poverty

The Orphan Rescue

andrea — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

The Orphan Rescue opens in Sosnowiec, Poland in the late spring of 1937 as twelve-year-old Miriam and her grandfather take her younger brother David to an orphanage. Miriam’s grandparents have no other choice. The Depression has been a financially trying time for everyone, and when her locksmith grandfather injures his hand and can no longer work, the family is faced with a difficult decision. Young Miriam is pulled from school to work as a butcher’s assistant, while David must go and live at the orphanage, headed by the beady-eyed, vulture-like director, Mr. Reznitsky. After already losing her parents, Miriam is devastated to say good-bye to her brother and vows to bring him home, one way or another.

The Orphan Rescue offers the pre-teen reader a strong girl character in Miriam, who is true to her word and perseveres until she fulfills her promise, even when it requires her to tell lies and transgress the rules. In the book’s afterword, the author, Anne Dublin, shares how The Orphan Rescue is based on the true story of her cousins, Miriam and Alter Chaim. Dublin also states in this section that she wanted today’s children to know that poverty throughout the world still forces families to send their children to orphanages and take them out of school to work.

Although this book is intended for pre-teens, I decided to read it to my 8-year-old daughter. She thought Miriam did the right thing because brothers and sisters have an obligation to protect one another. But she also believed “that was a long time ago, they don’t have orphanages today.” I told my daughter that these types of institutions no longer exist in our country, but we still have foster homes. This led to a fairly lengthy conversation about the few alternatives some parents have when they lose their jobs or become ill and have no immediate family to help them out.

As a former teacher, I can see that The Orphan Rescue would make a good class reader, as the subject matter holds the interest of strong readers, while the story is easy and short enough to accommodate those with lower reading skills. The book also provides teachers with numerous areas of discussion and starting points to explore other areas, such as European Geography, World Religions, the Depression, Genealogy and Child Labour.

Another idea might be to create a second version of this book for stronger or older readers. The first few chapters are very dramatic and could have been fleshed out with more period details to draw the reader further into the narrative.

Overall, The Orphan Rescue was a rich story and all the more compelling because it was true.

Written by: Heather Leighton, March 26th 2011

Threads of Hope

farhana — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Directed by Amanda Ibrahim

Ferasha Films

I have to admit to watching this film with much trepidation. Too many films and documentaries are dedicated to analyzing the poor state of women’s lives in the developing world, but few dedicate their focus to researching and explicating the systemic inequalities rooted in patriarchy, that exist to reinforce women’s conditions. However, while watching I was determined to keep an open mind and value the work and perspective of a young woman of color, endeavoring to make a difference in the world by documenting women’s lives in Kolkata, India.

This is a short piece by American student Amanda Ibrahim, who with a scholarship, traveled to India for two weeks to document the effects of the ConneXions vocational training on the women who worked in the training center. ConneXions, Ibrahim narrates, focuses on creating job opportunities for women by training and employing them in fair trade textile production. One of the stated aims is to make women self-dependent while providing them with an opportunity to help their family with money.

Though the camerawork was good, the footage was quite limited. Only a few people and places in Kolkata were included in the film. Much of the filming was done at the center with the management team and the women participants. When the women were depicted, they were always carrying out particular gendered roles, including cooking, cleaning, dancing and sewing. When they were interviewed, they seemed shy, awkward and as though either reading from a cue card or being prompted by the person next to the camera. Two women, Shibani and Krishna were interviewed more extensively, and both assert that through their work at ConneXions their lives have been transformed; they can now afford to put food on the table and pay for their children’s schooling. At one point, Shibani proudly states that everything she makes goes to her family and children. At this point, one could probably ascertain the reasons for women being the recipients of this program.

Though I appreciate the altruistic aspirations of the ConneXions project, this film, and the limitations I expect Ibrahim experienced, the main contentions I have with this film all relate to its limited analysis.

My lesser contention is the overarching theme of Christian ministering that ran throughout the film. The film opens with the words of a Christian prayer, and you later learn that the ConneXions vocational training center was founded by a Swedish couple, who had come to Kolkata as Christian missionaries through the non profit organization Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor. The homepage of Servants states that these Christian communities participate with the poor to bring hope and justice through Jesus Christ. All of the managers state their Christian position, and one in particular states that she teaches the women the gospel. What you don’t know by watching this film is whether the women are coerced into listening to the gospel or converting religions in order to access the training program. I am always weary of Christian missions particularly considering its mostly violent history with Canadian, South American, and Australian indigenous communities. That an immediate alliance and little analysis is done on the role of Christian ministering in the slums of India indicates the religious bias and socio-political naivety of the director.

