Thursday, April 30, 2009
What we all become in the end...
I think we all become sisters in one way or another...through birth and love, life and death.. Its so sad that petty things keep us all apart in this world when we really have so much in common in the end . I miss Algeria so much.. Its been more than a year since I went there..but after Rayan died all I can think of was what would life be like if I could have brought him with me there...
Biyouna dances to Cheba Djenet's Matajoubouliche
This song is song by Cheba Djenet about the love of her life when he traveled to France and left her behind. Biyouna ,the famed Algerian comediene dances to it in the 2004 VIVE L'ALGERIE
This song was one of sound tracks of my life and the reason I became interested originally in travelling to Oran, Algeria...
This song was one of sound tracks of my life and the reason I became interested originally in travelling to Oran, Algeria...
Vive L'Algerie
One of the critical turning points of my life was seeing this movie. I became obsessed with visiting Algeria....and my heart cried just like Biyouna's song in this clip...
Walesh...why did you throw me down a well..LOOK AT AMAZING ALGIERS>>>> I LOVE ALGERIA FOREVER AND FOREVER...
From the New York Times about the photographing of Algerian women by the French
THE COLONIAL HAREM By Malek Alloula. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Introduction by Barbara Harlow. Illustrated. 135 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cloth, $29.50. Paper, $13.95.
IN the postcard, the beautiful Fatmah is wearing elaborately draped trousers with an embroidered and beaded vest. On her head is a jeweled turban, around her forehead are more beads, and her neck and ankles are weighted with chains and worked metals. She leans against a carpet, careful, in this pose and in others, to show the cigarette in her hand.
According to Malek Alloula, an Algerian poet who lives and writes in France, Fatmah is a phantasm, a French colonial projection of a world that never truly existed, an oriental mystery whose secret lies not so much in what her exotic costume hides as in the imperialistic desires that evoked her image.
For 30 years at the beginning of this century, the French photographed Fatmah and other Algerian women, displaying their images on postcards that were sent back to France with casual or incidental messages. The real message of the cards, according to Mr. Alloula, whose book contains 90 photographic reproductions, was neither casual nor incidental, but was instead a sign of conquest, of Western designs on the Orient, of violence. Wanting to possess the Algerian land, French colonists first claimed the bodies of its women, using sex as a surrogate for an extension of another larger usurpation of culture.
Beyond doubt, many of these images are tawdry, and Mr. Alloula has arranged them in an increasing order of degradation, ending his book with what he calls an ''anthology of breasts'': women, naked to the waist, peer out of the postcards accompanied by captions like ''Want to party, honey?'' or ''Oh! Is it ever hot!'' or ''The Cracked Jug.'' The ordinarily hidden is made brutally visible; the private is perverted and made public. The model, Mr. Alloula tells us, ''in selling the image of her body . . . sells at the same time . . . the image of the body of Algerian women as a whole.'' ''These raided bodies are the spoils of victory, the warrior's reward.'' They are a surrogate for political and military conquest. Mr. Alloula's motive in writing this book and in compiling these images is, in his own words, to return ''this immense postcard to its sender.'' It is a belated form of confrontation with the French, or as Barbara Harlow, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote the book's excellent introduction, suggests, a ''challenge and riposte.'' Through it Mr. Alloula reclaims a lost sense of honor; he recoups a former oppression - an oppression, he says unabashedly, that he takes personally: ''What I read on these cards does not leave me indifferent. It demonstrates to me . . . the desolate poverty of a gaze that I myself, as an Algerian, must have been the object of at some moment in my personal history.'' I AGREE with the art historian John Berger that one of the most valuable things we can do as critics is to restore photographs to their original contexts and thus recover the political and social memories associated with them. But the context revealed by Mr. Alloula's analysis is to me (another kind of spectator, neither French, Algerian nor male) as disturbing as the initial artifice that he unmasks.
