their home. The street was lined with instrument shops and traditional cafés where the ustads, or masters, used to sit on takhts, traditional beds, and talk and play their instruments. Each of them had students who would come to learn the art of playing traditional South Asian and Afghan instruments in their talim khanas, or schools.
“From the day we were born we heard the sound of music,” Shaidayi says. “When the students came we would go too and listen and learn how to play the instruments.”
Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers.
“Growing up here was so much fun,” Hamahang says. “Our childhood was beautiful. Our fathers were very rich. They were living like kings.”
But Shaidayi was only 10 years old when he lost his father, Ustad Shaida, in an accident. “It became very difficult to survive,” he says. Not long after, his mother also passed away. He had to drop out of school after eighth grade.
“I started learning harmonium from one of my father’s students, Saleem Qandahari,” he tells me.
Qandahari’s house was right in front of Shaidayi’s. Back then, most of the musicians regularly performed live at Radio Afghanistan and would be busy until noon. Their songs were transmitted all over the city through loudspeakers, Shaidayi remembers. After that, they would come back to Kucheh Kharabat and take an afternoon nap. At 4 o’clock they finally had time to receive their students.
“Because my father was his teacher he had time for me — he respected me,” Shaidayi says. In return for the lessons, young Shaidayi ran small errands for Qandahari’s family, such as buying rice and coal.
As Shaidayi and Hamahang were slowly growing into adulthood, the prelude to war began. First, the king was overthrown by his cousin Daud Khan in 1973. But he was assassinated only five years later, in 1978, by communists who then took over in Kabul.
At the age of 18, both Hamahang and Shaidayi had to enroll in the newly communist country’s army. It was there that their musical talents were put to use for the first time.
“They noticed I was really good at singing so they asked us to create a group,” Hamahang says.
The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.
The communists were ruling the country with an iron fist. In a deeply religious country like Afghanistan, not everyone liked the atheism they were propagating. A resistance was being organized, led by a group of religious leaders who became to be known as the mujahideen.
Both Shaidayi and Hamahang — each around 20 at the time — were still in the army when the war started in 1979. The Soviet Union had decided to invade Afghanistan to put an end to the mujahideens’ revolt. While soldiers were sent to fight the guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan, Hamahang and Shaidayi stayed in Kabul, in a fort called Bala Hissar, whose ruins still overlook the muddy lanes of Kharabat.
The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.
But worse times were still to come. In 1992, three years after Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen took over Kabul. An interim government was formed, but not all mujahideen leaders were supportive of it.
A violent civil war erupted, as opposing factions started shelling Kabul, destroying much of the city and killing as many as 50,000 people. Kharabat was directly in the line of fire of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s rockets.
“It was like a rain of rockets,” Shaidayi says.
“We couldn’t go outside. No one even dared to look out of the window to see who was there,” Hamahang continues. “We stayed in the basement of our house. There was nothing to eat besides rice.”
In a matter of days, the entire city became a horrifying battlefield. Prisoners in their own homes, the Kharabatis witnessed what war can do to people.
“Many people were hit by rockets and we would have to bury them in their homes. A lot of people were buried in our homes, too,” Hamahang says.
Going outside was simply too risky. The mujahideen would periodically come to the Kharabatis’ houses, asking them to take their injured fighters to Bala Hissar, the army fort, where they could be treated. If they refused, the fighters would hang the men and cut off the women’s breasts, the men remember.
“I have seen so much cruelty in Afghanistan, so much cruelty,” Hamahang says, shaking his head.
Both men, who were now married, realized the situation was simply too dangerous for their families. They decided to leave their homes and take their families to safety in neighboring Pakistan.
“We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,” Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.
“We saw that they were injured, but we did nothing because in that situation you only think of yourself,” Hamahang explains, his expression turning somber.
‘We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,’ Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.
A short ceasefire allowed them to get out of Kabul unharmed.
“We took nothing with us,” Shaidayi says. There was no time to rescue precious instruments or tape recordings of their fathers’ performances. Family heirlooms and wealth accumulated through generations were left to the mercy of looting militias.
“When we left, we thought we’d be back in a couple of weeks after things in Afghanistan would calm down,” he explains. Instead, weeks turned into almost 14 years.
When the family reached the border crossing into Pakistan at Torkham, it was nighttime. There was nowhere safe for the women to sleep, so the men decided they all had to sleep on the ground and make a circle around the women, making sure no one would touch them. Peshawar, the city where most Afghan refugees were headed to, was still hours away.
But once there, the family split: Hamahang, his parents, and his wife decided to stay in Peshawar, while Shaidayi took his sisters, wife, and children south to the city of Quetta, where his brother was waiting for them. Both cities were full of newly arrived Afghan refugees, many living in congested camps on the cities’ outskirts.
“We started from zero,” Hamahang says.
