18/04/2017

Election présidentielle française : le point de vue d'un chercheur en sciences politiques



Chers lecteurs,

 je ne poste jamais ce genre de messages, mais cette semaine, je crois que cela pourra servir à certains... Vous connaissez ma passion profonde pour la vie politique, surtout internationale, mais aussi française, bien évidemment, et si ce message peut contribuer à en éclairer certains, tant mieux.

Cette campagne a été confuse, laide et éprouvante, et médias, Facebook et autres réseaux sociaux n'arrangent pas les choses... 

Si vous avez un moment, lisez ces réflexions rédigées par un brillant ami, professeur à Sciences Po, diplômé en Sciences Politiques passé par Princeton et Stanford... Et n'hésitez pas à partager.

A bientôt et bon vote à tous,
melissa

-

Chers tous,

Je vous écris à une semaine de l’élection parce qu’il est maintenant clair que la possibilité de Jean-Luc Melenchon au second tour de l’election presidentielle est reelle, tout comme celle de Messieurs Fillon, Macron et de Madame Le Pen. J’entends autour de moi beaucoup d’hesitation, d’indecision et de peurs  Je vais donc brievement, a la lecture des programmes et de certains elements d’information, tenter de contribuer a la reflexion des hésitants. (J'écris sur un vieux clavier anglais: vous voudrez bien me pardonner la presence aleatoire d'accents)

D’abord, si vous voulez du changement vers une société solidaire mais que vous hésitez, que vous vous dites ce sera pour la prochaine fois, détrompez-vous : vous n’avez que cette élection pour voter pour le candidat du changement solidaire. S’il n’est pas élu, Messieurs Macron et Fillon vont mener une politique d’austérité qui va contribuer à la paupérisation des plus défavorisés et au ressentiment vis-à-vis de la construction européenne qui restera un marché et des appels à la déréglementation pour payer la dette. Suite à cela, les déclassés se rallieront au FN fort de son absence d’exercice du pouvoir pour canaliser et attiser les mécontents, comme jadis le PCF.

Ensuite, si vous vous dites que vous ne pouvez pas voter Melenchon parce qu’il est anti-europeen, considerez les cinq elements suivants

1. Nous sommes attaches a l'Europe comme representant la democratie, l'economie sociale de marche (entre le liberalisme sauvage americain et l’economie planifiee sovietique), le respect de l'etat de droit et des droits de l'homme

2. En dehors du programme Erasmus et de la recherche en commun qui fonctionnent, et de la commodite de circulation, l'UE telle qu'elle est ne correspond pas a ces ideaux. C'est un grand marche qui s'incarne en la personne de Monsieur Barroso qui apres deux mandats a la tete de la commission, a pantoufle chez Goldman Sachs. (Rappelons que la monnaie unique devait proteger des chocs assymetriques et apres la crise financiere de 2008, ce n'est pas du tout ce qui s'est passe) En France, l'Europe est l'alibi du socialisme mitterrandien pour cacher l'echec de 1983 en disant qu'il faut conduire la politique sociale au niveau europeen mais rien de tout cela ne s'est passe. (Cf. l’ouvrage L’Europe sociale n’aura pas lieu de Francois Denord et Antoine Schwartz, 2009)L'EU est l'un des bras de l'austerite et du demantelement des Etats providences contre la pomesse originelle de l'economie sociale de marche.  Donc il nous faut transformer l'Europe de l'interieur pour la rapprocher des ideaux qui nous y attachent.

3. J-L. Melenchon a voté pour Maastricht, on le lui reproche assez dans le camp souverainiste. Il ne veut pas quitter l'Europe. Il sait simplement que la négociation passe par le rapport de force. Ce n'est pas gagné mais cela vaut la peine (Il a été vraiment déçu quand Alexis Tsipras a plie face aux exigences de l'austérité et c'est vrai que la France n'est pas la Grèce et aura plus de poids) Le pari est de refaire une Europe anti-austerite. Pourquoi ne pas se battre pour ca? 

4. Si J-L. Melenchon est élu (et peut être Martin Shulz en Allemagne), la possibilité d’un candidat qui prône un changement anti-austeritaire vers plus de solidarité va sans doute fédérer une plus grande coalition au sein des peuples de l’Union européenne, ou la paupérisation progresse aussi.