For the deepest source of his anger seems not to derive from concern for the women who are the subjects of these photographs, but from ''the absence of . . . male society . . . its defeat, its irremediable rout.'' The challenge Mr. Alloula returns to the French, the cultural dialogue he initiates, remains male-centered and concerned with women as property and as symbolic marks of (dis)honor or status for the men in their families. If Algerian women were vulnerable and disgraced by their original display on colonial postcards, they are once again exposed by their display in this book. Their images leave them still silent and newly imprisoned by the very text that purports to liberate them. I cannot believe that the barred windows of the harem were solely the fictions of a colonial imagination
IN the postcard, the beautiful Fatmah is wearing elaborately draped trousers with an embroidered and beaded vest. On her head is a jeweled turban, around her forehead are more beads, and her neck and ankles are weighted with chains and worked metals. She leans against a carpet, careful, in this pose and in others, to show the cigarette in her hand.
According to Malek Alloula, an Algerian poet who lives and writes in France, Fatmah is a phantasm, a French colonial projection of a world that never truly existed, an oriental mystery whose secret lies not so much in what her exotic costume hides as in the imperialistic desires that evoked her image.
For 30 years at the beginning of this century, the French photographed Fatmah and other Algerian women, displaying their images on postcards that were sent back to France with casual or incidental messages. The real message of the cards, according to Mr. Alloula, whose book contains 90 photographic reproductions, was neither casual nor incidental, but was instead a sign of conquest, of Western designs on the Orient, of violence. Wanting to possess the Algerian land, French colonists first claimed the bodies of its women, using sex as a surrogate for an extension of another larger usurpation of culture.
Beyond doubt, many of these images are tawdry, and Mr. Alloula has arranged them in an increasing order of degradation, ending his book with what he calls an ''anthology of breasts'': women, naked to the waist, peer out of the postcards accompanied by captions like ''Want to party, honey?'' or ''Oh! Is it ever hot!'' or ''The Cracked Jug.'' The ordinarily hidden is made brutally visible; the private is perverted and made public. The model, Mr. Alloula tells us, ''in selling the image of her body . . . sells at the same time . . . the image of the body of Algerian women as a whole.'' ''These raided bodies are the spoils of victory, the warrior's reward.'' They are a surrogate for political and military conquest. Mr. Alloula's motive in writing this book and in compiling these images is, in his own words, to return ''this immense postcard to its sender.'' It is a belated form of confrontation with the French, or as Barbara Harlow, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote the book's excellent introduction, suggests, a ''challenge and riposte.'' Through it Mr. Alloula reclaims a lost sense of honor; he recoups a former oppression - an oppression, he says unabashedly, that he takes personally: ''What I read on these cards does not leave me indifferent. It demonstrates to me . . . the desolate poverty of a gaze that I myself, as an Algerian, must have been the object of at some moment in my personal history.'' I AGREE with the art historian John Berger that one of the most valuable things we can do as critics is to restore photographs to their original contexts and thus recover the political and social memories associated with them. But the context revealed by Mr. Alloula's analysis is to me (another kind of spectator, neither French, Algerian nor male) as disturbing as the initial artifice that he unmasks.
