Zombie Rights Movement!

So it's late, late on Halloween, all your charming neighborhood goblins have retreated to their lairs to count their treasures, you've put aside the balaclava you donned in honor of Pussy Riot and you're ready to get back to the 'real' world of serious human rights activism. May I suggest transitioning back with Amy Wilentz' great NYT op-ed "A Zombie is a Slave Forever," in which she explains how the zombie legend sprang from the institution of slavery and goes on to riff,

The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea...

This zombie-slavery connection just has Doo-Dah parade entry written all over it. Zombie Rights Movement anyone?

We enjoyed Wilentz' novel Martyrs' Crossing and if this opinion piece is any indication, we could be very interested in her forthcoming book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo:

It was no surprise to Amy Wilentz when Haiti emerged from the dust of the 2010 earthquake like a powerful spirit. Her book is about magical transformations. It is filled with raucous characters: human-rights reporters gone awry, movie stars turned into aid workers, musicians running for president, doctors turned into diplomats, a former U.S. president working as a house builder, street boys morphing into rock stars, and voodoo priests running elections. 

Wilentz looks back and forward at the country: at its slave plantations, its unthinkable revolutionary history, its kick-up-the-dirt guerrilla movements, its troubled relationship to the U.S., the totalitarian dynasty that ruled for decades, as well as its creative culture, its ancient African traditions and attitudes, and its uncanny resilience. 

Our September Book: The Devil and Mr. Casement by Jordan Goodman

This month, we are reading The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness by Jordan Goodman. Roger Casement is a fascinating historical figure who we have encountered before (in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost and Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil) who is also the subject of Mario Vargas Llhosa's most recent novel, The Dream of the Celt. It's a wonder there hasn't been a biopic starring, say, Daniel Day-Lewis about him, though there is really too much drama for just one film, just as there is too much to cover in one book. Although this book concentrates on Casement's investigations of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by rubber barons in the Amazon, there are a couple of enjoyable ways to get a thumbnail summary of his entire life. One is to listen to the ballad below, but if you have a little more time you can listen to the radio drama The Dreaming of Roger Casement (download via iTunes) from RTE (Radio Ireland).



I wish I could provide a little more background on Jordan Goodman or an interview about his book but I have hit a dead end on that front. There are still a few resources on the internet to supplement our reading, however. You can actually page through Walter Hardenburg's 1913 report "The Putumayo, the devil's paradise; travels in the Peruvian Amazon region and an account of the atrocities committed upon the Indians therein."  Here's a very brief film clip of Casement and a newsreel about his state funeral in Ireland almost fifty years after his death.  RTE also has a program in which a panel speculates "What if Roger Casement had not kept a diary?" (download via iTunes). An Independent 2011 news story of interest, "The Mystery of the Missing Amazonian Rubber Slaves" traces the fates of Omarino and Ricudo, the two Indians Casement brought back to England,

"We are sent far, far into the forest to get rubber, and if we do not get it, or if we do not get it quickly enough, we are shot," Omarino told the Daily News, a popular national newspaper founded and edited by Charles Dickens. "London is very wonderful, but the great river and the forest, where the birds fly, is more beautiful. One day we shall go back."
The men did make it back to South America in the end, but the last known record of their whereabouts shows them separated from their homes by thousands of miles of thick rainforest.

I tend to think of the movement for corporate responsibility in human rights as a relatively new development so this book was very instructive in showing that human rights activists have been seeking justice, not just from governments, but from businesses for more than a hundred years. Unfortunately, the descendants of the Putamayo Indians are still facing environmental threats brought on by corporate exploitation of their resources. This Survival International article compares the Roger Casement story to the current illegal trade in mahogany, which we read about in Ted Conover's The Routes of Man. Jordan Goodman notes the exploitation of the Putumayo by the oil and gas industry.  You can learn more about the current struggle by watching the documentary, Crude  or check out Amnesty International's corporate accountability program, their specific work on Chevron in Ecuador, a success story for indigenous rights in Peru, and an action you can take here.