5. Et si on le plan A échoue? Cela voudra dire que l’UE ne peut pas réaliser ce qu’elle prétend être, il faudra alors la quitter sans regrets, après lui avoir donné toutes ses chances. 
Si vous y voyez l’avancee des droits de l’homme, vous pourrez vous consoler en notant que L’avenir en commun prevoit d’ « Offrir l'asile aux « combattants de la liberté », c'est-à-dire toute personne persécutée en raison de son action en faveur de la liberté dans l'esprit du préambule de la Constitution de 1946. Edward Snowden et Julian Assange seront récompensés et accueillis en France » (p. 89) l’Union Europeenne ne l’a pas fait, la France insoumise propose de le faire.

Si vous vous dites que vous ne pouvez pas voter Melenchon parce qu’il est liberticide, voyez le rapport d’Amnesty International ci-dessous qui felicite la France Insoumise en matiere de libertes de la presse. Notez aussi page 89 de L'avenir en Commun la proposition d'"Offrir l'asile aux « combattants de la liberté », c'est-à-dire toute personne persécutée en raison de son action en faveur de la liberté dans l'esprit du préambule de la Constitution de 1946. Edward Snowden et Julian Assange seront récompensés et accueillis en France"

Si vous vous dites que vous ne pouvez pas voter Melenchon parce qu’il est pour l’alliance bolivarienne, donnez-lui 2 minutes 30 pour effectivement expliquer pourquoi
  • On peut etre dans l’ALBA et dans l’Union europeenne
  • L’ALBA fait partie d’une politique globale de la mer  du dirigeant de la France insoumise, qui entend valoriser les territoires d’outre mer et la facade maritime incomparable de la France
Ce n’est pas l’habileté du tribun qui s’en sort facilement. C’est parfaitement cohérent avec ce qu’il explique icihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGQtZo2bqUM de 5’17 a 15’17s
Dans ce 25e numéro de la Revue de la semaine, Jean-Luc Mélenchon analyse l'ambiance glauque qu'essaient de répandre certains médias au moment où la France in...

Je cite la proposition 15 qui est peu commentée.
Faire des Outre-mer des leviers d'alternative à l'échelle mondiale
  • Faire des Outre-mer des pôles régionaux de codéveloppement : transfert de technologie auprès des pays voisins, aide logistique et scientifique, investir dans des établissements de formation de haut niveau (santé) bénéficiant à la fois aux étudiants ultra-marins et à ceux des pays voisins
  • Rejoindre les coopérations régionales dans une démarche de codéveloppement écologique, social et de progrès humain : par exemple l'ALBA pour les Antilles et la Guyane française, l'Afrique australe pour Mayotte et la Réunion, etc.

Si vous ne pouvez pas voter Mélenchon parce qu’il est irresponsable de ne pas payer la dette, considérez je vous prie les aspects suivants.
    1. Ce malaise vient de l’idée que le remboursement de la dette est une obligation d’ordre moral qui distingue les gens honnêtes et responsables des escrocs. Le remboursement de la dette est donc la reconnaissance et l’acquittement de ce qui est moralement du à autrui.
    2. La dette dont nous parlons comme la seule significative est une dette financière a l’égard d’autres Etats et d’emprunteurs privés existant aujourd’hui.
    3. Dans la mesure ou la dette  peut se gérer par l’inflation, la guerre ou des politiques d’austérité qui ont pour but de baisser les dépenses publiques, lesquelles politiques ont toutes des effets néfastes sur la qualité de vie des citoyens les plus fragiles, présenter le remboursement de la dette comme un absolu moral équivaut
      • A dire que les obligations qu’un gouvernement à vis-à-vis des citoyens les plus défavorisés n’en sont pas.
      • A ne pas voir que c’est une injustice intergénérationnelle: les politiques d’austérité se font en grande partie au détriment des jeunes alors que la dette a été créée essentiellement au profit des générations de l’après-seconde guerre mondiale.
      • A supposer que quelqu’un va un jour rembourser la dette alors que bien des instances endettées ou en faillites sont refinancées parce qu’il est considéré comme inacceptable qu’elles fassent faillite.
Donc, le traitement du problème de la dette (diminution par l’inflation, la guerre ou l’austérité) est un choix politique sur qui va bénéficier et qui va perdre, pas une obligation morale dont il est évidemment bon et juste de s’acquitter. 
C’est ce qui est en jeu ici https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77diKEEPcQ surtout apres 3’16s
J’ajoute un element interessant sur la retraite
Si vous ne pouvez pas voter Mélenchon parce qu’il ne va rien faire en dehors de la constituante, voici ces dix premières mesures : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brJu7qMJdVc
Invité d'On n'est pas couché, Jean-Luc Mélenchon a donné les 10 premières mesures qu'il mettrait en place s'il arrivait à l'Éysée. À écouter et à partager ...