For the deepest source of his anger seems not to derive from concern for the women who are the subjects of these photographs, but from ''the absence of . . . male society . . . its defeat, its irremediable rout.'' The challenge Mr. Alloula returns to the French, the cultural dialogue he initiates, remains male-centered and concerned with women as property and as symbolic marks of (dis)honor or status for the men in their families. If Algerian women were vulnerable and disgraced by their original display on colonial postcards, they are once again exposed by their display in this book. Their images leave them still silent and newly imprisoned by the very text that purports to liberate them. I cannot believe that the barred windows of the harem were solely the fictions of a colonial imagination
I spend an awful lot of time thinking about Algeria. As you probably know from reading my bio, my little boy died in September. I have had a very hard time coming back from that and as time goes by, I seem to be doing a little better but I have an overwhelming sense of grief for him, although its turned more inwards. We still have each other, my baby and me but I have had to take care of my 4 year old and my 13 year old and not so much my older girl who is 22 but I have still got to be there in her life too. My sons death really consumed me. I grieved for him so hard that I aged 10 years in 2 months. I literally wanted to sleep on top of his grave and just stay there with him in the cemetary all the time but the reality is that my daughter who is only 4 needs to have Disney World and girl scouts and fun and a life and my 13year old needs his mom to be there for him. About 4 weeks ago, I went to visit his grave in the Greenwood Cemetary which is an old cemetary in downtown Orlando that even has Spanish American and Civil War graves and monuments and even a ghost tour. Next to my son's grave there is a bald eagle up in the tree that people take picture of ( the GREENWOOD CEMETARY BALD EAGLE AS HE IS KNOWN). There is also a little den of baby foxes with a sign ( warning baby foxes) Anyway, I got there at like 630 and lost track of time and when I got ready to leave, I drove up to the gates and discovered I was locked in the cemetary with no way out. I had to call 9 11 and it took them about 2 minutes to believe me ( I AM LOCKED IN THE CEMETARY... GET ME OUT OF HERE>) It was at that point that I decided that maybe I am going there too much. I took 2 weeks off and then I went yesterday and the day before so I am still going but I just get very upset when I am there too much and then sad when I do not go enough. Its been a while since my son died but I am not over it no matter how hard I try, I have serious problems moving past his death. I miss him so much.
I have done wrong things in my life....I have not been a perfect person...But I just feel so devastated and I ask myself, what in the world did I ever do wrong enough to experience this kind of trauma and grief? Since he died, I have been walking in trauma and grief, leaving it for weeks at a time and coming back to the same place of shock and horror over the loss of my son. I only want to hold him one more time and to kiss him and be with him but for the love of my other kids , I have got to pull it together. I write about him sometimes but I struggle to come to grips with the fact that I will never see him again. I miss him so much... Nothing in this life is more important than our children. Nothing.. Not broken marriages, foreclosures you name it... Our babies are our world and I thank God every day that I still have my other kids but I miss him so so so much. I miss my baby so so so so much.....
I have done wrong things in my life....I have not been a perfect person...But I just feel so devastated and I ask myself, what in the world did I ever do wrong enough to experience this kind of trauma and grief? Since he died, I have been walking in trauma and grief, leaving it for weeks at a time and coming back to the same place of shock and horror over the loss of my son. I only want to hold him one more time and to kiss him and be with him but for the love of my other kids , I have got to pull it together. I write about him sometimes but I struggle to come to grips with the fact that I will never see him again. I miss him so much... Nothing in this life is more important than our children. Nothing.. Not broken marriages, foreclosures you name it... Our babies are our world and I thank God every day that I still have my other kids but I miss him so so so much. I miss my baby so so so so much.....
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Newton Alonso Wells... An American artist who died in Algeria
I have discovered an artist named Newton Wells who died in Algeria while painting and I have been looking for his work in the collections of the Smithsonian.
From what I can find out through old articles, Newton was a muralist that painted all over the world. He even painted entire hotel lobbies....http://books.google.com/books?id=ADHNERXVh-gC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123&dq=newton+wells+artist&source=bl&ots=_Nng3NZ16I&sig=Q1ipI3FQH_SgOt-u72WJamjPwRE#PPA124,M1
The Desoto County Court House has murals done by Wells. I wonder if they know he died in Algeria. Apparently Wells also developed over 430 hues and influenced the development of turn of the century Chicago Murals.
A note from one of his family on www.ancestry.com
Some adjustments are in order: Alonzo was born in Oct. 1823 in Bridport,
Vermont and the family moved the next year, 1824, to Brandon, NY
(very near Malone). Alonzo was a circuit Methodist minister and preached
in Northern NY for over 50 years. His wife, Newton's mother, Julia Angeline Cargin,
was b. Mar. 9, 1824 in Constable, NY and died April 26, 1886 in Constable, NY.
