Everything Political
We all had election fever is some capacity. When Obama won I called my parents to see what they had to say, I wrote on Obeto’s page - “Kisumu forever”, and called Dardana at the Smashing Pumpkins concert to make sure she had heard. (She said Billy Corgan had told her.) In the subway that night we sat beside two men that did not know each other. Both African American, one was dressed in an America suit/ costume and the other in jeans, a beanie, and Bob Marley pictures hanging around his neck. They spoke hopefully about the spirit of Jesus Christ, and how Moses came down from Mount Sinai glowing from being in the presence of God.
I wish I could photograph this glow. I came downstairs this morning and it struck me how much more political my life has become since June. It started with Kisumu, and the remnants of the riots that affected a country and the lives of many friends there. It continued through Nairobi where I chatted with development workers whose cynicism ranged from hopeful to robotic. It moved through me when I came home and went to the World Youth Congress. Hundreds of kids marching through the streets waving the flags of justice, peace, equality and love. I saw K’naan perform and talk about coming to Canada as a refugee, and saw when he and the Right Honourable Michel Jean looked at each other with some knowing secret (as she danced beside me in the crowd.) It continued through my travels to South Africa where I saw the effects of the economic crisis in the tangible form of hunger and starvation. I saw the Taxi Wars first hand, the corruption and apathy. I came home to the cries of Wall Street, a historical financial bail out, the Canadian and American elections. Life revolved around getting home on time for SNL political specials, talking on panels about the global village, facilitating heated arguments about voter apathy and repetitively listening to songs with lyrics like, ”I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up, If I could stand up mean for the things that I believe.”
My best friend is staying with me right now. She just spent the last year working and living in a refugee house. I come downstairs to tell her about a story that I just read in a book a friend recommended to me. I want to tell her about a young Jewish man who was arrested for refusing to join the Apartheid Army in South Africa almost two decades ago, but she interrupts me because she wants to talk about a letter Harper wrote to the Washington Post in 2005. It takes a long time to work through both of our political interests, and how they converge.
I’m saying all of this because I’ve been sitting on a series of images that I shot in Kisumu. I look at them from time to time, but more often than not I close the window and continue on with life as I can. It hurts to see them, it definitely hurt to shoot them. They’re of the graffiti sprawled on the walls of houses burnt during the riots in Kisumu. The owners long gone fearing for their lives, the perpetrators triumphantly spilled their hatred around with cliches from American movies. My hope is that where ever there exists extreme hatred there will be extreme love. As journalists and story tellers I think we are called to show both. We see horrible things, we experience them and we record them because we want to see the situation evolve into something different. So here are the images. Perhaps I thought that finally showing them would allude to this idea that I understood something, but rather this post and these images are an effort to understand everything political around me.
I photographed these boys right after the former images, just a short walk down the road.