Si vous ne pouvez pas voter Mélenchon parce que vous craignez qu'il ne gagne pas contre Madame Le Pen au second tour
  1. Benoit Hamon a déjà annoncé qu’il voterait Mélenchon au second tour
  2. Les electeurs de Monsieur Macron et une partie de ceux de Monsieur Fillon voteront contre Madame Le Pen. (Plusieurs electeurs de Monsieur Fillon avec qui j’ai discute disent qu’ils voteraient Melenchon contre Le Pen au second tour)
  3. Une partie des electeurs FN du premier tour manifestent un vote protestataire mais ne vont pas lui redonner leur voix au second tour
  4. Le sondage du 10 avril suivant le donne gagnant par 57 contre 43% des voix http://www.bfmtv.com/politique/sondages-desormais-teste-au-second-tour-melenchon-est-donne-gagnant-face-a-le-pen-1139366.html  
Si vous votez FN par vote protestataire, sachez qu’aujourd’hui vous avez le choix en matière de vote protestataire : Monsieur Poutou, Madame Arthaud, Madame Le Pen ou Monsieur Melenchon. Les deux premiers ne veulent pas le pouvoir et le disent clairement, le dernier remet en cause la corruption, la pauperisation et, avec votre vote, pourrait arriver au second tour.

Si vous hésitez entre Mélenchon et Hamon, considérez les quatre aspects suivants.
  1. Les soutiens de Monsieur Hamon et les membres de son gouvernement potentiel sont pour beaucoup des membres du gouvernement actuel
  2. Le programme environnemental et de défense du candidat Mélenchon est plus ambitieux que celui du candidat Hamon et poursuit des buts analogues à ceux du candidat Hamon: la lutte contre le changement climatique est à l’ordre du jour: cf. le graphe ci-joint préparé par l’équipe de ma chaire à Sciences Po. 
  3. Monsieur Hamon a peu de chances d’être au second tour et a lui-même annonce que si Jean-Luc Melenchon y était, il voterait pour lui (http://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2017/article/2017/04/09/benoit-hamon-appellera-a-voter-jean-luc-melenchon-s-il-perd-au-premier-tour_5108409_4854003.html), de même pour l’économiste Thomas Piketty http://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/04/12/piketty-soutien-de-hamon-voterait-melenchon-plutot-que-macron-au-second-tour_1562416 . Voter Hamon le 23 avril, c’est faire perdre le changement.
    L'économiste Thomas Piketty, figure parmi les soutiens du candidat socialiste Benoît Hamon, préférerait voter pour Jean-Luc Mélenchon plutôt que pour Emmanuel Macron, qu’il juge «coresponsable» du «désastre économique du quinquennat», a-t-il expliqué mercredi.

    Dans l’émission « On n’est pas couché », le candidat socialiste à l’élection présidentielle a assuré qu’il choisirait Jean-Luc Mélenchon en cas de défaite au premier tour.

Si vous hésitez entre Mélenchon et Macron parce que le second serait plus responsable économiquement, rappelez-vous de l’échec du pacte de Responsabilité mené sous le quinquennat Hollande. Observez aussi que l’économiste Thomas Piketty a annoncé  qu’il voterait Melenchon plutôt que Macron au second tour.http://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/04/12/piketty-soutien-de-hamon-voterait-melenchon-plutot-que-macron-au-second-tour_1562416.