For September: The Devil and Mr. Casement

For September, we have selected Jordan Goodman's book about Roger Casement's anti-slavery work in South America, The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness:

In September 1910, the activist Roger Casement arrived in the Amazon jungle on a mission for the British government: to investigate reports of widespread human-rights abuses in the forests along the Putumayo River. Accusations against the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana had been making their way back to London, and the rumors were on everybody’s lips: Arana was enslaving, torturing, and murdering the local Indians. Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company, with its headquarters in London’s financial heart, was responsible. Casement was outraged by what he uncovered: nearly 30,000 Indians had died to produce 4,000 tons of rubber. When Casement’s 700-page report of the violence was published in London in 1912, it set off reverberations throughout the world. People were appalled that murderous acts were being carried out under the cloak of British respectability. The Peruvian Amazon Company was forced into liquidation, and its board of directors was publicly shamed. From the Amazonian rain forests to the streets of London and Washington, D.C., Jordan Goodman recounts a tragedy whose exposure in 1912 drew back the curtain on exploitation and the wholesale abuse of human rights. Drawing on a wealth of original research, The Devil and Mr. Casement is a haunting story of modern capitalism with enormous contemporary political resonance.

(If you show up for the discussion having read the just-released novel The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa, also about Roger Casement, you won't be turned away!)

Our February Author: Toni Morrison

This month we are reading Toni Morrison's A Mercy.  Not surprisingly for such a rich and dense story, every interview and profile has a nugget or three that adds to your appreciation of the book and makes it worth it to take in numerous interviews even with the repetitive bits.  This Guardian profile may serve as a good introduction to the author, if this is your first encounter with her.

For starters, I like this clip in which Morrison explains her motivation for writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, because you can see so clearly how this vision of the black girl and her relationship to society has stayed with her through Beloved to A Mercy:



Also from a Washington Post profile of Morrison and A Mercy,

And how did this particular narrative start?
"Well, I have this needy girl. She's going to go on a journey. By herself. Usually, guys go on journeys in narratives and the women stay home.

NPR introduces more of the book's themes in this short video:



I initially listened to the audiobook, read by Morrison herself, and while I don't recommend that you rely on it exclusively as it can be difficult to follow the varying perspectives, its worth listening to at least a few samples just to hear her voice purr.  Luckily, NPR offers some audio sections online.

If you have a bit more time, there is a Los Angeles Public Library talk, An Evening with Toni Morrison also available for free download from iTunes. Tavis Smiley and Charlie Rose, especially good on the historical context for the novel, also have informative interviews.

In this Nation interview,  Obama the writer, and Edwidge Danticat get a nod, and we get this insight into the language of Florens,

You've said that you need to hear your characters' voices before you start to write. In A Mercy there are several mesmerizing characters: the young slave, Florens; the Dutch farmer, Jacob Vaark; his wife, Rebekka, who has fled the poverty, filth, crime and sickness of London. Whose voice did you hear first?

I heard Florens's first, the girl. And she approaches language in a slanted way. She can read and write; she learned from a Catholic priest under scary circumstances. And she's taken someplace else; she doesn't know what they're talking about. When she was with her mother she spoke Portuguese. She knows Latin. So I just put all her language together and gave her an individual voice that was "I"--first person--and very visual. But also, once I realized that I could make her speak only in the present tense, it gave the narrative an immediacy, it made me disciplined in revealing what she thought, and it gave her a kind of innocence and, at the same time, a kind of sophistication.

The Chicago Public Library chose A Mercy as their 'One City, One Book' selection in 2010 and assembled some useful resources including a timeline and suggestions for further reading. One of the books Morrison frequently mentions the book Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770 as one of the sources she used for creating the historical texture of the novel. I can imagine certain Loyal Readers wanting to investigate that one... For a little more insight into the history depicted in the novel try these two posts from an historian of the period.  Morrison also frequently mentions Bacon's Rebellion in interviews about the book. The website for the PBS series Africans in America may be useful to learn more about this event and about slavery in the colonial period.  You can watch the whole series here.  Slavery in New York is another site worth visiting. 