The musicians were in a slightly more fortunate situation than those living in camps however because they could use their musical skills to earn money. “We rented a house [in Quetta]. The house had four rooms and we were eight families,” Shaidayi says.
Slowly, the people in Quetta started inviting Shaidayi and his brother to perform at their weddings. Many of them were Pashtuns, members of an ethnic group that lives on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shaidayi, an ethnic Tajik and Persian speaker, started learning Pashto so that he could perform at their weddings.
As they started making money they could soon afford a bigger house. But they still lived largely hand-to-mouth.
Years went by like this, exiled in a foreign country. But Kharabat remained in Shaidayi and Hamahang’s dreams.
One day, a few years after leaving Kabul, Shaidayi heard of a new militant group on television: the Taliban. The group had taken over most parts of Afghanistan, and its militants were now moving around Kabul, brandishing their Kalashnikovs and punishing women for as little as showing their ankles.
Kharabat was now empty. Countless musicians lay in their graves, buried under their houses which had been bombed to the ground. Or, if they had been lucky, they had escaped the rockets to Pakistan like Shaidayi and Hamahang.
With the Taliban’s rule of fear, a temporary peace also came to Kabul. But there was no question of returning to Afghanistan. Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.
“The Taliban didn’t allow music or musicians. All those things were forbidden,” he says.
Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.
In Kabul, people suddenly had to hide their radios and music players out of fear of the Taliban’s brutal punishments. An eerie silence descended upon the city, broken only by the azaan, the call to prayer that rang out like clockwork five times a day, spreading from the first mosque to the next, filling the entire valley of Kabul.
But Afghans were not isolated from the Taliban even in exile in Pakistan.
“The Taliban were there in Quetta, too, but they couldn’t say anything to us,” Shaidayi says. This, according to him, was because the group didn’t have the authority to do anything on Pakistani soil.
The Taliban in Quetta could easily be identified by the way they dressed and talked, Shaidayi remembers. They also frequently carried weapons.
Sometimes, Shaidayi found himself performing at parties members of the Taliban would attend. “They would come and listen to us there. They didn’t bother us,” he says.
* * *
Almost 400 miles north in Peshawar, Hamahang was leading a similar life, recording music with his father and playing at wedding parties.
One day, upon arriving to perform at a wedding, he saw a person with kohl-rimmed eyes and a large turban on his head. “I went to sit in a corner so that he wouldn’t see me. Then I asked who he was. He said he was the chief of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice in Kabul. I became very afraid,” Hamahang says.
The man had come to perform the nikah, the wedding ceremony, for the bride and the groom. He signaled Hamahang to come closer and asked him who he was. “I was shaking from fear,” he says.
When Hamahang identified himself as Ustad Hamahang’s son, the man said, “Your father had a very good life in Kabul.” Hamahang said, “Don’t do anything to me, the minute I walked up to you, I became ritually impure,” meaning he had wet himself out of fear.
“I could tell my companions to take you to the other side of Torkham,” the man said to him. “There, I could do anything to you. I could kill you, but I won’t. Don’t worry, don’t do anything, don’t sing while I’m here. I will wed the couple, I will go, and then you can sing,” the Taliban chief told Hamahang.
Once the man had left, Hamahang says he sang so well that the Taliban chief’s companions became drunk on the music. Later they brought alcohol bottles and started drinking — a serious offence under the Taliban regime.
For a while, it seemed the Taliban had meant to stay in Afghanistan. Years went by. At times, the families would visit one another; a week or two in Quetta, a month in Peshawar.
The year 2001 rolled in, at first like any other. But then came the 9/11 attacks in New York City. “We didn’t realize anything would happen to the Taliban when we were watching the attacks on TV,” Shaidayi says. But Afghanistan’s fate was about to change once again. In October, the United States invaded the country and chased the Taliban and their al-Qaeda associates away. But the country was in shambles following decades of war. It was not time to return yet.
While living in Pakistan, Shaidayi and Hamahang’s fame had started spreading to all the corners of the world where Afghan refugees lived. Hamahang had already toured the United States with his father in the late ’90s. While there, he had met several famous musicians from all over the world and had even been offered the opportunity to settle in the States. But the dream of one day being able to return to Kharabat had made him refuse.
* * *
In 2004, it was Shaidayi’s turn to see the world. One day, he received a phone call from London. An Indian man at the other end of the receiver wanted to invite him to perform at a Sufi concert along with other Afghan and Iranian musicians.
A few months later he found himself in England, sitting in front of a mostly British audience.
“A lot of people asked me what I thought about London,” he says. What I always remember is that when I was singing a song about Ali [Prophet Muhammad’s nephew] and the person who was playing tabla was translating the lyrics, all the British people were crying. It was very interesting for me.”