Pensez enfin à la responsabilité du chef d’Etat à faire face à Messieurs Trump, Poutine, Erdogan et au futur chancelier allemand.
.
Si cet effort vous a paru éclairant, faites suivre au maximum de personnes possibles : les indecis et abstentionnistes sont encore nombreux.

Bonne dernière semaine, sans messages interminables!

Benoit


The heart against the world


The sound of April 2015... 



Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser - 
'All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun'




and...


Elizabeth Fraser - 'Song to the Siren'  
Royal Festival Hall - 6 August 2012






Such a beautiful and tearing month at the same time.

Feelings and thoughts from April 2015 come back to my mind, a week before an important election here in France.

At the time, the United Kingdom was about to vote and chose to keep a majority that led to an unfolding series of political disasters.


While reporting there, on politics, and some other days on beauty, meaningfulness, art and music, I was overwhelmed by the contradictions of my work.

On the one hand, I was writing and speaking about the refugee crisis - at its peak that spring - and about the coming election and the focus on immigration.

On the other hand plunged into my research in Bristol for my coming book, full of hope but also expectations, as my research was also blocked by doubts a few days in that month. 

Such an intense moment. 

And here I am this April, two years later, author of that book, still haunted by my doubts about journalism and wishing I could do more... once again.

Music is indeed so profound and human and powerful, it is anything but disconnected from political matters, because politics is only the imperfect art of choosing how to live together in a given territory. So it is indeed an amount of affects, thoughts, feelings from individuals, who, most of the times, forget how connected they truly are.

And music has the immediate power to remind us of this connection.

-

So much could be added, but is it really necessary?
Let's talk more tomorrow...




17/04/2017

'Forever In My Heart'


Sharing today a new song from my lovely singer / songwriter from Bristol.
Very much in my current mood...



Lady Nade - 'Forever In My Heart' 





Part of her 'Song a Week' challenge!




Published on 16 Apr 2017

Hello Lady Nade followers!
Thanks for stopping by for another installment of my song a week challenge.

Here's some additional links:

http://patreon.com/ladynade

https://soundcloud.com/lady-nade


Subscribe to me on YouTube, or Patreon and automatically be entered into my Facebook monthly free giveaway competition to pick a cover song of your choice for me to learn upload and share.

www.facebook.com/ladynade

Out of the 501 Interactions I received on Facebook last month I asked my top fans Nade Sings to select a winner, that winner is Andy Bebbington​ who has chosen a RadioHead Song which I will be sharing On Monday May 1st whilst also announcing my next winner!

Thanks to everyone that's taken part so far.


This song is called forever in my heart' if you'd like advance notifications of my weekly submissions, an exclusives an MP3 version or a commentary audio track please check out my Patreon page

http://patreon.com/ladynade 

Thanks so much for stopping by!
Your thoughts, as always are much appreciated!
Scroll down for the lyrics below :)

Lots of Love

Lady Nade
-x-


'Forever In My Heart'

Lyrics:

I miss you when I need someone to hold me tight
I miss you when I’m alone in the still of the night
I miss you the feeling of your kiss
I miss you so much it hurts

I never knew how strong I could be
Until I lost a part of me

Forever in my heart
Forever in my heart
You’ll always be
Forever in my heart

I miss you in silence when my day is through
I miss you time stands only to leave me blue
I miss you the shelter of your arms
I miss you so much it burns

I never knew how strong I could be
Until I lost a part of me

Forever in my heart
Forever in my heart
You’ll always be
Forever in my heart

It’s time to say goodbye
Until we meet again
You 'll always be
You 'll always be

Forever in my heart
Forever in my heart
You’ll always be
Forever in my heart

Forever in my heart
Forever in my heart



16/04/2017

Interview with Chris Ofili in The Observer


 Rare interview in The Observer today with one of my favourite British painter, Chris Ofili. Some of his painting and recent work will be displayed in Endinburgh and in London, and the Observer's journalist Tim Adams was lucky to meet with the man whose gallery says he "doesn't give interviews"... I know as I have tried.

Very interesting read about his move to Trinidad, his relations with his homeland Manchester and his perspective on politics in the art.