My greatest contention with this film is its focus on female empowerment through Christian vocational training. I don’t dispute that the women are becoming empowered by receiving trained in textile production, and having then the potential to seek employment in the tailoring industry. However, the explicit goal of achieving empowerment through becoming self-dependent does not stand up against the stated end-result of these women spending everything they earn on their family. Self-sufficiency does not always equate empowerment. This is encapsulated in the comment of one of the young girls interviewed who shares innocently that she will have to leave the center in the very near future because she has to get married and will soon be just a housewife. This project perceives these women as simply reproducers and passive recipients of services. It offers a band aid solution to women’s disproportionate poverty by training them in a skill that would lead them to meeting their most basic needs, without addressing systemic gender inequity and the social, economic and political relations between men and women that perpetuate women’s oppression in India.

Ibrahim ends her film by depicting a group of smiling women, stating that the women who work at the center are blessed with deep friendships, which might be true, but which functions to generalize and romanticize the experiences of these women without providing evidence to support this statement, masking their relations with each other and with the center's management.

An interesting short film by a young female filmmaker, admirably attempting to foreground women’s lived experiences in the developing world. I only hope that her future directorial endeavors offer more mature and critical analysis.

Written by: Toni Francis, January 12th 2011

Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars

barbara — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Sonia Faleiro

Penguin India

Beautiful Thing is an eponymous title. It is journalist Sonia Faleiro's first book, about the dancers and not-so-secret prostitutes of the “dance bars” of suburban Bombay (Mumbai). These now-illegal establishments offered the tripartite pleasures of alcohol, enticing women, and Bollywood music. Their dancers were “bootiful” young girls, sometimes in their initial teenage years, and well aware that their “booty”—pun unintended—is what defines them, and keeps them fed and clothed.

But this free-market beauty of Faleiro's informants and the women in their lives—mothers, daughters, sisters, wives of their lovers, their hijra (male-to-female intersex, transsexual, or transgender) friends—is what dehumanises them into things. Beautiful things. Things that entertain, things to watch, things to make money with, things to rape, things to give as gifts, things to show off, things to have sex with, things that produce meals, things to punch when the world tightens the screws.

And their eternal tragedy is that their beauty fades, usually by the grand old age of thirty, but their essential thingness, their perceived worthlessness as anything other than beautiful and sexually available women, remains.

And yet Faleiro's informants are neither cowering nor desolate, nor are they subaltern heroines, stiff-upper-lipping the world. Her guide to “the secret world of Bombay's dance bars,” Leela, came to Bombay at fourteen to escape her abusive father's pimping. More infuriating than him selling her virginity to local policemen for a gang-rape at the station, she said, was his refusal to give her the money she earned. Bombay was much better. She could get money just for dancing, relative freedom to choose “kustomers,” and pretty things from men who admired her. Even weekends at expensive resorts. Although the bar owner took the greater share of the money men threw at her, she made enough to live in luxury. If she was forced to "go" with a patron, he was usually a mafia boss, and there was both privilege and profit in sleeping with them.

The histories of the other dancers are all riffs on the same general theme. They come from poor families with too many mouths to feed and little money to do it with. They were prostituted from puberty, and the injustice of being the broke and abused breadwinner nagged them till they decided to start working for themselves in the big city. In their first months several were tricked or forced into brothels, in conditions harsher than home, but most escaped—Leela by jumping out of a window—and found their way to a dance bar. For all the politically-motivated moral outrage directed at these ostensible destroyers of the social fabric and disgraces unto womankind, the bar dancers of Bombay were amongst the tiny minority of poor, illiterate, victims of abuse who managed to win a measure of independence and happiness without institutional intervention, and no social capital apart from their “bootiful” faces.

In fact, if one manages to look past the scene-stealing women, Beautiful Thing is a chronicle of total institutional failure. From “family” and “community,” to the state legislature for banning their “immoral” profession (in open defiance of their Constitutional right to live and work without prejudice), to law-keepers who extort, rape and get free blowjobs from this suddenly-unemployed or illegally-employed demography, these women have been let down by every institutional holy cow. The only place that lends them space—at a price—is the underground nexus of police, politicians and the mafia that “really” runs Bombay. And even then it is a faceless, substitutable existence amongst a steady influx of fresher, younger girls.

Yet, despite the horror, anger, frustration, pity and even guilty relief (there, but for the grace of god...) that one might feel about the dancers, their defining moment comes, fittingly, at the end. Leela, having lost family, job, home, savings, and friends, is about to be smuggled into Dubai without a passport, ripe for every kind of abuse and exploitation imaginable. To reassure a nervous Faleiro, she points to her own smiling face and asks, “Do you see fear?”

And Faleiro has to admit she doesn't.

Written by: Priyanka Nandy, November 26th 2010

The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti

priyanka — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell

University of Iowa Press

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell's collection of short stories, The Company of Heaven, is an unkind narrative of Haiti and Haitians. It is unkind in the way one can be unkind when recalling a sibling’s awkward puberty or seeing for the first time, the humiliation of a parent by a stranger in a public place. She is unkind to her Haitians and yet she remains a family member, intimately invested and loyal. It is difficult to like even one of her characters, however, it is even more difficult to look away from them.

