"Cubism was born in Africa" – Pablo Picasso

 

On April 8, 1973, Pablo Picasso put down the brush for the last time. 50 years later, the Spanish painter leaves behind an abundant body of work, rich in tens of thousands of paintings, engravings,...

In the early 1900s, in Europe, the era of colonial expansion was in full swing and tribal art still interested only avant-gardists such as Henri Matisse or André Derain, founders of Fauvism. Before being caught up in African know-how, Picasso first set out to discover Catalan primitive art. 

He made "a journey to the depths of Catalonia, where he discovered a medieval Iberian creation that strongly affected his technique," says Juliette Pozzo, in charge of Pablo Picasso's personal collection at the Musée national Picasso-Paris...

Negro art? Don't know! ", quipped Pablo Picasso to an art critic in 1920, in his own tone without laughter. The Iberian artist, born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, nevertheless collected African, Oceanic, Hispanic and more broadly, extra-Western art objects. This is in any case what testifies the finds in his private collection and the images of his workshops, full of statuettes, tools, ornaments, masks, totems ...

Picasso was an experimental painter, both one of the most acclaimed and the most criticized of modern art, "for his ultra misogynistic side and very violent towards women," says Olivia Marsaud, head of visual arts at the French Institute of Senegal. 

A little prodigy of drawing from the age of 14 who "could have been one of the greatest classical artists of the twentieth century," says Gilles Plazy, one of his biographers."

Read more from source here.

"Transforming broken skateboards into drinkable water:" Barcelona meets Africa

Video focusing on the volunteer work of John French, an Australian artist (and friend of mine) living in Barcelona. MOSS, the skating group organisation he leads is helping to create new water resources for townspeople in Swaziland/Eswatini, Africa.

"Where (some of) Spain's agricultural workers live"

A video report from LaSexta titled ‘Between garbage and no hot water in old farm-buildings: the inhumane conditions in which the seasonal workers have to live’.

[Thanks again to the comprehensive round up of weekly news at Business Over Tapas.]

"Black lives matter in Barcelona" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Unlike the UK or USA, one of the more visible ways that many Europeans are used to seeing black people is at work as street sellers, especially during summer in the bigger cities. These are the so-called ‘top manta’ who display their products on blankets in busy places.

In July three years ago, Barcelona’s ‘top manta’ vendors – virtually all of whom are of African descent – decided to set up their own website and clothing brand. Their aim was to turn an illegal activity into a more widely accepted one by “officially registering as a non-profit organisation/union.”

In a piece of good news, they recently finished the first round of their crowdfunding campaign to which almost 2,500 people donated (mainly in amounts of less than 50 euros) to reach their initial target.

(This entrepreneurial move predated the 2015 tragic death of a local man of Senegalese origin who fell from his third floor apartment balcony in Salou during a law enforcement raid. His family sued the police.)

The union collective says the business venture is part of a broader goal to improve their living conditions as marginalised people and because they “want an alternative to the fake products we dreamt we could take off the streets in our city.”

The association was formed by migrants from various African countries who have found a form of daily subsistence in street vending. They argue that they want to have legal employment and residence status but that has been denied them.

Under the slogan “Surviving is not a crime,” their collective had been founded as “a way to support [themselves] in the face of the harshness of selling in the street every day and as a way to defend [themselves] in the face of institutional racism, persecution and criminalisation.” They are also keen to remove the stigma around their jobs and emphasise that they are “creative individuals with ideas and ambition, [just] like you.”

Some members have talked about the dignity of their work even though many earn an income that barely reaches 200 euros a month.

A recent Barcelona council investigation found that, contrary to allegations, there was “no mafia” involvement in the supply of products to ’top manta’.

It is believed that there are organised groups involved in the trafficking of people who bring these immigrants to Spain and there are also “criminal bands” linked to counterfeit goods.

Partly due to pressure from several migrant collectives, in 2010 street vending was “de-penalised” in Spain and it became a minor infraction.

