Waging war on the internet, one comment at a time

by Aaron Grierson

Everyone knows about news on various scales; local, national, international. The internet helps facilitate faster access to information, from Google, to news websites, to posts on social media. The potential for one’s exposure to news has increased exponentially.

This increase subsequently results in increased reactions, not just in quantity but in volatility as well. Even on regular news websites, some of the commentary is not only poorly spelled but can become quite inflammatory, especially when directed at a certain user or users, while being totally irrelevant to the news item in question. This sort of hateful backlash is exemplary of larger underlying problems that are elemental to the internet.

Conflict is the root issue. By most standards, various forms of conflict are seen as inevitable, like fistfighting in the schoolyard or arguments between two people. More serious conflicts that tend to be discouraged might include armed assault or verbal harassment. Each of these may, in some contexts, be considered bullying. Bullying has been extensively persecuted in many Western countries, and despite this, is still a very widespread problem. The internet, as one might expect, makes bullying possible through anonymity and 24/7 access to known or potential victims. These interpersonal conflicts are quite obscene to any decent person, but we may not want to view our children or cowokers as indecent, perhaps searching for some deep-rooted anger or jealousy; some source of the conflict. These quests are often fruitless, as knowledge of a bully is something difficult to attain for a victim, and may be problematic for any proxy. Unfortunately the roots of bullying go well beyond the internet or schoolyard.

Individuals aside, the act of bullying shares many characteristics with a more historically widespread activity: the act of war. If an individual is simply irrationally violent, or otherwise lashing out due to personal issues, the problem would, no doubt, compound with several such individuals. However, war seldom happens without an instigating factor. No matter how petty, politicized, or well intentioned, war has a definable cause, a raison d’être. So it would seem that war and bullying are somewhat disconnected.

War and the internet, on the other hand are perfectly connected. Perhaps too perfectly. Not only is war advertised by all forms of media, but it is brought much closer to home. Through the internet the battlefront becomes the homefront, available at your nearest electronic screen. The war then becomes fodder for any angry ranter, from disjointed, impassioned comments on forums to thoughtful and well reasoned entries on blogs. The degree to which we see ourselves as having free speech as an inalienable right fuels these fires. Sometimes to the extent that commentary becomes an interfaction war on the homefront. The internet simply makes the process easier for people by providing them a shield from immediacy and contact with others.

At the same time, the internet enables people to more safely express their opinions on topics like war, arguably in the most democratic way possible. Everyone can read or listen to everyone else’s opinion on various issues by way of the ‘information superhighway’. As we have all no doubt experienced, these forums often result in arguments, which begs the question: why are forums of communication as open as they are?

It’s just a guess but it seems the answer lies in idealism. We want a world where people can say whatever they want, and while possible in theory the reality of things is that invariably someone gets offended at some point. So for some, it seems as though war overseas may become war at home. This is an unfortunate tension, and is one that needs to be kept in check. Rather than toting freedom of speech as a sort of endgame defense against any accusation concerning opinions, people need to be a little more aware, that a person’s opinion is just that. There is generally no weapon being put against our heads to change our minds or defend ourselves to the death, and so we may, in theory, say whatever we want.

Perhaps when it comes to opinionbased conflicts over the internet, no matter what the issue, people should concede their opponents’ position, should it be a fair and rational one, such as those not involving genocide or segregation of certain peoples. This way, while we may not be able to end war on an international level, we may keep the peace at home and on screen. It may seem redundant, or even despondant, but the potential for any and all change is in the hands of us, the readers. The internet is like a tank, capable both of being a simple showpiece or a serious explosive power. But so far it seems like any potential is being used more for destructive or otherwise harmful purposes, with beneficial initiatives taking the back seat for both funding and exposure.

Then again, there is always hope the net will expand and envelope the bullets and bombs of today in a cloud of antiquated methods of problem solving, propelling (in a lesser theoretical extent) the world’s advancement towards peace.

Ghausia Rashid Salam sits down with a young and enterprising baker; part philanthropist, part artist, Aamina Jehangir seems to have it all figured out.

Aamina Jehangir tried her hand at baking for the first time as an unassuming 4 year-old. As she laughingly explains, it consisted of more finger-dipping than baking. She ruefully admits it was no masterpiece, but that didn’t stop her. At 17, she launched The Cakery, a home-based cupcakery. Now, at 21, this young entrepreneur is a focused businesswoman, with a determined eye toward the horizon and firm goals for the future.

At 17, most teenagers are focused on the frivolities of life. Not so for Aamina, who had three goals in her life – “First, to be a doctor; second, to be an astronomer, and third, to be a chef.” While she gradually grew disenchanted with  medicine, astronomy remained  a passion, and still something pursued. But it was baking that would become her truest calling. Throughout her childhood, she worked on developing her skills, learning by experience, and most importantly, developing her own recipes, now  100 percent original derivative-free concoctions. “I’m more about the science behind everything, and once you understand that, you can work on your own,” she says. Her earliest source of inspiration was New York City’s Magnolia Bakery, and despite not being a sugar nut, puts the bakery as her first choice destination for desserts.

Because parental approval wasn’t built in, she studied side by side, but ultimately took a year away from law school to focus on The Cakery, a choice she hasn’t regretted. “I wanted to concentrate on my work, so that it would become a habit and be smooth sailing from there,” though she admits to wanting to earn a bachelor’s degree as a ‘safety net’. Despite being a businesswoman, her interests lie more toward social sciences and media studies, and she expresses an interest in web designing. But she has no reason to regret her choice; together with her sister, she has also launched WonderMilk, fresh camel milk, a healthier and lighter alternative for lactose intolerant people as well as beneficial for cancer patients and diabetics.

2009 marked the year Pakistan went “crazy for cupcakes” – a phenomenon that largely began in the US. With a rush of international and corporate orders, The Cakery soon amassed a loyal clientele.  2010 brought in  orders from Proctor & Gamble, RainTree Mini Spa, N.M Productions, HSR, and many others. Word was spreading by word of mouth alone. Her father, who  manages several restaurants of his own, has been a constant source of advice. She credits her inherited business sense as the anchor in keeping the budding business on course. “I was always a PR person, even as a child,” she reveals. “I always wanted to make my birthday a huge gala event, or organize parties for others. Because I had a passion for it, I tried to teach myself as much as possible.” But business seems to run in the family. Her sister Sarah Jehangir runs CTL360, an advertising agency and design house. Aamina credits Sarah with the creative aspect of her business which includes The Cakery’s logo, stickers, website and menu.

An entrepreneur of the online-marketing generation, she offers insight into the challenges of growing a home-based business. “Facebook is a huge help obviously in running a business. It creates awareness on a larger level; you develop a stronger fan base,  get to share your menus as well as your prices, and basically share the visual aspect of your products with the public.” While she thinks the cupcake craze will eventually die down, she acknowledges the art of creating ‘a mini-cake,’ and how much creativity goes in creating ‘designer’ cupcakes. “The creation of a fancy cupcake is an art.” Exampes of this are evident given how much the cupcake industry has expanded and evolved, with different bakeries coming up with a variety of creatively imagined cupcakes. She cites Cupcake(s) by Cookie as one such example, admiring her imaginative cupcake themes and intricate, detailed designs.

Deeply involved in charity work from an early age, The Cakery provided Aamina with a forum to continue her work on a larger platform. This lead to The Sugar Sisters, an  ambitious venture founded in early 2011, for  bringing together fellow bakers and ‘sugar sisters’, and collectively working toward garnering charity donations. Future endeavors include a massive bake sale. “A lot of cupcakery owners were doing individual charity work, and collectively, we (realized we) could make a bigger difference. There are so many people that we can help: flood victims, orphans, cancer patients, providing clean drinking-water to people living in unsanitary areas,” she explains earnestly. One organization she wants to donate to is The Citizen’s Foundation (TCF), who help build schools in Pakistan.

With a sudden boom in  home-based bakery businesses, owing partly to the cupcake craze, the industry has grown brutal. Many businesses suffer from  ideas being ripped off, designs copied, and even  business names stolen. In Pakistan, “copyright laws” remain in their infancy.  But she remains unfazed by the competition; after all, “people can steal your ideas, but they can’t steal your talent.”

Though Aamina has a special place reserved for home-based businesses, The Cakery will soon open as a café and takeaway outlet in Karachi. The café will include customer loyalty programs, discounts, freebies and other promotional offers. Though no launch date has been announced, Aamina hopes the store will serve as “a pioneer in the transition from home business to outlet”.