In "Meat," a stranger stranded at the airport in Boston describes the contents of her suitcase. Cooked meat to delight her undernourished relatives in Haiti for at least a week. The traveler cannot stop returning to Haiti and yet she describes a mean Haiti where dog fights dog and even goat, and family members are picked up off the street by masked men and discovered decomposing in sewage holes.

The living are also decomposing: there is sickness in Haiti and Phipps-Kettlewell rarely distinguishes between mental, spiritual and physical corrosion. There is cancer, old age, the lust for little girls, insanity, and AIDS too—a disease that wipes out a circle of beautiful boys and men in the story "River Valley Rooms." The narrator mourns in rooms inhabited by decaying family and filthy dogs. The narrator has returned from the US and becomes the reluctant heir to her late father’s patriarchy: spying on her brother Justin and her mother and saving them from an encroaching army of parasites siphoning off the illusory remains of the family wealth and status.

And yet Phipps-Kettlewell’s characters are not caricatures of rich and poor in a poor country. Neither the poor or the rich are noble, and the power (im)balance between the two fluctuates within each story. Phipps-Kettlewell never allows the servants, workers, guards, gardeners and other dependents of the masters to be powerless. In "Down by the River," it is the servant Venant who carries the collapsed patriarch Misye Emanyèl from his shower and hands him his teeth. There are the legion of servants who attend Misye Emanyèl’s funeral bringing their children and grandchildren: "They were there to bury our dead. We were never there to bury theirs."

The servants and poor Haitians are at the disposal of the elite, they stoke the masters’ vanities, witness their follies and also fan their paranoia. In "Land," a woman who describes herself as French and proud of it, is swindled and threatened by Sasal, her son’s poor friend, in a land deal gone wrong. Sasal is sick of ‘these bourgeois’ but accepts their money. In "Down by the River," the daughter recently bereaved by her father’s death seduces a poor child with a new dress, running water and the promise of America—she steals her away from an impoverished but devastated surrogate mother. And in "Marie Ange’s Ginen," a wily American immigrant returns to his community and extorts a travel fee from friends desperate to flee poverty. The vessel to America is overcrowded, poorly constructed and destined to sink. And yet an old mother boards it and makes a pact with death, with the ocean, with ocean zombies, that she may be taken but that her daughter must survive and escape misery.

Phipps-Kettlewell’s stories describe poor people, even her rich prose cannot conceal their poverty of both spirit and pocket. Her narrators do not conceal depravity, failure, perversion, grief, and longing. As a result, her fiction cannot be conventionally beautiful... but it is true.

Written by: Chiseche Salome Mibenge, November 2nd 2010

Take It From Me

andrea — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by Emily Abt

Pureland Pictures

Take It From Me makes an emotional statement even more than a political one. This documentary film chronicles the time period after the passing of the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act, which placed a five-year limit on public assistance. Emily Abt, the producer and director, is a former social caseworker in New York City. She offers us the daily lives of four women who are struggling against great odds to raise themselves and their children up out of poverty.

Abby is a nineteen-year-old mother of three who has been turned down for public assistance six times due to reasons varying from her age to her parents making too much money to qualify. Her sons have been placed in foster care until she can get an apartment. Yet without public and housing assistance, she cannot pay for it with her paltry earnings. It is heartbreaking to watch as her sons suffer physical and emotional abuse in foster homes, while Abby’s case continues to get delayed by the courts. She is a loving mother, easy to root for, and it is frustrating to watch her being dragged around by a heartless system.

Iyoka and Louie Riveria are a young married couple with a young daughter, who have suffered a house fire which left them temporarily homeless in a shelter. They are cut off from welfare during the film as Iyoka chooses between public assistance and completing her college degree. Her strength, pride, and desire to offer her daughter a better life is admirable. Iyoka worries about not being able to afford health insurance or daycare for her daughter. Louie shares it is difficult to feel like a man while they are experiencing that “no one is on their side.” By the end of the film, they are separated as the strain of their financial situation is too much for their relationship.

Teresa has been out of work for three years and has gone on multiple job interviews in that time. She is facing the threat of having her very small public assistance funds taken away from her at any moment. Her nineteen-year-old son lives with her and suffers from an undiagnosed mental illness. Teresa’s life is consumed with frugality, stretching the amount she gets as far as she can when most of it “only goes to cover the phone and electric bill.” The filmmakers lose touch with Teresa as she refuses to talk to them anymore after her son has an extreme reaction to their presence. In her last interview, Teresa candidly tells the camera that without the welfare money, she is sure that she and her son will die.