After the concert, a group of British people came up to Shaidayi and invited him to read Sufi poetry on a hilltop. They said they were followers of a Sufi saint, Hazrat Ghaus. “When I read the lyrics of a qawwali song, they all fell into a trance.”
* * *
In late 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president of Afghanistan. Hamahang and Shaidayi soon started hearing good news from Kabul. “Streets had been fixed, a lot of construction was taking place, and a lot of capital came to Afghanistan,” Shaidayi recalls.
In 2005, they finally packed their things, vacated their houses in Peshawar and Quetta, and headed for the Torkham border crossing, more than a decade after the first frightening night spent there.
Despite all the construction and development, a devastating sight awaited them on returning to Kabul.
“Kharabat had vanished,” Hamahang says.
Determined to see the area return to its old glory, the families started slowly rebuilding their houses. But nothing would ever be quite the same again. The years of war and horror had changed the people of Kabul.
Although many were glad to have music return to their lives after years of haunting silence, not everyone was happy to see the Kharabatis back.
“The people who had stayed in Afghanistan during the Taliban — the poor people who weren’t able to go to Peshawar — experienced a lot of terrible things, and they were psychologically affected. Because of that, some of them had very bad ideas about us,” Shaidayi says.
Still, most of the Kharabatis started teaching and performing again, hopeful that slowly things would get better. And for a good 10 years, Shaidayi had a steady, albeit meager, flow of students. But most of the students only took classes for a few months then disappeared. Two years ago, Shaidayi had to give up the small office he was renting as his teaching space. “I simply couldn’t manage anymore,” he says.
The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.
“Some days ago I met with a person who wanted to learn to play the rubab [a traditional string instrument]. He told me his wife had said to him, ‘Why do you want to learn music, it’s not good.’ This is because of illiteracy. People don’t understand,” Hamahang says.
The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.
Music is not explicitly prohibited in Islam. There are scholars who believe it to be permissible and those who do not. Conservative mullahs and imams of mosques often speak against music in their Friday sermons, or khutbas, because they have been influenced by extremist interpretations of religion. Their words are taken seriously in Afghanistan.
There is a mosque near Kharabat where the musicians often go to pray. The mullah there behaves well with them, partly because the Kharabatis give him money each month.
“But he is against our work. He doesn’t view it positively,” Shaidayi says.
Once, Shaidayi went to pray in a mosque further away. The mullah recognized him. “Because of that, he started his khutba by saying that music is forbidden in Islam, music is bad, and that musicians make women dance.”
Slowly, the men understood that the peace in the early years after the U.S. invasion had only been temporary. The Taliban had regrouped and Kabul became unsafe again. Now, bombs explode on a regular basis and ISIS has started targeting the Shiite community of Afghanistan. Corpses pile up and anyone who doesn’t agree with the extremists’ interpretation of religion must fear for their lives.
“From Amanullah Khan’s reign up until today, these mullahs have destroyed our lives. Not only ours, everyone’s,” Hamahang says, suddenly agitated.
And so it has become a question of life and death for the Kharabatis to prove that they are good Muslims, even though their ways of worshipping might be different from the mainstream.
“Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,” Shaidayi says. “They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.”
But it is not only mullahs, the Taliban, and other extremists who threaten the Kharabatis.
‘Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,’ Shaidayi says. ‘They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.’
One night, Hamahang saw two drunken men with guns outside his house injure a child. He ran outside and asked what was going on. “They shot me, too,” he says, showing his injured hand. The bullet went through his palm and now he is no longer able to move his right middle finger. The men, he says, were part of a criminal gang that sells drugs in Kabul. “No one can do anything to them because they are powerful.”
The gangs often lure the musicians to come to shady locations, speaking of parties and promising them money. “When we arrive, there is nothing there. They beat us, take our keyboards, and all our instruments,” Hamahang says.
Powerful former mujahideen commanders sometimes bring girls and young boys to dance at parties — a practice known by the name of bacha bazi that is often connected to sexual abuse.
“If we go to a party, how can we know that they are bringing a boy or a girl to dance there?” Shaidayi asks. “If we sing, it is uncomfortable for us when someone is dancing in front of us. And if we don’t sing, we will be beaten by them.”
It is a rainy Thursday afternoon. The houses in Kabul are cold and the smell of gas from heaters lingers on men’s traditional suits, or payraan tumbaans. Shaidayi walks down Kharabat wrapped in a woolen shawl. He has just returned from the mosque.
Hamahang appears from around a corner and greets Shaidayi. He has been invited to perform on Afghanistan’s largest TV network’s music program tonight. Occasionally the other Kharabatis go too. But interest in traditional music has decreased even among the more liberal and educated Afghans as Western-influenced music videos have taken over TV channels.
“Now people only watch. They don’t listen. … If there are no girls in the video, nobody is interested,” Shaidayi says.