Juggling two businesses, along with  a budding charity organization, this young entrepreneur has her hands full. Her growing success foreshadows  future endeavors, and with that “inherited”  business savvy and  creativity, Aamina Jehangir holds the promise of an artful future.

Vintage, 2001, 379pages (Paperback)
ISBN: 0-099-28336-0

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone

Judge any book by its back cover and you could be forgiven for thinking you’re about to read a work of inimitable, once-in-a-generation genius. Turn over Atomised, the English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires, (possibly in an attempt to avoid staring at the half-naked woman on the front) and you find the usual glowing reviews. Anyone willing to trust the opinions of Time Out must accept that the novel is ‘totally mesmerising…Compulsory reading.’ If, on the other hand, you choose to believe The Independent, Atomised is ‘compelling… haunting.’ Julian Barnes (important enough to be named) describes it as ‘a novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits.’

The difference here is that the hyperbole is justified. Michel Houellebecq may strike certain readers as a nihilist, a racist, a misogynist, a pedlar of the cheapest of literary cheap tricks, but he is without doubt one of the most fascinating contemporary writers in any language. Atomised is a work of staggering ambition, aiming to imagine what Houellebecq refers to as ‘a metaphysical mutation… a transformation in the values to which the majority subscribe’ by inhabiting the mind of ‘a first-rate biologist and serious candidate for the Nobel Prize’ and compressing numerous lives into fewer than four hundred pages. Houellebecq sets himself the intensely serious task of envisioning a future in which both religion and science have been usurped as dominant paradigms, and ends up producing a novel as readable as any airport thriller.

Not that you’d want to take Atomised with you on your next plane journey. It happens to be relentlessly gloomy: the first page informs us that the protagonist ‘lived through an age that was miserable and troubled… haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives.’ By the end of the first chapter, Michel Djerzinski has abandoned his job, organised a lifeless ‘sham’ of a leaving party, and returned home to find his canary dead. He dumps it in a rubbish chute, has a nightmare in which the bird’s intestines are ripped out by huge worms ‘armed with terrible beaks’, and has to swallow three Xanax tablets before he can get back to sleep. For the rest of the book, his condition deteriorates. Just in case the more or less inexorable downward spiralling of one life isn’t enough, Michel has a half-brother, Bruno, who ends the novel in a mental institution after the suicide of his girlfriend.

At the heart of Atomised is a vision which recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of humanity as a mass of ‘desiring machines’, with desire the agent which produces ‘reality’. Houellebecq’s ‘metaphysical mutation’ effectively involves the elimination of desire, creating a brave new world in which ‘a new, rational species’ relies on cloning rather than ‘sexuality as a means of reproduction.’ Sex and death are inextricably linked: Michel Djerzinski establishes that ‘all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal’; the ‘new species’, independent of sexual reproduction, is by definition immortal.

Only a small section of Atomised is devoted to the implications of that immortality. Superficially, the novel seems to deal in abstractions, but it remains grounded in the details of day-to-day lives, relishing the mundane. The world it depicts is unflinchingly brutal: Michel recalls watching a programme called The Animal Kingdom, observing how ‘Snakes moved among the trees, their fangs bared, ready to strike at bird or mammal, only to be ripped apart by hawks.’ Animals are ‘slaughtered’ or ‘dismembered and devoured’, their days spent in ‘abject terror.’ At times, Houellebecq’s view of the world is pessimistic to the point of self-parody. On other occasions, it contains an awful ring of truth, as when he recycles an idea from Whatever and examines the brutal nature of ‘free market’ sexuality, a system which concentrates power among a select few and leaves the rest with little or nothing, abandoned to ‘calmly observe the decline of [their] virility.’ Neither Michel nor Bruno belongs to the sexually satisfied 1%: Michel half-heartedly browses the lingerie section (‘Sensual Suspenders!’) of his 3 Suisses catalogue, while Bruno pursues the shadow of a dream of liberation at the ‘Lieu de Changement’, which pompously prides itself on being ‘open to new spiritual ideas.’

Relief is never more than temporary – Bruno eventually enters a relationship with Christiane, but Christiane becomes paralysed from the waist down after an incident in a ‘club for couples’ and commits suicide when faced with the spectre of her physical decline; Annabelle, the great love of Michel’s life, dies of uterine cancer shortly after becoming pregnant with his child. Atomised concludes that, in our current ‘miserable and troubled’ age, complete happiness is impossible. Huxley’s Brave New World seems to be an obvious point of comparison: the question posed by both books is not ‘can we attain true happiness?’ but ‘do we really want to attain true happiness?’  Huxley’s future society and Houellebecq’s new species are both perfectly content, but the worlds they inhabit seem sterile (in more than one sense) and devoid of meaning.

Towards the end of Atomised, Michel investigates ‘this space of which [we] are so afraid’ and reaches a conclusion which appears to offer some hope of transcendence. He concludes that ‘Love binds, and it binds for ever… All that exists is a magnificent interweaving.’ The idea of love ‘binding’ is deeply and deliberately ambiguous, but Houellebecq appears to let Michel ‘make his peace’ in the final weeks of his life, taking ‘long, dreamy walks…with only the sky itself as witness.’ The cruelty of The Animal Kingdom can, perhaps, be forgotten, if not overcome.

Atomised may sound like the type of book you wish to avoid – heavy on theory, filled with unpalatable opinions (for example, one of the characters sees Islam as analogous to Nazism), perhaps overly graphic. Instead, it is the type of book everyone should read – ambitious, innovative, filled with ideas which are genuinely challenging, perhaps even a thing of beauty. It demands to be judged by no standards other than its own.

Jacob Silkstone, besides being Poetry Editor, blogs about books and the publication industry at http://aloneinbabel.themissingslate.com. 

by Michael Owen Fisher

6 FEB 2009

Iain is washing up when a light comes on across the quadrangle. He sees a smudge of movement in the window opposite him and reaches for his glasses. A young woman is clasping a towel to her chest. Iain drops to the floor, scurries on all fours across the lino, and flicks off the kitchen light. The woman pauses in the centre of her bedroom and pads herself dry. Iain’s mouth lolls open as he shuffles on the draining board, attempting to find a clear line of vision through the candles on her windowsill. The rubber gloves trail suds across his fly.

Rachel pulls the duvet further up her body and twists onto her side, so that her head rests a metre from the screen. The TV licks her face with red flecks. “Finished?” she asks.

“Yes, all done,” Iain replies, moving from the doorway of their marital bedroom into the en suite bathroom. He cleans his teeth every morning and evening in their en suite rather than the larger bathroom at the end of the flat. “You looking forward to seeing your mum tomorrow?”

Rachel’s eyes laze on the TV.

“Rachel?”

“Mmm?”

“Should be fun. The trip with your mum. Tomorrow.”

She closes her eyes. “Yes.”

“We’ve reached that time again,” the host announces over the game show’s incidental hum.

Iain reaches across the bed. Rachel’s nose twitches, as if she were able to sense her husband’s hand hovering above her arm.

“Goodnight,” he says. “You sleep well.”

7 FEB 2009, afternoon

Iain listens to Barbara’s footsteps echoing up the block. She stops on the third floor landing and drops her head to one side, feigning exhaustion.

“So many stairs,” she says, “don’t know how you do this every day.”

“Good journey?” Iain asks. He bends forward to kiss his mother-in-law. Her cheeks are pink, downy, and cold.

“Not too bad. Slight hold up around Crowborough.”

They look at each other, then at the hall floor.

“How’s she been?” Barbara asks.

“It’s ok.” Iain puffs out a cheek and focuses on the space beside the front door. “You know. We’re doing ok. She’s been drawing a lot. Really got into it, as the doctor suggested. Little sketches of buildings. Skyscrapers. Which is good, I think. A good hobby.”

Barbara opens her arms. She has dyed her hair late-summer brown this morning. Iain smells a trace of ammonia as he presses against her soft pastel wools.

“Little Eiffel Towers,” he says, laughing.

Rachel fumbles with her jacket as she enters the hallway. She looks up and her mouth curls into a rictus. “I’m ready,” she says, “if you are mum.”  

Iain drowses on his bed, and the damp winter sun drops low. He thinks about the woman in the window. Her shallow curves and her skin, mannequin smooth. Stray light from the quadrangle wisps across the ceiling and hangs over the black of his eyes.