Sharing here. Link to the article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/16/chris-ofili-trinidad-is-really-exciting-tapestry-the-caged-bird-sings-interview?CMP=share_btn_fb




Chris Ofili: ‘Being in Trinidad is still really exciting… I think it is working for me’

Suffocated by his image as the ‘elephant dung YBA’, painter Chris Ofili left 12 years ago to live and work in Trinidad… Here he describes the island’s strange hold on him, now revealed in the extraordinary tapestry The Caged Bird’s Song



A detail from Chris Ofili’s original watercolour for The Caged Bird’s Song. Photograph: © Chris Ofili/courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London


It is a dozen years since Chris Ofili deliberately stepped away from the art worlds of London and New York and moved to Trinidad. At the time Ofili was famous in the popular imagination for two things. He had been, aged 30 in 1998, the first black winner of the Turner prize, in part for his indelible tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence, No Woman, No Cry. And he had achieved international notoriety when New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani closed down a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art because it featured Ofili’s (beautiful) painting of the Holy Virgin Mary, which employed spherical lumps of elephant dung, his signature material, and a host of angels that on close inspection were cut-outs from porn magazines. Ofili was too smart, and too good an artist to want either of those lines of notoriety to define him. So he moved in part to escape those pigeonholes – “black British artist”, “pachyderm shit Giuliani guy” – to make things new.

No Woman No Cry, Ofili’s tribute to Stephen Lawrence’s family, 1998. Photograph: Rosie Greenway/Getty Images

He first went to Trinidad in 2000 to host a workshop in Port of Spain, along with his great friend from Chelsea art school days the Scottish-Canadian painter Peter Doig. They were both entranced by what they found on the island, and went back a dozen times, before separately buying land and moving permanently four or five years later. I remember talking to Doig about that shared decision in an interview, not long after they had gone, and him being still in thrall to the sheer strangeness of exploring the island with Ofili on that first trip, partly by canoe. Looking back now, Ofili, born in Manchester to first generation parents from Nigeria, lights up in a similar way recalling that voyage of discovery.
“Moving to Trinidad was a great experiment,” he says, with the easy smile of a man for whom the hypothesis delivered. “I never knew what it would do to my work. Or even if it would be accepted by people, and not be seen as me just falling off the edge of the earth.”
Why did it seem like the only thing to do?
“As cliched as it sounds,” he says, “that first visit with Peter really was euphoric. Every morning you had the feeling that you were right there on the edge of what you want to be creative. You don’t understand it, necessarily, but you know that it’s the food that you need. You want to stuff it into yourself.”
Ofili had sensed that kind of feast once before, in 1992, on a visit to Zimbabwe, which became a kind of pilgrimage to study ancient cave paintings. That trip had resulted in him packing balls of elephant dung in his suitcase, aide-memoires of all he felt. Not sure what to do with them when he got home, he put them on a display at Brixton market, before making them emblematic of a trippy pan-Africanism in his phosphorescent English paintings (he managed to establish a regular supply from London Zoo).
In Trinidad, Ofili didn’t just want to bring the otherworldly emotion home in his suitcase; he wanted to go there and live among it. “It’s hard to describe,” he says. “I was like, nostrils wide open. I knew this might break everything that I had done before or it might remould it. But I knew I had no option but to go with it, or live with the fact you had basically suffocated yourself.”
He moved out to Port of Spain with his new wife, Roba El-Essawy, whom he had met when she was a singer and songwriter in a London hip-hop band called Attica Blues. Their two children, a boy and a girl, now nine and six, were born on the island. Ofili asked his closest friend, the architect David Adjaye, to build a house and a studio for the family in the jungle above a favourite beach. In the meantime, while the plans were being carefully laid, he painted most days in a decrepit cottage that clung to the hillside 10 minutes from downtown Port of Spain. The set-up was about as far as he could get from the Young British Artist conceptual world with which he had been inadvertently associated: no studio assistant, no technical support, no sense of the art market “constantly nipping at your heels”, and no glitter or elephant dung. Just him and the canvas.
“I always wanted to do that. I did like the idea of having only paint and a surface. And I think it is working for me. I am not that interested in the question of whether I am making better things than I was. Just that I don’t feel as limited as I did 12 or 15 years ago.”
Ofili has always had an edgy, shape-shifting relation with post-colonial politics, searching the present moment for resonant mythology. His most acclaimed work since his chosen exile has been his Blue Devils series, which took a Trinidadian carnival tradition of men coming down from the hills body-painted blue, to spread mischief and intimidation, and viewed it partly in the context of the relations between police and young black men in western cities, to after-dark stop-and-search.
The sense of partial mystery in those paintings, of known unknowns, is ever present in his work from the island. It’s there, he says, “because Trinidad never really fully reveals itself. They have not set themselves up in the way that other Caribbean islands have. It is not heavy in tourism. They have oil and gas, a major port. But as a constant outsider you spend a lot of time working out kind of what it is there for. To be in a place like that is really exciting to me still. Not exciting of the heart more exciting of the spirit. There is always inner reshaping going on…”
Ofili has always had an edgy, shape-shifting relation with post-colonial politics, searching the present moment for resonant mythology. His most acclaimed work since his chosen exile has been his Blue Devils series, which took a Trinidadian carnival tradition of men coming down from the hills body-painted blue, to spread mischief and intimidation, and viewed it partly in the context of the relations between police and young black men in western cities, to after-dark stop-and-search.
The sense of partial mystery in those paintings, of known unknowns, is ever present in his work from the island. It’s there, he says, “because Trinidad never really fully reveals itself. They have not set themselves up in the way that other Caribbean islands have. It is not heavy in tourism. They have oil and gas, a major port. But as a constant outsider you spend a lot of time working out kind of what it is there for. To be in a place like that is really exciting to me still. Not exciting of the heart more exciting of the spirit. There is always inner reshaping going on…”
He finds the perspective, the sense of being of the place but a bit removed, liberating, not only in his relation to Trinidad but also to the UK. “I love Manchester,” he says, “I love Manchester United. But I would really struggle to be creative there. I feel a bit lost, over-familiar maybe. Maybe too stuck in my own web of history…”

