I've just made the following post to the Rabat American School Moodle (registration required):
By George (a fictional character from American folk wisdom), I think we've got it! I used last Thursday's class (link to the April moment in Psychology 214b) to
- provide background for hearing Mahmoud Darwish's "Rita and the Rifle" (as performed by Marcel Khalife) in the history of the Palestine/Israel conflict and the Lebanese Civil War
- wonder out loud with professor friends born out of the US whether Americans have a "sense of the tragic"
- set the stage for understanding Nass El Ghiwane's "Sabra and Chatila" in terms of Moroccan politics 20 years ago, and now
- reflect on the innocence of the Eisenhower, early Kennedy, Simon and Garfunkel years, and the tiresome politics of the 60s
- report the welcome Americans receive in Morocco since 9/11
- ask rhetorically how 9/11 affected our media
- play Ani Difranco's "Self Evident"
- wonder out loud whether it's 1955, or 1965, or 1968, here on the Main Line, in terms of the political future immediately ahead for my students
- cite Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning"
As our class ended, Gar Green's began, and it's podcast from RAS (download MP3). Tomorrow, with a little luck, we'll continue our discussion with Gar's class's in mind; and then I'll call on Skype and introduce us to them.
Now, where can we take this? How about some accounts of our responses to the music we like, podcast from Haverford and Rabat? Lots of you have iPods and other MP3 recorders, right? What about asking some old folks like your parents what they were thinking, as they listed to Khalife/Darwish or Ghiwane in their youth?
Oh, and what do you want to know about the stuff we're listening to at Haverford, and how it relates to youthful American politics? Could we, like, interview each other on Skype, and podcast that?
Oh, and do listen to بين ريتا وعيوني . . بندقيه
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On that sense of the tragic in American culture: perhaps we have nothing to compare to the sense of al-Andalus, but maybe we can identify some cultural strands of our own great losses.
The Southern imagination of the Civil War, for example, is generally cast as a tragedy, complete with high values, doomed odds, heroic behavior, and nobility somehow undercut by fate. The necessary companion to that representation is the black American consideration of the long experience of slavery.
More recently, American writing about Vietnam is usually tragic. Consider how inappropriately heroic is The Green Berets as novel and film, and contrast with the intense tragic vision of any given Vietnam film. For writing, a reading of Stuart O'Nan's massive collection, or any given set of novels, confirms this sense. At times American writing about that war darkens beyond the tragic to the satiric, or the horrfic, but the argumentative sense of tragedy, its glimpse of goodness failing is more pervasive.
The largest span of time I can think of would be various native American nations, imagining their dispossession from (most of) a continent.
Posted by: Bryan | April 18, 2005 at 03:42 PM