Morrison, whose books are among the most frequently challenged, advocates passionately against censorship.  The New York Public Library has an entertaining conversation between Angela and Davis and Toni Morrison, Literacy, Libraries and Liberation which explores this issue, the importance of activism and many others (also available on iTunes for free download).

With her son Slade, Morrison has written several children's books (Peeny Butter Fudge, Little Cloud and Lady Wind, Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper? and more). For more on what she aims to accomplish in her not uncontroversial writing for children, see this interview by Rob Capriciosso.

Finally from the past some optimism for the future from this recent Chicago Tribune interview,

Q: You're feeling hopeful?
Yes, because I have a history in my head. I remember the way it was. I remember going out in Loraine, Ohio and picking up coal from the railroad tracks and putting it in a bucket. Out there would be Mexican people, Italian people. We were all doing the same thing. Stealing coal was what it was. Poor people were what we were. But if someone had difficulties, they were helped. Children were taken in. It didn't matter where you came from. I know the fiber of the country.

For February: A Mercy by Toni Morrison

For February we have chosen Toni Morrison's A Mercy:

In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Our September Author: Adam Hochschild

Ten years ago, Rights Readers got its start with Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost. This month, we are reading another of Hochschild's books, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.

Most available interviews with the author focus on Ghost or his subsequent book on the history of the movement to abolish slavery, Bury the Chains, however the internet still serves up this 1994 piece from the Progressive and in this interview from 2005 he answers some general questions on what he reads and how he writes. For the latest from Hochschild, check out this very recent New York Review of Books piece: Rape of the Congo (with accompanying podcast).

There are several online exhibitions on the Soviet gulags and you can spend much time just browsing photographs:

George Mason University Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives and Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom).
Open Society Gulag: Forced Labor Camps
The New York Public Library NYPL Digital Gallery
A website for a film GULAG 113 that has some multimedia extras
Finally, this site from a survivor: KOLYMA: The Land of Gold and Death

For a glimpse at how Russians are still processing the Stalin era be sure to check out this NYT article: Re-Stalinization of a Moscow Subway Station.

Doo Dah 2009 - Slavery Is Not History ... Yet!

AI Group 22's entry in the Pasadena Doo Dah Parade directed attention to modern-day slavery in the form of human trafficking. In keeping with the traditional raucous nature of Doo Dah, sex slaves were portrayed by guys in drag, while women took the roles of villainous traffickers.



We carried signs and distributed information to the spectators that emphasized the seriousness and magnitude of this human rights issue. To take action on issues concerning human trafficking and women's rights, visit this AIUSA page. More information on human trafficking is located here and here.

Congratulations and thank you to Marie-Helene and Robert and their talented associates for organizing yet another wonderful Doo Dah event for Group 22!

Amazing Grace

I went to see the movie Amazing Grace last weekend, in fact on the actual bicentennial of the abolition of slavery and was inspired enough to immediately begin reading Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains which tells the same story, though with different emphases. So although I may be jumping the gun a bit by posting about the book before we've made it an official selection (I feel certain that we will at some point-- Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost was our inaugural selection so just for nostalgia's sake...), I've assembled some links that may be of interest to those who saw the movie or have read the book.

The film has a companion website, The Amazing Change, which aims to make the link between the historic abolition movement and the campaign against modern forms of slavery. Included is an effort to match the number of petition signatures to that Thomas Clarkson gathered.

The BBC has put together a very nice package which includes reports on modern day slavery and trafficking, resources for children, and a even more goodies like an interactive map for history buffs. The gallery of abolitionists feature was put together by Hochschild and the "Tools of Abolitionists" gallery is a must-browse for modern-day activists of any cause interested in understanding the history of the techniques still in use today.

A little more on modern-day slavery: Here is a nice photo-story package from photojournalist Pete Pattison. A little background explanation is available at openDemocracy.