Ofili is telling me this story in the upstairs room of the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, where a different kind of web weaving has been going on. He is here for the unveiling of a huge tapestry of one of his watercolours that has been two and a half years in the making. The work has been commissioned from Ofili and Dovecot – one of only two working tapestry studios in the country – by the Clothworkers’ Company, one of London’s guilds, to hang permanently on the west wall of their dining hall.
When he was first approached by the Clothworkers in 2013, Ofili was intrigued but not convinced. “The idea of a commission felt a bit of a dead end,” he says now. “Like being caged in to do someone else’s idea.” When he politely declined, he was told that actually he could do whatever he wanted and that he didn’t even have to meet the guild members (“which was good because I felt I would carry some of their vibes into the piece”). And there was also the opportunity to work with the weavers at Dovecot, which traces a thread of its lineage making fine-art tapestry all the way back to William Morris.
Ofili had lately enjoyed returning home for a couple of other collaborations – one with the National Gallery, where he had been invited to respond to two new Titian acquisitions based on Ovid’s Greek myths. And the other with the Royal Ballet, where he had developed that response to Titian and Ovid into a living artwork in which he created a set based on his Trinidadian landscapes and painted directly on to the dancer’s bodies during the performance. He really liked the contrast that collaboration gave with his quite solitary work habits, and he saw the tapestry as another opportunity to explore that, a “kind of calling” from back home, he says. He made a small watercolour of an imagined scene of island life, and five weavers have spent something like 7,000 hours bringing it to life thread by thread. Today is the day that the final threads will be cut, and the tapestry, produced on a roll on a huge loom 18ft across, will be seen in its entirety for the first time.
Downstairs from where we are talking the great unveiling is being planned. The Company of Clothmakers, incorporated in 1528, are here in force along with curators from the National Gallery where the tapestry will hang before delivery to the guild over the summer. The moment is to be captured too by a BBC television crew, led by Alan Yentob, who has been making an Imagine documentary about Ofili. The crew had been out filming previously in Port of Spain, but Ofili had not been there to see them. He is wary of exposure, and sceptical of the fascination with artists beyond their work (his wife describes him as the “world’s most private man”) but he is, too, full of genuine anticipation over the culmination of what has been a long labour of love.
“It has been quite extraordinary working with the weavers,” he says. “For them it is really a two-and-a-half-year meditation. Sometimes I have come up here and it is clear this is not just about producing an artwork. They have to lose themselves in the process, the tiny gestures that they are making and millions of decisions about colour…”
His work has always been labour-intensive, with its layers of pigment and collage, his habit of overpainting and his experiments with texture and material; in the tapestry makers he has found kindred spirits. “To spend two and a half years moving thread around when you can get an image on your iPhone in milliseconds speaks to a different idea of time,” he says. “It becomes a life choice. How many are you really going to make in a lifetime?”
We are surrounded in the upstairs gallery room by the sketches and roughs of the original watercolour, which was made in Trinidad, and which the weavers keep in sight through the warp of their loom. Looking at the sketches you see Ofili as a sort of magic realist, mixing myth and the everyday in the spirit of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez. The scene he created for the tapestry, The Caged Bird’s Song takes some specifics of Trinidadian life and weaves a myth from them: the title refers not only to the Maya Angelou memoir, but also to the practice among Trinidad’s men of capturing songbirds for competition, and carrying them as they go about their lives in Port of Spain, to accustom them to the noise of traffic and street life. In Ofili’s painting, one such man holds a caged bird, which is being fed with seeds from the native “crab-eye grass” said to make the birds sing more sweetly. On the far side of the painting a woman also carries the plant, and in the centre it seems the two of them come together on a beach, and beneath a waterfall. The waterfall draws inspiration from Habio Falls in inland Trinidad, where Ofili and his family go to swim, but also from another location – a favourite kayaking spot – where in the rainy season water cascades straight into the ocean.
In a typical Ofili touch, this flow of water is set in motion at the top of the painting by a sort of celestial cocktail waiter, who on close inspection is modelled on the former Manchester City and Liverpool footballer Mario Balotelli. What’s he doing here?
Ofili laughs. He included the footballer partly to locate the story in the present, he says. “But he was chosen pretty deliberately. I am interested in him as an African European. Someone who has been both persecuted and celebrated. Someone who is almost mythical as a character. Who sets fire to his house. Who wears a shirt saying ‘Why always me?’ An orphan on the continent. Quite tortured and mysterious.”
Ofili doesn’t want to explain his painting much more than that, but is happy, hoping for it to be read as a story or an allegory. It looks to me like both a kind of expression of his great love affair with his life in Trinidad, or like those William Blake reveries of Adam and Eve before the fall (with a bit of Match of the Day thrown in).
Partly Ofili created the scene as a technical challenge, he says. He was fascinated by how the serendipitous pigmentation and bleeding of the watercolour would work at scale in the tapestry. “I was interested to see if you could weave water.”
When he describes his island life – hiking in the hills, sleeping on the beach with the children in hammocks, jogging in the hour he leaves the studio in the late afternoon, the great thrill of the home that David Adjaye has created for his family, the ad hoc open air film club he runs with Peter Doig – it is hard not to think of it as a kind of paradise. I wonder if he ever fears that truism that great art comes from difficulty; that happiness is the least interesting of all human states?
He does, he says, but not for very long. He suggests that even in pure happiness there is always a sense of the moment passing, of loss, something that he trusts this latest painting, in which a storm brews on the horizon, captures in full force. “Also, where I live, it is not only about the kind of joie de vivre that painters might have found in the south of France, say,” he says. He hesitates to call it a dark side, “but there are certainly peaks and valleys to island life. There’s a lot of poverty; there is crime. Racism and ‘shadeism’ that is unique to there. A brand of humour and nonchalance that some might see as distasteful. An ability to let go of problems that feels quite unique to Trinidad, in part because the people have always been faced with them.” Again he likes that sense of trying to grasp those unfamiliar complexities.

