I write about Yaaba as I saw it, without introduction and without discussion during a festival of African films in Quibdó, Colombia. Yaaba is a slow, visually beautiful, memorable movie about rural life in a small dry village on the savannah. Two kids, Bila and his cousin Nopoko, befriend an old lady, Sara. Sara has been ostracized from the village and is called a witch. Bila becomes her friend and calls her yaaba, or grandmother. Nopoko is taken ill, and Sara finds help. The movie ends as it begins, with two children playing in the dry grasslands. The simplicity of the story left me with many thoughts. The movie was so slow that at times I found my mind drifting, yet it kept drawing me back in with gentle jabs. It shows a vision of the rural life without preaching, telling the small stories without statistics, poverty, violence, or explanation. A simple story of village life, one accompanied always by the wind.
Daniel Tubb
This blog is a place to collect personal thoughts on books and movies.
A dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. Charlie Asher is a second hand thrift store owner in San Francisco. On the day of his daughters birth he unwittingly becomes a death merchant, helping souls find their new home. A quick read, rather funny, certainly not high literature, but also kind of fun. Moore dedicates A Dirty Job book to hospice workers and volunteers around the world.
English, 405 pages, HarperCollins, 2007.
I am a child of the 1980s, but I was a teenager in the 1990s. I make no pretense to be a fan of Japanese anime from the 1970s, and am have no memories of the video games that Ernest Cline writes about. In elementary school I didn’t play Dungeons and Dragons, I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
A sublime ode to the 1980s and her video games and geek culture; it is a beautiful book. I still remember that first day when my parents came home with an Atari. It wasn’t a game console, it was a computer. An Atari 1040 ST, with 1 megabyte of memory, a monochrome monitor, and built it keyboard. It was for my mother’s work. My childhood memories of computer games were not the Atari 2600; indeed, I didn’t know what the Atari 2600 was until much later. In Grade 8, everyone was ‘atarily tired of my Atari’ as I talked about not much else. Excited by programming, at eleven I developed my own “operating system:” Daniel’s Operating System I called it, DOS for short. Somewhere along the line I stopped being a programmer, stopped thinking in arrays and memory structures, and became a Spanish major and now an Anthropologist.
The part that struck home about Ready Player One were those early games. I’ve never played them, but I have played more recent titles, from the early 1990s: Escape from Monkey Island, Utopia, SimCity, and SimCity 2000.
Ernest’s Cline’s book made me think about the computer of my youth, not his. For that, Ready Player One is well worth the read.
English, 384 pages, Crown, 2011
I’ll admit it, I came across David Nicholls’ most recent book while browsing for a movie. Some kind of romantic comedy on iTunes. The title “One Day” was intriguing. The movies premise was compelling.
Nicholls follows the lives of the two protagonists, every July 15, for 20 years from their meeting to the end. I thought I might like One Day in the same way I liked Away We Go; a coming of age tale for my generation. Since it was a book as well, I downloaded it to read on the iPad.
It opens with a description of a meeting between Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley in the student squalor of Edinburgh in the 1980s. The left-wing agitation, Tracy Chapmen, and dirty wine glasses resonated with my own studies at Trent University. The first few chapters then turn to wandering travels, and being lost in dead end jobs in in the early 1990s. It all connected with me. I to have travelled to India and lain on a beach in the Mediterranean. I was never quite as sexy though; always too polite or with too many books to read.
Mid way through One Day threatened to become a Bridget Jones (or Jane Austin) story of love unattainable. But, Nicholls redeemed himself with the suddenness of happiness and the stupidity of death. That’s what really got to me. I’m not 40, but I have lost a partner, and One Day brought that all back to me. Nicholls got me reading fiction again. I’m not complaining.
English, 448 pages, Vintage, 2010.
Fueron negros los que desarrollaron la tierra caliente, no sólo en Colombia sino en todo el mundo. Fueron negros los que extrajeron el oro que hizo rica a la colonia, los que cultivaron la caña, a los que cavaron el Canal de Panamá y los que construyeron las obras públicas. Sin ellos no existiría la llamada “civilización”, de la cual la clase dominante y los blancos se jactan tan orgullosamente llamándola suya, diciendo que los negros son indignos de tal “civilización.”
— Mateo Mina, Esclavitud y Libertad en el Valle del Río Cauca
It was the blacks who developed the hot lands, not only in Colombia but throughout the world. It were blacks that extracted the gold that made the colony wealthy, they grew the cane, they dug the Panama Canal, and they built the public works. Without them there would be nothing called “civilization “, which the white ruling classes are so proud of calling their own, saying that the blacks are undeserving of such a “civilization.”