But again in 2015, a penal code reform, carried out by the conservative government of the People’s Party (PP), reestablished street vending as an offence with sanctions of between six months and two years jail.

Legal status of ‘top mantas’ aside, I am interested that these men and their families have an income that allows them a decent life that keeps each of them away from serious crime as a way of making ends meet financially.

Some other members of the public have expressed frustration that ‘top manta’ sellers take business away from established shops and businesses, as well as the complaint that they pay no tax and are selling goods manufactured by children in extreme poverty.

These strike me as probably valid points that need to be worked out, but on a European-wide basis rather than a national or local one. Overall though, we face the problem of what should (and can) be done when people are trapped in the kind of situation the ‘top mantas’ are.

Everyone has the basic right to a decent living. How governments and society deal with this is a huge question that tests how humane we really are.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2020. ]

More info on the Barcelona 'top mantas' here: https://en.goteo.org/project/top-manta-bcn

    

"Illegal workers in Andalusia: unwanted yet indispensable"

An undocumented migrant poses in ‘Almericien’ shantytown in El Ejido, Almeria province, on 14 January 2019. (Jorge Guerrero / AFP)

"In southern Spain, the far-right party Vox has drawn farmers’ votes with a pledge to deport illegal workers.

‘But I don’t know what they would do without us,’ an African man remarked as he left a greenhouse in El Ejido.

In this part of the sprawling region of Andalusia dubbed the ‘sea of plastic’, shimmering greenhouses lie side by side for miles on end.

This is where Vox got its best results in recent local elections that have led to it sitting in a regional parliament for the first time in modern Spanish history.

And while it did not get enough votes to govern, the support of 12 Vox lawmakers has allowed a conservative-liberal coalition to take power in Andalusia.

One of the mainstays of the far-right party’s programme is a call for illegal immigrants to be denounced and deported.

Riding his bicycle along roads lined with greenhouses, Issa Guebre, 24, says he is paid 36 euros per day to grow melons.But in this area of southeastern Spain, dubbed ‘Europe’s vegetable garden’, foreign workers are an integral part of the ultra-intensive farming that the regional economy depends on.

He arrived last year from Burkina Faso after climbing the tall fence that separates the Spanish overseas territory of Melilla from Morocco.

Guebre says his boss ‘has never asked’ him for any identity documents and that he has never seen a work inspector.

50 degrees

Asked about Vox’s call to deport all illegal workers, he says: ‘I don’t know how they would cope here without us Africans.’

‘In the summer it’s so hot in the greenhouses at 50 degrees (120 degrees F) that even the owner doesn’t come in.’

A Senegalese man who lives in Andalusia, Serigne Mamadou Keinde Diassaka, recently drew attention when he published on Facebook a video seen more than 600,000 times.

Responding to Vox at six in the morning in a vineyard in Albacete, he said: ‘Here’s what we immigrants do: work.’

In El Ejido, population 89,000, Vox got 29.51% of the votes, ahead of the conservative People’s Party (PP) that has governed the town for 28 years.

Vox could even win municipal elections in May, polls show."

Read more from source at Spain in English

"Room To Read" - a charity worth conisdering

"For nine consecutive years, Room to Read has received Charity Navigator’s highest rating of four stars for financial accountability and transparency—an honor only 1% of their rated charities can claim."

"Hard to believe" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

 "Remember, little children are not too little to go hell.”


These are some of the words that are included in a new picture book published by a Puritan organisation in the United States last month. 

The book, whose title I choose not to state so that it is not given any further free publicity, is targeted at five to nine year olds and uses quotes and interpretation of lines from the bible to outline the usual nonsense about hell being a place of eternal fire where supposed sinners are “locked in [solitary] cages.”

In a note to parents at the back of the book, the author says: 

“Some parents may be thinking that this kind of exhortation to children will give little ones horrible nightmares… It would be better for them to have nightmares now while you teach them about the realities of hell… than to wind up in the reality of the nightmare that is hell.”

Ignoring the obvious absurdity of such a place existing after death, writers such as Christopher Hitchens have questioned whether any good at all can come from terrifying children in this way. 

