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February 8th, 2011
01:32 am - Afghan Star (2009)
There is a profoundly disturbing sequence in the film that traces the condemnation of Herat's residents (Herat being the hometown of Setara, one of the top ten contestants in Afghan Star), towards her on-screen transgressions. Apparently Setara has just been booted out of Afghan Star – a singing contest whose very existence overshadows any of its contestants’ claims to vocal prowess or pop star potential – after she receives the lowest number of votes that week. As she gives her final performance, her personal fantasies triumph over fear of politico-religious retribution and she dances. And she uncovers her head. Backstage, the other contestants are quick to project disapproving expressions and media-friendly nuggets along the lines of “she shouldn’t have,” or “it is not right”. It is telling that though the condemnation is swift, it is not thorough, and to some extent, muted, even ambivalent. The only other female contestant to have gotten this far, Lema, at first manages only a look of empathetic resignation in a close up where she gazes downwards and shakes her head with puckered lips; however in a later outburst of speech, she indicates that she is unwilling to risk communal shaming to indulge personal fantasies, either of freedom or, of something much more subtle (and for what it’s worth, non-political) – for example, happiness. The ambivalent disapproval here – after all, the contestants must identify with each other as fellow rebels – is nothing compared to the unequivocal condemnation of the Herat people, which reaches a chilling climax when one man declares, “She deserves to die.”
One cannot help but wonder how many (or ineed, how few) interviews were carried out to secure a comment such as the above. It is to the filmmakers’ credit that they do not overindulge the tired debate between “Western” mores and Islamic values; nor did I feel that they were wagging that same disapproving finger at the audience: Aha! Now I’ve caught you in your illiberal, horrified rejection of another culture. While the appearance of an aged man who announces that he is no longer able to watch the show because of Setara’s transgressive behaviour appears to be a gentle prod in that direction – “She should sing by Islamic rules,” he says – it gives an alternative reading of modernity. The concern with rules, order in society, application of justice are undeniably modern in outlook. The Herat people are not unlike us in that both their world and ours are shaped by the structures of reason, though these structures have given birth to wildly different realities. Setara, then, begins to resemble something more primitive, a goddess from some creation myth who dwells happily in chaos. Both sides cannot claim her fully: on one hand she represents the individual’s right to freedom, on the other she is a symbol appropriated by a society seeking to preserve and affirm it’s own traditional religious beliefs. Ultimately though, she may represent the regenerative potential inherent in the creative impulse, a thesis that is consistent with many of the film’s other aspects.
The idea of creative regeneration illuminates the film from its first minutes. It begins with a blank screen, over which is layered the voice of a child, singing. Then the corresponding image appears – and we discover that the endearing voice belongs to an apparently blind child. This is one of the most powerful images in the film. Children are a common symbol of the innocent imagination; here, this convention is energised by another (Shakespearean?) trope – where moral wisdom, and indeed this film’s transcendental thesis, is dispensed by the most foolish of characters. In this case, it is a child who dispenses the most profound advice when he comments on his own (and indeed, the entire nation’s) love for music: without it, there would be silence. This might be a tautology elsewhere, but as this statement lingers on and ferments over the film’s other sequences, it manages to solidify into a kind of central thesis for the entire film: what Afghan Star really represents is the reclaiming of one’s destiny or aspiration, where Music can redeem us from a world of silent nothingness.
When the film approaches the last episode of the singing contest, where only two contestants remain, it begins with the voiceover: “Dear people of Kabul…this is the final episode of Afghan Star!” layered over a panoramic view of the Kabul cityscape. There, the sun is just rising, the fog hasn’t yet cleared, but campaigners for the show are all busy at work already. Indeed, some campaigners were singled out for their extreme practices of devotion – including selling their possessions to purchase thousands of calling cards for their favourite contestant. Their emotional and material investment in the fate of their idols echoes aptly the myth of regeneration as they reclaim the contestants’ future as their own, and indeed the entire nation’s. Through a loudspeaker, a campaigner announces, “Your vote can decide their fate.” Surprisingly, this is not a political point (about the superiority of any model of politics – even democracy – or the need for individual empowerment) but a transcendental one. A campaigner for Hameed, the eventual runner-up in the competition, jokes, “When we went to the village to campaign, it looked like the President was coming to town.” The point here is surely that, despite the similarities, popular support for the show and its contestants is a force both greater, and of a different nature from political pageantry. This is an imaginative force that provides the possibility of rebuilding national confidence and providing cultural rebirth; political scheming, on the other hand, is a destructive force that has only resulted in cultural decay.
This dawning-of, or transition-into, finds expression in a scene that has two rural boys who mutter to themselves, “We are late to watch Afghan Star… We are running late… We must go to watch Afghan Star.” They hurry, the older carrying a canvas sack filled and bulging, and the younger, a sort of farming tool, further and further into the limits of the camera. These are children expressing a primitive joy and curiosity as they explore the outer limits of experience. What is most poignant is that the film is relentlessly humanistic: it reminds us, even if it is through a protagonist such as Setara, of the things that give to us our human identity. There is a scene where Setara takes a ride in a amusement park mainstay, the “pirate ship”, over which she voices, “When I’m performing on stage and singing for the people, the feeling of freedom comes to my soul. I’m so happy! And this happiness even makes me feel like dancing.” Her thoughts are made physical here: just as she follows the ride along and towards the limit of its arc, she is a spirit who continually probes the limits of societal norms. Sure, there are consequences to this sort of inner freedom, but the film continually encourages us to believe in its immortality. And Setara appears almost immortal, if only numinously, when she converses with a family member she has not seen in a while: “We heard you’ve been killed.” “No, I’m not dead.”