Finally, here is Hochschild commentary on reparations for slavery in the LA Times. and for a bit of African perspective on the same subject, try this sampling from Global Voices Online of the African blogosphere.

Check here for more Rights Readers posts on slavery.

Adam Hochschild on Amazing Grace

In advance of the release of the movie Amazing Grace (view trailer here), Adam Hochschild (author of Rights Readers selection, King Leopold's Ghost, and Bury the Chains) offers some perspective on the British anti-slavery movement in an NPR interview.

LA Event: Child Trafficking Conference

Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking and several other area organizations are sponsoring "Hiding in Plain Sight: Finding and Protecting Child Victims of Trafficking A Southern California Conference for Advocates," on Wednesday, September 20, 2006, from 9:30 am – 5:00 pm at The Center at Cathedral Plaza (555 West Temple St. Los Angeles, 90012). Keynote Speaker for the event will be Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves and author of the highly recommended Rights Readers selection Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy). Conference flyer and registration form can be found here.

Tags: slavery, events, Kevin Bales

Brazil: Modern Slavery

Veteran Rights Readers will recall the chapter on Brazil in Kevin Bales' excellent book on modern slavery, Disposable People, Here are a couple of news items on recent efforts to erradicate slavery in Brazil: "The hunt for slave outposts in the Amazon", "Raids across Brazil free 4,000 slaves". By the way, Bales' is still on the case with this recent report: Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States.

Brazil: History of Slavery

For browsing the historical references in A Death in Brazil:

The Library of Congress has a bilingual site, still in development, United States and Brazil: Expanding Frontiers, Comparing Cultures. Check out the Colonial Period section for more information on slavery in Brazil illustrated with engravings and old maps.

And here's a recent article about the uncovering of a mass grave exposing the bones of as many as 20,000 slaves.

A bit more in the way of historical links, lending visuals to the narrative, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha have Wikipedia sites with engravings, and da Cunha has his own site. Here's an engraving of Zumbi de Palmares.

This Month's Author: Peter Robb

Just finishing up A Death in Brazil. Let's start the supplementary links off with a bit of background on the author...

Here's a short radio interview transcript and here's a newspaper profile. A tidbit about his method:

"I'm not a great reader of history, but I like plundering books for the interesting bits," he says. "Where all the information is so remarkable and entertaining that there is no effort involved in reading it – I admire that. You've got to keep people interested, and interested in things they might not think they're interested in. Maybe people who don't care about slavery might want to read about Brazilian cuisine. One employs the arts of seduction."

Resources on Slavery

While Edward Jones makes it clear that he went to no great lengths to research his novel, The Known World, the book did provoke our interest in learning more about the reality of slavery. Here are a few resources I've been exploring:

The Library of Congress offers excerpts from Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writer's Proejct of the Works Progress Administration. Some audio is also available, or try the documentary, Unchained Memories, made from these interviews.

The PBS series Africans in America has a website offering a resource bank of documentation, illustrations and interviews.

The University of Virgina also offers an image bank --"The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record."

Finally, for another unusual slant on the topic, the New York Historical Society offers an online exhibition on Slavery in New York.

For March: A Death in Brazil

Yesterday we selected A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb for February. Here's the cover description:

Deliciously sensuous and fascinating, Robb renders in vivid detail the intoxicating pleasures of Brazil’s food, music, literature, and landscape as he travels not only cross country but also back in time—from the days of slavery to modern day political intrigue and murder. Spellbinding and revelatory, Peter Robb paints a multi-layered portrait of Brazil as a country of intoxicating and passionate extreme.

For January: The Known World

At our last meeting, those gathered chose Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer-winning The Known World for our Sunday, January 15 meeting. Bookflap description:

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order and chaos ensues. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.

Edward P. Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant, Jones was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His first book, Lost in the City was originally published by William Morrow in 1992 and shortlisted for the National Book Award. Mr. Jones was named a National Book Award finalist for a second time with the publication of his debut novel The Known World which subsequently won the prestigious 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.