"Good Luck, Toni" A new book, a new website, and a book signing....

 

 

 

I. 

 

Back in December, 2018 I posted that my friend Waîthira Francis had published her first novel, My Name is Toni.

I'm pleased to report that she's published a sequel, Good Luck, Toni.

Toni is no longer a naïve, young Kenyan immigrant struggling with her religious upbringing as she navigates the mores of an unfamiliar culture, but a married woman, a mother, and a working professional.

"Her life is not spared the drama, love snares and shenanigans that seem to follow Toni everywhere."

Francis has created a website where you can order copies from her directly:  Waîthira Francis.

II.

I've organized a reading/book signing for November 12th at 8PM.   The reading will take place at The Wild Rose (17, rue Maury, Toulouse; you can contact the venue directly at 09 81 84 88 06.)  

In addition to Francis, I will be reading from my novella, The Ice Mine.  Books will be available for purchase and signing.  This reading was originally planned for over a year ago but was derailed by the pandemic.

Fabrice Gieryga will play a few songs and I will sing on one song and play tambourine on some others.  The reading and music will last an hour and a half at most. 

The Lost Generation had Paris in the 20's and 30's.  The Beats called an unnamed hotel at 9, rue Gît-le-Cœur home from the late 50's to the early 60's.  Will Toulouse become known as a literary hotbed for the expat writers of Generation X?  Come help make it happen.  At the least you can grab a drink and hear some literature and live music.... 

My Name is Toni

My friend Waithira Francis has published a book entitled My Name is Toni, which I intend to review on LoS when time permits.

I was supposed to read and review it before publishing for a back cover quote, but alas, I was just too busy to finish the book before she published.  I regret that!

What I can say is that it's an semi-autobiographical account of an African woman who emigrates to France and her ensuing adventures.  What strikes me is how she manages to both shed light on what it's like to be a woman, an African and an émigrée, yet touch on universally-recognizable experiences and emotions. 

Or maybe it's just me.  I'm a white, American man but like Francis, an émigré.  That shared experience makes our differences much less important.  But one need not be an expat to understand and be struck by this book.

You can send a message at this Facebook page to inquire about ordering.

Pulling an Oneida, Pt. 3

Back in January 2016 I wrote about a town in New York whose seal depicted what appeared to be a frontiersman throttling a Native American fellow.  Critics called it racist and offensive, defenders said it portrayed an actual historical event, a friendly wrasslin' match between one Hugh White and an unnamed Oneida, a test of strength and manliness.

The seal looked pretty darn dubious, but Whitesboro residents were not phased and didn't want to change it.  Well, national media coverage must have had an effect because less than two weeks later it was reported that the town and reps from the Oneida Nation were going to come up with a new seal.

Just a peek at the original:

 

I don't think one need be a "social justice warrior" to see why this seal is problematic.  If I didn't know the story, I'd probably think it was satire.  I mean, even the name...Whitesboro!? 

Well, I'm a bit late (it was reported back in September) but they've finally come up with something that's basically the same image but a little more even-handed:

 

I think it's a good compromise.  Sign o' the times.

Although now it's "case closed", you can still enjoy this witty bit The Daily Show did back when the kerfuffle was still causing noise....

Pulling an Oneida, Part 2.

This seal will go

In our last post we marveled over the seal of Whitesboro, NY, which appears to show a pioneer choking an Oneida man to death.  At the time, the village had decided to keep the logo after it was put to the vote.

Apparently all the attention has caused them to reconsider, and the village has now decided to work with the Oneida nation to come up with something new.

The NYT has the story.

See also another recent post:  The Politics of Removal which is in many ways the same story....

Pulling an Oneida....

This seal will stay

When I saw this village emblem in an article on my Facebook news feed I thought I was looking at something from the Onion or some other piece of satire.  I looked for a motto such as "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."

Fortunately I'm not overly sensitive, for it appeared as though some white dude wass choking the life out of some unfortunate Native American guy, perhaps a Mohawk or Seneca (he's an Oneida).  Under the impression that this was a joke, I found it a pretty deft piece of satirical dark humor.

But wait, the link was to a "serious" newspaper.  Just to clear the remaining grit from my eyes after having rubbed them both vigorously with the top of my clenched fists, I did a quick Google and found an article in America's paper of record.  Surely, that can't be true!  The village emblem shows a man killing an Indian?  In a town named Whitesboro?  I could already see the protest signs being marched in circles in front of city hall on an Onion News Network segment:  "Whites don't borrow, they steal!"

The drawing itself is so lacking in stately gravitas....that....surely it was something popped out by an intern graphic designer for use in a little article poking fun at white insensitivity to Native American complaints about offensive place names, mascots, Hollywood depictions, municipal logos....

