Monthly Archives: August 2007

Many Middle Passages

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif., 2007) takes some of its inspiration from the 2000 Beacon Press book Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which argued in part that the Atlantic slave trade could be used as a way to understand other slave trades. The editors of Many Middle Passages felt that the Atlantic slave trade’s infamous middle passage — the disorientation, the violence, the occasional resistance — could help us understand other slave trades, in other parts of the world and in other eras. Eleven independent essays explore this idea further.

In “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” Edward A. Alpers sheds some light on the lesser-known slave trade on the other side of the African continent. Alpers raises the obvious point that “it is a mistake to restrict analyses of the middle passage only to oceanic passages, assuming that enslaved Africans embarked from the African coast as if they were leaving their native country, when in fact their passage from freedom into slavery actually began with the moment they were swept up by the economic forces that drove the slave trade deep into the African interior.” [p. 21] Based on this assumption, Alpers traces the Indian Ocean slave trade into the interior of Africa. Relying primarily on freed-slave narratives, Alpers presents us with the horrors of the slave trade on land and by sea. The ocean passages were as horrible on the Indian Ocean as they were on the Atlantic Ocean, with the same high mortality rates and the same dehumanizing conditions. The commodification of human beings seems to take similar forms no matter where it springs up.

In “‘The Slave Trade Is Merciful Compared to This’: Slave Traders, Convict Transportation, and the Abolitionists,” Emma Christopher examines how England transported the earliest convicts to Australia. Some captains of the early ships that carried convicts to the penal colony in Australia had been slave traders previously. As slave traders, they had some financial incentive to keep as many slaves alive as possible. On the trip to Australia, however, there was no financial incentive to keep the convicts alive: “the captains could actually gain financially from the death of the convicts, as the food of the deceased was saved and could be sold once the ship reached its destination.” [p. 110]

Emma Christopher quotes from a letter sent to England by a soldier stationed in Australia at the time who said, “the slave trade is merciful compared to what I have seen in this fleet.” She then goes on to point out that whereas the incredible suffering on slave traders resulted from the commoditization of human beings, the absence of financial incentives helped create the incredible suffering on the convict transports: “Inured to the kind of cruelty that pervaded the trade in slaves, and with no financial incentive to check their behavior, [the ship’s officers] cared little for their charges.” [p. 122] Once back in England, the ship’s officers were tried and quickly acquitted, yet pressure from abolitionists and others forced the government to make sure the convicts were treated better thereafter. The real point, left unspoken, is that it would have been better if we hadn’t commodified human beings to begin with.

In “La Traite des Jaunes: Trafficking in Women and Children across the China Sea,” Julia Martinez studies the trade in sex slaves in and around the China Sea. This slave trade came to prominence in the late 19th C., peaked in the first half of the 20th C., and continues today. Many of the victims of this trade were children — some from destitute families who may even have sold their children out of desperation, but some kidnapped from prosperous families. The children sere sold as young as eight years old, and girls would be forced into selling sex at about age thirteen; they might be released from “debt bondage” at age eighteen [p. 214]; it is horrible to think that children treated as commodities, not as human beings, even if they were eventually released from bondage.

The China Sea sex slave trade was partially repressed through the middle 20th C., but there was a resurgence in the 1980’s as the times brought increased prosperity to the region. The sex slave trade continues today throughout the region. The final chapter of the book, titled “Afterword: ‘All of It Is Now'”, points out that more people are enslaved today (27 million) than at any previous point in history. The good news is that a smaller percentage of the world’s population is enslaved now than in earlier centuries, and that slavery is now illegal everywhere. But still — there are 27 million people enslaved even as I write this.

I was expecting this to be the usual boring academic book, but it wasn’t. Not all of the eleven essays were as powerful as the ones I have discussed, but all the essays are worth reading. The subject matter is so shocking and fascinating (in a horrible kind of way) that it overcomes even the occasional turgid academic prose. And the book is particularly compelling because several of the writers go out of the way to provide lengthy excerpts from first-person freed-slave narratives, so we get to hear the voices of slaves firsthand — at least, we get to hear the voices of those lucky slaves who somehow made it to freedom.