Others, such as Greta Christina have called it “child abuse.” 

Author Dan Arel has suggested “using a more Socratic method” of questioning children about what they already think as a better method of then exploring ideas about what happens to us when we eventually die.

Meanwhile in separate case of backwardness, a senior Vatican official has denounced the same-sex marriage referendum result in Ireland as a “defeat for humanity” after the country overwhelmingly voted to support it. 

On the same day as the Irish vote, reports emerged that Taiwanese pop songstress Jolin Tsai's song and her music video “We're All Different, Yet The Same” had been banned from broadcast in Singapore. The video shows two women in a marriage ceremony kissing (with closed mouths) for about seven seconds.

Also recently, two judges in Argentina are still somehow sitting at the head of their courts, after saying that the rape of a six year old boy wasn’t too serious because he was “already gay”. They reduced the rapist's sentence, saying the boy was used to being abused and had “homosexual tendencies”.

In Australia (that far off country that I used to call home) their ultra-conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott blocked both legislation and the possibility of a referendum on gay marriage.

In more encouraging news though, back on this side of the planet, Greenland’s Parliament has unanimously approved same-sex marriage and adoption. 

MPs in the country, which has a population of 57,000, voted to adopt Danish laws on the issue, scrapping Greenland’s domestic partnership legislation, adopted from Denmark in 1996. 

Also, a lesbian fleeing persecution (because of her sexuality) in her native Cameroon has now received asylum in Spain after a long legal battle.

Progress moves slowly - in fits and starts through the world - a world that calls itself modern.

I wish all readers a very enjoyable summer.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2015.]

"Sahara sands and other's lands" - My latest article for Catalonia Today

Fine, red-brown dust covered every flat surface across Europe and the south of the UK just four weeks ago. 

If it was ever needed, it gave the strongest physical evidence that nature does not respect borders as well as telling our eyes, noses and throats that continents can exchange things through the air as easily as we can go on our holiday flights.

Apart from local pollution and pollen, the major source of this all-encompasing powder was North Africa's Sahara desert. Powerful wind storms there whipped up the particles making them airborne well into the north where they were brought down by light rain. 

Personally, I like the idea that someone living in Catalunya (or even London) can be affected by natural forces from a desert that we have usually thought of as being "a long way" to the south. (I'm often reminded how close it really is by the Arabic traffic sign on the autopista near El Papiol.) 

This desert, like the others I have visited in the USA and Australia, is both enchanting and beguiling. 

The apparent emptiness, the sheer width of the open space, the calming shimmer of the sand, the soft curves of the dunes, the barren beauty of the raw plains and the friendly proximity of the stars in your face at night, and (if you are lucky) all from the back of a placid, gentle-paced camel with extra long eyelashes. 

To me, the desert is infinitely more preferable than trying to look at the irritatingly ceasless, repetitive and ultimately moronic monotony of the ocean, which for all it's supposed romance and admittedly great bounties, is to me just something that makes me seasick.



But this recent weather phenomenon, including the reporting of it, has another aspect to it. 

Many of us are at least subconsciously pleased that it has come from outside where we live or have grown up. It is easy, convenient, mentally lazy, to categorise something that has created a minor health concern like asthma as a problem caused by an "oustide" influence or created by an "external" source. 

We can, without even vaguely realising it, make a casual association with other "African problems" like immigration/refugees/hunger/starvation/poverty and this allows us to wash our hands of any possible moral responsibility simply because it was not "us" who made it so. 

We can quietly form the idea that it is those from outside our own homelands who bring in trouble/disease/political extremism/desperation or even "false" religion and this means that we have logically gone most of the way to dismissing the needs of negros with "other continent" problems. 

And we have barely exercised a brain cell in the process. 

Because of the luxury of viewing Africans as others, and not "one of of us" we also set up a chain of thought (or is it more like a lack of thought?) that links "their" difficulties as somehow removed from "our" difficulties. 

This permits a kind of unconscious, indifferent racism. By creating the idea of "us" we create the idea of "them." Even the word "foreign" is objectionable to me. 