Valentina is a recovered alcoholic and drug abuser and mother to at least four children. She has been on welfare for twenty-eight years and offers an inspirational story of recovery and perseverance. Raised in foster care, abandoned by a drug addicted mother, Valentina is proud to have kept her promise to her own children that she would never leave them. She works cleaning pots for $5.50 an hour, yet she also dreams of getting her GED and a better job. She is ready to get off of welfare and is also realistic that even working full-time, it is only with the help of her local church that she is able to make it. One of the most inspirational scenes in the movie is when she encourages other recovering addicted mothers to take it one day at a time, and think of their children first.

The film effectively makes a point about the shadow side of the American dream and how public assistance creates dependency without empowerment. It also shows the tragic impact of our inability to provide for all of our citizens by meeting their needs, nourishing and taking care of their children, and supporting the empowerment of women, especially single mothers.

Written by: Jillian Vriend, October 31st 2010

Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant

tina — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Susan Supernaw

University of Nebraska Press

On the surface, Susan Supernaw’s memoir Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant is a story about an unlikely Miss Oklahoma winner and her trip to the 1971 Miss America pageant. The true story, however, is Supernaw’s struggle to escape a childhood marred by extreme poverty and violence and earn the Native American name revealed to her during a near death experience.

While reading the memoir, it was hard to keep in mind that Muscogee Daughter wasn’t a work of fiction. Supernaw’s struggles haunted me long after I finished reading the book, especially the image of her dying grandmother sharing a bed with Supernaw as an ill and abandoned infant.

Supernaw was the fourth daughter in a poor family and her birth was a major disappointment to her father. When she was just a baby her parents left her in the care of her elderly grandparents on a farm in rural Oklahoma so that her father could go back to college. It’s never made clear why her parents took the older girls and left their newborn, but whatever the reason it was ill conceived. By the time she was six months old, Supernaw’s grandmother had died and her mother returned to collect her.

Months of being confined to her grandmother’s bed and being fed cow’s milk and coffee by her inexperienced grandfather landed her in the hospital for many weeks. That would be the first of a handful of close calls in Supernaw’s life and each time she believed she was about to die, a beautiful woman appeared to comfort her. Supernaw believed she was a manifestation of the Corn Mother.

The second time the woman appeared she brought a small dancing bear, a personification of Supernaw’s Native American name. A community elder came to Supernaw’s bed side and advised her to follow her destined path in order to earn the right to her name and earning that name became her primary goal. Paralyzed after a horse riding accident, Supernaw fought to walk again and eventually, she became an athletic high school cheerleader, a Presidential scholar, an accidental beauty queen, and a unifying figure for the eastern and western tribes of Oklahoma.

Supernaw memoir reveals many painful and personal details about her life. We learn of the abusive father who left the family bereft and who was replaced by an even more tyrannical and dangerous step-father, though initially the four girls were happy to have him provide more than the ketchup sandwiches they had been accustomed to eating for dinner.

Supernaw seems to understand that her family’s story is representative of a piece of American history—one that is too often untold; however, it feels like too much was left unsaid. Though she was an anthropology major concerned with human rights, her attitude towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is puzzling. Supernaw says that it gave her white boyfriend “an unfair disadvantage and made me feel like I’d been given an unfair advantage.” In later pages she reveals that she “felt a lot of confusion over minority preference,” yet she also felt the sting of racism from her boyfriend who believed her Presidential award was the result of her being a minority. There were was also the cheerleaders’ parents who did not allow her in their homes; the Miss America pageant that treated her like an oddity; and the media that used offensive stereotypes to describe her.

Muscogee Daughter was both fascinating and frustrating. As a reader I wanted to know more about her family and her experience as a woman of color living between white and Native worlds. The importance of earning her Native American name is clear, but the significance of the milestone is not. Nevertheless, Susan Supernaw’s memoir is essential in the narrative of American history.

Written by: Stephanie Sylverne, October 29th 2010

Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories

mandy — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Morrison Phoel

Southern Methodist University Press

There is hardly anything more satisfying to read than well-crafted short stories. Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s debut collection of tales from Bulgaria intertwines the stories of several families living in fictional Old Mountain, many sharing a concrete post-Communist apartment building, neighbors in crumbling plaster houses; and often, surviving similar struggles in their attempts to find love and meaning in life and to escape the poverty they have always known.

In Cold Snap, we meet unhappy couples who argue, then don’t speak because there’s nowhere to go, no way to leave the other person and the tiny space they have carved out together. An underemployed husband spends his summer earnings on a satellite dish; soon, his friends have filled the apartment, pushing out any space for reconciliation with his migraine suffering wife. Their son begins to fail his English class, where his teacher gives lessons on contextual words like heartbreak, forsaken, hanky, and drunk—words that feel funny to learn and nevertheless described abysmal realities and people at whom you should not laugh.