I wonder how easy it has been for his wife, who as well as being a musician has degrees in biology and neuroscience, and who initially, by some accounts, wasn’t as persuaded of Trinidad’s euphoric qualities as her new husband. He grins. “I wouldn’t speak for her,” he says, “but I think she is happy.”
Ofili has made a lot of money from his work – his larger paintings sell for nearly half a million dollars. A major exhibition of his new work will open the brand new outpost of Victoria Miro’s gallery in Venice on 10 May. He has kept a studio and a house in Hackney, and the family come back in the summer, which the kids find increasingly strange and exciting.
He himself approaches Britain these days with much more of a stranger’s eye, not least because its politics look increasingly unfamiliar. “You sense the rise in confidence of the right both here and in the States,” he says. “You thought those arguments had been won. But they are back in the mainstream.”
He tends to think it’s healthy sometimes for reactionary views to be aired. “But I don’t think they should be aired for very long.” The attitudes sound too familiar from his growing up in the 70s and 80s, he suggests. “It just seems to be all about limiting rather than expanding. Maybe it has to go in cycles. You go from Barack Obama, a man I think history will view as a significant figure, and then you have the current president whose name I don’t like to use. Someone who is clearly inherently not very generous as a human being, and probably very destructive. You wonder how that happens?”
Does he think of himself as a broadly political artist?
“I wouldn’t say even that I’m a broadly political person,” he says. “But on occasion I have felt that I have no choice but to paint something with a strong moral stance. The paintings now at Tate Britain, No Woman No Cry and Blue Devils, they are my Eric Bristow-type attempts to hit the bullseye of things that were going on.”