18 JAN 2008

Rachel is home. She is Iain’s wife of nineteen years. Rachel is a retail consultant for a large pharmaceutical firm. She plays the clarinet, but less often than she would like, watches legal dramas, and enjoys reading novels by Maeve Binchy and Alan Hollinghurst. She is E(xtroversion), (i)N(tuition), F(eeling), J(udging) on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. When she is confused her eyes circle round and round like a child’s toy. She loves cuddles.

Iain forms a letter T with his forefingers, which is the couple’s shortcut for “do you want tea?” Rachel sits on their sofa, caressing the underside of her chin and staring past him into the plane-scarred sky. She fails to see her husband’s question.

“Any tea?” he asks.

“I’m ok for now.”

“Sure? We’ve got some Lady Grey in, or builders’ tea.”

“I’m alright.”

Beside Rachel is a family photo in which Adam has shoulder-length hair. Iain wears an iron grey sweater, the one that made him look thinner but later began to unravel at the sleeves. Rachel wears a skirt that lets through sunlight. She is leaning into her son’s shoulder, laughing.

“Adam’s going to phone this evening,” Iain says.

Rachel moves a hand up and down her cheek. The sun crawls from behind a small cloud, setting off slow-motion explosions on the steel and glass of the office block across the road.

“Good. That’ll be good.”

7 FEB 2009, evening

Here is Iain at his desk, wearing a smart black shirt. Outside is dusky. The windows around the quadrangle glow solar yellow, as if they were soaking up the sunset. A baby’s cry thrums, hangs, and distracts Iain from the parity product graphs on his laptop screen. The girl hurries into her room and tosses her hat onto the bed. Her hair tumbles across her shoulders. Iain scrolls down the jags and spikes of the graphs and pretends to make notes in his writing pad. Her face is flushed. She removes her jeans and heavy winter coat and disappears into a wardrobe. Iain presses his pen to his lips and stares academically into the night sky, his eyes squinting and unsquinting as if he were zeroing in on a thought. The girl emerges from the wardrobe holding a green dress, and her eyes skip across the quadrangle. He exhales. Sighs Jesus. His flat door clicks open.

“We’re back.”

15 MARCH 2008

Iain watches Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula late at night and is taken aback by the similarity between Dwight Frye’s unhinged expressions as the dark prince’s servant, Renfield, and his wife’s smile.

9 FEB 2009
Iain rummages in his clothes cupboard. Water runs and stutters into confluences down to the towel around his waist. The young woman is curled on a chair in her dressing gown, eating from a bowl. Her bedroom is lit in muted yellow, but brighter light pulses from a TV in a hidden corner of the room. Iain dabs his hairy torso with the towel and waters a plant on the windowsill with his free hand. His midriff has the firm, buttery swelling of middle age. The woman removes her dressing gown and moves about her room in a knee-length negligee, which gleams like sun-drenched fuel. On Iain’s desk are the latest pupilometrics data for the prototype Eos double-page spread, which features every colour in the Eos range: chocolate, crimson, caramello, mother-of-pearl, ivory, coral/aqua. As Iain suspected, crimson and coral/aqua elicit the strongest responses. He holds one of the data sheets, his eyes narrowing in faux-concentration. The towel has made his skin pink. The girl stretches forward to close her curtains, allowing Iain to see the swell of her breasts. She smiles and produces an equivocal movement with her hand, which Iain interprets as a wave. Her curtains close.

15 APRIL 2008

Dr. Gianakos edges the acetate sheet across his desk and waves his pen over Rachel’s forebrain. “It’s here we’ve seen…where we have found something of note. The forebrain, here,” the doctor says, lifting his long fringe and massaging his forehead, “exposed to the bony ridges inside the skull is, I mean, it’s probably the most vulnerable part of the brain.”

Iain nods, his eyes fixed on Rachel’s indigo brain, which the doctor has illuminated on a mobile electronic tablet.

“Rachel has damaged a specific part of these frontal lobes. It’s easy for this to happen in a crash. I mean, the effects are varied, but some damage, temporary or otherwise, is common.” The young neuropsychologist draws a squiggle in the air over Rachel’s frontal lobes. “There is such a high chance of—”

“So…”

“Yes.” The doctor shifts upright in his chair, and now he nods, encouraging Iain to speak.

“So this part of her brain is affecting her emotions. Has changed her…”

“Yes, exactly. Damage here explains this…this emotional void she has developed.” Dr. Gianakos pauses, anticipating another question, but Iain has glazed over. The doctor’s hand fans and contracts on the desk. His tone becomes more subdued. “You mentioned Rachel’s outbursts. I mean, this is an associated sign. The frontal lobes, one of their jobs is censorship. Screening out this aggression and certain…primitive urges.”

On the doctor’s desk, beside the brain scan and propped on the rear of a framed photo, is a wide-eyed, white-coated bear holding a stethoscope in its paw. Iain leans on the desk and toys with the bear’s fur.

“And.”

“Yes,” Dr. Gianakos says.

“And in the long run?”

11 FEB 2009

Behind the frosted glass of their flat door is a tall silhouette. Rachel is motionless on the marital bed, except for micro-movements of her eyes across the TV screen. The bell rings for a second time and Iain opens the door.

“Hello sir. I was wondering if I could come in for just a brief moment.”

“Yes, yes, come in,” Iain says. His voice rises an octave mid-sentence. “Tea? Can I get you some tea?”

“No thank you. It’s just a brief visit actually sir.”

Rachel stands in the bedroom doorway, tugging her dressing gown across her chest. The policeman nods hello to her before turning back to Iain. “Is there a room we could pop into briefly, sir?”

21 JULY 2008

Iain has been with Cook & Magris, part of the Praesto Group, for eighteen years, for the previous five of which he has been a creative director. He is respected within the company for his understatement and gently-delivered assessments, especially of product life cycles, and for his analyses of parity products. Today Iain plans to commute to Cook & Magris’s London offices once Rachel and he have finished at the Centre for Clinical Wellbeing. He holds his briefcase between his feet. The cognitive therapist’s room is stuffy even though she has left open her awning window. Through the window waft summer scents: dead air, clean grass and the soapy, carnal smells of plants yielding and opening.

“Rachel, do you feel as though any changes have taken place in you since the accident?” Dr. Leighton asks. She has the poise of someone trained to avoid unnecessary movements and maintains her expression of professional sympathy while she waits for Rachel’s response.

“The main thing is, I don’t worry about things.”

“And is that a good feeling?”

“Yes.”

“It is good?”

“Yes. I only worry about how I feel in the morning. Sometimes I feel…bored. I think that’s it. Bored. Or restless.”

Dr. Leighton writes in her notebook. Iain watches the trees rustle outside and pictures the doctor, in black spandex, ordering him to remove his trousers.

“And Rachel, when you say you don’t worry, does that mean you don’t care about anything?”

“That…I think so.”

“Do you care about Iain?”

Both the doctor and Rachel glance at Iain, who is knifing his nose with his fingertips.

“I suppose so.”

“Do you love him?”

“Oh yes. Course.” Rachel’s lips contort into another Renfield Smile. Over the preceding weeks it has dawned on Iain that, although she spots cues and produces appropriate and well-timed facial responses, his wife has forgotten why she smiles.

“And what does the love feel like?”

“I don’t know. It’s good having him around. We’ve been together so many years.”

Dr Leighton’s hand whirrs across her notepad. She nods encouragement, her head sweeping down in slow arcs. Her hair is fizzy red. Iain imagines how it would feel on his skin.

“I don’t know.”

11 FEB 2009

A wedge of amber light shines from the top of the girl’s window, where the curtains have failed to meet. The policeman leans from Iain’s bedroom window, nodding to himself, satisfying himself with something or other.

“Can I ask,” Iain says, “who reported this…what would you call it? Display?”

“Public indecency is the term that tends to be used.” The policeman plays a couple of scales across the sill. “And I think we both know sir, for me to reveal that sort of information is a hostage to fortune.”

15 MAY 1987

Gianni’s’ lighting is low. Rachel and Iain sit opposite each other on a small table near the window. Every curl of lip, change of timbre, and head movement is precise and measured. The restaurant is busy. They watch their waiter hurry back to the kitchen.

“He’s funny,” Rachel says.

 Iain imitates the waiter, dipping his head with exaggerated deference, and they both laugh. “Yeah, he sounded like the skeleton from the Scotch tape ad.” He begins swaying his head to a private rhythm.

Rachel raises an eyebrow.