The beauty of these narratives is that they’re told across stories, in nonlinear ways. A young mathematician graduates and faces an uninspiring future. One woman compulsively knits extraordinarily beautiful sweaters, the kind that her friends joke could only be worn on shows like Dallas. Upon completion, she abandons them by the dozen in her cellar. The only woman who has made it out comes home for a visit, but leaves again for Japan before she is ensnared by her old life. The community dentist is busiest in cold months—the only time she is truly swamped—when the townspeople flock to the only place where they can sit in a well-heated room for several hours at a time. In the final story, after which the book is named, every character makes one final appearance as the entire village waits for the central heat to come on in the dead of winter with one powerful yet simple flick of a switch.

Phoel worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria, and it shows. She writes the way only a cultural insider can, with compassion and humor and insight into the lives of her characters and their unique struggles. Yet her forced distance is the best part of her work. Through her, we peer into the lives of others without ever fully inhabiting them. The balance is perfect.

Reading about the street dog affectionately called “Cucumber” because of his protruding rib cage—who shows up in every one of the book’s stories—I cried so hard one evening that I woke my sleeping partner. For a long time, we were both unable to sleep. Even the less overtly sad of these bleakly charming stories kept me up at night, entranced, and haunted me still weeks later. If only everyone could translate the experiences from their time abroad into such compelling fiction.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 25th 2010

Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Alexandra Pelosi

HBO Films

Orange County, California is known for both wealth and political conservatism. In fact, the most recent American Community Survey reports that the largely Caucasian locale boasts a median household income of $81,260.

But as filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi’s latest documentary, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, demonstrates, more than ten percent of OC residents live below the poverty line. Some sleep on the streets while others find shelter in rundown hotels, where single rooms rent for between $800 and $900 a month. Ironically, Disneyland is a short distance from the county’s seediest areas, but for impoverished motel residents, Disney is no more accessible than Saturn.

Pelosi’s camera gives viewers an inside peak into the desperation of those living in cramped and often bedbug-infested quarters, places rife with drug dealing, prostitution, and police surveillance. That kids grow up in this environment—sharing one tiny room with siblings, parents, and pets—is sobering and should be an indictment of U.S. housing policies. Sadly, it falls short.

One of the problems is that Pelosi interviews too many people, and it’s hard to remember who’s who. In addition, she never moves beyond the personal, and fails to inject needed political analysis into the discussion. For example, why is housing so expensive? Do motel residents have access to social service programs, job training, or counseling? And most importantly, why has the government refused to build new public housing for those unable to pay market rates?

Despite these flaws, the film is not without its poignant moments. One woman, a married mom of two, proudly touts her family’s survival. Although she admits that she hated living on the streets, she champions the things she learned there. “We know how to bathe in eight ounces of water,” she begins. “We know how to do pooh-pooh in a bag.”

Like all of the “motel kids,” her daughters attend Perfect Hope School, a public program exclusively for those without permanent housing. The sixty-seven pupils stay at Hope as long as they remain in the OC, meaning their education is not interrupted if they leave the motel. Teacher Judy explains one of the school’s advantages: “No one makes fun of you if you wear the same clothes for thirty days.” Plus, she continues, two meals a day—albeit heavy on sugar and fat—are provided.

Predictably, many of the kids have deep problems. One boy, eleven-year-old Zack, is already on probation for robbery. “Some of us kids want what other people have,” he says, “so we just take it.” He later expresses surprising self-awareness. “Sometimes I do it for attention,” he admits. “My mom is too busy.”

Profiling Zack’s family in greater depth would have made the film more insightful and would have given viewers a better understanding of how easily life can fray for the working poor. After all, Zack’s mother and twenty-one-year-old sister both work full-time, but simply don’t earn enough to save the thousands of dollars they’d need to get into an apartment.

Despite these faults, Pelosi deserves recognition for bringing attention to a population that too-often falls through the cracks. What’s more, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County prods lawmakers to do something about the country’s worsening affordable housing crisis. Since approximately two percent of U.S. children are presently undomiciled, the film is a stark, if understated, wake-up call. Let’s hope Pelosi’s mom—yes, Alexandra is Nancy’s daughter—and her colleagues will watch it and once-and-for-all do something about this shameful reality.

Premieres on HBO tonight at 9p.m. EST

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, July 26th 2010

Entre Nos

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Gloria La Morte, Paola Mendoza

IndiePix Studios

Mariana and her children, Gabriel and Andrea, are stranded in New York City. Two weeks after her husband Antonio asked them to leave their native Colombia and join him in Queens after a lengthy separation, he left $50 in an envelope, headed for Miami, and stopped answering his phone. A family friend tells Mariana that he isn’t coming home.

Undocumented and completely broke, Mariana tries to sell homemade empanadas on the streets while also accepting random jobs as they come. On one occasion, she’s forced to leave the kids home alone while she goes out for a few hours to take day work as a dishwasher. Kids being kids, they lay around teaching each other curse words in English until a friend comes by with a better offer, and they all sneak out to take an illicit dip in an elderly neighbor’s pool. Racing home after they’re discovered and chased away by an angry old man, they’re only seconds ahead of their mother on the subway platform, who witnesses them out alone in public. Clearly terrified for her children’s safety and of the U.S. authorities, she barges into their tiny apartment moments after her children, shouting at Gabi that in this country, they take children away from their parents.