Chris Ofili, Iscariot Blues, 2006. Photograph: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

I wonder if the sensibility that produced his Turner prize work, the complicated celebration of his paintings, the directed anger of the Stephen Lawrence piece, feels like emotion from another stage of life for him?
“The things that I covered there, they are not irrelevant to me now, of course not,” he says. “But they are not the things I feel I need to explore at the moment. Change is not indecision. It is where the work happens.”
A little later we go down and watch the tapestry being prepared to be laid out for the first time in its entirety on the floor of the studio. It is a poignant moment, not least for the weavers who have lived with it for all those hours, creating a centimetre or two on a good day. There is a speech by the director of the Dovecot Studio, David Weir: “Love is proved by the letting go,” he suggests – and to prove the point Ofili goes along the thousands of threads with the master Clothmaker and a large pair of scissors cutting the ties that bind the work to the loom. While the triptych of the tapestry is unrolled Ofili stands and chats with the weavers who have worked his magic in silk. And then we all gaze down on a sudden explosion of Caribbean possibility in the grainy Edinburgh afternoon, and at Mario Balotelli, one part Prospero, one part mixologist, bringing it all to light.
Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic is at the National Gallery, London WC2, 26 April‑28 August

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The power of writing: the will the "change the narrative"



Change the Narrative, Change Your Destiny: How James Baldwin Read His Way Out of Harlem and into Literary Greatness

“You’re playing the game according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game, which is not, after all, worth playing.”

When Margaret Mead and James Baldwin sat down for their remarkable public conversation in the summer of 1970, the transcript of which was eventually published as A Rap on Race (public library), the seven and a half hours of generous genius that flowed between them covered such wide-ranging issues as race and gender, power and privilege, capitalism and democracy, and a wealth of nuanced human concerns in between.
One of the most poignant portions of the conversation looks at why real change becomes possible only when we change the cultural narrative. Baldwin recounts how, as a child, he read his way out of his own culturally-imposed narrative of possibility, which allowed him to go beyond what Kafka believed books could do for us — serve as “the axe for the frozen sea inside us” — and go further, turning books into an axe for the frozen sea between us.
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And he said:
"I used to tell my mother, when I was little, 'When I grow up I’m going to do this or do that. I’m going to be a great writer and buy you this and buy you that.' And she would say, very calmly, very dryly, 'It’s more than a notion.' That kind of dry understatement which characterizes so much of black speech in America is my key to something, only I didn’t know it then.
Then I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on, murder mysteries, The Good Earth, everything. By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. There were two libraries in Harlem, and by the time I was thirteen I had read every book in both libraries and I had a card downtown for Forty-Second Street… What I had to do then was bring the two things together: the possibilities the books suggested and the impossibilities of the life around me… Dickens meant a lot to me, for example, because there was a rage in Dickens which was also in me… And Uncle Tom’s Cabinmeant a lot to me because there was a rage in her which was somehow in me. Something I recognized without knowing what I recognized."

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Read more here:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/10/a-rap-on-race-james-baldwin-reading/