Newton died in Algeria on Jan. 10, 1923, and, we assume, that he was buried
there.
I wonder where he was buried in Algeria, how he ended up there and where he is right now?
Well I just found the obituary of his wife and it says that he died sketching arab tribes and was living at the time with his wife in Algeria. She returned to the US and ended up passing away in 1923
Born: Lisbon, New York 1852
Died: Algeria 1923
Algerian Exhibit at the GETTY in Los Angeles, California
Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City
May 19–October 18, 2009
The city of Algiers, renowned for its white walls cascading to the Mediterranean, historically sheltered a diverse population. During the Ottoman centuries (1529-1830), Algeria had been a semi-independent province of the empire. French rule (1830-1962) transformed Algeria. European norms and the French system of governance were imposed. The land was mapped, its peoples surveyed and classified, and dramatic interventions to urban fabrics enforced a new duality. In Algiers the "Arab" city on the hillside, known as the Casbah, was separated from the "French" or European city that spread out in districts below and around the Casbah. This division endured during the 132 years of French occupation leading to the War of Independence (19541962). More than a colonial capital, Algiers served as a testing ground for urban renewal with its walls extending metaphorically across the Mediterranean to take part in the search for modernity. Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City, examines the city's complex history by considering its places and peoples through diverse 19th- and 20th-century visual sources. The exhibition will trace, for example, an itinerary of the Casbah and the European quarters through vintage postcards, and juxtapose the long-tradition of staged Orientalist representations of "indigenous" people with photojournalist coverage from the Algerian War.
May 19–October 18, 2009
The city of Algiers, renowned for its white walls cascading to the Mediterranean, historically sheltered a diverse population. During the Ottoman centuries (1529-1830), Algeria had been a semi-independent province of the empire. French rule (1830-1962) transformed Algeria. European norms and the French system of governance were imposed. The land was mapped, its peoples surveyed and classified, and dramatic interventions to urban fabrics enforced a new duality. In Algiers the "Arab" city on the hillside, known as the Casbah, was separated from the "French" or European city that spread out in districts below and around the Casbah. This division endured during the 132 years of French occupation leading to the War of Independence (19541962). More than a colonial capital, Algiers served as a testing ground for urban renewal with its walls extending metaphorically across the Mediterranean to take part in the search for modernity. Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City, examines the city's complex history by considering its places and peoples through diverse 19th- and 20th-century visual sources. The exhibition will trace, for example, an itinerary of the Casbah and the European quarters through vintage postcards, and juxtapose the long-tradition of staged Orientalist representations of "indigenous" people with photojournalist coverage from the Algerian War.
Concerned about missing Algerian artifacts
I have been deeply concerned about the lack of accountablity by the French and major US art institutions for missing Algerian art. I went to Paris a few weeks ago armed with drawings of missing Algerian artwork that was taken out of Algeria in the 1800s. Not only could I not find a single piece of Algerian sculpture, the website itself discusses ( the louvre) Algerian sculptures and they are not on display either. This is extremely puzzling . What the heck would it hurt the French to return these sculptures to Algeria so that they could at least be on display. The louvre is full of sculptures . What would it hurt for these few things that are labeled to be returned to Algeria where they rightly belong? I think what drives me completely batty is that they are not only not on display but they are not willing to let them be repatriated. Selfish and petty as far I am concerned
FA BRIDGEMAN
I have been seeing alot of information about the American artist who documented his travels in Algeria. I have a book I bought called WINTERS IN ALGERIA published in 1889. Its so awesome to see all the tributes on the web to the American artists who painted Algeria in the late 1800s
My You Tube Channel about Algeria
I started my youtube channel kwoolr in the fall of 2006 because I noticed there was very little about Algerian history in English on the web. One video by one, I started making little picture shows featuring Algerian artifacts. I bought these things off of ebay. I now have over 200 videos on youtube with over a thousand subcribers and I have alot of fun with it every day
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