Though their circumstances are often dire, the bond depicted between Mariana, Andrea, and Gabriel is remarkable. Overcoming a seemingly endless stream of difficulties along the way, Gabi pitches in to help the family survive, collecting cans when Mariana is too sick or exhausted to do it herself. And while the ways in which Mariana sacrifices for her children are clear, there are also lovely examples like when she pays for the kids to see a movie together. The $21 entrance fee for three is a bit steep, but she can shell out enough for the two of them and makes them swear to meet her out front the moment the film is over. They shriek in agreement as they race into the air-conditioned building as she calls after them, "Te quiero!"

Co-director Paola Mendoza is largely responsible for honoring the depictions of the struggling immigrant mother and her young children; the story is based on her own family’s struggle, a tribute to her mother. Entre Nos is very visually pleasing, expertly edited and strikingly beautiful despite the pain it depicts. Scenes of quintessential American poverty loom throughout, like neighbor women sharing at-home abortion tips on the sly or when the small family stands timidly outside the emergency room after Gabi hurt his leg until Mariana offers to “wash it at home” before they retreat back into the night. Whether they’re afraid of being deported or because they simply can’t afford the medical bills, the scene is an important reminder of how poverty and immigration are often deeply intertwined.

The film weaves themes of homelessness and the camaraderie of the streets with universal depictions of the strength and resilience of single mothers and their innocent, precocious children. It also reminds you that even if life as an undocumented immigrant seems unbearable, even if you want to go home, you may not be able to afford to turn around.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, June 20th 2010

The Japanese Wife

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Aparna Sen

Saregama Films

Here’s what I can muster for Aparna Sen’s film The Japanese Wife: I still don’t quite get it.

The Japanese Wife is not as simple as Madame Butterfly, but I think a similar analysis applies. This film was odd. The story is about this awkward (poor!) Bengali school teacher who is lifelong pen pals with an equally socially obtuse (relatively poor) Japanese woman. Neither of them speak English as a first language, yet they communicate, fall in love, get married, and live their lives (separately) through letters. There was no miscegenation happening.

Now what is the term for sub-empires orientalizing other sub-empires?

Every time Miyage, the Japanese Wife character, spoke there would be this ever so delicate music wafting in (gongs!) and all of a sudden, as if it were the elusive groundhog itself, would come her voice. Her tiiiiiny, high-pitched, broken-English voice. I have nightmares about this voice. Exotic yes, feminine definitely, little Miyage. Flutter flutter. "Miyage" to my knowledge, is a Japanese surname, not a first name. Miss!

A lot of The Japanese Wife was by the book. Like Snehamoy (the husband) being seen as a “race”-traitor/Japan-lover, so the plot line included the exotic Asian woman captivating Snehamoy enough for him to shun Indian women, specifically Sandhya (Raima Sen’s character), the beautiful young widow who (due to unfortunate circumstances) moves in with Snehamoy and his aunt. It’s best shown in a scene that takes on nationalistic proportions, where Snehamoy represents Japan in a village kite battle against the ultra-Indian kite team manned by the local teenage boys of Snehamoy's village.

So I figure, like the timing of M. Butterfly, Incredible !ndia, too, is going through major cultural-economic shifts. I mean look at the March Nuclear Agreement; thanks to the Obama Administration, India’s ascendancy as a "sub-empire" is firmly in place. Clearly Incredible !ndia’s capitalist growth and emerging status as world economic power (8.2% growth according to Asian Development Bank in 2010) is a discursive force in itself.

New India should exercise its growing machismo and brand its own Orientalism. But that’s not it! Bengali men are not exactly the epitome of machismo. Neither does India share in the post-WWII relations between the U.S. and Japan. India is expanding and the wave it’s expanding on is producing, circulating, and reinventing cultural practices and relations. So, it’s not as simple as saying that this example of fetishizing Japanese women is some sort of inherited or weird mimesis of nation-buildings past.

In a sense (and I feel like I’m sidestepping history, power, labour, etc.), the idea of the gaze is flexible. And employed by Indians. Just watch The Japanese Wife. Or Chandni Chowk to China. Or the host of new Indian films featuring ethnically Asian characters.

Now the celibacy of Miyage and Snehamoy remains. Maybe Sen really is a genius and made it easy for us to see the symbolism in Snehamoy’s celibacy as a way of describing a postcolonial nation-in-process. Clearly India is not Empire-proper. Indian men are still symbolically emasculated, same as U.S. hegemony still exists. Or I mean, shoot, it really is all about miscegenation. And Indians are not ready for transnational-transracial love like this. You’ve got to preserve some Brahmin in there.

