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i live here, called the witch house

strike against censorship

My Somali Italian friend Suad, who works with her community In Italy now, urges her people in Somalia NOT to take that dangerous ride: even if you survive the trip, what waits for you in Italy can be fatal. Italy is in deep economic crisis today, on the verge of bankruptcy and social disorder. The new government struggling to remain a G8 power while the euro and United Europe are at stake. Italy also struggles to overcome a big moral value crisis after twenty years of Berlusconi’s reign of sexism, racism, indolence and corruption.

But I was wrong about the Africans. It was a fancy cruise ship full of wealthy foreigners that wrecked unexpectedly near the island of Giglio.

The splendid Costa Concordia was 290 meters long, and had thirteen decks. The ship featured thirteen bars, five restaurants, four swimming pools and five hundred balconied staterooms.

One woman survivor testified: it was horrible! The foreign crew was screaming in their language in panic. We broke the glass and then we fought each other to get the lifejackets.

-While we were eating dinner, the first course, the plates started to flow, the glasses all of a sudden to run and then the lights went off. Then we fell on top of each other. People were stampeding while the ship was turning upside down. Now I am trying to find a friend I lost. Her cell phone is ringing but she is not answering.

A young Serbian girl who worked in the ship’s gift shop recalled:

We had to unleash the lifeboats ourselves: the instructors who had taught us how to do that jumped into the boats. There were no signs of ship officers to calm the passengers. Eighty-year-old people in a panic were shoving children, and mothers with babies in arms, in order to save themselves…

When passing the isle of Giglio, cruise ships often greet the inhabitants of the island with a honk of the ship’s horn. They say the habit dates back to an old Italian ship captain who was from Giglio and was bidding his home goodbye. From the land, the illuminated ship looks beautiful, and from the ship it’s romantic to see the dark shape of an island speckled with lights. But for the Costa Concordia, everything went wrong.

Every tragedy becomes romantic if it’s the last day of your life. All ships that sink carry the aura of the Titanic. All big disasters reveal the good and bad in people tested by adversity: people transform into heroes or cowards, and you never know who lurks within your own self at that ghastly hour.

A son of two elderly parents on the ship — they had never left their home since their honeymoon years before — personally came with his whole family to rescue them. He managed to save his mother, but for his father, it was too late.

A quiet Korean honeymoon couple was found alive after two days of fear, hunger and cold.

An Italian actress, also a survivor, said: I was like an idiot, completely lost! When this ship tipped over on its side I tried to stop it with my feet! In a further irony, this actress had once starred in a film about the famous sinking of the Andrea Doria.

There were four thousand people on that cruise ship: mostly Italian and French, but also tourists from many other nations. Students on a training course, hairdressers who had won a competition excursion worth 100 000 euros, many retired people, handicapped people and children. A floating Babel of different languages and cultures: a ghost nation.

Once the Costa Concordia showed her bad karma, of course it was recalled that on the day of her launch, the bottle of champagne smashed against her bow did not break. A bad omen.

The captain of the ship was arrested and accused of manslaughter. He was charged with abandoning his position of command by cravenly saving himself, reaching the coast where he was found on a rock while his passengers fought for their lives.

The captain, in his distress, claims that his maps did not show the “Ghost Rock” on which his ship foundered: but his crew tells a different story. A deliberate decision to cruise far too close to the coast, to the bella isola di Giglio…to whistle a fond goodbye!

Naturally the Italian social networks spread their wisecracks: That’s what happens when you hit the rock of Italy, the sinking country!

Other tourist cities in Italy like Venice are changing the security rules for cruise ships. A potential ecological disaster lingers: the fuel tanks in the carcass of the Costa Concordia might rupture.

My dear friend, Maja Mitic, an actress and activist from Belgrade, was aboard the Costa Concordia. She was there on her honeymoon, and to celebrate Serbian New Years. She wrote this on her Facebook profile:

“Dear friends, Ljuba and I are finally home…. after cruising seven days on Costa Concordia where we spend our last night, Friday the 13th of January, like on the movie Titanic… thank you all for your messages… What does not kill you, make you stronger!”

