The making of an audience

(This essay originally appeared in Open magazine.)

There’s a lot of good stuff out there even if little of that is mainstream. In the age of auto-tune, indie bands are stepping up to reclaim intellectual purity. (‘Indie’ is a term generally used to denote relatively obscure bands signed up with independent record labels.) As far as Western indie bands are concerned, there’s barely any money to be made anyway beyond the Anglophone market. In the case of desi indie bands, any awareness of their work would probably be limited to the Indian cognoscenti whose number is restricted to a few thousand and who till recently were inclined to pass up locally produced music in favour of classic American and British bands.

This is a condition that the fledgling Indian college radio scene can rectify. Ruia College Radio does some interesting things. The RJs speak to their guests and audience in a mix of English, Hindi and Marathi. There is even a show that promotes Urdu culture. I’ve heard them play ghazals in languages like Marathi. (I didn’t know they were performed in anything other than Urdu.) They don’t play material that might be considered commercial. It is no coincidence that Indian bands can now dream of sustaining themselves without playing a single Metallica cover. The intent is great, but they really ought to work on hitting international standards of quality.

Read more here.

When being gay is wrong

It has been revealed that Amina Abdallah Aral al-Omari, aka "A gay girl in Damascus", supposedly kidnapped last week by Syrian government forces, was in fact a fiction created by a white heterosexual American graduate student living in Scotland.

I had not heard of "Amina" until this morning but the framing of this story intrigues me. We are treated to an interview with Tom MacMaster, the perpetrator of this fraud, wherein he expresses contrition for his idiotic act. Elsewhere, the response from Arab bloggers more familiar with the event has understandably been scathing and it is clear on the point that MacMaster must take any criticism that comes his way for throwing in doubt, even delegitimizing, the voices of gay Arabs.

A Western commentator, Daniel Villareal, writes here:

...the next queer Middle-Easterner to cry for help on her blog will most likely receive a lethal amount of skepticism while people figure out whether or not to believe her. Now anti-gay foes can say that liberals have to fabricate stories just to bolster queer rights worldwide which dilutes the power of real abuse accounts happening in Syria this very moment. The Syrian government can now claim that any reports of real human rights abuses in the region could just be a potential American fraud or over-reactive reporting of a hoax rather than the real deal.

That observation is valid; frankly, given the circumstances, MacMaster's continuation of the blog as a dramatic story of disappearance was irresponsible to say the least.

As a spectator living several thousand miles away from the chaos, with no personal stake in it, I am tempted to ask if any barriers ought to be put in place at all, against appropriating voices. Most people would answer yes. My own instinctive response is that people must be responsible and apply self-censorship -- not the pressure of clamps. Beyond that, nothing and nobody is above criticism.

In an ideal world so long as resistance made moral and logical sense, it would gain traction. But of course reality, or at least our sense of it, is shaped by power. I remember being offended a few years ago by Slumdog Millionaire's commercial and critical success, built on its exotic and patently inaccurate portrayal of Indian voices. I wish Danny Boyle & co. had never made the movie but of course, the feel-good aspect of it appealed to millions of other Indians (to say nothing of foreigners) who didn't share my objections.

Still the Orientalist appropriation that was Slumdog is very different from this case. In MacMaster's defense his portrayal of Amina is, by all accounts, sympathetic. But this cannot hide the fact that lives are at stake. Until his confession, the Western media had taken his blog seriously. Arab gay activists even broke cover to inquire about the incarcerated Amina. MacMaster didn't think through any of this.

The Guardian notes:

(MacMaster)... started the blog... because he believed online posts about the Syrian and Israel-Palestinian situations would earn "some deference from obnoxious men" if written under an Arab woman's name rather than under his own, where "someone would immediately ask: why do you hate America? why do you hate freedom? This sort of thing."

And in an earlier confessional post on "Amina's" blog, MacMaster wrote that he was seeking, in part, to expose "the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal orientalism". Now I can sympathize with that aspiration. While we're on this subject I must also say I am vehemently opposed to underprivileged groups aggregating along a single axis of identity, whether along the lines of race or sexuality or economic status; it is a politics so self-absorbed as to completely miss the big picture. But in the end, there are infinitely better ways of going about expressing a viewpoint.

In hindsight, for all its stupidity MacMaster's deception works if only as a satire challenging self-righteous and self-serving Western readings of the situation. That is the only message worth extricating from the messy, on-going propaganda war between bloggers and the Syrian government that "Amina" has set off.

Whatever his true intentions -- satirical or otherwise -- in the fog of rapidly changing political events in Syria, MacMaster's actions have suddenly taken on greater significance than they should. American and British media outlets, which originally set the consensus agenda on the criminally exuberant coverage of the protests that swept across West Asia, are now looking for a fall guy; MacMaster is an easy target for a media bent on covering its arse.

Let us remind ourselves, MacMaster is not the story.