Shrugs.

Written by: Nafisa Ferdous, June 11th 2010

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between the Rich and the Poor in an Interconnected World

admin — Sun, 23 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Jacqueline Novogratz

Rodale

Would you give up a promising career in international banking to pursue a lifetime of attempting to understand and eradicate global property? Jacqueline Novogratz began her career as an international banker at Chase Manhattan Bank. As a member of the Credit Audit team for Chase Manhattan Bank, Novogratz was responsible for reviewing the quality of the bank’s loans in other countries, especially in troubled economies. As time went on, Novogratz began to explore the possibilities of working with the poorest people. As her interest grew in helping the impoverished, she found a New York City based microfinance organization that focused on lending to women. The Blue Sweater tells the story of Novogratz’s career from international banking to philanthropy.

After leaving her job at Chase Manhattan Bank to work with the microfinance organization, she was sent to Africa to work with women. Novogratz had never imagined herself working in Africa. She was unprepared for the hostility she experienced from the African women and the amount of corruption and lack of credibility in some of the programs. Although she began her trip to Africa as a naïve idealist, she began to learn that she needed to listen to program participants to truly understand what was needed. While in Rwanda, Novogratz participated in the founding of Duterimbere, a microfinance organization that would lend exclusively to women. She also assisted in setting up a successful bakery operation for single women. The Rwandan genocide had a devastating effect on the organizations she helped to establish.

After spending time in Africa, Novogratz had the opportunity to attend graduate school for business administration and to work with other international organizations. Novogratz directed the Philanthropy Workshop and the Next Generation Leadership program for the Rockefeller Foundation. During this time, Novogratz also founded the Acumen Fund, an organization based on “patient capital.” Patient capital is a combination of venture capitalism and traditional charity that focuses on lending to social entrepreneurs. The programs sponsored by Acumen Fund are also based on the idea the poor will pay for goods and services, instead of the model of traditional charity.

I thought Novogratz’s story was inspiring and instructional. The Blue Sweater is accessible to those who do not have a background in international finance. Her commitment to helping people living in poverty in a meaningful way is based on the idea that all people are interconnected.

Written by: Rekesha Spellman, May 23rd 2010

Jesus Boy

admin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Preston L. Allen

Akashic Books

Star-crossed intergenerational love between a Christian matriarch and a young church pianist sounds like an unlikely fictional masterpiece, but in Jesus Boy, Preston L. Allen’s empathic, intricate storytelling skillfully unfolds this improbable tale of religious conviction, sexual desire, and social pressure to conform.

While striving to maintain a virtuous private life—and wholly failing to do so—Elwyn Parker struggles with his public image as a young preacher. At the tender age of sixteen, his childhood crush becomes pregnant by another boy, confusing his chaste heart. At the same time, his aged mentor dies, leaving a grieving widow with whom Elwyn takes up, despite their twenty-two year age difference and to the great surprise of them both. Suddenly, sexual vices overwhelm a story of deeply religious believers, who struggle to make sense of the contradictions between spiritual dogma and physical and emotional desires. Most of the story’s characters live hypocritically at best; yet, their humanity is striking and a clear reminder of what it means to live with wholly unrealistic expectations of oneself and one another.

Between the evangelical language and the geography, the novel had additional resonance for me personally. Set in South Florida towns like Lakeland and Plant City, I could easily imagine not only the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters congregations and their church buildings but also the two-lane highways that connect some of the small cities mentioned. My maternal grandparents, retired ministers, have lived in that area for the last decade and attend two church services every Sunday: one in their trailer park, where grandpa leads the worship service, and one at a Church of God in Lakeland.

The book takes many turns, and sometimes I would be reading for several pages about a newly introduced character before all the pieces fell into place. Allen layers themes of familial obligation and incest with religious judgment and piety, all the while undoing any assumption you might make about essential underlying elements of a functional intimate relationship blossoming in the shadow of slavery and racialized poverty. Feminist in the sense that the author exposes the humanity of each character equally, Jesus Boy will encourage the most progressive thinker to reevaluate their moral judgments about love, parenting, pregnancy, and May-December romances.

Akashic Books consistently publishes quality fiction, and Jesus Boy is just one more must have title in their catalog. If you only read five novels this year, this should be one of them.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 27th 2010

The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Marisa Chappell

University of Pennsylvania Press

In The War on Welfare, Marisa Chappell compiles a comprehensive record of decades of antipoverty and anti-welfare movements and coalitions, the policies and programs they influenced, and the biases that both shaped and undermined their objectives. From the War on Poverty of the 1960s to the eradication of welfare in the 1990s, Chappell follows an ever-changing debate where the arguments first marshaled by one side were later embraced by another and the realities of poverty clashed with the ideals of those who sought to eliminate it.