New Year in New Orleans

Last time we tried to get to New Orleans, our car broke down close to Holly Beach, Lousiana. Holly Beach was a major disaster area at the time: ruins after the hurricane, no facilities… so we had to go back to Texas.

This time, again close to Holly Beach, we almost ran out of petrol. Fools that we are, we expected a gas station on a highway, but a woman living there told us that, since the storms — not “Katrina,” but “Ike” and “Rita” — no gas stations had been built for thirty miles in either direction.

And this is the USA? The land of opportunities: in front of us, huge iron pumpjacks were pumping oil out of the earth, at the same speed and ever bigger prices, for decades on end. And yet these people, who had lost their home to storms twice and lived in a trailer, had no gas stations, no proper houses, and no facilities! This could be South Serbia not South Louisiana!

When we realized we would run out of gas in a mosquito haunted coast, miles from anywhere, we knocked on a trailer door to ask for help. A woman answered with a cast on her arm. She summoned a family member, found five gallons of fuel stockpiled in a plastic jug, and gave it to us, asking for nothing and simply wishing us a happy new year.

I asked about her injury. She said, a minor accident, no broken bones. Then I asked: what happened to the house? She said: just our third hurricane, but we are rebuilding it again. Like people under the volcano, these Cajuns don’t give up. Proud as they are, they didn’t want our money, or even a modest gift. So I took a photo of them, smiling embraced: it proved that solidarity existed even in the land of falling capitalism, even in a desert: even more so.

If you judge fun by the amount of people in the streets than Bourbon Street in New Orleans is the biggest place of fun in the world: people were so tightly packed that it verged on a stampede. When the crowds started randomly jostling in waves it felt like million-person Serbian crowd that toppled Milosevic.
If you judge the place by the way people are dressed, then Bourbon Street at new year could be the place of the worst taste in the world: awful but quite uniform, sequins and high heels for women, and anything extravagant for men.

If you judge a New Years Eve by the amount of booze then Bourbon Street could be the center of the world; every few yards a person was falling over high heels or a bottle, commonly clutching handheld mobiles as they slumped to the pavement. With their last bits of strength or reason the celebrants were text-messaging, Googling, whatever.

No blues no jazz no voodoo dances: shops clothes gadgets food drinks from the coast to the French Quarter: all night long.

In the sleazy motel where we finally and randomly collapsed, guests were drinking on the porch until dawn: the sheets on my bed had stains of blood, and the blood was not mine. The guy next door crept into our room as soon as we left it. We drove away in a short powerful storm that cleared the sky.

On the beach, in the Ninth Ward, drowned by Katrina six years ago, everything was calm and beautiful. No signs of destruction, the old is swept away, concealed or forgotten. Some new people are living in the outskirts; “Welcome to the wild west,” a beautiful African American girl shouted at us.

I come from the wild east, I thought. The radio played Cajun music and spoke half English half French. I understood it better than American English. Out of New Orleans, rural Louisiana is poor, the centers of old small towns are deserted, boarded-up and silent: only the highways are kitted-out with flashy restaurant chains and cheap tourist motels.

People from downtown have nothing to do other than gamble and drink, I was told: I saw a drug court in Opelousas, a bankruptcy court in Alexandria. Lots of public-service ads for gambling and other addiction problems.

I remembered the movie Storyville with Billie Holliday set in New Orleans when jazz was born in the brothels. When the population, proudly singing the blues, leaves the town. I remember the refugees from the Katrina hurricane in Austin Convention center, a couple of days after the tragedy, telling me their stories of loss. Refugees from politics, climate and warfare all sing the same blues.

Hamletovska dilema Borisa Tadića

Posle gotovo osam godina na čelu Srbije, predsednik Boris Tadić našao se u situaciji koju je tokom celog mandata nastojao da izbegne: da napravi konačan izbor između Kosova i Evrope.

Tadić je u 2011. godinu ušao sa solidnim razlozima za optimizam, sa dva puta overenom podrškom glasača i solidnom većinom u parlamentu. Evropski put Srbije bio je trasiran, a svetska finansijska kriza još se nije razmahala. Situacija na Kosovu i Metohiji, loša ali stabilna, nije zahtevala vatrogasne mere.