Parallel

While researching this week’s sermon, I came across this paragraph in Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement (1805):

To say God’s revealed will is contrary to his eternal and unrevealed will, would in me be blasphemy of the first magnitude; yet I do not doubt the sincerity of those who frequently say it. But is it not in a direct sense charging God with hypocrisy? However shocking it may seem, I know of no other light in which to view it. [link]

Isn’t this vaguely reminiscent of Theodore Parker’s distinction between permanent religions, and transient religion? In Parker’s famous sermon, “The Transient and Permanent in Religion” (1841), he writes:

Looking at the Word of Jesus, at real Christianity, the pure religion he taught, nothing appears more fixed and certain. Its influence widens as light extends; it deepens as the nations grow more wise. But, looking at the history of what men call Christianity, nothing seems more uncertain and perishable. While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, in each man that feels it, the Christianity of the Pulpit, which is the religion taught; the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands, except only in name. The difference between what is called Christianity by the Unitarians in our times, and that of some ages past, is greater than the difference between Mahomet and the messiah.[link to full text]

Obviously, Parker and Ballou are making somewhat different arguments, for somewhat different purposes. Ballou distinguishes between God’s “eternal and unrevealed will” and (conventional) revealed religion. Ballou’s purpose is quite specific:– to support his argument that, in contradiction to then-current Christian tradition, eternal damnation does not exist. Parker wants to show how religion as we experience it in day-to-day life changes and evolves. Parker’s purpose is more general:– he makes a general distinction between historically situated religion, and eternal permanent religion. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see this parallel between two 19th C. religious liberals.

Disruptive

At last night’s meeting of the church’s board, Bill asked if any of us could help out in the soup kitchen the next morning (which is to say, this morning). First Unitarian sends a crew to make lunch on the third Wednesday of every month, but two of the five regulars were away on vacation, another two were down with some kind of virus, and one of the two replacements Bill had recruited to fill in had called to say she was sick.

Of course, most of the people at the Board meeting either had to go to work, or had already made other plans. But Maggi said she’d come right at nine to prepare food. I said I’d show up at nine thirty to help out, and I called Carol to see if she would be free — she was, and Bill had most of his crew.

This to me is one of the signs of a healthy congregation:– when something goes wrong, and you need volunteers at the last minute, enough people step forward to take care of whatever commitment needs to be taken care of. I don’t base this on any grand theory; all I know is that when this happens, the church feels like a real community to me.

By the time Carol and I showed up at nine-thirty, Bill, Maggi, and Maryellen (who had felt better and showed up to work) had already made most of the sandwiches and made up the desserts. Bill said Maggi and Maryellen couldn’t stay to serve the food, so Carol and I slipped home and worked for a couple of hours (fortunately, we both had flexible schedules today), and went back at eleven thirty to help serve lunch. There were a lot of people to serve. Bill said they usually serve 150 people on the third Wednesday, but today we served about 190, including some families with children. By noon, Bill was madly making more sandwiches while Carol and I served people. Finally, we ran out of sandwich meat and had to serve bread and butter. At least it was something to eat.

My carefully planned work schedule for today was completely disrupted. But sometimes volunteer work really is more important than anything else.

Delightedly annoyed (again)

The mail dropped through the slot in the door. Mr. Crankypants picked up the newest issue of UU World, the denominational magazine and mouthpiece, and opened it expecting to be delighted. UU World almost always has at least one article that annoys Mr. Crankypants, who delights in getting annoyed. And he was delightedly annoyed once again.