“Tape what you want both night and day,” Iain chants, tapping out the beats between lines in the air. “Then rerecord, not fade away.”

She grins.

“Rerecord, not fade away,” they repeat in unison. Rachel rocks back in her chair, giggling, hitting an angle where her filigree broach reflects the candlelight onto her face. “He does.”

Iain wears chunky-rimmed Cazal glasses. His hair is wiry and big, and he has a habit of stretching his facial muscles by flexing his jaw to his chest, which action refreshes his eyes but results in his mouth opening in the style of a horror film still or the figure in The Scream.

Rachel tells him about her cat, how she loves that almost every meal in South America is served with popcorn, and of her fascination with tall buildings. Whenever she struggles to remember a name, her nose crimps and puckers, and the small muscles above her eyes knot so that she resembles a person trying to scratch their head without using any hands. Iain steals looks up and down her purple dress and makes an effort to avoid stretching his facial muscles. Gianni’s empties around them.

18 FEB 2009

The exposure data from 2007’s Maia campaign falls into the range Iain envisaged, and, in his opinion, justifies the ramped-up DAGMAR he has been pushing for Amy’s new Eos range. He scrolls down the spreadsheet on his laptop one more time. An architect’s lamp illuminates the prototype Eos spread beside his computer.

            To bring a Smile to Your face,  and His

Most of the windows around the quadrangle are asleep, but Iain’s attention is caught by a fourth floor flat in the opposite block. In the curtains’ slight opening he sees a shift in the varieties of black, a shadow of shadows forming, then stillness. Iain stands and tilts forward over his desk to improve his view of the window. Seconds later the curtains ruffle and close.

The young woman’s curtains are closed too. They have been for several days, ever since the policeman’s visit. Iain feels beneath the folders and papers in his desk drawer. He pulls out a jiffy bag, on which he has scrawled the woman’s address in thick black felt tip. Inside the bag is a mother-of-pearl Eos bra. The new Eos range has embroidered tulle and a high cotton percentage for maximum comfort, no underwiring, and a macramé lace balconette. Iain runs one hand across its surface and rereads the note he has paper-clipped to the strap. He puffs out his cheeks and reburies the jiffy bag at the bottom of the drawer.

Iain pulls on his pyjama bottoms and leaves the room. The door to the marital bedroom is ajar and from it light leaks into the hallway. He pauses by the door, bends forward and peers through the gap, which is no more than a pupil’s width. Rachel is standing in front of the mirror, examining her body, lifting and kneading her heavy breasts. She mumbles as she jerks a comb through her hair. Iain watches with one eye pressed into the thin band of light. His face hangs post-coma blank. Rachel sets down her comb on the dressing table and turns to face the quadrangle. Her nose crinkles, and she presses herself up against the cold window pane.

Michael Owen Fisher is a 31-year-old writer from Brighton. His stories have been published in several magazines, most recently Riptide and Bewilderbliss. He is working on his first novel.

Reviewed by Emma K. Gold

Tower Heist follows Josh Kovacks (Ben Stiller) and his coworkers who are all employed at the Tower, one of New York City’s most elite living communities.  The Tower is owned by Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda); early in the film, Shaw is revealed to have engaged in crooked business dealings which lost the pensions of the Tower employees but which kept Shaw’s own sizable fortune intact.  After a near tragedy, Josh resolves to steal back the pensions money for everyone who works at the Tower and must round up an unruly and inexperience band of thieves in order to accomplish his goal.

The premise echoes other heist movies, such as any of the Ocean’s movies, but goes slightly beyond the boundaries of the genre to include a bit of social commentary and speak more directly the specific economic climate of its time.  Ocean’s 11 (2001) could have been remade in any time period, but Tower Heist has a specificity that not only lends it a certain credibility, but also makes it more appealing than it ever could have been if it were just a heist movie.

Tower Heist is more of a comedic drama than a pure comedy.  The focus of the story is on the characters and their relationships more so than on the actual heist itself.  One of the major criticisms of the film is that the actual heist doesn’t start until halfway through the movie.  While that’s a valid point and would probably annoy audience members who wanted to see a funnier Ocean’s 11 (2001), the real strength of this movie, and what keeps it from flopping, is the effort it puts into the characterization at the beginning.  The audience understands and feel a kinship with the characters and thus the betrayal of the characters’ trust is more impactful.

Moreover, because of the care taken with characterization earlier in the film, the entire work was surprisingly heartfelt.  By situating the film within this specific historical and cultural moment, the filmmakers created characters and a story which audiences could care about.  While the film is by no means perfect, it’s definitely successful in capturing contemporary American anxieties about wealth and class relations and then embodying the fantasy resolution of those anxieties.

The ensemble cast performs admirably and is one of the big draws of this film, but Matthew Broderick as Mr. Fitzhugh stood out as horrifically inept with one of the most wooden performances of his career.  Broderick has never been an especially gifted actor, but Tower Heist is his absolute worst performance.  He either could not or would not express any realistic emotion throughout the entire movie; not only is his performance incredibly poor, but it sucks any potential likability from his character.  Thankfully, Broderick’s part is small compared to the other characters and is only memorable for the disaster of a performance he gives.

Eddie Murphy, on the other hand, is quite refreshing.  He seems to be getting back to his comedic roots; his characters in this film was much more like the fast-talking, crude, funny characters that characterized his early career, which is a nice change of pace from some of his more recent projects.

Alan Alda’s work is what really stands out in this film.  Alda’s always been a gifted actor and he’s often been labelled as the ‘sensitive’ type, but nowhere is that put to better use than in this film.  Alda plays the protagonist Arthur Shaw and does an impeccable job of making the character absolutely despicable while still maintaining just enough charm to almost coax the audience into sympathizing with him.  The fact that the audience can see and understand the depth and the nuance of the character’s manipulations is what really showcases Alda’s exceptional talent and what makes his one of the most stand-out performances of the film.  The other actors, Ben Stiller and Casey Affleck, both perform acceptably, but without any real sparkle which is understandable given the mediocre quality of the writing and direction.

Overall, Tower Heist definitely had its high points, but it doesn’t really shine and wasn’t particularly memorable.  While it clearly taps into the collective American imagination, the writing and direction are just not very good.  While there are a few laughs to be had, most of the jokes aren’t funny and a lot of the gags don’t really work.  Tower Heist is enjoyable as a piece of work specific to the contemporary era in America, but it’s not spectacular enough to be remembered for very long.

Emma Gold is a freelance film critic and recently graduated with an MA in Gender & Women’s Studies and English Literature from Lancaster University, UK.

Not really. Uptil O Levels I wanted to get into finance and then when I noticed my brain shutting down while studying accounting I thought maybe a career in Finance may not be the best option for me. When the time came to decide the major for college , Visual arts was the only area I could see myself studying.  The opportunities I got after graduating were as such that I just fell into being a full time visual artist.

Can you recall the first drawing you ever made, what was it?

I can’t actually. I’ve always been drawing, I do have all these hazy memories drawing and feeling so good about it.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Everything. The city, the female body, fabric, threads. Then there are things that inspire me sub consciously ( like reading up on time travel not being an impossibility and information on pretty much anything and everything )

Are there any artists / writers in particular that you admire?

Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Kiki Smith, Eve Hesse, Edward Said, Mohammad Hanif, Liam Gillick. Bruno Latour. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Milan Kunder, Michio Kaku, Richard Dawkins  and Veena Malik obviously.

Your work screams Karachi, which I take it is also your hometown, how’s that relationship working out for you?

Much healthier than a lot of other relationships I see.

If you could illustrate any already existing body of work, which one would it be?

Probably a poster of some Pashto film.

How much of your own self do you put in to your work?

Quite a bit, actually. Its very obvious if you look at the work.on the other hand, it is my writing that is very strongly influenced by the current socio political landscape 

Would you ever think about doing something else for a living?

Teaching maybe. Or writing.  I could be like Carrie Bradshaw and earn a hefty income through my writing.

What’s a normal day in your life like?

A interesting mix of reading, writing, drawing, painting and socializing ( gossiping and making fun of some poor fellow or another )

How would you collectively describe your work in your own words?

Spontaneous. Emotional. Bold. Layered. Textured. 

By Kate Lu

When Liam propped himself up on one elbow and said, “Ellie, I think it’s about time I met your parents,” I knew I was in trouble.

It had been midmorning last Saturday, and like every other Saturday morning that we’d spent together for as long as we had been dating, Liam and I were still lying in bed, not dressed, dozing in the too-warm white sheets.

I put my hands over my face and groaned. “Liam, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. We’ve been over this.”

Liam laughed, pulling at my elbow. “It’s been a year and they still don’t know.”

As I peeped at him through my fingers, he lay flat on his back with a sigh, his face smoothing out into a serious expression.

“You’ve met my parents. They weren’t so bad.”

“Your parents aren’t Asian,” I said, sitting up in bed and looking down at him. “My mom would freak out if she knew that the guy I was dating wasn’t Chinese.” I paused to reconsider. “Actually I think my mom would freak out if she knew I was dating a guy at all, but the fact that you don’t quite meet her standards racially makes it worse.”

Liam pursed his lips, and I could tell that he was struggling not to give me the puppy dog look that he knew worked on me every time.

“It’s been a year, Ellie,” he said again. He tangled his feet with mine; the desperate way he did it felt like a plea. “Things have been pretty serious for a while now. Just think about it, okay?”

I leaned back against the headboard and stared at the bright blue wall in front of me. I sighed.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to my mom, okay?”

Liam sat up and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“You’re going to regret this,” I warned him.

He laughed and got out of bed, looking around the floor for his pants.

“How bad can they be?” he asked, gathering his clothes from off the floor.

I watched him, bemused. “You’d be surprised,” I said.

Liam and I had met while we were still undergraduates, but we didn’t start dating until we were both going to the same university for graduate school. He was the best friend of my roommate’s boyfriend, Sam. Both of them had gone to the same high school in California, and Liam had stayed there to do his undergrad at UCLA. He likes to tell people that he came across the country to DC for grad school because of me, but I know that isn’t true; when he first met me while he was visiting Sam during our senior year, I’m pretty sure he didn’t give me a second thought. While he and Sam caught up, my roommate, Claire, and I felt like third and fourth wheels.

Liam and I didn’t meet again until he had arrived in DC for graduate school. This time, though, things were different: Claire and Sam had gotten engaged and were planning their wedding, and so Liam, who didn’t know anyone else on the East Coast, was thrown together with me, even though I generally kept to myself. We didn’t start dating until about a year into getting our masters degrees. Liam was doing political science; I was doing English literature. We had almost nothing in common except for our mutual friendship with Sam, but somewhere between all the coffee dates, the cram sessions, and the trips to the library where we had to help carry each other’s books, we grew close. When we started dating, no one was really surprised.

Now, one year later, we were both out of grad school and looking for jobs. My mother always expected me to move back home after finishing school and to look for a job in New York, but I had no intention of doing that. I’d never admitted it in so many words, but the entire reason for my going to school in DC and staying as far away from New York as I possibly could during that time was to get away from my parents. I still hadn’t grown out of that need to escape that had claimed me during high school. Even when I was over two hundred miles away from my parents, I felt like I was suffocating whenever my mother called me, like I was back in high school and my mother was still dangling her rules over my head.

It was that disconnect that had caused me to hide my relationship with Liam from them for an entire year. It was easy to do; my parents visited me in DC so infrequently that it was a matter of lying by omission. I already knew that they wouldn’t approve of him just based on what my mother had told me when I was in high school and an Italian boy in my class had asked me out. I had only told her about the incident in the interest of being honest; after that, I told my mother as little as I could get away with.

“White boys will just leave you in the end,” she told me. Her voice climbed several octaves as she lectured me, as if it were my fault that a boy had asked me on a date. “I don’t want you dating any boys who aren’t Chinese. If he were Chinese, maybe I’d think about it, but he isn’t. You aren’t allowed to date boys who aren’t Chinese.”

My father had remained silent while my mother yelled at me; he sat on the couch with his arms crossed and stared at the wall. I wondered if he was even listening. His silence meant that my mother’s words were rule, and that was the end of it.

Now, so many years later, a tight knot of anxiety formed in my stomach at the thought of telling my parents about Liam. Twenty-four years old, and I still felt like a little girl trying to appease her parents.

On Saturday afternoon, I paced around my living room, holding my phone and trying to work up the nerve to call my mother. Liam had left a few hours ago to run errands; he wouldn’t be back until dinner.

Finally, standing in front of the window that looked out onto N Street, I took a deep breath and dialed my parents’ house. My mother picked up on the fifth ring.

“Hello?” she said in English.

It took me a moment to think of the words. “Hi, Mom,” I said, wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans.

“Ellie!” she said. She switched to Chinese. “It’s been a while since you called. We were beginning to worry about you.”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes and deferring to her native tongue. “Listen, I have to talk to you about something.”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone. Then my mother said, “What happened?”

“Um.” I bit my lip. “Well, um. I’ve been dating this guy . . .”

“A boy?” My mother’s voice was a little too loud. “You’ve been dating a boy? For how long?”

“A couple months,” I said, wincing. I told myself that it wasn’t, technically speaking, a lie.

“Is he Chinese?” she asked, her voice full of critical accusation.

“Uh,” I said. “Well. No. No, Mom, he isn’t.” I put my free hand to my forehead and massaged my temples.

My mother didn’t take long to process this information before she started yelling in earnest. “Ellie,” she said, “I don’t want you dating this boy. You are going to marry a Chinese boy, preferably a doctor, someone with a good background and a good education—”

“It’s not like I picked him up off the street,” I protested. I leaned my head against the cool window and stared down at the traffic below. “Look, we were planning to come up to New York to visit some friends of ours next weekend anyway, and I thought it would be good for you to meet him.”

“I don’t want to meet him; I don’t want you seeing him,” my mother said tersely. “I knew living down there for so long would be bad for you. I knew you should have just come home right away after undergrad. You should have gone to graduate school at NYU.”

I bit back a frustrated groan; we had had this argument a million times. “Mom, we can have him over for dinner. It’s just one meal. He’s not so bad, really. Just meet him, okay? You and Daddy.”

My mother made a hmph noise and sighed loudly. “Fine. Dinner. Okay. I’ll let you know what time.”

“Thank you,” I said, but my mother had already hung up.

“So have you talked to your mother yet?” Liam asked me. He was lying on my bed while I dug around in the bathroom cabinet for his spare toothbrush.

“I talked to her this afternoon,” I said. I pulled the toothbrush out of the cabinet and handed it to him.

“And?”

“And she said you can come to dinner while we’re in New York next week visiting the girls,” I said, referring to two of our old graduate school friends who were now roommates in New York.

“Is that all she said?” Liam asked.

“More or less.” I didn’t want to tell him that she already didn’t like him.

“Okay,” said Liam.

“Just okay?” I stretched out on the bed next to him and put my head on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m glad I finally get to meet her.” His voice sounded flat.

“What, are you nervous?” I teased him, poking him in the ribs.

“No, of course not.” He responded a little too quickly. I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at him; his mouth was pulled into a slight frown.

“You are, aren’t you. You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“No, no.” Liam sat up. “It’s important. I mean, I guess it’s the proper thing to do at this point.”

“If you say so,” I said. I had been all too happy to keep our relationship a secret from my parents, and I wouldn’t have had a problem calling my mother back and telling her that my earlier revelation had all been one elaborate joke.

“I’m fine,” said Liam. “I’ll be fine.” He got up to brush his teeth without looking at me.

Later, lying next to him in the dark, I watched him sleep. He always fell asleep before me, so I would usually be stuck staring at the ceiling for half an hour while he snored. That night, though, I watched as a crease formed between his eyes and his jaw tightened while he ground his teeth together. I put my thumb on his forehead, as if to smooth out the skin there.

“It’ll be okay,” I whispered. At least, I hoped it would be.

I met Liam’s parents when his father flew out to DC on a business trip; Liam’s mother tagged along with him. We had dinner at a restaurant I don’t even remember the name of. It was one of those classic, all-American steakhouses that Liam loves and I hate, mostly because he could eat steak every night and I don’t eat any kind of meat except poultry.

I remember being almost nauseous, wondering what Liam’s parents would think of him dating a Chinese girl, but they shook my hand without batting an eye; ethnicity didn’t come up in the dinner conversation at all. They were staid, polite people—a typical upper-middle class couple, nondescript, suburban. They asked all the usual questions about what I was studying and what I wanted to do with my life, how Liam and I had met and how long we had known each other. His father wasn’t very talkative, but his mother smiled a lot and offered me some of her food. They were friendly in a restrained sort of way, but they also weren’t people that I would just be able to fall into conversation with. Liam thought they seemed to like me. At the end of that weekend they both flew back to California, and I haven’t seen them since. Sometimes, Liam says, they ask about how I’m doing.

