Readings…

I recently attended a reading at the Seattle Asian Art Museum by the wonderfully warm and humorous travel writer and historian William Dalrymple.  His new prose non-fiction book is called Nine Lives and like many of his books it is set in India, illuminating the unique  life stories of people whose spiritual practices fall conspicuously outside of what Dalrymple described as the rapidly homogenizing, conventional urban religious customs.  Instead the people whose lives he focuses on reveal the particular habits and traditions of specific regions of the subcontinent; more importantly, they reveal that irreducible truth that is any one person’s journey.

I also had the chance to have some coffee and lively, sparkling conversation with some young Americans who are each making their own unique contributions to the emergence of a contemporary Muslim culture.  I spoke with the graphic novelist G. Willow Wilson about her new memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, and the challenges she faced (and overcame) in putting her own experiences and relationships from her years spent living in Cairo, on paper.  

Jordan Robinson, a former editor of Islamica magazine, told me about his current work supporting the development of locally-based Muslim civic and social enterprise – specifically we talked about the dynamic Muslim hub that the city of Chicago has become. We talked about shifting the cultural emphasis away from a general, diffuse, global ‘islamic’ identity and into specific, regionally and locally-influenced forms of Muslim culture as contributions to the identity of our pluralist, polyglot local communities or cities.

posted by Rahat Kurd

We make culture, and culture makes the world

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we make culture, and how important it is that we understand the fact that we do this.  Culture doesn’t happen by accident; it doesn’t just sit there like a huge boulder in the middle of the street, forcing all human and animal activity to go around it.   The making of culture is worth paying attention to because we can almost always, always choose to do something to influence it.  

Perhaps I should start by offering my definition of culture: it’s a shared memory.  If you and I both happen to know the Swahili word for “bread”, and find out that we share this knowledge, that is a small but powerful instance of culture at work.  We might have learned it in different ways and at different times, and if we told how we’d each come across this bit of Swahili vocabulary, whether in a casual conversation during an economy-class flight from Vancouver to Tokyo, an epic, gut-wrenching screenplay for a Hollywood movie, or a series of exquisite haiku spray-painted on abandoned warehouses down by the Fraser River, we would be making culture.  Even if we stood in the front hall of my apartment building and argued for ten minutes about the right way to pronounce it, or spell it, or the polite way to ask for some in a restaurant in Nairobi, that argument would be a cultural event arising from our shared memory of this one word.  

It is the elasticity and perennial availability of cultural forms that fascinate, delight & inspire me: the brilliant array of possibilities from which we can choose to participate in the human conversation, whether global (think of how many millions of people watched that heartbreaking moment when the South African goalkeeper got sent off this morning during the World Cup soccer match against Uruguay) or micro-local (that in-joke you share with your brother that drives everyone else in your family crazy).  I think it is important for us to understand that culture is a thing we can make deliberately and carefully, from what is best in us, in order to generate greater amounts of beauty and happiness in the world.  I insist on this idea, that culture is shared memory, in order to extricate the concept of culture from the fixed ideological boundaries some of us might make mistakenly believe are markers of cultural authenticity.  

In the weeks and months to come on this site, most of the time, my aim is simply to discuss books I’ve read and art I’ve looked at and what I think they mean.  But occasionally, I hope to engage readers on this “macro” – level subject in order to reflect more closely on the relationships between culture, power, and ideology, as explored in profound ways in contemporary art and literature.