Nope.  The image depicts an allegedly real occurrence, a friendly wresting match won by town founder Hugh White, who in a swift and decisive victory over his challenger gained the respect and acceptance of the Oneida already living in the area.  Presumably these Oneida were subsequently forced off their lands because the village's Native American residents make up a scant .33% of the total population, according to recent census results.  But that's another story.

19th c. version

As for the quality of the image in the current iteration, it's as if they'd hired that lady in Spain who transformed a portrait of Jesus in her local church into some kind of weird, featureless monkey:  Ecce Mono!  

Better than the Whitesboro emblem

In 1977, the current emblem replaced an earlier version; White's coonskin hat disappeared and his hands are now on the Oneida's shoulders and not around his neck, in order to make it appear less like what it still seems to depict, e.g. the murder of a Native American.

In any event, this comes hot on the heels of our last post about updating place names and public art in order to reflect changing attitudes towards targeted elements of our history.  Not to mention demographic reality.  Although the slight modification in '77 was triggered by a complaint and that even the mayor at one time suggested a change, it's apparently not offensive to the majority; on the 11th of January a vote was held and the townspeople came down in favor of keeping their disconcerting village emblem.

But even if the emblem does depict a friendly wrassle, it's a bit weird when you consider that the town was founded in 1784 and incorporated in 1813.  This would be about the time that veterans of the Revolution began occupying their land grants, received as a reward for their military service....despite the fact that the land was often already occupied.  Incidentally, it's also about the time my ancestor Amos Adkins was leading his family through the area, staying long enough to give birth to Great (etc.) Grandfather Issac in Cayuga County (1817), before moving on to Ontario and finally to Newport, Ohio.  When Amos and Mary Adkins arrived in Newport (1830), the local Indians had for the most part already been forced west.

The Whitesboro emblem is more of a wound than an offensive image to New York's Native American nations, because they are still fighting in the courts to regain some of the lands wrestled away by the State of New York around the turn of the 19th century.

New York's Native Americans have tended to make slow headway, despite the fact that the very first act of the very first Congress under the newly-ratified Constitution was to pass a law declaring that only the Federal Government could negotiate with foreign nations.  Congress thus defined the Native American nations as sovereign -- which is sort of why you can buy your tobacco tax free and go gambling on the Rez.  

That Congressional action also renders un-Constitutional any treaties signed between New York State and the Native American nations.  Of course, as Native Americans were overwhelmed by ever-growing numbers of illegal aliens on their soil, their sovereignty became increasingly meaningless.  Disease and warfare continued to reduce their numbers and the tribes became a shadow of what they once were, pushed onto reservations which continued thereafter to be nibbled away as these European immigrants and refugees saw the "need" arise.

Every treaty ever signed between Congress and Native American nations has been broken by Washington.  Not a single treaty has been signed that Washington has not broken when European numbers made it possible to ignore what they had signed when they had been vulnerable due to the fact that they were so few and far between.  When these newly-minted Americans grew in numbers strong enough, they no longer concerned themselves with treaties in order to acquire land.  Brute force was both quicker and had the added advantage of killing off as many of those bothersome aborigines as possible.

So Whitesboro might as well have kept the pre-1977 version of the emblem, showing a Daniel Boone-style frontiersman with a more determined choke-hold on a Native American's neck.  Unlike the wrestling match, this part of history can be confirmed.

But to be honest, I'm far more offended by the flag of my hometown of Tampa, Florida.  I mean, one can argue that Hugh White was a decent guy and by all accounts trusted by the Oneida, so the flag represents not hatred, but a friendly tussle.  But Tampa's flag, my God!  Whoever approved that thing should be tried at The Hague for Crimes Against Humanity.  Don't look too long, your eyes might fry in their sockets....

At the Mountains of Madness

هبوب aka "Strong Wind"

The New York Times reports today ('Haboobs' Stir Critics in Arizona) on a skirmish taking place in the op-ed pages of the Arizona Republic.

The dust storms sweeping over Phoenix recently are apparently being referred to in local media as "haboobs", an Arabic word for sandstorm meaning "strong wind."  This has rankled some Arizonans.

It all started here, when one Don Yonts ["Yonts" being an Anglicized version of the German "Janz"] objects: 

....this is Arizona, not some Middle Eastern nation.

I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob.  How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?

Aside from wondering who appointed this guy as the guardian of veterans' feelings, his sentiment is hands down a sign of the silliest sort of nativism

Of course, the debate over loan words isn't a new one, and as any historian of American English knows, Webster single-handedly Americanized English spelling when he published his dictionaries.  His efforts along this line, as well as his work in Americanizing grammar, were part of the era's obsessive push towards creating a national culture, celebrating the virtues of liberty and patriotism.