            I’d have liked to think that Liam would have just as easy a time meeting my parents, but I knew that that wasn’t going to be the case.

The following Friday afternoon, Liam and I took a bus to New York and met our friends at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. We wouldn’t be having dinner with my parents until Saturday night, but Liam, I could tell, was already in a state of nervousness. For Friday evening and the day after, he was uncharacteristically quiet. I would have expected his usual, jovial self to be amplified by seeing our old friends, but he didn’t say much during meals or sightseeing, which unnerved me.

While we were sitting in our friends’ living room waiting for them to get ready for lunch on Saturday, I put my hand on Liam’s arm.

“Hey,” I said, “are you feeling all right? You’ve been awfully quiet for the past few days.”

He gave me a weak smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’m all right, really.”

I twined my fingers in his and squeezed his hand. “Are you nervous about tonight?”

He looked down at our hands and then back to me again. “Maybe a little,” he admitted.

“You’re the one who requested this,” I pointed out, half teasing and half serious.

“I know,” said Liam, “but I can’t help being nervous when you tell me such wonderful things about your mother.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

I frowned. “It’s not that my mother is a bad person,” I said carefully, “it’s just that she’s ridiculously traditional. She basically thinks that Chinese people should have a miniature country of their own in America, where none of that Western stuff will be able to get in. Marrying me off to a Chinese guy is important to her; it means that, even though I was born here, I’m still a fundamentally Chinese girl. It’ll mean that she raised me the right way. The thing with me is that I’ve never been able to agree with her about any of that.” I wrung my hands, struggling to explain. “Does that even make sense?”

Liam nodded. “It does, I think. Doesn’t really make me feel less nervous, though.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “And even if you’re not, I’ve been with you for a year. I feel like it’d be rude to leave at this point just because Mommy says so.”

Liam laughed then. “Well, as long as you’re committed to that.”

Dinner was at seven. At six-fifty, Liam and I stood in front of my parents’ tiny four-floor walkup in Flushing, bracing ourselves.

“Ready?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, taking my hand. “Let’s go.”

I pulled out the keys I hadn’t used in months and opened the front door, then led Liam to the second floor, where my parents lived. I figured it would be good to knock, so I did.

My mother flung open the door. She was framed in the doorway, diminutive and critical, and passed a sharp eye over Liam, who towered nearly two feet above her. She looked him up and down, took in his slightly wrinkled shirt and his neatly combed hair, and frowned slightly. Then she saw me.

“Ellie!” she said, hugging me awkwardly. My mother didn’t start hugging me until I went off to college and she didn’t get to see me all that often; I guess she thought it was the thing she was supposed to do. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t started doing that, because every time I hug her I feel like she’s gotten smaller. Older.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “This is Liam.” I gestured toward him, and he held out a hand for my mother.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. My mother touched palms with him briefly before stepping back so we could go inside.

            My parents’ apartment had always been cluttered, and I tried to imagine what Liam thought of it, since he was seeing it for the first time. There were books and newspapers in Chinese stacked up on the coffee table in the middle of the living room; my father didn’t throw out his newspapers if he didn’t have to. There were a few flea market end tables pushed against the walls, upon which were knick-knacks: little jade statues, old vases painted with flowers, pictures of relatives in China that I had never met. The rug, whose pile was flat now from years of use, was freshly vacuumed but still looked wilted. In the back was the tiny kitchen, which my mother made a beeline for. She probably wasn’t finished cooking.

I slipped off my shoes and then spotted my father. He was sitting on the couch, watching a Chinese soap opera, but he turned it off when Liam and I walked into the room. He stood up and gave me a loose hug, and then shook Liam’s hand. He did not appraise Liam as my mother had, but only nodded, his face kept even in the neutral expression he typically wore.

“Hello,” my father said. He knew even less English than my mother, and I knew that he would probably not say much for the rest of the evening, since he didn’t usually speak at all. He worked as a butcher in one of the fast-paced markets in Chinatown, and sometimes I thought that he didn’t talk when he came home because he’d spent the entire day yelling.

Liam and I sat on the couch with him in silence, listening to the old wooden clock on the wall tick away the seconds.

“Ellie says you and Mrs. Chang are immigrants,” Liam said to my father, trying to make conversation. I had told Liam about how my parents had moved to America before I was born, settling in Flushing and finding jobs in Chinese-owned businesses in the area. Liam had found the story interesting, but now my father only looked at him a little quizzically, not comprehending the statement but probably not wanting to seem rude either. Liam gave him an awkward grin before both men sat back in their seats.

            Liam’s fingers found mine where my hand lay on the cushion. His palms were cold and a little sweaty. I tried to give him a look of reassurance, but he was staring at the blank TV screen.

I briefly considered giving Liam a tour of the apartment, but my mother bustled back out of the kitchen a few moments later and said, “Okay. Dinner is ready.”

As we stood up and prepared to follow her into the kitchen, she made a hissing noise and pointed at Liam.

“Shoes off! By the door. No shoes in the house,” she said.

Liam turned bright red and scurried back to the door to kick off his shoes. I gave a little sigh; this was not going to be a smooth evening.

My mother had already set the table. In the middle of it were large platters containing vegetables, chicken, fish, and an entire crab. I was a little surprised; crab was reserved for special occasions, and I didn’t think that my mother would deem this special enough to buy an entire crab. It was possible that my father had convinced her, though—he took any opportunity he had to eat crab.

At the place settings, one small detail struck me: Three places were set up with a small bowl of rice, a plate, a glass of water, a napkin, and chopsticks. The fourth had a fork and knife. I could tell that Liam noticed, too, because when he sat down, he fingered the silverware, a small frown on his face. I wondered if he suspected that we rarely used it.

“So how did you meet him?” my mother asked in English, putting some fish on her plate. She was sitting across from me, and my father was sitting across from Liam. My mother clicked her chopsticks and I could tell that she was trying to refrain from being rude and pointing them at Liam.

“In school, Mom,” I said, holding back a small sigh. I had already explained this to her on the phone when she had called to tell me what time dinner would be. “He was studying political science.” My mother stared at me blankly. “How the government works,” I tried to explain.

My mother grunted, and I could tell she was trying to figure out how much worse a job as a political scientist was than a surgeon. “Any good jobs with that?” she asked. I knew that what she meant was, How high of a salary are you going to have?

“Well there are lots of different things you can go into with a political science degree,” said Liam. “There are a lot of different jobs associated with it.” My mother studied him for a moment; it was the first time he had spoken to her all evening, aside from greeting her. He looked at me a little helplessly, and I shrugged. My parents had never voted, never paid attention to the political system in the United States, and there was no good way to explain it to them.

“A lot of money?” my mother asked me in Chinese.

“Mom,” I said, warning her.

“I just want to know,” she said.

I glanced sideways at Liam, who looked like he was struggling to keep his expression neutral, even though he had no idea what my mother was saying. My dad was largely ignoring all of us and instead focused intently on his food, loudly crunching the shell of a crab leg.

“You’re a wonderful cook,” Liam said to my mother after several long moments.

My mother gave Liam a tight smile and took some chicken out of the dish.

There was a long silence filled only with chopsticks and silverware clinking against dishes, slurping noises, and the occasional loud crack of crab shell. Liam pushed scraps of food around his plate; I could tell that he was just waiting for dinner to end. I was, too.

After eating, I helped my mother clear the table while Liam and my father sat on the couch.

“He’s very quiet,” my mother said to me in Chinese while we scraped the dishes.

“You’re not exactly making it easy for him,” I said, deferring to Chinese in case Liam was listening. I dumped a dish into the sink with a loud clatter.

“Watch the dishes!” my mother said. She put hers in the sink more quietly, as if to prove her point. She reached for another dish. “Have you been having sex with him?”

“Mom!” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “You don’t get to ask questions like that.”

“I knew you should have gone to NYU for graduate school,” she muttered. “You would never have met a boy like him there.”

I made a loud, exasperated noise. “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘a boy like him’?”

“You would have met a nice Chinese boy and been living at home and helping us, like you’re supposed to!” my mother shouted.

“NYU isn’t a church, Mom,” I snapped back. “It’s not that great. You act like it’s swarming with Asian guys and that they’re all supposed to fall at my feet and marry me.”

“Better them than someone with no prospects!” my mother said.

