The Middle East, Rap Music, and Movies

A few weeks ago, I was reading about J. K. Rowling in Time magazine. Speaking on how global Harry Potter has become, the author reported that a teacher in Pakistan asked their students to look at the books politically. The students called Pervez Musharraf Voldemort, and labeled Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix Lestrange. Bellatrix Lestrange is evil, which didn't fit with what the press was saying about Bhutto after her death (the photo is from the Academy of Achievement).

William Dalrymple was the exception--and solved the Lestrange-martyr mystery. In Time (Jan. 14, 2008), he writes things like: "Amnesty International accused [Bhutto's] gouvernment of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, abductions, killings, and torture."

I went to a Sundance film yesterday. Slingshot Hip Hop. It was a documentary about Palestinian rappers in occupied Israel. And after the showing--woah, five of the rappers were there. They were sitting right behind us, and went up and fielded questions and did a little free-style.

It was an interesting way to look at the conflict--how rappers from the different groups can't all get together for a concert because visas to leave the occupied territory are so hard to come by--and because the issue and honoring of visas is so arbitrary. Where some of them live, it takes eight hours to travel fourteen miles, because of all the checkpoints set up.

That surprised me. They can't move around. They don't have mail and electricity gets cut off. They aren't free. The rappers more than once in the film called rap their reason to live.

I think, though, an equally sympathetic story could have been told from the Israeli side. During the Q&A, someone asked what they could do to help the occupied Palestinian cause, and one of the rappers essentially said, "don't support Israel." Both sides of the conflict are unyielding--it is all black and white, so no one can win.

I saw Juno this weekend. It was the best movie I've seen in a long time. I liked it even better than the fancy Sundance flick. Fox Searchlight owns the image.