— Matthew Mina, Slavery and Freedom in Cauca River Valley.
There is something compelling about Esclavitud y Libertad en el Valle del Río Cauca. Michael Taussig, one of the most well known English language anthropologists of Colombia, wrote the short book of non-fiction in Spanish under the pen name Mateo Mina in the early 1970s. In choosing his pen name, Tuassig pays homage to a leader of the slave rebellions of the 19th century. Taussig’s words have a clarity that I find refreshing in the evening heat of Quibdó. He describes the conflicts over land in the north of the department of the Caucua. The way that the land owning classes used violence, technology, and the language of civilization to force black peasants from their land, with disastrous cultural, social, and economic results.
Esclavitud y Libertad is a precursor to Taussig’s later works on the devil and commodity fetishism, violence and healing, the magic of the state, and so forth. What makes the book interesting is that although it is clearly within a framework of class analysis, with a linear progression that is reminiscent of a simplistic Marxist analysis, Taussig also makes few theoretical digressions, which accompany so much of his later work. Indeed, it has a clear direct language that his more literary endeavours lack, although there is a foreshadowing to that in his later work.
The book is compelling precisely because of its (then contemporary) economic history of the area around Puerto Tejida. He describes the abundance and richness of the land in the area during the pre-colonial period, the horrors of Spanish slavery, and the rebellions and resistance the second half of the 19th century when black peasants fought for their land. He concludes with period of consolidation of land in the hands of a the dominant classes in the twentieth century with the War of a Thousand days, La Violencia, and the ‘green revolution,’ and the impact of all this process on peasant society.
In the book’s linearity, Taussig probably misses much of the nuances of these historical forces. Things were perhaps never so clear cut. Yet, it is the simplicity of the basic account that makes the book all the stronger. The lack of jargon, the lack of theory, and the space that he gives to voices from the archives and interviews is compelling. It is strange to write, but there is something about his story of the landed and the landless, the worker and the boss, that is compelling, although I have an undergraduate degree filled with postmodern critique of these simple stories.
Taussig wrote Esclavitud y Libertad at the beginning of a long career. I find it thought provoking as I think about what will result from my own doctoral work on gold mining in the Chocó.
Spanish, 164 pages, 1975, Publicaciones de la Rosca.
Ottawa, Canada, May 2010.
I am a doctoral student in engaged anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. I have been living in Colombia since May 2010 as part of my doctoral fieldwork. I completed my Masters work in Political Economy at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy. I completed my undergraduate work at Trent University in Spanish Literature and International Development. I have lived, worked, and studied in Ecuador, Spain, Scotland, and Canada, and I have been coming to Colombia since 2008.
My current research interests are on the cultural political economies of gold mining in the Colombian department of the Chocó. By describing how people involved in different sorts of mining understand what it is that they are doing, I hope to be able to reflect ethnographically on the economic, social, and political explanations offered by those involved in mining, be they: afro-descendants who have mined for gold in the Chocó for generations, those who work in the mechanized mining sector, and those who work for the international mining companies. Combining methodologies of long term participant observation with visual ethnography, my research will ultimately shed light the on the mining sector in the Chocó.
With the observation that anthropology is ultimately the hermeneutics of life itself, I am interested in the ways of combining different literary and visual forms to offer a better ethnographic interpretation. My work combines textual interpretation with photography and film.
My previous research has focused on citizenship and violence in the neighbouring department of Antioquia, and in particular the city of Medellín. Prior to this, as an undergraduate, I published an article on human rights discourses and internal displacement in Colombia.
Journal Articles
I have two forthcoming articles on the citizenship and violence in Colombia.
“Statelessness & Colombia: Hannah Arendt & the Failure of Human Rights” Undercurrent: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Development Studies, 3(2), 2006. PDF
Journal and Research Affiliations
I am a member of the Grupo de investigación sobre igualdad racial, diferencia cultural, conflictos ambientales y racismos en las américas negras (Idcaran) hosted by the Centro de Estudios Sociales at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá.
I am on the editorial board of Nokoko, an open-access journal promoting dialogue, discourse, and debate on Pan-Africanism, Africa, and Africana hosted by the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University.
Between 2004 and 2006, I was on the editorial board of Undercurrents: The Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Development Studies.