A foreigner therefore, is an "outsider," Auslander in German or an extranjero (which has the suggestion of someone being "extraneous," to an English-language ear, meaning: " irrrelevant/not forming an essential or vital part.)



So, weather can reach out over frontiers. When any person does the same we should be complelled to consider the Latin writer Terentius' words from around 160 BC. He stated that " I am a human being, so nothing human is foreign to me." 

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2014.] 

My interview with Matthew Tree - author of SNUG

Below is the text of my interview with Matthew Tree, the prolific British/Catalan writer who has just published SNUG, his first novel in English.

[A version of his article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine in June 2013.]

You've had a very successful career over many years writing in Catalan but this is your first published novel in English. What has caused the delay and now the publication of SNUG?

What mainly caused the delay was the fact that I found my written voice first in Catalan, in 1990, when I wrote and published a small text called 'Viatge a Romania'. As I still hadn't found my written voice in English, I then made a more or less conscious decision to write only in Catalan for about ten years (with the odd incursion into English, which only went to prove that I still couldn't write in this language). Then, in 2000, I got an idea for a full-length novel which came to me in English and in English only. So I wrote the novel in English, and discovered that, finally, after the years of discipline of working in another language, I had finally broken the back of my mother tongue. That novel, however, was published in Catalan (my version) and in Spanish (translated by someone else from the English original). But not in English. The idea for SNUG came to me in 2006 and was based on a host of other ideas that had been building up over the years. I finished it in 2011. My agent, irritated with the wall of silence she was getting from most UK publishers, decided to bring SNUG out as a promotional, though professionally produced, edition. Much as I like this edition, which has been beautifully done, the idea is to use it to attract the attention of a mainstream publisher.

You are one of the few writers born in England who is brave enough to regularly write honestly about social class in that country. How important is class as a theme in your work?

Class was the reason it took me so long to find my written voice in English. Class is built in to British English, as far as I can see. The stratification that English society is still in the grip of, reaches right into the language: open a book by almost any English writer and the vocabulary and syntax will immediately indicate the social class of either the writer or the narrating voice. I wanted an English that was fully malleable, fluid, unconditioned, like American English. And when I got it - or I hope I did! - I used it to talk about class, but directly, not 'unconsciously'. They say writers should write about what they know. Like everybody raised in England, I know about class. It's affected me all my life, and I suspect it's a lot more important - reveals a lot more about the nature of people in general - than is usually supposed.

Why did you set SNUG in a small town on an island in England?

Because I wanted the African visitors in the book to come across England at its most complacent and cosy and snug. I got the idea for the novel when on holiday in the Isle of Wight, which is the kind of place that feels like nothing is ever, ever going to happen there. Perfect.

One of the three main characters in SNUG is what could be called an "intelligent racist." He's a quick-witted man but his blind-spot is that he is instinctively prejudiced. Did you base his personality on a particular "type" of person?

The interesting thing about racism is that, despite its irrational, acientific (or pseudoscientific) nature, it is often espoused by highly intelligent and well-informed people. Who are not intelligent enough, however, to realise that they are gift-wrapping their intelligence around outmoded and patently absurd prejudices in order to justify them. Dr Whitebone in SNUG is that kind of 'intelligent' racist. Smart, but not really smart. Christ knows there's enough of them around.

This same character in the novel says that "providence has provided me" as the solution to the crisis in the town. Do you think that this delusion is a typical one of religious zealots?

No. For what it's worth, I suspect that religious zealots are weak-minded people who love to feel that they are subjected or even enslaved by their beliefs and therefore do not have to answer for anything those beliefs impel them to do. Dr Whitebone's sense of providence is more like that believed in by many political leaders, of the left or right: they think they're the man or woman of the moment, and can help the benighted populace, even if this means some sacrifices being made by that same populace. 

The anti-Semitism in your novel is particularly well shown-up. How much of a problem do you think this still is, in the UK and Europe?