“Liam’s got prospects!” I said. “He’s smart and he treats me well. For once in your life, why can’t you just be happy for me? I’m not like you. I don’t want to go back to China and get some kind of arranged marriage just because you don’t like who I date.”

“Your father and I are a good match,” my mother said.

“You and Daddy don’t even talk to each other!” I exploded.

My mother’s jaw tightened and she glared at me. Her eyes were narrowed and looked darker than usual; it was the closest thing to hate I’d ever seen on her face.

“You are my daughter,” she said through gritted teeth. “You will do what I say.”

“No, Mom,” I said. “I’ve been doing that ever since I was a little kid. I’m not going to do it anymore, and I’m not going to let you try and make me. I’ve been with Liam for a year, and that’s not going to change. And I’m staying in DC.”

With that, I walked out of the kitchen and headed for the living room.

“Where do you think you’re going?” My mother was right on my heels.

“I’m leaving,” I said, spitting the words out in English. Liam jumped up from the couch. He looked jittery; he had probably heard all the yelling coming from the kitchen. I grabbed his hand.

“Let’s go,” I told him.

I didn’t have to tell him twice. We put on our shoes while my parents stood there: my dad with his hands in his pockets, silent as always, and my mother, quiet for once, but seething.

“Bye, Daddy,” I said, giving him a small hug.

As I pulled away, he grabbed my arm. Leaning a little closer to whisper in my ear, he said in his broken English, “You do what make you happy. You go to school in Washington, you live there, you love this boy? It’s okay. Your mother will be okay.”

I stepped back and stared at him, speechless, fumbling for words. “Thank you,” I finally said, not really knowing what else to say.

And then I took Liam’s hand, and we left.

That night, while Liam and I lay on an air mattress in the middle of our friends’ living room, I asked him if he was okay. We had been lying there in silence, both of us staring at the ceiling, Liam stiff and tense beside me.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just worried about you. I didn’t want it to be this huge blow-up over me.” His eyes were dark with worry.

I shook my head. “The blow-up’s been a long time coming, to be honest. I’m kind of surprised it didn’t happen earlier.” I looked at him. “I don’t feel bad about anything that happened. Really.”

“I’m sorry,” said Liam.

“For what?”

“That I asked.”

It took me a minute to realize what he was referring to. Then I laughed.

“You were just trying to be a gentleman,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “and now you’re not talking to your mom.”

I shrugged. “I’m not complaining; it’s not like any of this is your fault. If it makes you feel any better, I think my dad liked you.”

Liam choked out a laugh; it sounded almost bitter. “Are you sure? He didn’t say much of anything at dinner.”

“My dad doesn’t say much to begin with,” I pointed out. “Look, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“If you say so,” Liam said, rolling over onto his side and lapsing into silence.

But that night, while he slept, I watched that crease reappear on his forehead, watched his eyes move rapidly behind his eyelids. I put my thumb to the line that I knew would become a wrinkle in ten or fifteen years and whispered, “It’ll be okay, I promise.”

His eyelids flickered briefly, but he remained asleep.

Kate Lu is a student at The George Washington University, where she is the editor-in-chief of The G.W. Review. Her work has previously appeared in Gone Lawn, Defenestration, and The Battered Suitcase, and is forthcoming in Ellipsis…Literature and Art.

Frailty of the fairer sex: A myth or reality?

By Wajiha Haider

“The history of man’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of the emancipation itself,” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

The above quote demonstrates two things: Woolf was ahead of her time (which, depending on who you ask, might not be newsworthy) and she was aware of the imbalance between the two sexes. Women of the age, ‘enlightened’ women, the women who in their own ways blazed the path for feminism, were still trying to find ways to address the gap, questioning its right to exist in the first place.

In the middle of the twentieth century, in the cradle of what went on to become the feminist movement, women began to speak up. The sex that had until then been exploited by men and society and at certain heartbreaking moments, by women themselves, was redefining who was ‘in charge’ of the discussion and by extension, their own lives.

In patriarchal societies, however, feminism has not reached its fullest potential. Education, career, marriage, inheritance are all part of a performance scripted by one’s parents in an attempt to conform to social ideals. From the moment she is born, she is treated like a second-class citizen of her own life. Despite an increased sense of awareness and educational amenities, many parents in the subcontinent still prefer boys over girls, at times attributing a false sense of superiority to one gender over another.

Farah, a 32 year old woman of two, does not want to return to her husband’s home, after suffering through emotional and physical abuse for six years. When asked why she didn’t retaliate, her response was simple, “He is the father of my children and I was comfortable with him. To the world, we were a family and I wanted my children to live a normal life. I kept giving him chances hoping he’d change. But he didn’t.” She now resides with her parents until her divorce’s paperwork comes through, which may take a while due to Pakistan’s skewed laws. Many women like Farah tend to live the lie others might call wedded bliss. Yes, marriage is a compromise, but our pointless traditions take compromise to a completely new dimension.

Most blame women for not fighting back. But even if she does, the “What will you do? Where will you go? This is a man’s world” comments will be the knee-jerk reaction of a society willing to accept the skeletal framework of feminism without incurring any of its more lasting costs. American activist and writer, Sonia Johnson put it in a much starker light when she said: “Who but women would be told that it’s ok to talk about your oppression, but not ok to organize to end it?”

There is a flip side, of course. The growing number of professional women entering the professional workplace bears testament to this. “When I started working, I was told I wouldn’t survive,” says Zahra. “I faced intense rivalry and discrimination from the moment I began working,” which, owing to her ‘special case’ as a two-time divorcee didn’t make weathering the social storms any easier. But “they kept on giving me challenges, I kept on becoming more competitive, until one day they had to give in and admit that I was their equal, if not better.”

Zahra was recently promoted to chief marketing manager at a major advertising agency.

There are very many angles to both of the above scenarios and numerous cases ranging in between these two extremes. Many social, psychological, individual factors affected both the women differently; causing each woman to act or not to act the way that she did. The injustices against the fairer sex are countless but at the same time, number of inspiring women who choose to rise above their grievances is also rising, slowly perhaps, but consistently. It may be why women, who have risen above this unwritten subjugation, have been labeled as rabble-rousers who don’t want ‘normal’ women to be satisfied with the roles that have been stipulated for them by society.

But perhaps the question is not so much about equality as it is about the fact that no one should have the right to make decisions for women, except women. It is encouraging, however, that women today are more aware of their existence than they have ever been before, and are actively speaking up against the injustices that they’ve continually been subjected to.

It may be prudent to presume that a war raging for generations may just be turning into a fairer fight.

Cast & Credits

Directed by Gus Van Sant; written by Jason Lew; music by Danny Elfan; with Henry Hopper, Mia Wasikowska, Ryo Kase, Shuyler Fisk and Jane Adams. Rated PG-13 for thematic and sensual elements. Running time: 91 minutes

This unconventional film from Gus Van Sant (which will not take fans of the filmmaker by surprise) chronicles the friendship and subsequent relationship between terminally ill cancer patient, Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) and Enoch (Henry Hopper), a morbid teenager who talks to a WWII ghost Hiroshi (Ryo Kase).

Well received at Cannes, Wasikowska steals the show as a tender, almost saintly young woman who intends to cherish her last days and maybe fall in love. The chemistry and relationship between the two principal characters drives the story forward and in what is now typical Hollywood, Annabel draws Enoch out from his shell which is motivated by a deep sadness and grief of its own.

The film forces viewers to wonder at the believability of Enoch’s relationship with Kase’s Takahashi, whether the ghost is ‘real’ or an imagined coping mechanism for Enoch who lost his parents in an accident where he survived. While it is Enoch’s journey that is meant to serve as the film’s principal sole anchor, it is Annabel who, much like she does for Enoch, gives the film its much needed lightness despite the darkness her absence represents.

Restless is produced by Bryce Dallas Howard in a role that forced Wasikowska to cut her hair into a short crop believable for a cancer patient.

The film’s end is a foregone conclusion but is heart-breaking nonetheless. Recommended viewing with a box of tissues.

by Maria Amir

Just a simple song of freedom,

He was never fightin’ for,

No one’s listenin’ when you need ‘em,

Ain’t no fun to sing that song no more.

Just a broken song of freedom,

And the closing of a door,

No one’s missin’ till you need ‘em

Ain’t no fun to sing that song no more.