While Hamahang prepares for his performance, Shaidayi wants to visit some of his former colleagues in the nearby Shor Bazaar where some Kharabatis have their offices. As he is starting to cross a busy road, a man who looks like a beggar comes to greet him. He is also a musician.
Not too long ago, the man’s desperate financial situation drove him to attempt to sell his daughter, Shaidayi explains. But the other Kharabatis, although poor themselves, intervened, collected some money, and prevented this from happening.
Finally in Shor Bazaar, Shaidayi sits in front of his harmonium on the carpeted floor of a room where some Kharabatis still continue to teach their students. The stuffy room smells of hashish and gas from a small heater. Shaidayi starts singing as the man to his left plays the tabla and the one to his right a clarinet. Immediately, everyone is transported to a different world, mesmerized by the melody and lyrics of the song. The piece is a ghazal, a genre of poetry popular in South and Central Asia, composed by Shaidayi’s father, Ustad Shaida. It tells the story of two lovers, Laila and Majnun, a Sufi parable for the relationship between God and his worshipper.
All of this would be considered haram, or forbidden, by the Taliban. But for the Kharabatis, this is the very essence of religion.
“The Taliban don’t like music. If they decide to kill someone [for that] we are the first ones to end up dead,” the tabla player in the corner says after the song has finished.
Shaidayi stands up to leave. Outside, the weather is murky and depressing. Winter has arrived. He slowly walks toward his rented flat in Kharabat, careful not to ruin his shoes in the puddles and open gutters. On the other side of the town, a bomb has just exploded. Sirens fill the air for a while as the injured and dead are transported to hospitals. Then, life must go on again. In the evening, Hamahang’s performance is broadcast on TV while the rest of Kharabatis prepare for another qawwali night in the shrine at the end of the street.
Kharabat may never again become like in the past, but the community worshipping inside the shrine will always welcome Shaidayi and Hamahang. There, away from the eyes of others, it can almost seem like no time has passed.
***
Maija Liuhto is a freelance journalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan. She covers Afghanistan for the Los Angeles Times and the largest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, the Christian Science Monitor, and VICE.
At the top of Riverdale, at the top of the Bronx, there is a city on a hill. The city exists within a single building; there are single rooms with no locks, each with a bed, a dresser, and — if the resident’s family provides one — a television set with which to while away the hours. Time is measured by the same clock as it is in other cities, but here it curves and collapses, compresses yet languorously stretches. Once a week there is a hairdresser and a manicurist, too. It is lovely — and dreadful. You can visit the citizens here, and you are free to leave when you are ready, if freedom is measured by the movement of one’s feet. My mother lives in this building, which is a nursing home. We signed the contract for her just last month, in what might have been human blood.
The city-building overlooks the Hudson River, which today glimmers silver under a portentous sky. It’s spring by the calendar, but winter has persisted in the Northeast. I trudge west from Riverdale Avenue bundled into my down coat, the wind biting at my neck. I like to pretend that my mother is expecting me.
She has lived there only a few days. I am acquainting myself with the place every time I visit. She lives on one of the dementia floors, the medium security floor, with other people who are social and display a level of intellectual competence that affords them the illusion of freedom — they do not require help from aides with dressing and bathing, for example, and they may choose where to sit at dinner.
She lives on one of the dementia floors, the medium security floor, with other people who are social and display a level of intellectual competence that affords them the illusion of freedom…
There is a code to gain entry to the elevator, and another to make the elevator move. We are asked not to let the residents know these numbers, although this seems to miss the point; no one who lives here could retain the numbers long enough to use them. Still, I take the piece of paper on which the nurse has written the codes and stash it deep in my coat pocket, checking it discreetly before punching in the numbers.
The unit has a hospital floor plan, which casts a gloom over the space, a reminder that this is a ward, not a home. Still, the idea of a central nurses’ station affords some comfort — someone is just down the hall in case of emergency. My mother has one endless emergency here — her own urgent need to leave.
She looks up eagerly when I cross the threshold bearing my weekly gifts — this time, a CD player, some photos to hang, cookies, fresh underwear and socks. Everything she owns must be labeled; dementia-floor residents can be found in each other’s clothing routinely. “You have to have a sense of humor about it,” my mother’s social worker tells me.
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Her room has a river view. I wonder what it’s like not to know which body of water it is that one sees through the glass; not to know that the sun will set over this water because one is facing west; not to know which way the bathroom is or what time it is or how to find the phone; not to remember the combination of numbers that will allow you to reach your children; to know you have children, but not to remember their names.
“It’s so large,” my mother says, as we stroll down the hall, gazing at the paintings on the walls. We take the elevator to the mezzanine, where we can get some food. We walk down another long hall, passing a small pool, a gym, a spa. “Isn’t this nice, Mom?” I ask, and she nods agreeably.
I hear music, an accordion bleating out a melody in a minor key.
