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ISRAEL: The Knesset, Chagall, and the endless election cycle

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As part of my trip, we were given a tour of the Israeli Knesset. Our group were all political nerds, so we had a blast getting into the details of the political system and the functioning of the legislature.

One of the highlights was the stunning Chagall triptych in the main hall – setting out Jewish past, future, religion, and stories. Chagall’s work pops up all around Israel, but these massive tapestries are some of the most stunning, just overwhelmingly full of small details.

The Knesset was very quiet, as both it was summer break, and there was an election on. However, there will still a few MPs around, as there is a live board that shows which ones are in the building. It seems like it would be really useful for political staffers to find their MPs, but weirdly, this live board is also viewable online. It seems like a major security loophole in a country very focused on security, though our guide explained that in this case, transparency was more important.

While this was quite rosy and straightforward, Israel’s political system is anything but. They’re currently in the middle of their fifth election in three years. Israel has one of the most extreme forms of proportional representation, which ends up with messy coalitions of many parties, with minor party leaders becoming the “kingmakers”. There’s political parties along the left-right spectrum, like in any country, but there’s also identity-based parties, including Haredi and Arab ones. Religious vs. secular and Zionist vs. non-Zionist adds an extra dimension as well.

Here’s a really good primer on the Israeli political spectrum – it’s a few years old, but touches on a lot of deeper divides, voting patterns, and political priorities.

The time between elections in Israel is often spent forming and maintaining coalitions. The previous coalition was between eight parties, including leftist, centrist, right-wing, and Arab ones, and was notable for actually passing a budget. The coalition has since fallen apart, and this election this fall is once more a question of “Yes Bibi / No Bibi” – yes or no to a return of Netanyahu and his coalitions of right-wing and Haredi parties.

Somehow, voter turnout remains high (and higher than turnout in Canada), but most Israelis I spoke with expressed frustration at the constant cycle of elections, dealmaking, and coalitions – there seems to be very little time for actual governance.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Tempête sur Bangui by Didier Kassaï

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Didier Kassaï’s Tempête sur Bangui (Storm over Bangui) is a shocking graphic novel on several levels. It’s an autobiography of his experiences of the 2013 civil war in the Central African Republic, as Séléka rebels overran the capital and toppled the government. Kassaï recounts the chaos, the violence, and the confusion on the ground through the eyes of Bangui’s residents. It truly is a graphic novel.

However, what is particularly shocking is how Kassaï draws Africans. While non-black characters are drawn in a realistic style, all the black characters – including Kassaï himself – are drawn like old “sambo” racial stereotypes.

Kassaï explains his artistic choice as a stylistic one, and connects it to the deeper ligne-claire cartoon tradition from France and Belgium. (He draws Africans in a realistic way in his other works).

“I believed this war had no face. I couldn’t recognize any of my countrymen and women back then because everybody was spreading messages of hatred, so I gave them only eyes and mouths.”

– Didier Kassaï, “This is what it’s like to be a cartoonist in the Central African Republic“

But there’s something more to this – it’s a style that is instantly shocking to Western eyes, and hearkens back to Tintin in the Congo. That’s not without reason – CAR was treated by France the same way the Congo was by Belgium – divvied up as personal property for Europeans to exploit. France and Belgium left such deep lasting damage to central Africa that countries like CAR and the DRC have struggled with chronic instability and violence since then.

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If you wanted to read even further into Kassaï’s artistic choice, you could make an argument that drawing Africans as a faceless stereotype shocks Western readers because it exposes that many people do see Africa as a faceless victims, rather than real individuals with their own autonomy and lives. The whole continent is often treated as an amorphous whole, and the essential humanity of the people living through events like CAR’s civil war are overlooked in a way that they aren’t for conflicts in other parts of the world (say, Ukraine).

Tempête sur Bangui is meant to shake you up, and it does.

It’s only published in French, though there’s a well-translated excerpt in English at Words Without Borders.

BANGLADESH: Djinn City by Saad Z. Hossain

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A lot of reviews of Saad Z. Hossain’s Djinn City say it resists classification, and I really agree – it’s ostensibly a scifi/fantasty novel, and definitely starts out as one. Indelbed is a young boy in Dhaka, from a prominent family line fallen into poverty, with an alcoholic father and a mother who died in childbirth. His lonely existence is changed when his father falls into a coma that is not what it seems, and Indelbed discovers the magical parallel world of the djinn – ancient, powerful beings with magical powers.

However, this is not a classic “hero’s quest” – the djinn are litigious, vain, and caught up in their own political dramas, and Indelbed ends up abandoned in a dungeon for most of the book. Most of the action shifts to his older cousin Rais, who learns the levers of djinn bureaucracy and status trading, and then works the system to try and find answers about his family, and to stop one bored djinn from unleashing tsunamis to wipe the Bengal Delta clear of humans on a whim.