—‘Broken Freedom Song’ by Kris Kristofferson

Some say it’s the word itself that puts people off. Over the years, ‘hippie’ has become synonymous with everything from nymphomaniacs and drug addicts to rabble rousing mobs and a notoriously poor fashion aesthetic.

The ‘hippie movement’ traces its roots as far back as the Mazdakist movement in Persia, whose leader—the Persian reformer Mazdak—was amongst the first known advocates of communal living, the sharing of resources, vegetarianism and ‘free love’ translated to sexual freedom[1].  In truth, most tend to center themselves around an offbeat, avant-garde branch of humanism that goes beyond most established definitions of freedom to encompass a more universal free-for-all. Amidst all the slurs pertaining to their allegedly poor sanitary habits and general inertia, what remains constant and compelling is the music.

While drugs may have been the common denominator uniting the 60s global atmosphere, the other was always the music itself. Wartime seemed to run seamlessly with revolution, resistance and anti-war campaigning. It is perhaps the latter that is acutely missing today.

Some argue that ‘protest songs’ were a product of the Vietnam War and that the pioneers of Woodstock, followed by The Beats in literature and ground activists continued their crusade long after the war against oppression was over, wherever and whenever it was is in the world. “The world cared back then. It doesn’t any more. I don’t know why and I don’t know if it ever will again but I know that right now no one cares to take to the streets singing songs anymore. No one really believes in the power of a song the same way they did when Dylan took the stage or when Seeger sang ‘This Land is Your Land’,” says a musician friend Ethan, who performs in Washington Square Park, New York.

Either way, there is a gaping hole in sentiment in the world today. The outpouring of grief following 9/11, the distinct lack of it for global disasters before the twin towers came tumbling and its subsequent rehashing has somehow failed to provide enough impetus to spark some life back into the arts. This is surprising, and oddly, it is also a historical anomaly. Traditionally, for both better and worse, hard times have always provided a flourishing ground for counterculture and artistic expression. Today, we seem to be waiting for an ear-piercing rallying cry for peace and met instead by an overwhelming silence.

This doesn’t mean of course that no one is singing, or writing, or drawing against oppression. What seems to be missing is the symbiosis of intention and action. “There are just so many causes these days that it has become nearly impossible to unite under one. We are all fighting so many battles, against poverty and ignorance and against terrorism and tribalism on the other. Women are slut walking to prove a point and men are camping out on Capitol Hill to take down Wall Street. Where do we fit in music and poetry?” says history professor Ammar Siddique.

One would assume more causes would mean more art by default. One would also think that this much rage would give birth to a generation of artists giving voice to the cause of their choice in the medium of their choosing. Collectively, as the human race, why are we not yelling for all the killing to stop? Or better put, why are ‘enough’ of us not yelling for it to stop. When did the ones vying for blood and vengeance swell to such sizeable ranks that the remainder decided it was no longer even worth the effort to keep up appearances? Why aren’t there enough pro-peace rallies today? Why aren’t little girls stepping up to army tanks and pushing in freshly plucked daisies to mortar mouths? Why are there no young men sporting Woodie Guthrie ‘this machine kills fascists’ guitar cases? And, why do none of us really believe that any of it could still work? What changed along the way and when?

As far as Pakistan is concerned, our music has never really been political. It has been patriotic, but that is never really the same thing. “Protests and politics were always the domain of poetry. When it came to protest poetry ours was incomparable. We had Faiz and Jalib and they have Lawrence Ferlinghetti beat any day,” says poet and historian AK Khaled. Today’s Pakistan is flanked by battles on every front. One need only step out of their house to pick a cause and each cause we pick will unearth ten more. There is a veritable cesspool of coppers to complain about: beggary, corruption, illiteracy, patriarchy, fundamentalism, terrorism, lawlessness… the road goes on forever and the party never ends. And yet considering the flux of material to work with, art has fallen drastically short of the task. The poetry, prose, films, paintings, music…have all shied away from saying anything really big. Sure, there have been gems here and there and the most recent resuscitation of the National Student’s Federation to promote the voice of the progressive youth, films such as Bol and bands like Beghairat Brigade and Laal have tried to stand against the tide, but their voices are simply not as loud as they need to be.

Some might say the problem lies in the nature of ‘protest songs’ themselves. By definition, protest songs are songs associated with a movement for social change…they tend to be topical and it is hard to narrow down a topic today. Wars are no longer fought against nations or along borders. The 21^st century is the age of ideological battles calculated and cultivated on land. War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, each of these cosmic battles encompasses global audiences and theoretical principles but sets them on a chess board manipulated by financial overlords. Previously, movements were time bound and often the spark of one cause ignited elsewhere in the world where it was needed and it spread on its own. This was clearly the case with the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. Today’s world works in reverse; the cause starts globally and slowly begins to splinter into smaller and smaller target zones. This usually means that nations having nothing to do with the origins of the ideological battle get stuck with the baggage of other countries along with their own.

“In Pakistan, pro peace rallies have a hard time finding any support, because if we’re honest peace isn’t really what we’re after. The people want peace but it’s not a pacifist kind of peace…they want justice and retribution. They want someone to pay for what has been done to them and this is a place where ‘an eye for an eye’ will always, always trump ‘turn the cheek’ notions,” says malang and part-time cobbler Habeeb Shah.

If there is a peace narrative to be found in Pakistan, it is perhaps best located in Sufi music. As is the case with most things in the country, religion will always be one corner for most kinds of art. At least, most kinds of art that have any long term, grass root appeal and yet the version of ‘faith’ that does make it into revolutionary thought or art tends to be in a league of its own. Sufi songs inspired by centuries old poetry by Bulleh Shah and Sultan Bahu, serves as a vehicle against both bourgeois detachment and orthodox involvement in battle for the public sphere.

Bulleh Shah has been quoted as saying:

Pee sharaab te kha kebab, heth baal haddan di ag

Bulleha bhan ghar rab da, ais thuggan de thug noo thug

(Drink your wine and eat your kebabs, roasting in the fires of bone

Oh Bullah, break into God’s house and cheat the cheat of Cheats)

Over five centuries later, Canadian born legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen, in his anthem ‘Democracy’ echoes the sentiment:

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,

the holy places where the races meet;

from the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen

to determine who will serve and who will eat

And honestly, who would ever undertake the futile task of trying to pinpoint the effectiveness of one verse over the other. Still, given the dearth of voices reacting to violence today, both the East and the West seem floundering in the discontented waters of their respective pasts. We all seem to be feeding off of this “great art of yore” theory rather than sustaining and regurgitating our current bitterness effectively. “People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas,” Dylan once said.

I am unsure of whether this is because we are too scared of creating something new in this bitter, ugly world or because we are simply too apathetic to believe in something new. After all, art is above all else, a process of giving birth and there is too much anger out there for most newborn creations to survive the impending assault of censure, ridicule and bitterness that lurks behind every corner and in every critic.

No matter where we are coming from, we need to push past this ominous, ever present silence.  Silence was once what terrified people most but today it seems to have set in and congealed in the collective human conscience. Nearly the entire human race is engaged in war today, in one form or the other and still most of this race also appears to have separated itself from the affects of its condition. Many of us have retreated behind silicon screens that allow us to post tidbits of ourselves and thereby prevent us from actually working long and hard to give voice to our rage in a cohesive and- more importantly- common voice.

In Pakistan, anti-war sentiment is viewed largely as a flailing Western past-time. It tends to be viewed as that luxury only available to those who have the choice to choose their own battles. For the rest of us, war is here whether or not we like it and ‘peace mongering’ has been dismissed as the cowardice of those unwilling to take a stand. In Pakistan, we tend to think of protest songs or pacifist songs as inherently American and thereby suspect by nature. The whole ‘yes-we-canness’ of classics like ‘Blowin in the wind’ and ‘This Land is My Land’ seems rooted in the seemingly arrogant notion that good things will always come your way. It involves a hope that we in Pakistan lost a long time ago and have since been struggling to recapture.

After all the best protest songs are by definition a perverse mixture of feel-good, feel-guilt and feel-motivated. Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ both emanated from a deep-set belief in universal brotherhood that many in the world today separate themselves from in favour of tribalism, nationalism or multiculturalism.

Is it just that romanticism is dead and that no one is willing to cling to hope over lost pride any longer? Are we apathetic?

Or are we all too willing to lump all our inertia into the ever-widening public discourse of post-modernism that prevents us from needing to give it any voice beyond the white noise that already persists?

Because that is what a protest songs really is.

It is the noise that puts an end to all that white noise.