Those were the days, my friend
We’d thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d thought we’d never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
I smile; it is comically, tragically apropos for a nursing home. Still, I guide my mother toward the music, which is both lively and disturbing, as though accompanying the final sequence in a horror film.
We arrive at a small ballroom in which a crowd of mostly wheelchair-bound seniors sit, nodding to the music, enlivened and demonstrating as much to the height of their ability. It reminds me of bar mitzvahs I attended long ago — the wall-to-wall carpeting, the tinny music reverberating in the stale, enclosed space. I turn my head toward the door and notice a bird cage. It’s actually a glass enclosure, in which parakeets and cockatoos chirp and flit from one end to the other.
“Let’s find the café, Mom,” I say, and she replies that she will follow me anywhere.
I direct her out of the ballroom. We walk until at last I see sunlight. They call it the River Cafe; it looks like a bodega. Here we can buy cookies and toiletries and coffee. Booths line a glass wall affording a dazzling view of the water.
“Look at the view!” I have been saying this a lot today, as if the sight of the river were recompense for her confinement.
“Yes, it’s lovely,” she replies, “It’s very nice.”
She is uneasy, asking me constantly if after this tour I will be taking her “out of here.”
“Look at the view!” I have been saying this a lot today, as if the sight of the river were recompense for her confinement.
Yes, I tell her, we are going to my sister’s house, it’s not far at all, we are walking there.
“Thank god,” she says. “ I can’t tell you how happy I was to see you walk in.”
* * *
Almost no new memories imprint; I am struck by the specific details she retains: my entrance into her room, what she felt like at that instant, how desperate she felt just before. Will this crystallized moment be sent down the pipe to long-term memory? Or will she have it only for today?
We buy a cookie then leave the café. On the way to the elevator, a small room set up like a museum alcove catches my eye. Pickles and Egg Cream reads a sign overhead. It’s an exhibit of dioramas in which a woman named Ruby G. Strauss has recreated scenes from her parents’ years on the Lower East Side. I peer into a scene of passengers exiting the subway stop at Broadway and 14th Street, another of Strauss’s grandmother’s garden in summer, wedged between two tenements, a line of clothes drying above children skipping rope and a man in a straw hat reading the paper. There are dozens of little figures holding tiny props: a man drinking wine by a cathedral radio in his parlor, a bride and groom on their wedding day, a grandmother wearing wiry glasses, knitting.
Like the parakeets, the dioramas are too easy a metaphor. Life under glass. Life observed through glass. Life imprisoned within glass walls. I pull my mother out of the alcove. Her eyesight has been failing, so for her the exhibit is a blur.
I punch the code in and the elevator arrives. We emerge on the first floor and exit through the lobby, passing a collection of dolls made in the images of American First Ladies. I can see my mother’s reflection — her long coat and dark hair — in the glass that encases the dolls, moving swiftly and enthusiastically toward the lobby door.
A shock of cold wind hits as it slides open.
“It’s really a nice place,” I say. “In spring all these trees will bloom and they have barbecues in the garden.”
“Yes, I’m so lucky,” my mother says. “Are we leaving now?”
As we walk down the hill toward the guard booth, I think of an Isaac Asimov book I read in my youth. In Caves of Steel, he envisions a futuristic city complex where New York City once stood. It is entirely enclosed, without a drop of fresh air seeping into its midst, contained under metal domes.
The air is so qualitatively different outside the walls of the pavilion in which my mother now lives, which hums with the electrical energy of a well-run hotel. Its seamless wall-to-wall carpet obliterates any hint of nature, the scent of cateria food permeates the first floor corridors, the ring of elevator cars creates a perpetual dinging soundtrack in the lobby.
A siren goes off, as though a dog had jumped a security perimeter. It’s my mother’s electronic bracelet, which they’ve attached to prevent her from wandering off the property. I negotiate our departure without alerting my mother to this indignity.
We proceed eastward on a paved path. Alongside the path runs a tall metal fence that separates us from some tan, patchy grass — the sort that works as visual shorthand for the ravages of winter. I’m breathing better now, as is my mother, who has all morning complained of agitation.
“I was so glad when I saw you in the doorway,” she says again, as we walk into the wind toward Riverdale Avenue. We cross it and as we do, seem to travel through a time portal. The red-brick houses are narrow and built right next to one another; they have small porches, and I see a window sign declaring that We are all made in God’s image. There is a cozy, nostalgic compression to the neighborhood, some sense of Americana that is absent from the busy streets of Manhattan, where I live. I see errant crocuses defying the angry winter wind and a daffodil or two, flags, rusty porch swings, and broken children’s wagons on tiny front yards.
“Where are we going?” my mother asks.
“To your daughter’s house,” I reply. “We’re almost there.”
“That’s right,” my mother says. “I know I have to go back tonight, to the place, but I don’t want to think about it now.” She smiles and plays with the electronic bracelet on her arm, unaware of what it does.