Not everyone shares Yonts' point of view:

May I remind the writer that, according to his logic, the following words of foreign origin should also not be used as they may insult him and our armed forces? Typhoon, shawl, pajamas and kiosk. Also, we should not teach "algebra," use the "zero" or wear "khaki" pants.

Some are likewise amused, peppering an entire letter with loan words, while others "....laughed at [the] use of fancy words to describe a good old-fashioned dust storm."  According to the latter, the word haboob "has been imposed on us, and we can do nothing about it."  I  love the hapless victim posturing.  Very productive.

The nativist sentiment recurs: 

Why does it surprise Arizonans when our legal aliens (non-natives) call dust storms haboobs?

These are the same strangers who have made no attempt to learn how to pronounce state names and landmarks given to us by our pioneers, Native Americans and Hispanic cultures, ranging back hundreds of years.

Apparently, history is finished.  Hispanic and Anglo pioneers are okay, but more recent arrivals are to be derided.  And Arab words should be avoided.  The process of linguistic enrichment stops here.  A line in the sand!

But these haboob nay-sayers may have a point.  On the discussion page of Wikipedia's haboob article someone writes: 

The term "Haboob" was defined by the indigenous population of the Middle East and Sahara deserts. The name defines the storms of their region that is a subset of dry wind storms that involved primarily sand and usually of a longer duration that North American dry storms. Dust storms of the southwest US and Mexico consist of primarily dust or top surface soil. To compare relatively benign dust storms to the more damaging sand storms of the Middle East and northern Africa is to reduce the impact the name "Haboob" evokes when discussing dry wind storms.

Now, keeping foreign words at bay is a hopeless task...just ask the French, notorious anti-loan worders.  They should know.  Old French and Norman account for more Modern English vocabulary than Old and Middle English. 

All this comes against the backdrop of the Arizona legislature's recent campaign to solicit private donations for a border fence to keep out illegal immigrants, drug runners and haboobs, an effort which netted 58,000 USD on day one.

Advocates of a fence have a powerful ally in reality.  The website for this effort features the following startling image:

When a country must warn people about movng freely within their own borders, there is indeed a problem.

But while most opponents of the fence target it as anti-Hispanic, the website actually dedicates a lot of its time arguing that the danger is in fact not from Latinos but Arabs, militant or otherwise: 

According to an investigation by the House Committee on Homeland Security, intelligence officials have determined members of the terrorist group Hezbollah have already infiltrated the U.S. by crossing at the southern border. Border Patrol agents recovered military-style patches on clothing near the border—one patch contained the word "martyr" in Arabic and another depicted a plane appearing to fly into sky scrapers.

In 2009, according to Homeland Security documents, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials detained 45,279 illegal aliens classified as OTM (Other Than Mexican), many of whom were from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan.

Additionally, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee stating that these OTMs "are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connections who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic.

All this talks of desert storms and barriers and Arabs brings to mind Operation Desert Storm, the US name of the Iraq airland conflict in 1991.  Now, this storm began in 1990 as Desert Shield.  The name is a catchy one to be sure.  It's the English translation of a 2006 offensive by the Iraqi insurgency led by Al-Qaeda in Gulf War 2:  Son of Gulf War. Keeping foreign influence at bay it something shared by all parties it would seem.

So a shield becomes a storm and becomes a shield again, wielded by mad Arabs trying to get through yet another shield into a desert storm-ridden area guarded by Minutemen, glad American patriots who take their name from men who helped wrestle the east coast away from men who'd wrestled it from Indians and then made their way here to wrestle it away from Mexicans who'd wrestled it away from other Indians and who the Minutemen fear are slowly wrestling it back from Americans, etc., etc.

Do good fences make good neighbors?  What exactly is a storm fence?  How does a shield become a storm?  Are we reaching the perfect storm for....something?  Haboob?  Got boobs?  Got milk?  Where's the beef?  Who let the dogs out?

Is there room in this town for haboobs and dust storms?  I think so, but as much as I find the phrase "dust storm" to be evocative for the mind's eye, saying "haboob" is just funny, like "boing", "poob" or "pumpernickel".  I think I'll be using it a lot more in the near future.

And yeah, I actually get the rancor of the Arizona native.  I've seen Florida turn into a giant strip mall as aresult of an endless influx of New Yorkers and other assorted yankees.  I remember when Tampa was actually livable.  Now I live in France and am watching it happen all over again, thanks to the success of Airbus.

And my British friends call me a Yank.  I guess in terms of adding to the urban sprawl in search of a job, they're right.  Which is all a haboob wants, innit?