Još letos, kada kada je hapšenjem Ratka Mladića i Gorana Hadžića konačno ispunjen haški uslov, izgledalo je da Tadiću ništa ne stoji na putu da do kraja mandata ispuni svoje predizborno obećanje da će Srbiju dovesti na prag Evropske unije.

Za svega nekoliko meseci, sve se izmenilo: kriza koja je ozbiljno uzdrmala temelje Evrope i te kako se oseća i u Srbiji, a incidenti i barikade na severu pokrajine poslužili su kao povod da se od Beograda kao uslov za status kandidata za EU zahteva odricanje od ono malo suvereniteta što mu je na Kosovu ostalo.

Time je geslo “I Evropa i Kosovo”, koje je Tadiću donelo dve izborne pobede, ozbiljno dovedeno u pitanje. Iako su ovako formulisanu politiku mnogi shvatili kao jeftinu predizbornu parolu, za Tadića je ona bila mnogo više od toga, jer proizilazi iz osnova njegovog pristupa politici.

Kao predsednik, Tadić se sve vreme iskreno trudio da prevaziđe duboke podele koje je Srbiji ostavio Slobodan Milošević: podelu na patriote i izdajnike, na urbane i ruralne Srbe, na građane prvog reda i drugorazredne manjine – etničke, verske ili seksualne.

U maju ove godine, Tadić je čak pokušao da pomiri navijače Crvene Zvezde i Partizana. “Ja sam Partizanovac koji je godinu dana trenirao fudbal u Crvenoj zvezdi”, rekao je prilikom posete Marakani i dodao da bi “odnosi Partizana i Zvezde trebalo da budu bolji.”

Bilo bi suviše lako ovu težnju za sveopštim objedinjavanjem otpisati kao nedopustivu političku naivnost. Nesporno je da je Tadić za poslednjih sedam i po godina postigao ozbiljne rezultate na normalizaciji i pomirenju, kako unutar Srbije, tako i u okruženju.

Na unutrašnjem planu, Tadić je savezom sa socijalistima pomogao transformaciju Miloševićeve stranke u nešto što stvarno liči na modernu evropsku levicu; upristojio je politički dijalog i potisnuo govor mržnje na marginu; javno je ustajao protiv raznih oblika diskriminacije.

Kada je reč o regionu, Srbija je danas unapredila, ili u najmanju ruku izgladila odnose sa gotovo svim susednim državama, i to je pre svega rezultat Tadićeve politike. To mu je, na kraju krajeva, priznao i Evropski savet, na istom samitu na kome je kandidatura Srbije uslovno odložena za dva meseca.

Sada se ta pomirljiva politika slama na bedemu koji je podigla Nemačka, ultimativnim zahtevom da se “paralelne strukture” na severu pokrajine demontiraju. U suprotnom, Srbija bi mogla da se trajno zaglibi na evropskom putu, sa teškim posledicama po ceo region.

Ima neke ironije u tome da se zarad statusa kandidata, koji neki potcenjivački zovu “papirnom krunom”, od Srbije traži da se odrekne suvereniteta koji na većem delu Kosova takođe postoji samo na papiru.

To ipak Tadićevu dilemu ne čini nišsta lakšom, jer od njegove odluke zavise sasvim realni ljudski životi, severno i južno od reke Ibar.

Šef socijalista i Tadićev koalicioni partner Ivica Dačić je nedavno kosovsku dilemu nazvao “hamletovskom”. Pri tom je verovatno mislio na ono čuveno “biti il ne biti” iz Hamletovog monologa.

Bolji poznavaoci Šekspirovog dela setiće se, međutim, da je glavni uzrok Hamletove propasti bilo njegovo oklevanje da u ključnom trenutku pređe sa reči na dela.

U tom smislu zaista ima neke sličnosti između predsednika Srbije i bledog danskog princa. S tim što za razliku od Šekspirovog komada, srpska politička drama još ima šanse da izbegne tragičan kraj.