I bring up the river, again, out of habit.
“There’s a beautiful view from your room, Mom,” I say, finding my own smile sinister.
“Yes — ” she starts. “I’m so lucky.”
Another universe unfolds inside my sister’s house. It is organized along the principle of family: children’s bedrooms, toys organized by age appropriateness and size, a kitchen stocked with packaged soups and treats young children like. Still, the wreckage of six children and two dogs is everywhere in evidence: chewed pillows, fights underway, dirty dishes on the table, crayons on the floor. My mother settles on the couch after asking if she can be of any help. She smiles at me, looks around for my sister, asks where the house is. I am not sure how to answer. I tell her it is down the street from where she lives, but this means almost nothing to her. We are supposed to give her something to do, something to occupy her hands and provide her with a sense of her necessity; I have read that all humans need this. Sometimes we do find tasks, but sometimes we lack creativity and tell her she should just relax. She cannot relax; there is nothing relaxing about perpetual confusion. She asks again if she can help. I ask her to pick up the crayons. I find later that she’s put them in the dishwasher.
Noam, who is 7, kisses his grandmother when it’s time for me to walk her back. He looks at her as though in love, and I wish this were all she needed, all anyone needed. I assure her that she will return to this house soon. Right now, it’s time to go. She sighs; I hear a whistle in her breath that betrays more than passing reluctance.
The clouds have drowned in the ink of a night sky; I sing a familiar tune and hold my mother’s hand as we walk back to the nursing home. I assure her I’ll be back soon. It jangles my heart, this wrongness, this dropping off, this dislocation of a family member, the exile imposed by decline. The lobby murmurs with electricity, the First Lady dolls stare expectantly from behind their glass.
It jangles my heart, this wrongness, this dropping off, this dislocation of a family member, the exile imposed by decline.
I punch in the code and we ascend in silence to the second floor. My mother suddenly squeezes my hand and tells me she loves me.
The air in here is stale as ever. Both of us feel the panic return.
I have an impulse to seize my mother’s arm and run. I want to bring her home and put her in bed and sing to her until she falls asleep. Instead, I pick out a nightgown and pat her head. She tries not to cry.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom,” I offer.
“Will you?” she asks.
And I retreat — from her, from her pain, from mine, from the city on the hill.
I punch in the code and the humming box takes me down. First floor. Past the First Ladies. Out into the night air. Onto the BXM2 bus, which will carry me home to Manhattan.
* * *
Reality is a a series of universes with membranes loose and undulating. Where does one end and the other begin? Is there a wall between the perceptions of the “demented” and the rest of us, who retain enough memory to support a more continuous vision of our histories, our days, to support a logic dependent on past and future? Or is it more a window, or more alarming yet, a swinging door?
All realities exist near porous borders — for example, my mind has flown into fantasy as I mentally retrace in words the cavernous, tiny universe of my mother’s nursing home complex. I’ve fashioned it into a cave of steel, in the image of another reality, stolen from within the pages of fiction. The path between it and my sister’s house is now a time machine of my own construction, my sister’s street is a world built of images I see in the past of a country in a time before I was born. My mother merely wants to know whose house we are visiting; her “sane” daughter, her guardian, is dreaming of the way in which streets, houses, concrete walkways, and riverside high-rise complexes splinter and spiderweb outward into separate communities from the moment humans began interacting with time. Which of the two of us, my mother or I, is more connected to reality as we define it as an everyday convenience? Surely my mother’s questions are more practical, more connected to pragmatic concerns, than mine, which are based on hallucinatory impressions of time and space. I have fallen somewhere on this visit, stumbled and slipped into fantasy, allowed the home that keeps my mother safe to drive me close to madness. I am not sure where anything begins or ends anymore, not sure that anything does.
The bus is turning off the Major Deegan Expressway now, it rolls steadily down Fifth Avenue. The trees on either side, illuminated by a flush of light from a streetlamp, are bare and white and wild-limbed against the black sky. They incline toward the street, forming an archway under which we sail. There’s the time portal again, coming into view: the buildings lining the avenue, stately and majestic, are alive with the ghosts of the 19th century, one can see the horses and carriages clopping underneath the arboreal canopy, one can smell the pipe smoke and the dirt, see the women in full skirts hurrying across this boulevard two centuries ago.
How easy it is to slip into reverie, to slip across the boundary from one reality to the other, one fancy to the next, especially in this city. New York is known for its boundaries between rich and poor, but also for the suddenness with which the neighborhoods change. Swank lobbies with doormen line one block, graffiti-worn bodegas and chain link fences line the next. This is how fast Madison Avenue shifts between 94th and 96th Street.
My mother is confined in her cave of steel, trapped within the boundaries of her forgetfulness. I am trapped in my own universe of half dreams and meditations. Her worries are immediate and connected to the hardness of her reality, mine are existential, free to float philosophically above her everyday concerns.
We walk the halls of her city on the hill together, unavailable to each other, trapped under different kinds of glass.
My bus drops me at my West Side stop; I exit to the sight of hot dog carts and the scent of park-bench smokers, to the music of barking dogs and basketballs bouncing. Though now walking a familiar route home, the sensation of wandering does not abate. Maybe it is merely the tableaux of street life shifting and sliding past that evokes my dizzy sense of dislocation. I think it is something more, though — I walk as if chased by the wind, or worse. I slow down, speed up, ascend the stairs to my apartment; still I am pursued. I go to bed and dream of the city on the hill. It is now a castle in which old people turn young, wrinkles are smoothed into satin flesh, the people dance and flick their skirts and sing.
We walk the halls of her city on the hill together, unavailable to each other, trapped under different kinds of glass.
A river runs past this castle, and boats too, in which the people make their escape. I do not see which boat my mother takes, or who ferries it, but when I return for our next visit she is not waiting on her bed for me, gazing at an unknown vista. I am so very glad — when I arrive at her threshold — that this time I do not see her there. She has crossed the perimeter between her world and my reverie, traversed the undulating boundary between reality and fancy, between mother and daughter, between dementia and freedom.
But this — this is only in my dream.
* * *
Leslie Kendall Dye is an actress and freelance writer based in New York City.
I’m a huge fan of saxophone genius Charlie Parker, the man known as Bird. Recently I’ve been listening to live recordings instead of his studio work, most taken from scratchy acetates of ancient radio broadcasts or lo-fi private recordings made by fans like the legendary Dean Benedetti. Even in our internet era, it can be hard to find detailed, reliable information about live recordings from, say, 1947 at LA’s long-defunct Hi-De-Ho Club. In the process of researching, I found David Remnick‘s 2008 New Yorkerarticle “Bird Watcher.”
In it, Remnick profiles jazz historian and Charlie Parker devotee Phil Schaap, who’s hosted “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station for three decades. Although this article is a decade old, it remains relevant because Bird’s art remains relevant, or as Remnick puts it, “There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker.” Parker died in 1955, yet new CDs keep coming out containing historic live recordings that have finally been remastered or re-sequenced. Schaap’s knowledge is so deep that when Dean Benedetti’s lost live recordings of Bird — one of jazz’s true holy grails — needed preserving and documentation, Schaap did the job, reinforcing eight miles worth of disintegrating tape by hand. A repository of information, he relishes minutia and arcana; his show’s winding, digressive style blurs, in Remnick’s words, “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”
Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.
For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.”
In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.”
When Charlie Bird died, fans painted “Bird Lives!” on buildings around New York City. Thanks to fans like Schaap, the epitaph holds true for fans like me.
When the parliament’s foreign affairs committee asked British journalist Oliver Bullough about how much Russian money, both dirty and clean, gets laundered through London and parked in certain assets, he realized how little he or the government actually knew. For the Guardian, Bullough seeks answers to these important questions, separating the corrupt Russian money from the honest money, and addresses why it even matters. And why justice is elusive: Prosecution is even harder in the U.K., especially when key witnesses keep getting poisoned.
So whose money is this? How is it getting here? The bank’s analysts didn’t look into that question. However, had they wanted to, they could have walked down the hall and asked their colleagues, since it turned out that Deutsche Bank itself was a significant culprit in spiriting money out of Russia without informing the authorities. Less than two years after the report – called Dark Matter – was published, Deutsche Bank traders in Moscow were caught secretly moving $10bn (£7.5bn) of their clients’ money out of Russia by illegally exploiting the stock market. (As a result, the bank had to pay fines of $425m (£317m) in the US and £163m in the UK.)
With institutions as sophisticated as Deutsche Bank working to hide Russian money, it is unsurprising that the total amount in the UK remains vague. So there is no real answer to the foreign affairs committee’s first question, except to say that the volume of Russian money in Britain is far larger than the official statistics would have us think.
There are two reasons why we should be worried about this. The first is the low-probability but high-impact chance that Putin is hiding money here in the financial equivalent of sleeper cells, ready to slip out and buy influence when a crisis comes. The second is more significant: no one steals money if they can’t keep it. By letting Putin’s allies launder their stolen fortunes, and hide them in our country, we are drawing a line under their crimes, and rewarding them for actions we should not be condoning. Do we really want Britain to be the Kremlin’s fence?
On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”
The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.
The entire west side of Oakland, California, is undergoing dramatic change, and the Ghost Town neighborhood of resident Annette Miller, who was born in her house on 30th Street over 50 years ago, is right in the thick of it. Rents and house prices have soared, while nearly 43 percent of its neighborhood’s residents remain below the poverty line. And while the white population has more than doubled, the black population has dropped from 50 to 39 percent.
Over the years, Miller has fought an eviction notice and a stream of realtors interested in buying her home. But more recently, with properties on the block selling for over $800K and an industrial building soon to become live-work spaces for artists, she feels like many things are out of her control.
From this perch, Miller has watched as the block—and the entire west side of Oakland—has changed over the decades. She can disentangle its history like an evolutionary biologist. During the Great Recession, houses were bought and lost to banks at some of the highest foreclosure rates in the entire Bay Area. Then those houses were scooped up by real estate men who paced the sidewalks and rarely smiled. Buildings were emptied out, murals painted over. Fences went up. Rent went up—by 71.5 percent over the last five years. Way back in 2001, SFGate called the neighborhood “deliciously attractive” because its “poverty and misfortune preserved a rare sort of purity and beauty,” as if it were a forbidden, primitive fruit. Later, the real estate men would try to take a bite out of Miller, too.
Miller was born in this house, some 52 years ago. “The average person lives in a house for what, three years?” she asks. “I try to tell my kids, living in the same house for so long, it should mean something.” As the pace of change has accelerated, Miller has become the default historian of the block, a keeper of its stories and secrets, an advocate for the old-timers and a bridge to the new arrivals. “It’s not hard at all to remember,” she says of all the missing people and families who once made a life on 30th Street. “When you’ve lived here your whole life, you don’t forget.”
In the past several weeks, a flurry of U.S. Senators have come out in support of a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders announced that his office will propose a plan; Cory Booker filed legislation for a pilot program with Jeff Merkley, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren as cosponsors. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work, and by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers,” Booker said.
The idea—that the government should provide a job for anyone who wants one—is both radical and impressively well-liked. A recent study found that 52 percent of Americans support it, compared with just 29 percent who say they’re opposed. David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, which conducted the research, told The Nation, “This is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled.”
That’s not all that surprising. Americans overwhelmingly believe that everyone who can work should work, and the obvious corollary is that everyone who wants to work should be able to find a job. In its broadest form, this premise appeals across the political spectrum, not just to liberals who want to raise wages and improve labor’s bargaining power. A Trump supporter I met while covering the 2016 New Hampshire primary, a guy deeply convinced that the country is being ruined by lazy moochers, told me, “If you can work, maybe we need to put you to work in government offices or something.” Read more…
WINDSOR, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 19: Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex wave as they leave Windsor Castle after their wedding to attend an evening reception at Frogmore House, hosted by the Prince of Wales on May 19, 2018 in Windsor, England. (Photo by Steve Parsons - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
Markle majored in international relations and theatre at Northwestern University, Illinois. Besides becoming an actor, she became a feminist who worked for UN Women as an advocate for political participation and leadership. Yes, she has been praised and criticised as “outspoken”, but her style never risks being “aggressive” or “combative”, or any of the other words thrown at women who are deemed insufficiently graceful when they disagree with men. Even when she makes staunch political statements, her manner astutely — sometimes cloyingly — balances the forthright and the pleasing. She’s learned to use political maxims and assertions very effectively. As in: “It’s time to focus less on glass slippers and more on glass ceilings.” With the word “fairytale” now a ubiquitous tag line for the royal romance, this should be a useful daily mantra.
The Cinderella story refuses to dwindle into a period piece; in the last 20 years alone there have been six film remakes with white, black and Latina leads. But Markle has not been plucked from poverty or — like the heroines of such romcom adaptations as Pretty Woman and Maid in Manhattan – from the low-status toil and trouble of working-class life. Her net worth as an actor has been estimated at around $5m. An actor’s fortunes can fluctuate, especially when that actor is a woman. But so can the fortunes of a wife. If the royal marriage were to end in divorce, Markle would not have to depend on the Windsor millions nor, like many once-upon-a-time celebrities, design a skincare or jewellery line for QVC.
Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,609 words)
This past February, during the book tour for my essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America, one of the recurring questions I received most frequently from readers was about how I pushed past the fear to write about the most intimate aspects of my life? I assumed the crowd expected to hear about some grandiose regimen I followed — half an hour of meditation followed by an hour-long chat with a therapist, combined with some amount of whiskey drinking, or chain-smoking. Nevertheless, I told them the truth: I never did fully push past the fear when I wrote about my internalized anti-blackness, my surgically-modified labia, or my indulgence in pornography. Fear was ever-present as I worked on my book. I found it was best to acknowledge it, but not let its presence stun me into paralysis.
Fear is the little sister my mother never gave birth to. She appears and reappears in the furthest corner of the room in which I write and inches closer and closer as I approach the heart of a confession. I’ve discovered throughout the years that the best approach to meddlesome siblings is to acknowledge that they’re there, because if you don’t, they will wreak havoc and derail whatever it is you set out to do. This essay is the longer answer to that question.
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