The first annoying article that caught his eye was titled “Not My Father’s Religion: Unitarian Universalism and the Working Class” by Doug Muder. (There may be other annoying articles in this issue, but Mr. C. is taking so much delight in being annoyed at this one that he hasn’t read any further.) Muder started off with one of Mr. Crankypants’s favorite critiques of Unitarian Universalism:– that we don’t welcome working class people. How true! But, annoyingly (delightfully annoyingly), Doug Muder places the blame on theology. Theology is a nice thing to write about, but to do so ignores a whole host of other, more than sufficient, reasons why working class people avoid Unitarian Universalist congregations like the plague.

What’s that you say? What are those other reasons?

You could start with social snobbery. Take, for an example, something Mr. Crankypants saw with his own eyes. The new Unitarian Universalist was talking with some long-time members at social hour one Sunday. The long-time members were talking about what their fathers did for work — lawyer, doctor, university professor, other professional high-status jobs. Wanting to include the newcomer, one of the long-time members turned to him and asked, “What does your father do for a living?” The newcomer replied, “He’s a janitor.” The conversation died abruptly and everyone drifted away from the newcomer. That newcomer lasted less than a year as a Unitarian Universalist.

You could add geography, demographics, and congregational lust for money. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many Unitarian Universalist congregations decided to move their church buildings out of the downtown and into the suburbs. Mr. Crankypants has heard an apocryphal story that in January, 1953, the Board of Trustees of one Unitarian congregation was discussing selling its downtown building in order to move out to the suburbs. The minutes of that meeting supposedly record that the Board chair asked, “Why not go where the money is?” To which the minister (whose salary was dependent on contributions) replied, “Yes, why not?”

You could add the Unitarian Universalist obsession with college education, coupled with little support for helping people get a college education. In our snobbier congregations, one is simply assumed to have a college degree (preferably from a “good” college). But don’t bother to ask your typical Unitarian Universalist congregation for a scholarship, for tutoring, for moral support, or for any other help while you’re in college. They only want to see you when you get out of college, are married and in your thirties with children and a job. (Oh, and be warned:– if you want to be a non-traditional student, and finally go to college when you are middle-aged, expect even less support.)

Continue reading →

The Case of the Pointless Paperwork

This afternoon, I worked on organizing my office. I hate organizing my office. It’s boring. I want to be making something happen, not straightening up my desk and filing paperwork. Of course, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do those mundane office chores. Somewhere, the poet Gary Snyder talks about how important maintenance is — you can’t always be creating things, he says, you also have to maintain what you’ve got. So I tried to tell myself that I was doing Snyderian maintenance this afternoon, even though I think what Gary Snyder had in mind when he was talking about maintenance was more along the lines of sharpening his axe or cleaning out the barn, chores which would have been much more attractive than dealing with paperwork.

In my opinion, the greatest theorist on the subject of paperwork was the great philosopher, Perry Mason….

….Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

“Yes.”

“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

“Yes.”

“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

“And did you answer those yourself?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

“Transferred them to another file.”

“What file?”

“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

[from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1939.]

In the book, Mason works on paperwork for about ten minutes before a new client walks into the office with another high-speed murder case. I should be so lucky. In my office, I plugged away all afternoon. I kept hoping that a client would walk in the door and want me to investigate a murder case. That didn’t happen, although the chair of the House and Grounds Committee did stop in for ten minutes to let me know how the various building maintenance projects were coming along.

By the end of the day, I had found lots of paperwork that had once been relevant, but was now so irrelevant that I skipped the “LAPSED” file and threw it right into the recycling bin. Such was the sad end of the case of the pointless paperwork.

Now that my vacation and study leave are now truly over, and I can no longer pretend otherwise, I’m back to my usual schedule for writing posts, which goes something like this — Monday: Congregational life — Tuesday: Stories from real life — Wednesday: Congregational life (and marketing) — Thursday: Theology — Friday: Book review — Saturday: Anything goes — Sunday: Meditation. My evil alter ego Mr. Crankypants and new guest blogger Isaac Bickerstaff may, however, disrupt this schedule without warning.