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September 17th, 2010
11:50 pm
突然假想，如果我在班上读小说，会不会引来他人的异样目光？
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June 14th, 2009
05:09 pm - boys don't cry
You are not you, who are flying over the desert that desires
On imaginary wings (so difficult to renounce) glad and silent
For you learnt a certain vanity, and recklessness looking at the sun
Day became truth as the proud lapping golden sphere extended
Then shriveled into nothing, but before that spilling death
In red throughout the lazy sky, as if to say
Those who will not change themselves will face certain doom.
And then you were gone, echoing only in lover’s warmth
Present in blooming spray of streetlamps, or the dangerous
Curves of speeding headlights reflecting under a low sky
Tonight pickup heavy wheels light heads clouds absent
It’s nobody’s fault, this speed, this drive into illusion
Sleepless and waiting, or waiting and therefore sleepless,
To emerge, in day, a victim from the slaughterhouse
A lone fly from the slain.
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September 22nd, 2008
08:46 pm - notes
In the last two days: watched Lust, Caution and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Had bought (note the tense)
郑愁予诗集 1951-1968
完整的寓言－杨牧（诗集）
新诗 30 家
新诗 300 首上／下
雷雨－曹禺
北京人－曹禺
中国史－吕思勉
如何现代，怎样文学－王德威
Waiting for Godot (finally - till now I only have the unappealing A4-sized filed version)
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September 20th, 2008
10:45 pm
Just earlier tonight I felt a landscape emerge
From my hair from my body from the silence
The insistence of rules oh the control
Of authority, diets and escalators
Making me go round the other side
And I will have to retrace the steps, horizontally
Like from a tunnel, and one will then see
That blue may now be green, and
Sea will become land, air into soil and mountain
When a landscape emerges, one navigates
By his sense of the possible using what light
Comes through
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August 2nd, 2008
07:41 pm
In this room, I think neither of dinner
Nor of tomorrow, and certainly not
Of a thousand generic things that would come
And without pretense shore themselves onto my mind
With the frightening insistence of lapping waves
Ignorant of the shapes they carve this land into
The land, similarly ignorant; These are two elements
Touching and not holding on –
When will we realise
That we are here, buffered by wind and wave
And that cold moon, locked in a cycle of envy
That would have it vanish into nothingness.
Resurrection; but at that spot it would stay
Stubborn enough to compete with daylight
Until it was washed away by a New Sun,
Risen from the blindness of writhing sea.
You made it beautiful; now He has given it hope
Which I, like a wave, shall carry towards you
From one horizon to another, both of unseen things.
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July 26th, 2008
10:14 am
The days are wordless peace now,
The prologue to a book which I reread endlessly
Half-knowingly, surely
Such days will never end
Where I am is sleep
The intimations of a dream that will last
Beyond sleep itself, beyond waking even
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July 20th, 2008
12:54 am
Truth comes morning rains
Unbearable vision street snakes beyond feet
And room, beyond room more room exists
More persons dwelling within the instants
Of realisation, conversing with themselves
Speaking so broken the words a wisp of reality
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May 22nd, 2008
11:00 am - window seat
When the stripes on my shirt have, carelessly
Merged into the clouds, similarly self-absorbed
And reflecting themselves onto the folds of soft skin
A feeling passes – aided by tea – a faithless thing,
Coming and leaving – licentious – but precious.
What is a window; when our eyes are closed
And smile so content
Like springing from new-created sculpture
A graft to thought: seeing is a prayer,
Giving birth to beauty, pure and unforgivable.
Sometimes it is disappointing, this lookout
Impeccable though the framing is.
Like the clouds stillness itself seems to be moving
A soundless assassin, a child of softened streetlamps
And cars bathing in the afterglow of departed inhabitants.
An internal lighting is harsh on these thoughts;
The recollection of a feminist, who gave this seeing
The quality of a teasing vessel; as one overcomes the curtains,
And the frame – to make passage, almost clandestine
A journey into creation, knowing and not foretelling.
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10:59 am - a child's queries
Could I know, in this kind of night,
Which way to walk, to avoid the darkness?
Could I be sure that there are signs
Stubbornly alight to guide the way of the lost?
Which way to walk, to avoid the darkness?
What does it feel like, to be a streetlamp
Stubbornly alight to guide the way of the lost?
A meander punctuated by silence.
What does it feel like, to be a streetlamp
How can we speak?
A meander punctuated by silence.
When our mouths are gagged.
How can we speak?
I presume to understand another,
When our mouths are gagged,
When I do not yet understand myself?
I presume to understand another.
Yet to understand is to be human.
When I do not yet understand myself,
The grass wilts under a strong sun.
Yet to understand is to be human.
Can I ever explain the world, resisting the space of a map,
When the grass wilts under a strong sun
The world is yet my mind.
How can I answer a child’s questions,
But with sad eyes, and heavy heart, expose myself?
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