You'd have thought that after the Shoah, anti-Semitism would have gone the way of the dodo bird, but certain far left European intellectuals, especially in France, revived it in a new form in the late 60s and early 70s - as 'anti-Zionism' - and it has since spread from there. In the Arab world, where it was imported directly from Nazi Germany through Haj Amin al-Husseini (the founder of modern Palestinian nationalism, and one of Yasser Arafat's mentors) it is especially virulent. But it should maybe be remembered that Zionism - not to be confused with religious Zionism - is simply the belief that the Israeli state has a right to exist. Anti-Zionists, then, presumably want it to be eliminated (Hamas are genuinely anti-Zionist in this sense). It's a complicated issue, as there is no question that the Israeli state deserves severe criticism for its continued occupation of Palestine (the parts of Palestine that used to belong to Jordan, to be precise). But many people use that as a starting point for encouraging anti-Jewish hatred around the world, which is just absurd. As we hold this interview, news has come through that the Syrian government has just killed 50 Turkish people in a bomb attack. Compare the fairly muted international outcry now with when the Israeli military killed nine Turkish nationals on a boat headed for Gaza, a few years ago. Why this difference in virulence? Anti-Semitism, unfortunately, is still very much with us, on both the left and right, but gives itself sneaky political justification in the form of the undeniably legitimate Palestinian struggle for independence (support for this struggle, of course, doesn't automatically imply an anti-Semitic stance: you have to read between the lines to see where people are really coming from, in this sense). In the West, it seems, then, that anti-Semitism is hard-wired into the belief system, perhaps because it was, indeed, a Christian invention.

Another of the three main characters is 12 years old. What did you do to create the mind of this character?

I thought about when I was twelve. A lot of the larking about between the narrator and the other young teenagers is based on a holiday I went on in East Anglia - when I was twelve.

The other narrator of the story is an African man who is directly involved in creating the conflict on the island. At one point he uses a popular British hymn to cleverly satirise the locals. What was your idea behind this?

In fact, the use of William Blake's 'Jerusalem' - which Jonas Cole, the African spy, overhears and 'adapts' as he listens to it - is a bit of a cliché, in that it's appeared in a couple of films I can't identify at the moment (I vaguely remember people singing the hymn in church, cut with images of other people being beaten up by British soldiers or police). But 'Jerusalem' does sum up perfectly a kind of exalted self-satisfaction you often find in England, and which the visiting Africans, of course, disturb somewhat.

What influenced you to write SNUG and have you read any other books that also skillfully explore colonialism?

For about 20 years I'd worked on different ideas for a novel based on a siege: but I never got either the besiegers or the besieged 'right': the situations i invented just didn't work at all. Then there I was, in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, when I suddenly remembered a story I wrote when I was 20, in which thousands of Africans come to Thatcher's England, furious with the way their continent is being treated and the bullshit they have to put with. Bingo: I realised a Wight coastal village would be the besieged entity, and the besiegers, Africans. As for reading, I read anything I could get my hands on about Africa: history, African fiction, including Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart', perhaps the greatest anti-colonial novel of them all. For SNUG, I went to Tanzania and was lucky enough to meet a major Swahili language writer, Erick Shigongo, who put things into a much-needed non-European perspective.

What are you working on currently as your next book for publication?

I'm working on a new novel in English, which could be summarised in three words: 'England as sect'.

What are your thoughts about the current political situation in Catalonia?

My personal sense is that we are at a historical moment that started on the 11th of September, 2012. The outcome is uncertain but whatever happens, it will mean that Spain will no longer be as most people seem to think it is. It seems that the home-rule process is accelerating, not least because the Spanish government  is doing it's best to make Catalans feel like aliens inside Spain.

Nights & days in Spanish Africa

Children sleeping in rubbish bins, illegal people-trafficking, police drugging and torturing immigrants, 10km of barbed-wire fence, plus routine murder and a thousand other atrocities – all with tacit European Union approval. Welcome to Melilla!

A shocking article: “Europe’s dirty little secret”. In El Mundo (Spanish:) “El sucio secreto de Europa.”