Don’t let the magical setting fool you, this is pretty heavy stuff – murders, assaults, betrayal, being broken (physically and mentally) to survive, the shock of accidental death, and a deep lore. My one quibble is that is absolutely sets you up for a sequel more than it wraps the plot, but it also means I’ll be looking for the sequel.

Hossain bases much of his writing on djinns, which started as pre-Islamic Arabian myths, then were incorporated and spread through Islam into the stories of countries like Bangladesh. He writes in English, and writes in a way that is accessible to Westerners, but not in a way that exoticizes his own country and culture to pander to that audience. There’s an air of a South Asian Neil Gaiman about his writing.

There’s a great interview with Hossain from last year in Dhaka on djinns, using Asian mythology in his writing instead of the Norse mythology that Western fantasy is based on (see: Tolkein), as well as the writing process, and how humans are barely hanging on.

BANGLADESH: Podcasts

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National Martyrs’ Monument, Dhaka – Source

I got fooled several times looking for interesting podcasts from Bangladesh – there’s a lot of good stuff out there, but while the titles and descriptions are in English, the podcasts themselves are most often in Bengali – you don’t find that out until you’ve already downloaded and started to listen! While English is used in higher education in Bangladesh, despite/because of the colonial history (see French in Algeria), it doesn’t serve as a lingua franca like it does in India, as the vast majority of Bangladesh’s population speaks Bengali. That means a lot of podcasts and interviews with Bangladeshis in English are from outside sources, especially India or Britain.

BBC History Hour: The Birth of Bangladesh – A really useful primer on the creation of Bangladesh, with interviews and archival news clips. This overview covers Partition, the 1970 Pakistan election and the refusal of leaders in West Pakistan to transfer of power to Sheikh Mujib, Operation Searchlight, the Independence War, the effect on civilians (especially women), and India’s intervention on the side of East Pakistan/Bangladesh.

Cricket with an Accent: Mohammad Isam talks about the Bangladesh Cricket Landscape – I still have only the vaguest sense of the rules of cricket, but this interview with a Bangladeshi sports journalist is less on the game itself, and more on Bangladesh’s struggles to build an internationally strong cricket team, and how money and political influence play a big part in professional cricket and sports journalism in the country.

Naan Curry with Sadaf and Archit: How to eat like a Bangladeshi with Dina Begum – Another cross-border interview, this one between Indian and Bangladeshi food experts. They cover the differences between the cuisines of West Bengal (Indian side, around Calcutta) and East Bengal (Bangladesh), as well as Pakistan, and how options for South Asian cuisine are slowly diversifying in Western countries.

Desi Crime Podcast: Hercules: The Vigilante Killer – If you’re a true crime fan, this podcast covers all kinds of stories from across the subcontinent. This episode looks at the case of a vigilante killer in Bangladesh murdering men who had assaulted young women, with a larger discussion on police corruption, the crisis levels of rape in South Asia, the pressures on victims’ families, and the ethics of vigilantes.

Bangladeshi Trailblazers – Interviews with Bangladeshi entrepreneurs, with a focus on young female entrepreneurs. I listened to the episode Finding spaces in Dhaka with Farhia Tabassum, who co-founded the app Chaya, which is like an AirBnB but for photoshoot locations, and then has expanded into rentals for individuals, especially women.

The World: Tintin in Bangladesh – A short, fun podcast with radio personality Zahidul Haque Apu, who during the pandemic started drawing covers for fictional Tintin books set in Bangladesh. While Tintin never visited Bangladesh (he did go to India, Nepal, and China, among others), these are fun what-ifs. The podcast also touches on comics in Bangladesh, where Tintin is particularly beloved, to the point where people assume it’s a local comic (old colonial stereotypes aside). I loved Tintin comics as a kid – these are just great.

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UKRAINE: Horodecki House

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The Horodecki House (also known as the House with Chimaeras or the Gorodetsky House) is an incredibly fanciful building that sits across from the presidential palace in Kyiv. There’s so much going on here with it – to start, it is essentially a Ukrainian response to Gaudi. Art Nouveau, multi-layered and designed, with animals, plants, and other organic elements merging with busy rococo-ish elements.

The history of this building is also incredible – designed in 1902 by Władysław Horodecki, a Polish architect, it was intended to be sold as luxury apartments. Horodecki’s debts led to changes of ownership, including by a sugar factory, and during the Communist era, the building was carved up into smaller communal apartments, used as a refuge for evacuated actors, abandoned during WWII, and used as a medical clinic until 2002. The building had almost split it half at its foundations by that time, and the restorers had to threaten to board the medical clinic in to obtain the space for restoration. It eventually was fully restored to Horodecki’s original plans, and is used today for presidential and official capacities.

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It came back into the limelight this spring during the Russian invasion, with Zelenskyy using it as a background in his videos announcing he was staying in Kyiv and calling on Ukrainians to resist.