Sweatshop-free dress shirts

All of a sudden, my dress shirts are wearing out. I bought these shirts six or seven years ago from Land’s End, so I automatically went back to Land’s End and looked at their Web site. The same shirt costs the same as it did six or seven eyars ago, about US$25. In fact, I remember that same shirt costing about $25 twenty years ago. According to The Inflation Calculator, “What cost $25 in 1987 would cost $44.31 in 2006.” That suggests to me that these days, these shirts are now made overseas by workers who earn just a pittance for their work.

My conscience held me back from ordering shirts from Land’s End. I did a Web search for “union made shirts.”

And I happened to find Justice Clothing, which supplies union-made clothing as “the sweatshop-free alternative.” They carry two lines of dress shirts. They carry Kenneth Gordon shirts, based in New Orleans, with a nice button-down shirt selling for US$56.25 each if you buy two or more — unfortunately there was nothing in my sleeve length. Fortunately, Justice Clothing also carry shirts by Forsyth of Canada, who make a line of tall sizes — blended fabric button-down shirts for US$40 each, and 100% cotton straight collar shirts for US$53 each (for two or more).

Just thought someone else out there might like to know.

Max Roach

By now, you’ve probably heard that Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, died on August 16. The thing that stands out for me about Roach is that he, along with drummer Kenny Clarke, moved the beat up to the cymbals. As the BBC puts it in their obituary of Roach:

Before bebop, jazz was primarily swing music played in dance halls, and drummers served to keep time for the band, Blue Note spokesman Cem Kurosman said.

Roach, along with fellow-drummer Kenny Clarke, changed that by shifting the time-keeping function to the cymbal, allowing the drums to play a more expressive and melodic role. [Link]

All of which opened up all kinds of rhythmic possibilities, moving jazz away from the strict 4/4 beat of the popular dances. Many people accused Roach and the other originators of bebop of making jazz undanceable — as if you can’t dance to 3/4 and 5/4 and polyrhythmic beats — as if moving jazz from the dance hall to the concert hall made it somehow less worthy. I like to think that Roach saw larger possibilities for jazz, just as Mozart saw there was more to a minuet than music for one kind of dancing.

What I didn’t know about Roach was how active he was in fighting for the rights of African Americans. Trymaine Lee, in a appreciation printed today in the New York Times, reports:

“It was his technique,” said Jimmy Heath, 81, a saxophonist. “And his concepts were so innovative. But he wasn’t only a drummer. The thing about Max was he was always fighting for the rights of African-American people, that we were creative, worthy people.”…

The group [jazz musicians Heath, James Moody, Jon Faddis, and Phoebe Jacobs] remembered an incident at a Miles Davis show, when Mr. Roach took to the stage with a protest sign — “something to do with Africa or black people,” Mr. Heath recalled — and sat there with the sign held high above his head. “Miles was like, ‘Man, why did you have to do that during my set?’ ” Mr. Heath recalled, laughing with Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Moody. [Link to NY Times article]

I’m also amazed at the range of musicians with whom Roach played or made recordings. Of course I knew he had played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. I did not know that he had played with Duke Ellington, nor did I know that he played with avant-garde composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, nor did I know that he had played rap music with a hip-hop group called Fab Five Freddy, nor did I know that he had performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Roach could play the full range of African American music — indeed, he played the full range of human music.

Selected videos of Max Roach:

Roach with Dinah Washington in “All of Me”
Roach playing Ellington’s “What Am I Here For”, with Billy Taylor and big band
Roach with Fab Five Freddy and break dancers
Roach soloing on just hi-hat

New music resource

If you’re interested in new American music (mostly contemporary classical music but some other musics as well), there’s a great online resource called “Art of the States.” The Web site, produced in collaboration with WGBH radio, has a large collection of recordings of new music available online, with composers ranging from John Adams to Evan Ziporyn. You won’t hear most of this new music on the radio, nor will you find recordings of it in your local library, so I’m finding this Web site to be a great way to explore the music without having to spend tons of money (which I don’t have) to buy CDs. (Requires RealPlayer and broadband access.)

Link to Art of the States