Split into five sections, The War on Welfare moves from sections dealing with three major issues affecting the debate to comprehensive examinations of the Carter and Reagan administrations. The three major issues comprising the first three sections of the book include the racialization of the poverty and welfare debates, the role of the male-breadwinner family ideal in the feminization of poverty, and the majoritarian political strategies of the 1970s that led to both sides (or perhaps many sides) categorizing the poor as either deserving or undeserving. Through extensive sourcing, Chappell demonstrates how attitudes about race, gender and class contributed to the creation of welfare policies that were ineffective at best and disastrously counterproductive at worst, leading to an increase in poverty and precluding escape from poverty for many women and minorities.

Overall, Chappell does an extraordinary job of marshaling the evidence necessary to demonstrate the shared guilt of various “liberal” and “conservative” organizations and interests in preventing any serious attack on poverty in the United States. However, the presentation of that evidence leaves a bit to be desired.

First, in her valiant attempt to include each and every organization and coalition involved in the debate, Chappell often ends up creating an alphabet soup of acronyms that is difficult to follow. The same can be said for her introduction of so many main and supporting characters that the names tend to blend into one another after a while, leaving it difficult to remember who did what when.

Secondly, by using the vague labels of "liberal" and "conservative," presenting a bipolar politics rather than a political spectrum, and failing to address the ambiguities of political labels, Chappell tends to confuse some of the issues raised by the evidence she presents. For instance, she fails to clearly address how many “liberal” organizations in antipoverty coalitions were economically liberal, but socially conservative (and vice versa), and how many of those organizations are, in fact, more appropriately labeled as moderate or centrist. Finally, by using primarily “on the record” materials such as policy pronouncements and issue papers, Chappell fails to seriously address the backroom deals and covert exchanges that often have a far greater influence on policy than public debates indicate.

In the end, The War on Welfare is most useful as a research tool for policy wonks needing an extensive guide to the public positions taken by movements, organizations, political parties, and various important individuals. For the casual reader needing an introduction to the issues, it’s probably a bit too much and too little.

Written by: Melinda Barton, March 28th 2010

Fig Trees

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by John Greyson

V Tape

It’s hard to explain Fig Trees. It’s an opera yet it's also a documentary. There’s an albino squirrel and a nun. It scrutinizes the critical circumstances of the AIDS epidemic, from the 1980s to the present day, and points out, with sharp observations, the irony of consumer-driven AIDS campaigns. The main issues addressed are the ineffectiveness of governments and the greediness of pharmaceutical companies, but popular culture is not completely innocent either.

In Fig Trees, director John Greyson documents the story of South African AIDS activist, Zackie Achmat. Greyson portrays Achman as thoughtful, creative, and most of all, brave. He went on a treatment strike and refused to take his medication because he didn’t believe it was right that he could buy life while other, less affluent people couldn’t. This is where the opera, squirrel and nun come into play; they are a fragment of the visual puzzle Greyson creates.

The way in which all of the ingredients are put together to create such poignant commentary about HIV is interesting. Fig Trees is theatrical and complex—a bit too complex for my taste. For the most part, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. Fig Trees is subtitled, but instead of making things easier to understand, it made them even more nonsensical. This was especially true when the screen was split into two, each side giving different sets of subtitles.

This doesn't mean that the film wasn't enjoyable. On the contrary, there were some “Aha!” moments that gave me great pleasure and other moments that made me think more deeply about the issues. This prompting of contemplation is always a good thing.

Written by: Jessica Sánchez, March 11th 2010

Woman's Prison

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Katie Madonna Lee

Although Woman’s Prison is not a documentary, writer/director Katie Madonna Lee presents a realistic story of poverty and the struggles women, children, and to some degree, men face who experience it. From birth, Julie Ann Mabry is a quiet, shy person, who just wants to be safe with her mother (played by Lee). Sadly, her father takes away that option by murdering her mother, and she is left quietly battling predators, including her uncle.

When Julie encounters heart-wrenching situations, she does not lose hope. After she runs away from her uncle, she meets Butch, a guy who, at first, takes care of her. Because he does not force himself on her, she feels safe—but the honeymoon wears off when he begins to see her as just another financial burden in the two-bit town they live in. In one of the scenes, Julie is so hungry that she sneaks money out of his wallet to buy groceries at a nearby store.

Without community support or education, Julie drowns in postpartum depression, which leads to a prison term after she shoots Butch. She is given the choice of shutting up, putting up with the situation and getting out on good behaviour, or taking a stand to end the escalating sexual abuse that she suffers at the hands of one of the prison guards. Julie must decide whether prison is safer than the outside world, where her voice is silenced at every turn.

Lee has done a great job of assembling a cast of unknowns to play these characters. The movie has its finger on the pulse of poverty and how it gnaws away at both young and old. Woman’s Prison may be too painful for some audiences, but I hope they see it. Julie Ann Mabry is not just a character; she is thousands of women in America who have and will continue to experience such struggles.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, February 27th 2010