blacksnextdoor

It’s been a while since I heard from Hamid but last week we were in touch quite a bit by email and phone. Hamid is an Arab friend of a friend of a friend getting his own consulting practice based in the Middle East off the ground, trying to identify a candidate to oversee some kind of water treatment project over there on a temp basis.

I didn’t understand why he didn’t think he could find someone with the sought after skill set locally but he insisted the ideal recruit was going to come in from the US or Canada. As per a contract we created together, I would assist in the search.  If the government agency he was consulting for – and I am not saying exactly what Middle Eastern government this is for many reasons — chose to hire someone I referred, I’d make a fee.

My inbox filled up fairly quickly with resumes from a series of highly qualified Pakistani engineers.  After forwarding their paper work on to Hamed – or Dr. Mostafa as he likes to be called and getting little or no response, I spoke to Hamed by phone on Thursday.

Our discussion was not as insightful as I needed it to be. I found him vague in terms of who he thought the ideal person for the job was. Finally, he mentioned that the government always preferred guys with ‘blonde hair and blue eyes.’

It was awkward. There was a tense back and forth between us about the resumes I had sent. I was disappointed and shot him an email the next morning, letting him know that I was no longer interested in partnering with him on his search because of new priorities. As a P.S., I added:

I am shocked to hear that the _____ government prefers their consultants to be white males from the West. Here in the U.S., we’re realizing that some of the best minds in business are coming out of India and China, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve recently kicked out an incompetent white male President and replaced him with a much smarter black one!

Coincidence that last week President Obama reached out to the Arab world through Al Arabiya. He was typically genuine and earnest and did his best to convey the message that Americans and Arabs can work together in mutual interest.

My question is, is it really, truly in our black President’s best interest to ignore the anti-black climate of so much of the Arab mainstream than to address it head on?

Anyone who follows, Blacksnextdoor, knows I dislike Condoleeza Rice but why was it necessary for the Palestinian media to depict her in that infamous cartoon as pregnant with a monkey or use the fact that she’s black as part of so many of their otherwise justifiable attacks?

And as black Iraqis collectivize into The Movement for Free Iraq, hoping to improve their social mobility in a society where black skin is hardly an asset, is this an Iraqi social issue best left to white and black Iraqis to sort out — or the continuing civil rights struggle of people of African descent that the world’s most powerful black figure should acknowledge?

I notice that African Americans see commonality between themselves and the Palestinians. I’m not sure how mutual this sense of commonality is.

Certainly as far as Darfur is concerned, the Arab world would clearly much rather turn its head.

Still, I can see a socio-political collaboration between global Blacks and Arabs with Barack at the center possible that would take the dynamic between the West and the Muslim world beyond a military one. 

As the world sinks economically,however, Barack Obama is under pressure like Fareed Zakaria said, “to save capitalism.” So the focus for him, some would say, has to be bread and butter.

But for Barack’s presidency to be successful, he’ll have to continue to inspire this country and the world to reach for higher ideals. The symbolic nature of being a black American Democratic President demands it.

2008 has been…well, long. Really, really long and unrelentlessly demanding. Besides it being the year that I paid closer attention to a presidential election than ever before, it was the year that I saw 71 movies.  Yes 71.

Some of them were stinkers, but in the spirit of sharing, here are five that weren’t.  I feel obligated to first provide some criteria for what makes these films stand out to me.  Since watching a film is a highly personal emotional experience in which, under the best conditions, I get lost, it’s not easy for me to play movie critic after the fact but I’ll try to come close.

Some of the things I need a film to do for me to like it are:

1.      Take me out of the United States for God’s sake — or if not, show me an America that I haven’t seen a million times before in a million TV shows, commercials and other movies

2.     No obvious good guys and villains

3.     Cinematography that in and of itself puts me in a trance

4.     Dialogue that’s rich with metaphor

      5.    Explore relationships that are disturbing and painful and render

             their beauty                                                                         

I also need characters, of course, that I care about. Characters, I care about are often those who remind me of people I’ve known in my own life or even myself, (which is why I like Jeanne Balibar.  Whenever  I watch her, she’s this awkward, slouchy, effete mirror I look into and better understand – and for those of you who can’t grasp how a black woman can find aspects of herself in a white actress, you’re most likely too stupid to appreciate any of these films, so go back to chasing your own tail around in circles or being so keenly aware of who you’re not, you’re the biggest bore who ever lived).

OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way,  I would also like to add that these are not films that came out in 2008. They’re films I watched in 2008. They’re all DVD’s available at Netflix, some of them may be available other ways. The list that follows is not a ranking, just a list of films that are all superb:

·         The Road to Love, Remi Lange’s story about two young Arab men in Paris who fall in love is unforgettable, deeply moving and so romantic

·         Dar Es Salaam, directed by Issa Serge Coelho is the most moving argument for a war that I’ve ever seen. Shot in Chad, the actors who play guerillas resisting an oppressive government are the most poignant soldiers ever.  Just as poignant,  the desert backdrops

·         Testamento   For those of you who are fans of Cesaria Evora, she makes a cameo appearance in this. Very poetic, nostalgic feel to this film. Epic. Seductive in a uniquely Cape Verdean way. 

·         Inch’Allah Dimanche shows you the life of an Algerian immigrant family in France. The Muslim mother and daughter in law struggling to create lives in Europe come across as uncomfortably real. In fact, at times their strained relationship calls up the extreme culture clash between me and my own mother and perhaps between you and yours

·         Bamako director Abdelrahmane Sissako lands masterful blows against the world financial powers that exploit Africa. An intellectual exercise disguised as a film, it features  Senegalese Femme fatale Aissa Maiga. If you develop a crush on her as everyone quickly does, you can also see her bounce in and out of Romain Duris’s bedroom in Poupees Russes.

Ok, that does it for me for 2008. The next time I post something new for you to read here at Blacks Next Door, it will be 2009, and hopefully that’s a good thing.

Please send me any list of five films you think I should see. Until then affectionate, emphatic kisses to all!

There’s a great interview at http://www.jamati.com with Stafford Bailey and Judy Thayer-Bailey on their documentary “Blacks Without Borders” that gives you a better idea of what its all about. Because I’m feeling restless right now — it’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve got a million things to do before I’m running down my hill to catch a 7:30 express bus into Manhattan in the morning — I’ll just say that I greatly appreciated having seen this film and recommend it as much for the intimate view of modern South Africa it provides as for the entertainment.

As for entertainment, I’ll touch on what I mean by that in a moment.

I had no idea that South Africa was such a networking and new biz development paradise for African Americans. My mental image of cities like Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town did not include lavish estates with Ferraris in the garage, owned by black folks from the States. Thanks to the Baileys, globalization becomes a discussion in which African-Americans are not just spectators. Bravo.

It was refreshing to see African Americans fly in the face of the usual localized and restricting depictions. Bravo to the Baileys again and again.

As for the entertainment part I referred to, it was difficult not to think of Jurassic Park the whole time I watched this movie, especially when Charles Henderson, the Managing Director of LEAD, offered a tour of his dream home complete with a mini artificial jungle. The contrasting very visceral poverty of the surrounding shanty towns was never more present than in these MTV CRIBS-like scenes. If you grew up on Hollywood films as most of us, you couldn’t help but forecast an ending where reality violently closed in on the expatriate community’s too perfect fantasy.

Still, I was in disbelief when the discussion that took place after the screening quickly became a forum for complaints on African Americans in general. The audience was mostly black, but not black American and words I’m used to hearing from non American blacks to describe American blacks were thrown around, most notably superficial.  One woman of no particular distinction shared that black people from the US didn’t like blacks from other cultures. A Caribbean writer who had lived in Africa, remarked how African Americans in South Africa rely heavily on the US Embassy to create their social activities and to keep them at a distance from anyone but each other. Of course, there were the stern warnings that African Americans not perpetuate the exploitative agenda of whites in Africa.

While every African American interviewed in the film seemed to have relocated to Africa because of a profound cultural connection with the place, the audience dismissed the connections between South Africa and the African Americans in the film as not sincere or tangible enough. Questions as to how many local South Africans would benefit from their success propagated throughout the room, and so on. I was not able to get in a word in and left frustrated.

So here’s what I think.

I think that it’s always awesome to see economically empowered blacks. I don’t care what country we’re from. I attend large gatherings of executives across every sector from every global region fairly regularly and little more than a handful of blacks are ever present if any, so learning that African Americans are this legitimate entrepeneurial force in South Africa really moves me.

Emphasizing ethics when looking at blacks doing business strikes me as unfair even though I would like black wealth to accrue in behalf of some clearly self-serving social strategy. Why not?

I also think that black immigrants who arrive in the U.S. stick close with people from back home. It’s a common occurrence when people relocate, in fact, for them to form cultural enclaves so I don’t understand why African-Americans in Africa should be held to such a different standard.

What a coincidence that Dexter Gordon’s ‘Cheesecake’ is suddenly playing, reminding me that blacks from America have always had a global presence. (Dexter Gordon equals Paris for me at least). Clearly, African Americans need to be more vigilant in rising beyond the xenophobia of the larger American culture, but I think that the whole African-American legacy is so broad and all encompassing in terms of its progressive influences from music to civil rights that people can often not see the forest for the trees and be unfairly critical.

I could go on and on here, but it’s Sunday night.

Would somebody help me out here? What do you think?