You can walk through it on streetview, and I’d really recommend taking the time to look at the details – the frogs lining the rooftop parapets, or the flowers and tentacles emerging from ceiling chandeliers.

UKRAINE: Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

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Man with a Movie Camera is a 1929 silent movie from the Soviet Union, following daily life in Kyiv, Odesa, and Moscow. It’s groundbreaking the same way Prokudin-Gorsky’s full-colour photos from 1911 are. The film is cut almost at a modern pace (which audiences at the time found far too fast) with meta shots of the cameraman filming. The director, Dziga Vertov, used or created a huge number of modern camera tricks – fades, wipes, slow-motion, extreme closeups, split screen, freeze frame, stop motion, and far far more. It’s beautiful and hypnotic, and feels like it should be an art-house film in a gallery – it’s hard to digest just how old this movie is due to its modernity.

Vertov’s artistic career continued until the start of the Stalinist era, when the official establishment of socialist realism as an art form pushed all more novel and creative forms of art. Vertov went from one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated art directors to an editor of newsreels, but did at least avoid the worst of the purges.

The whole movie (about an hour long) is available freely online. Since it was a silent film, there is no soundtrack, so many later ones have been added. I particularly like this version; it adds to the hypnotic artistry.

UKRAINE: Making pysanky

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Not my pysanky – Source

Pysanky are pretty big in the part of Canada I grew up in (we even have a giant pysanky to go with the giant pierogi), and skilled pysanky are absolute stunning pieces of art. Pysanky (singular pysanka) are highly-decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs, made the same way batik is – using wax to cover layers of dye to make designs. There’s a lot of tradition in Ukraine over giving pysanky during the Easter season and a lot of meaning carried by the designs, and the art has been carried through the Ukrainian diaspora. They’re more than just decorative like the dip-dyed Easter eggs you make as a kid.

I’m going to try making pysanky for the first time! I’m a total novice, so I ordered a pysanky kit from This Folk Life – dyes, beeswax, candle, and a kistka (the stylus to draw wax with). All I needed was a few eggs, and egg piercer (the one from my egg steamer) and some boiling water and vinegar. It really helps to put newspaper down as well – I was also glad I have a black kitchen table.

It helps to sketch patterns on the eggshell with a pencil. I found some really helpful step-by-step beginner patterns at LearnPysanky.com and a general tutorial from the Capital Ukrainian Festival here in Ottawa. You work from lightest to darkest colours, using the candle to melt the beeswax into the kitska.

Once the dyeing is done, if you want to keep the egg, you’ll need to empty it. It’s a delicate process but between a needle to poke holes and a bobby pin / paperclip to break up the yolk, you can blow the insides out without breaking the shell.

If you want to keep your egg, you have to empty it before getting to the really fun part, melting the wax (or else you’ll have some hardboiled egg inside). You use the side of the flame and wipe gently with a paper towel, and it’s really fun to see your design emerge.

It’s very rudimentary, but I’m really proud of my very first pysanky!

I had a couple more eggs, so I played around with patterns and different colours. It takes some practice to not “sketch” the lines in wax and just commit to one line, and filling in larger sections with wax so there’s no gaps is tricky. I got creative with an impressionist (that’s what I’m calling it) Ukrainian sunflower.

This was super messy, super fun, and I think I’m hooked. The dye will keep, so I may go get some more eggs and see practice some more!

UKRAINE: Jungle in a castle / Ukrainian hardstyle

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The Crimson Room at Pidhirsti (1871) by Aleksander Gryglewski – Source

I’m adding to my list of DJ sets in unusual locations – first up a mountain in winter in Finland, then by a lake of liquid asphalt in Trinidad, now at an abandoned castle in Ukraine! Pidhirsti Castle dates back to the 1600s when the area around Lviv was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There’s some great drone shots of it in the video.

As for the set, it’s a really fire collab between Ukrainian DJs Nastia and Daria Kolosova – very heavy driving jungle / drum&bass, slightly industrial.

When you think of electronic music in Eastern Europe, hardstyle more often comes up (including hardbass, a subset that emerged in Russia, and is used in memes). Like metal, there’s fine-grained stylistic differences between genres – d&b is faster and syncopated, hardstyle is more harmonic and distorted, usually with vocals. Here’s a whole mix of hardstyle from Ukrainian musicians, in case you want to keep the dance party going.

GABON: Yannis Davy Guibinga

Kate ,
From Tèt Grenn, Tèt Kale and Pigments
From The First Woman

Yannis Davy Guibinga is a Gabonese photographer, now based in Montreal, who does incredible portraits exploring race, gender, decolonization, and the history and culture of Africa. His photography series come in stories – I’m really taken by The Grief, setting out the stages of grief and the reconnection to the self. I’d suggest scrolling through the whole story, but here are some beautiful excerpts:

From The Grief

Another incredible collection is Boy Wives & Female Husbands, a look a third-gender and gender-non-confirming stories from around Africa: