Archive for the ‘professional articles’ Category
What are your positions and opinions on Literature/Culture?
A review of the positions of Antoun Saadi for the new struggle of ideas in the Syria Nation
من كتاب الصراع الفكري في الأدب السوري
طريق الأدب السوري
بهذا الاتجاه الجديد يمكن أن يترافق الأدب والحياة، فيكون لنا أدب جديد لحياة جديدة، فيها فهم جديد للوجود الإنساني وقضاياه التي نجد فيها الفرد والمجتمع وعلاقاتهما ومُثُلهما العليا كما تراها النظرة الجديدة الأصلية إلى الحياة والكون والفن. إن الأدب الصحيح يجب أن يكون الواسطة المثلى لنقل الفكر والشعور الجديدين، الصادرين عن النظرة الجديدة، إلى إحساس المجموع وإدراكه، وإلى سمع العالم وبصره فيصير أدبًا قوميًّا وعالميًّا ، لأنه يرفع الأمة إلى مستوى النظرة الجديدة، ويضيء طريقها إليه، ويحمل، في الوقت عينه، ثروة نفسية أصلية في الفكر والشعور وألوانهما إلى العالم.
لا يمكن أن ينهض الأدب عندنا، ولا أن يصير لنا أدب عالميٌّ يسترعي اهتمام العالم، وتكون له قيمة عالمية باقية، إلا بهذه الطريقة، ولنفترض أنه يمكن إنشاء أدب جديد، أو إحداث «تجديد» في الأدب، من غير هذا الاتصال الوثيق بينه وبين النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، فما هي الغاية أو الفائدة منه وهو شيء غريب بعيد عن نفس الجماعة وقضاياها الفكرية والشعورية، أو عن قضايا الإنسانية، كما تمثل ضمن حياة الجماعة المعينة وحيز فكرها وشعورها، في أرقى ما يمكن أن يصل إليه هذان العاملان النفسيان؟
إن الأدب الذي له قيمة في حياة الأمة، وفي العالم، هو الأدب الذي يُعنى بقضايا الفكر والشعور الكبرى، في نظرة إلى الحياة والكون والفن عالية أصلية، ممتازة، لها خصائص شخصيتها. فإذا نشأت هذه النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن أَوْجَدَتْ فهمًا جديدًا للقضايا الإنسانية، كقضية الفرد والمجتمع، وقضية الحرية، وقضية الواجب، وقضية النظام، وقضية القوة، وقضية الحق وغيرها. وبعض هذه القضايا يكون قديمًا فيتجدد بحصول النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة، وبعضها ينشأ بنشوء هذه النظرة. فالحرية، مثلًا، كانت تُفْهَمُ قبل النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة في أشكال واعتقادات لا وضوح ولا صلاح لها في النظرة الجديدة، فلما جاءت النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، التي نشأت بسببها الحركة السورية القومية الاجتماعية، وقرنت الحرية بالواجب والنظام والقوة، وفَصَّلَت الحرية ضمن المجتمع وتجاه المجتمعات الأخرى هذا التفصيل الواضح الظاهر في تعاليمها، نشأت قضية جديدة للحرية ذات عناصر جديدة يبيِّنها فهم جديد، يتناول أشكال الحياة كما تراها النهضة القومية الاجتماعية، وفعل الحرية وشأنها ضمن هذه الأشكال.
والحب كان قضية شهوات جسدية ملتهبة، لها شكل مادي يظهر في العيون الرامية سهامًا، وفي خمر الرضاب، وفي ارتجاف الضلاع، وتَثَنِّي القدود، فصار قضية جمال الحياة كلها، واشتراك النفوس في هذا الجمال. عُرِضَ علي، مرة، سجل أمثال وأقوال، فرأيت فيه قولًا مفاده أن الصداقة أجمل ما في الحياة، فكتبت في صفحة منه: «الصداقة هي تعزية الحياة، أما الحب فهو الدافع نحو المثال الأعلى.» ومهما يكن من أمر رأيي في الصداقة، فرأيي في الحب يدخل في قضية الحب الجديدة، فالمثال الأعلى هو ما تراه نظرة إلى الحياة والكون والفن واضحة، معينة، والحب الواعي هذه النظرة يتجه دائمًا نحو مثالها الأعلى، ويرمي إلى الاقتراب منه، في كل اختلاجة من اختلاجاته. إن قضية كون الوصال غاية المطالب العليا النفسية هي قضية قد ماتت للنظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، وحلت محلها قضية كون الحب اتحاد فكر وشعور، واشتراك نفوس في فهم جمال الحياة، وتحقيق مطالبها العليا.
لقد نشأت نظرة إلى الحياة والكون والفن جديدة في سورية، ونتج عنها مجرى حياة جديد لتيارات النفس السورية، التي كانت مكبوتة ومحجوزة. فهل يتنبه لهذه الحقيقة أدباء سورية، وخصوصًا شعراؤها، ويُلَبُّون هاتف الدعوة، ويشتركون في رفع الشعب السوري إلى مستوى النظرة الجديدة ومُثُلها العليا، ويوجِدون هذا الأدب الغني بالقضايا الفكرية والشعورية، التي كانت كامنة في باطن نفسيتنا، حتى ظهرت في النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة؟
لا شك عندي في أن هذا ما يحدث الآن عند جميع الأدباء، الذين اتصلوا بالنظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، وفهموا قضاياها الكبرى في الحقوق والسياسة والاقتصاد والاجتماع، وفي الأخلاق والمناقب والمثل العليا، وإني موقن بأن هذا ما سيحدث لجميع الناشئين على اتصال وامتزاج بهذه النظرة المحيية، ولكني أشك في أمر الأدباء الذين نشئوا قبل ظهور النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة، وظلوا بعيدين عن مراميها وقضاياها الكبرى، وغير متصلين بمجرى الحياة الجديد، الذي وَلَّدَتْهُ هذه النظرة، أو الذين، مع إحساسهم بمجرى الحياة الجديد، لم يجدوا في نفوسهم قوًى كافية لنقلهم من حيز نظرة إلى حيز نظرة أخرى، ومن اتجاه مجرًى إلى اتجاه مجرى آخر.
بعض العلل المانعة لهؤلاء الأدباء من الأخذ بالنظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، واضحٌ في النزعة الفردية التي دللت عليها في كتاب السيد يوسف المعلوف إلى نسيبه الشاعر، شفيق معلوف، إذ يقول له: «اعتن في مؤلفاتك المقبلة أن تكون مبتكرًا فيما تنزع إليه، سواء كان بالفكر أو بالعمل، وأن تكون مقلَّدًا لا مقلِّدًا في سائر أعمالك؛ لأن على هذه القاعدة الأساسية تتوقف شهرة المرء في الحياة.» وقد بينتُ في صدر الدرس غلط هذا التفكير الذي يجعل الشهرة الشخصية غاية الفكر والعمل في الحياة. وأَزِيدُ هنا أن العمل بهذه «القاعدة الأساسية» التي وضعها عم الشاعر المذكور يئول إلى هدم الحقائق الأساسية التي يجب أن تكون بُغْيَةَ كل تفكير تعميري وكل شعور حي، جميل، لأنه متى صار كل نابه يسعى ليكون مقلدًا، فكم تكون التفرقة والفوضى عظيمتين بين المتزاحمين على «الابتكار» بقصد الشهرة والاستعلاء على زملائهم، الذين يصيرون أندادًا؟ ألا يبلغ بهم التزاحم والمناقضة حد العداوة والبغضاء والحسد المستورة بظواهر شفافة من الرياء والتدجيل في المظاهر والمطالب؟
قلت في ما تقدم: إن شفيق معلوف قَبِلَ القاعدة الفردية التي وضعها عمه، ولكنه لم يتقيد بها كل التقيد؛ لأنه احتاج إلى تبرير مجاراته سواه في شعره فقال: «ولئن طرقت بابًا ولجه سواي فهل في كل ما تتناوله القرائح ما يطرق الناس بابه؟» وقلت أيضًا إن شفيق معلوف كاد يصل، من هذه الناحية، إلى طَرْق باب ينفتح عن أفق تنبلج فيه أنوار فجر تفكير أصلي جديد، ولا يقصر إلا خطوة، أو قفزة واحدة ليلج هذا الباب. فما هي هذه الخطوة أو القفزة، وكيف تكون؟
سبق لي القول: إن الخطوة المطلوبة تفصل بين عالمين، وقد تحتاج لعكاز؛ ذلك لأنها تنقل صاحبها من نفسية إلى نفسية، ومن نظرة إلى نظرة، فيصير لها عالم جديد بأشكاله وألوانه وغاياته ومُثُله. الخطوة أو القفزة المطلوبة تكون باستعمال جميع القوى النفسية لِرُقِيِّ عالم النزعة الفردية والغايات المادية، وترك جعل حب إبراز الشهرة الفردية غاية أخيرة للفرد، والقفز إلى عالم ابتغاء الحقيقة الأساسية الكبرى، التي يستقر عليها الفكر، ويطمئن إليها الشعور، واتباعها حين توجد، سواء أوجدت بالاهتداء الذاتي أم بهدي هاد، هي حقيقة الفرد والمجتمع، وحقيقة النفسية السامية التي انتصرت على قيود المادية المجلجلة في الحضيض، وحلقت إلى السماء — السماء، التي لا تخلو من ألم وعذاب، ولكن ألمها وعذابها ليسا من أجل الشهوة المتلظية في المهج، بل من أجل ما هو أسمى من ذلك بكثير — من أجل ما لو أُطفئ لظى الشهوة الجسدية، وقضت النزعة البيولوجية وطرها لَظَلَّ لظاه يلذع النفوس ويعذبها حتى تجد له تحقيقًا — من أجل خذل الأقبح والأسفل والأرذل والأذل، ورفع الأجمل والأسمى والأنبل والأعز، فلا تكون هنالك اختلاجات حب إلا ضمن دائرة هذا الوعي، الذي يرفع قيمة الإنسانية طبقات جوية فوق القناعة براحة النزعة البيولوجية ذات الارتباط المادي، الغافلة عن المطالب النفسية الجميلة في نظرة شاملة الحياة والكون والفن.
القاعدة الذهبية، التي لا يصلح غيرها للنهوض بالحياة والأدب، هي هذه القاعدة: طلب الحقيقة الأساسية الكبرى لحياة أَجْوَدَ في عالم أجمل وقيم أعلى. لا فرق بين أن تكون هذه الحقيقة ابتكارك، أو ابتكاري، أو ابتكارَ غيرك وغيري، ولا فرق بين أن يكون بزوغ هذه الحقيقة من شخص وجيه اجتماعيًّا ذي مال ونفوذ، وأن يكون انبثاقها من فرد هو واحد من الناس؛ لأن الغرض يجب أن يكون الحقيقة الأساسية المذكورة، وليس الاتجاه السلبي الذي تقرره الرغائب الفردية، الخصوصية، الاستبدادية.
وقد قرب شفيق معلوف كثيرًا من هذه القاعدة في جوابه إلى عمه، ولكنه وقف خطوة دونها، فإذا هو خطاها تم له هذا الانتقال الفاصل من عالم إلى عالم، واستغنى عن نصائح عمه، التي تحتاج لغربلة متكررة، وعن إرشادات أمين الريحاني الغامضة، الخاوية، التائهة، وعن تَخَبُّط الأدباء السوريين والمصريين في «التجديد» وكيف يكون.
أعتقد أن لشفيق معلوف هذا الاستعداد العقلي-الروحي، لإدراك القاعدة المذكورة آنفًا، والغاية النفسية التي يقوم عليها أدب خالد. فهو قد وقف قريبًا جدًّا من هذا الإدراك الذي وقف معظم شعراء سورية ومصر وأدبائهما بعيدين جدًّا عنه. وهو الإدراك الوحيد الذي يمكن أن يجد مستقرًّا في النفوس وفي الأجيال. وكان اقتراب شفيق معلوف واضحًا في قوله: «إذ ليس الشاعر، في عرفي، من ضج له الجيل الواحد، حتى إذا تبدلت الأوضاع واختلفت الأحوال تناسته من بعده الأجيال.» وهذه منزلة لا يمكن بلوغها إلا بالاتصال بنظرة جديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، مشتملة على حقيقة أساسية صالحة لإنشاء عالم جديد من الفكر والشعور، إذا لم يكن هو العالم الأخير، الأسمى على الإطلاق، عند المشككين، فهو عالم فوق العوالم الماضية، ودرجة لا بد منها لاطراد ارتقاء الإنسانية النفسي؛ ولذلك هو عالم خالد، لأن ما سيأتي بعده في الآباد البعيدة سيصدر عنه ويثبت نفسه عليه، أو، على الأقل، ستكون النفوس التي ارتقت إلى هذا العالم الجديد مستعدة لاقتبال عالم أَجَدَّ، إذا كشفت مخبآت الأبد إنه سيكون ممكنًا إحداث ذلك العالم، الذي لا يمكننا، الآن وإلى أمد بعيد، تصور موجباته وحقائقه وقضاياه، ولكننا نتصور، بموجب مبدأ الاستمرار والاطراد الفلسفي، الذي أضعه نصب عيني في فهمي الوجود الإنساني، أنه لا بد من أن يكون ذا اتصال وثيق بعالم نظرتنا الجديدة وحقائقه وقضاياه، كما أننا نرى، بموجب هذه النظرة، أن عالمها ليس شيئًا حادثًا من غير أصل، بل شيئًا غير ممكن بدون أصل جوهريٍّ تتصل حقائقه بحقائقه، فتكون الحقائق الجديدة صادرة عن الحقائق الأصلية القديمة بفهم جديد للحياة وقضاياها والكون وإمكانياته والفن ومراميه.
ها قد بلغتُ غايةَ ما أردت توجيه فكر أدباء سورية وشعورهم إليه، في هذا الدرس المستعجل المقاطع مرارًا عديدة في سياقه، ورجائي إليهم أن لا يظنوا أن ما دفعني إليه هو محبة سبقهم إلى «الابتكار» أو رغبة في أن أكون «مقلدًا». إن ما دفعني إليه هو محبة الحقيقة الأساسية، التي وصل إليها تفكيري ودرسي، وأوصلني إليها فهمي، الذي أنا مديون به كله لأمتي وحقيقتها النفسية، وشعرت بالواجب يدعوني لوضعها أمام مفكِّري أمتي وأدبائها، وأمام أمتي بأجمعها، من أجل ما هو أبقى وأفضل وأسمى لحقيقة الأمة، وهي حقيقة تساعد كل مفكر وأديب على تثبيت شخصيته ضمنها والبقاء فيها، وتمكن الأمة من أن يكون لها أدب عالمي تبقى فيه شخصيتها وتخلد.
انطون سعادة
All kinds of Human trafficking: Forced child labor, sweatshop factories, immigrants, house helpers, sex slavery…
Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person’s labor.
By Noy Thrupkaew http://www.ted.com
About 10 years ago, I went through a little bit of a hard time. So I decided to go see a therapist.
I had been seeing her for a few months, and one day she asked: “Who actually raised you until you were three?” Seemed like a weird question.
I said, “My parents.” And she said, “I don’t think that’s actually the case; because if it were, we’d be dealing with things that are far more complicated than just this.”
It sounded like the setup to a joke, but I knew she was serious. When I first started seeing her, I was trying to be the funniest person in the room. And I would try and crack these jokes, but she caught on to me really quickly, and whenever I tried to make a joke, she would look at me and say, “That is actually really sad.”
I knew I had to be serious, and I asked my parents who had actually raised me until I was three? And to my surprise, they said my primary caregiver had been a distant relative of the family. I had called her my auntie.
I remember my auntie so clearly, it felt like she had been part of my life when I was much older.
I remember the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around me like a curtain when she bent to pick me up; her soft, southern Thai accent; the way I would cling to her, even if she just wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat.
I loved her, but [with] the ferocity that a child has sometimes before she understands that love also requires letting go.
But my clearest and sharpest memory of my auntie, is also one of my first memories of life at all. I remember her being beaten and slapped by another member of my family.
I remember screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as I did every single time it happened, for things as minor as wanting to go out with her friends, or being a little late. I became so hysterical over her treatment, that eventually, she was just beaten behind closed doors.
Things got so bad for her that eventually she ran away.
As an adult, I learned later that she had been just 19 when she was brought over from Thailand to the States to care for me, on a tourist visa. She wound up working in Illinois for a time, before eventually returning to Thailand, which is where I ran into her again, at a political rally in Bangkok.
I clung to her again, as I had when I was a child, and I let go, and then I promised that I would call. I never did, though: I was afraid if I said everything that she meant to me — that I owed perhaps the best parts of who I became to her care, and that the words “I’m sorry” were like a thimble to bail out all the guilt and shame and rage I felt over everything she had endured to care for me for as long as she had.
I thought if I said those words to her, I would never stop crying again. Because she had saved me. And I had not saved her.
I’m a journalist, and I’ve been writing and researching human trafficking for the past 8 years, and even so, I never put together this personal story with my professional life until pretty recently.
I think this profound disconnect actually symbolizes most of our understanding about human trafficking.
Human trafficking is far more prevalent, complex and close to home than most of us realize.
I spent time in jails and brothels, interviewed hundreds of survivors and law enforcement, NGO workers. And when I think about what we’ve done about human trafficking, I am hugely disappointed. Partly because we don’t even talk about the problem right at all.
When I say “human trafficking,” most of you probably don’t think about someone like my auntie. You probably think about a young girl or woman, who’s been brutally forced into prostitution by a violent pimp. That is real suffering, and that is a real story. That story makes me angry for far more than just the reality of that situation, though.
As a journalist, I really care about how we relate to each other through language, and the way we tell that story, with all the gory, violent detail, the salacious aspects — I call that “look at her scars” journalism.
We use that story to convince ourselves that human trafficking is a bad man doing a bad thing to an innocent girl. That story lets us off the hook: “I am Not a bad person. It shouldn’t be my problem”…
It takes away all the societal context that we might be indicted for, for the structural inequality, or the poverty, or the barriers to migration.
We let ourselves think that human trafficking is only about forced prostitution, when in reality, human trafficking is embedded in our everyday lives.
Forced prostitution accounts for 22% of human trafficking. 10% is in “state- imposed forced labor” and 68 % is for the purpose of creating the goods and delivering the services that most of us rely on every day, in sectors like agricultural work, domestic work and construction.
That is food and care and shelter. And somehow, these most essential workers are also among the world’s most underpaid and exploited today. Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person’s labor.
And it’s found in cotton fields, and coltan mines, and even car washes in Norway and England. It’s found in U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s found in Thailand’s fishing industry. That country has become the largest exporter of shrimp in the world. But what are the circumstances behind all that cheap and plentiful shrimp?
Thai military were caught selling Burmese and Cambodian migrants onto fishing boats. Those fishing boats were taken out, the men put to work, and they were thrown overboard if they made the mistake of falling sick, or trying to resist their treatment.
Those fish were then used to feed shrimp, The shrimp were then sold to 4 major global retailers: Costco, Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour.
Human trafficking is found in places you would never even imagine.
Traffickers have forced young people to drive ice cream trucks, or to sing in touring boys’ choirs. Trafficking has even been found in a hair braiding salon in New Jersey.
The scheme in that case was incredible. The traffickers found young families who were from Ghana and Togo, and they told these families that “your daughters are going to get a fine education in the United States.”
They then located winners of the green card lottery, and they told them, “We’ll help you out. We’ll get you a plane ticket. We’ll pay your fees. All you have to do is take this young girl with you, say that she’s your sister or your spouse.
Once everyone arrived in New Jersey, the young girls were taken away, and put to work for 14-hour days, 7 days a week, for five years. They made their traffickers nearly 4 million dollars.
hat have we done about it? We’ve mostly turned to the criminal justice system. But keep in mind, most victims of human trafficking are poor and marginalized. They’re migrants, people of color. Sometimes they’re in the sex trade.
And for populations like these, the criminal justice system is too often part of the problem, rather than the solution.
In study after study, in countries ranging from Bangladesh to the United States, between 20 and 60% of the people in the sex trade who were surveyed said that they had been raped or assaulted by the police in the past year alone.
People in prostitution, including people who have been trafficked into it, regularly receive multiple convictions for prostitution. Having that criminal record makes it so much more difficult to leave poverty, leave abuse, or leave prostitution, if that person so desires.
Workers outside of the sex sector — if they try and resist their treatment, they risk deportation.
In case after case I’ve studied, employers have no problem calling on law enforcement to try and threaten or deport their striking trafficked workers. If those workers run away, they risk becoming part of the great mass of undocumented workers who are also subject to the whims of law enforcement if they’re caught.
Law enforcement is supposed to identify victims and prosecute traffickers. But out of an estimated 21 million victims of human trafficking in the world, they have helped and identified fewer than 50,000 people.
That’s like comparing the population of the world to the population of Los Angeles, proportionally speaking. As for convictions, out of an estimated 5,700 convictions in 2013, fewer than 500 were for labor trafficking.
Keep in mind that labor trafficking accounts for 68 percent of all trafficking, but fewer than 10 percent of the convictions.
10:13 I’ve heard one expert say that trafficking happens where need meets greed.
I’d like to add one more element to that. Trafficking happens in sectors where workers are excluded from protections, and denied the right to organize.
Trafficking doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in systematically degraded work environments.
You might be thinking, oh, she’s talking about failed states, or war-torn states, or — I’m actually talking about the United States. Let me tell you what that looks like.
I spent many months researching a trafficking case called Global Horizons, involving hundreds of Thai farm workers. They were sent all over the States, to work in Hawaii pineapple plantations, and Washington apple orchards, and anywhere the work was needed.
They were promised three years of solid agricultural work. So they made a calculated risk. They sold their land, they sold their wives’ jewelry, to make thousands in recruitment fees for this company, Global Horizons.
But once they were brought over, their passports were confiscated. Some of the men were beaten and held at gunpoint. They worked so hard they fainted in the fields. This case hit me so hard.
After I came back home, I was wandering through the grocery store, and I froze in the produce department. I was remembering the over-the-top meals the Global Horizons survivors would make for me every time I showed up to interview them.
They finished one meal with this plate of perfect, long-stemmed strawberries, and as they handed them to me, they said, “Aren’t these the kind of strawberries you eat with somebody special in the States? And don’t they taste so much better when you know the people whose hands picked them for you?”
As I stood in that grocery store weeks later, I realized I had no idea of who to thank for this plenty, and no idea of how they were being treated.
So, like the journalist I am, I started digging into the agricultural sector. And I found there are too many fields, and too few labor inspectors.
I found multiple layers of plausible deniability between grower and distributor and processor, and God knows who else.
The Global Horizons survivors had been brought to the States on a temporary guest worker program. That guest worker program ties a person’s legal status to his or her employer, and denies that worker the right to organize.
Mind you, none of what I am describing about this agricultural sector or the guest worker program is actually human trafficking. It is merely what we find legally tolerable. And I would argue this is fertile ground for exploitation. And all of this had been hidden to me, before I had tried to understand it. (No different of what’s happening in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates)
I wasn’t the only person grappling with these issues. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is one of the biggest anti-trafficking philanthropists in the world. And even he wound up accidentally investing nearly 10 million dollars in the pineapple plantation cited as having the worst working conditions in that Global Horizons case.
When Omidyar found out, he and his wife were shocked and horrified, and they wound up writing an op-ed for a newspaper, saying that it was up to all of us to learn everything we can about the labor and supply chains of the products that we support. I totally agree.
13:52 What would happen if each one of us decided that we are no longer going to support companies if they don’t eliminate exploitation from their labor and supply chains?
If we demanded laws calling for the same? If all the CEOs out there decided that they were going to go through their businesses and say, “no more”?
If we ended recruitment fees for migrant workers?
If we decided that guest workers should have the right to organize without fear of retaliation?
These would be decisions heard around the world. This isn’t a matter of buying a fair-trade peach and calling it a day, buying a guilt-free zone with your money. That’s not how it works.
This is the decision to change a system that is broken, and that we have unwittingly but willingly allowed ourselves to profit from and benefit from for too long.
We often dwell on human trafficking survivors’ victimization. But that is not my experience of them.
Over all the years that I’ve been talking to them, they have taught me that we are more than our worst days. Each one of us is more than what we have lived through. Especially trafficking survivors.
These people were the most resourceful and resilient and responsible in their communities. They were the people that you would take a gamble on. You’d say, I’m gong to sell my rings, because I have the chance to send you off to a better future. They were the emissaries of hope.
15:28 These survivors don’t need saving. They need solidarity, because they’re behind some of the most exciting social justice movements out there today.
The nannies and housekeepers who marched with their families and their employers’ families — their activism got us an international treaty on domestic workers’ rights.
The Nepali women who were trafficked into the sex trade — they came together, and they decided that they were going to make the world’s first anti-trafficking organization actually headed and run by trafficking survivors themselves.
These Indian shipyard workers were trafficked to do post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. They were threatened with deportation, but they broke out of their work compound and they marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to protest labor exploitation.
They cofounded an organization called the National Guest Worker Alliance, and through this organization, they have wound up helping other workers bring to light exploitation and abuses in supply chains in Walmart and Hershey’s factories.
And although the Department of Justice declined to take their case, a team of civil rights lawyers won the first of a dozen civil suits this February, and got their clients 14 million dollars.
16:49 These survivors are fighting for people they don’t even know yet, other workers, and for the possibility of a just world for all of us. This is our chance to do the same.
This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society; that our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people’s pain; that our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice.
17:25 I was so reluctant to share my story of my auntie with you. Before I started this TED process and climbed up on this stage, I had told literally a handful of people about it, because, like many a journalist, I am far more interested in learning about your stories than sharing much, if anything, about my own.
I also haven’t done my journalistic due diligence on this. I haven’t issued my mountains of document requests, and interviewed everyone and their mother, and I haven’t found my auntie yet. I don’t know her story of what happened, and of her life now.
The story as I’ve told it to you is messy and unfinished. But I think it mirrors the messy and unfinished situation we’re all in, when it comes to human trafficking.
We are all implicated in this problem. But that means we are all also part of its solution.
Figuring out how to build a more just world is our work to do, and our story to tell. So let us tell it the way we should have done, from the very beginning.
Let us tell this story together.Romy Assouad shared this link from Shahd AlShehail
“This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society; that our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people’s pain; that our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice.”
A powerful dose of reality
Human trafficking is all around you. This is how it works Behind the everyday bargains we all love — the $10 manicure, the unlimited shrimp buffet — is a hidden world of forced labor to keep those prices at rock bottom. Noy…http://www.ted.com|By Noy Thrupkaew
Amid the waning of the humanities, Edward Said turned out to be one of the last literary scholars with a public presence.
Udi Greenberg @udi_greenberg. One of Said’s students
Teaches at Dartmouth College and is the author of The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (2015).
Note: wordpress is Not opening new texts on my Samsung Chrome in the last month. Maybe I need a better laptop. Untill then, minimal editing on the saved drafts.
Exiles often have conflicting feelings about their adoptive society, and Edward Said was no exception.
As a Palestinian in the United States, he recognized the country’s pervasive racism and violence, but he also knew its educational system made his career as a renowned and prosperous thinker possible.
His life was indeed filled with paradoxes and contradictions. He was one of the twentieth century’s most influential anti-colonial writers, who mostly studied his colonizers’ literature; a proponent of Palestinian liberation who wrote in English and mostly for English-speaking audiences.
Few statements capture his embrace of such tensions more than his surprising claim in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he was now the only heir to the Jewish tradition of radical criticism.
“I’m the last Jewish intellectual,” he exclaimed. “You don’t know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires.… I’m the last one.”
As comical as this statement can seem, Timothy Brennan’s new biography, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, suggests it captures Said’s unique place in public life: a Middle Eastern exile who provided an original explanation for American imperialism, powerfully condemned it, and successfully reached mass audiences.
By telling Said’s life, from his childhood in British-ruled Palestine to his death in New York in 2003, Places of Mind seeks to explain his unique ability to blend intellectual production and public activism.
Impressively researched and powerfully written, it charts Said’s many triumphs: his revolutionary scholarly writings, which became classics and are taught decades after their publication; his rise as a media celebrity (an unusual fate for an academic); and his role in making the Palestinian national movement a source of international fascination.
For Brennan, who was Said’s student and is an accomplished literary scholar in his own right, his teacher was everything a humanist should be.
By embracing his status as an “outsider”—an exile, a Palestinian, an “Arab”—he successfully infused America’s mainstream with new ideas and political visions.
Yet by claiming to be a “Jewish” intellectual, Said was doing more than placing himself in the company of giants like Franz Kafka or Theodor Adorno.
What he recognized, and what Places of Mind sometimes misses, was the tragedy of his career: how by his life’s end, the causes for which he fought were ultimately defeated.
The Palestinian liberation movement, whose cause animated so much of Said’s writing, was headed toward ruin (a reality that he was among the very few to realize).
(Fateh, the signatory to the Oslo treaty, was displaced by more radical movements in Gaza, and currently a new wave of reactions from every mixed towns and villages in the West Bank)
And the humanities, whose flourishing made his career possible, were entering a downward spiral from which they show no sign of recovery. Reflecting on Said’s life is not only a chance to celebrate groundbreaking achievements: It is also an invitation to recognize, soberly, some of our era’s heartbreaking misfortunes.
Colonialism is a brutal business, and this was certainly true of British rule in the Middle East and mandated France in Syria and Lebanon. Whenever locals protested the empire’s authority, as Palestinians did during the so-called “Great Revolt” of 1936 to 1939, British troops responded by demolishing entire neighborhoods, imprisoning thousands of civilians in concentration camps, and putting hundreds to the gallows.
(The British had to dispatch 100,000 troops to squash this civil disobedience movement that had a source the refusal of the British to have municipal elections on the ground that the Jews constituted only 20%)
Like many other colonialists, however, the British also sustained their rule in the region by offering alluring opportunities to some of their subjects. Those willing to cooperate could gain access to British markets, find jobs in the colonial bureaucracy, and send their children to European-run schools. These were the carrots that Europe’s “civilizing mission” dangled in front of its subjects’ noses: Submit to us, colonialists promised, embrace our language and culture, and maybe, one day, some of you would control your own fate.
This was the duality that made the young Said. Born in British-ruled Jerusalem in 1935, much of his childhood took place in the shadow of the Palestinian national trauma. While his parents, Hilda and Wadie, rarely talked politics at home, other relatives often protested their people’s fate. The price of political oppression was even more apparent once British troops were replaced by the armed forces of the Jewish Yishuv, which decimated the Palestinian national movement.
In 1947, Said’s parents fled to Cairo, which rapidly became home to many hungry and dispossessed Palestinian refugees. At the same time, colonialism helped cushion the Saids from some of this brutality. Not only were they affluent merchants, but they also benefited from being Anglican, a tiny minority that enjoyed preferential treatment by British authorities. Said’s father supplied office materials to the British (which ran the formally independent Egypt), and Said was sent to study in the elite schools of British missionaries.
Nothing demonstrated colonialism’s contradictory imprint on his family more than his regal first name, Edward, which his mother chose because she admired the Prince of Wales—a fact that Said bemoaned his entire life.
When Said’s parents sent him to the U.S. at age 15, he would find a similar pattern of simultaneous subjugation and inclusion. In his years as a student, first at an elite prep school in New England and then at Princeton, Said was alienated by the other students’ oppressive self-absorption. Almost all white, they were confident in the superiority of their Anglo-Saxon heritage and considered Arab culture primitive.
As he put it in a note uncovered by Brennan, “to be a Levantine” in the U.S. meant “not to be able to create but only to imitate.” At the same time, the postwar U.S. system of higher education provided remarkable opportunities. After Princeton, Said enrolled in Harvard’s graduate program in European literature, and in 1963, he was hired as a professor at Columbia. Ivy League prestige, as it often does, opened many doors, and Said quickly learned how to prosper in the world of U.S. letters.
He published a book on Joseph Conrad, built ties to the New York literary world, and began contributing essays to magazines like The Nation. For all the whiteness and Euro-centrist ethos of American academia, Said cherished his success in it. To his parents’ dismay, he preferred to spend most of his summers in New York, feverishly churning out academic writings.
These paradoxes of imperial power do not get much attention in Places of Mind, and its first chapters say frustratingly little about the colonial Middle East or the Cold War U.S. This is a missed opportunity, as the similarities between the two systems would later become crucial to Said’s intellectual and political agenda. Most important, both the British and Americans elevated certain minorities (Christians in the Middle East, Jews in the U.S.) to justify their subjugation of others (Muslims under British rule, Black people and other people of color under white U.S. hegemony).
The two cultures also similarly viewed their elites’ culture as universal, a sacred trust they had to bestow upon humanity. Both British and American elites were therefore eager to demonstrate that “outsiders” like Said, who appreciated the brilliance of Western culture, could join their club, as long as they fully assimilated and “overcame” their non-Western origins. It is likely that these parallels informed Said’s later insistence that the U.S. emulated European empires.
And it is clear that his effective navigation in both inspired his later claim that colonialism was not just oppressive but also creative, that hegemonic cultures could possess a certain allure even for their victims.
Said’s career up to the mid-1960s was headed in a predictable direction. Groomed by and for WASP institutions, he was on the path to become a footnote in their history, yet another scholar who studied the European canon and reproduced elites in his teaching.
But the convergence of two revolutions, one intellectual and one political, soon upended this trajectory. Harnessing their energies, Said went on to produce one of the twentieth century’s most important intellectual events. Be the most
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In its most impressive chapters, Places of Mind reconstructs Said’s participation in these two revolutions. The first was post-structuralism. Under the influence of philosopher Jacques Derrida, a group of French scholars launched blistering attacks on Europe’s intellectual traditions. Even after the Enlightenment, they claimed, Europe remained obsessed with enshrining hierarchies and binaries (between men and women, “primitive” and “civilized”); the most urgent task was to dismantle those.
While Said is not always associated with this school today, he was among the first to embrace it in the English-speaking world.
He took part in the early conferences on post-structuralism in the U.S. and was one of the first to utilize its concepts in his writings. He borrowed especially from Michel Foucault and his provocative depiction of the link between knowledge and power. Artists and thinkers, Foucault claimed, were rarely individuals who challenged authority. Most of the time, they reproduced and reinforced their society’s structures of authority, making them seem natural and even benevolent.
The second project that Said joined, and for which he became especially famous, was the Palestinians’ renewed struggle for self-determination. After the shock of the 1967 war, which initiated Israel’s military rule over large Palestinian territories, Palestinian activists and leaders sought to make their cause the center of international attention. They appealed to international institutions and launched multiple violent attacks on Israel to keep their struggle in the headlines.
While Said had little personal interest in returning to Palestine (by that point he considered his exile a permanent condition), he joined this campaign and quickly became its most prominent international figure.
He published fiery essays that compared the Palestinian struggle to other anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa and helped launch organizations that called for an end to the West’s support for Israel. His eloquence and rare status as a Palestinian at the center of U.S. letters made him into an icon. Palestinian politicians and leaders, some of whom he met in person during a prolonged academic stay in Beirut, sought his advice; in 1974, he helped edit and translate Yasser Arafat’s historic address to the United Nations, the first by any Palestinian leader in that forum. Three years later, Said became a member of the Palestinian National Council, the coordinating organization of the Palestinian national movement.
Bringing these two projects together was hardly an obvious undertaking. Post-structuralism’s philosophical musings, with its notoriously impenetrable jargon, seemed worlds apart from the blood and sweat of daily Palestinian resistance.
Yet in his monumental Orientalism (1978), Said fused these two projects to provide a new understanding of Western attitudes toward the Middle East. Drawing on his own experiences as a beneficiary and victim of colonialism, Said claimed that Europe’s colonial domination in the Middle East did not rely merely on military or political might. Rather, it was a vast intellectual project, in which countless scholars and novelists voluntarily rushed to explore, interpret, and explain why Europe had to dominate the “Orient.” Said further argued that the Orientalist project was in fact foundational to Europe’s own self-understanding. As Europeans sought to define themselves as rational, industrious, and self-controlling, they simultaneously identified the Orient’s people as emotional, lazy, and pathologically obsessed with sex.Said, in short, exposed how knowledge and art worked in the service of oppressive power.
This claim about colonialism’s centrality to Europe’s identity would have been enough to make Orientalism an intellectual bombshell. But Said went even further, using his literary study to explain the aggression of modern American diplomacy. Said argued that the collapse of formal European empires after World War II did little to diminish the orientalist mindset. Rather, orientalism continued to flourish in the U.S., where journalists, artists, and scholars conflated their country with a “civilization” that they contrasted with the Middle East’s alleged primitivism and fanaticism.
Indeed, Said maintained that U.S. diplomacy in the region, and especially its unwavering support for Israel, reproduced Europe’s earlier racism, arrogance, and myopia. U.S. diplomats and their Israeli allies inherited the view of Arabs as inhuman and thus dismissed their political demands as emotional and even animalistic outbursts. Said’s most scorching invective was directed at Middle East specialists like Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, whom he acidly described as the intellectual foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism. Their writings about the Arabs’ supposed fanaticism, he wrote in a related essay, provided “not history, not scholarship, but direct political violence.”
Said, in short, exposed how knowledge and art worked in the service of oppressive power. And in so doing, he forever transformed the meaning of the word orientalist: Rather than a term for a scholar of the Middle East, it now became an adjective describing a racist and paternalist worldview.
Orientalism’s sweeping claims could hardly leave readers indifferent, and Brennan masterfully traces both the admiration for and backlash to Said’s masterwork. Conservative commentators predictably dismissed Said as an ignorant trespasser who failed to understand the West’s greatness as he downplayed the orient’s failings.
In a lengthy review, Lewis lambasted the book as “insouciant,” “outrageous,” and “reckless,” inaugurating a rhetorical dual with Said that would continue for decades. Even more sympathetic readers highlighted the book’s limitations. Scholars like the French historian Maxime Rodinson noted that Orientalism was far too sweeping in approach. The study of the Orient, he noted, was a diverse field, and many of its proponents hated empire.
Other supportive readers questioned the book’s focus on ideology and representation. Wasn’t colonialism ultimately driven by economic exploitation? The critique that stung the most came from Arab and Pakistani Marxists, who lamented that Said unintentionally strengthened Muslim conservatives. The Syrian philosopher and activist Sadiq Al Azm, for example, argued that by depicting European knowledge as hopelessly tainted, the book “poured cold water” on the effort to popularize Marxist ideas in the Middle East and bolstered lazy anti-Western sentiments.
These misgivings, however, did little to diminish Orientalism’s impact on the international republic of letters. Appearing in 30 languages, it was widely celebrated as a fresh and sophisticated assault on Western arrogance, one equal to anti-colonial classics like Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961). “Here for the first time,” Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi wrote, “was a book by one of us telling the empire basically to go f— itself.” In a world reeling from the manifold disasters perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam, understanding the connections between Western self-righteousness and violence seemed more urgent than ever.
Said helped inspire the work of countless literary scholars, philosophers, historians, and political scientists who mapped colonialism’s intellectual legacies in the present. He was the founding figure of what in the 1980s became known as “postcolonial studies.” The impact of this intellectual project spilled beyond academic circles. After Orientalism, theater programs, museum catalogs, and Hollywood films began to adopt less Western-focused perspectives.
According to Brennan, Said in fact infused the humanities with renewed significance. Works like Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism (1993), which expanded its insight to more novels, demonstrated the centrality of literature and art to political discourse. Said turned the traditional Marxist view of culture on its head. He claimed that novels and images were not mere expression of social domination but their very heart; they informed how journalists covered world affairs, how citizens thought about politics, and how politicians enacted policies. Countless students and scholars came to view the study of stories, movies, and representation as political action, and journalists the world over courted Said, endlessly asking for his take on political matters.
Places of Mind’s last chapters trace Said’s rising prominence to the position of celebrity. As a testament to his triumph, they catalog the mind-numbingly abundant prizes and honors he received, describe his never-ending stream of interviews on radio and TV, and depict his collaborations with many famous artists, such as the conductor Daniel Barenboim. Yet along with the rapid ascent came frustration. Said’s publications may have made a splash, but they were unable to materially advance the Palestinian national cause, which suffered defeat after defeat.
For Said, stories were essential to the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. If Americans so enthusiastically lavished Israel with weapons and supported its cruel occupation, he claimed, it was not out of some hard-nosed calculation, but because they bought into a particular narrative, one in which persecuted Jews had heroically defeated their evil Arab neighbors.
According to Said, this story was sustained not only by relentlessly pro-Israel politicians, magazines, and TV shows but by the fact that Americans were rarely exposed to Palestinian perspectives. Said noted that this was true even for those who were deeply critical of Israel’s actions. Noam Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle (1983), for example, condemned U.S. diplomats and Israeli politicians for enabling the horrific massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon, but it, too, relied on Western sources and did not include Palestinian testimonies.
Alongside his campaign against the orientalist tradition, Said therefore launched an effort to open new spaces for Palestinians in the Western imagination. As he wrote in the essay “Permission to Narrate” (1983), the task was to forge “a socially acceptable narrative” that would allow people to empathize with Palestinians and view them as fellow humans. Venturing beyond European literature, Said sought to integrate Arab perspectives into the Western literary canon.
While most of his academic work remained focused on English and French authors, he also began studying Palestinian writers like Mahmoud Darwish and helped facilitate their translation into Western languages. And he collaborated with photographer Jean Mohr on After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), a collection of images and short texts that depicted Palestinian people in everyday activities.If Said’s words still resonate today, it is because the evils he helped expose are as powerful as ever.
Yet readers largely ignored After the Last Sky and similar projects, and most certainly did not lavish it with the prizes and honors that were showered on Orientalism. They were mostly interested in the analysis of the West’s colonialism; oppression’s victims were an afterthought. Said was painfully aware that this part of his work had limited impact, and during the 1980s and 1990s he became progressively despairing about the prospects of Palestinian liberation. “The road forward is blocked,” he ruefully wrote, “the instruments of the present are insufficient, [and] we can’t get back to the past.” His gloom only grew after the Palestinian leadership signed a tentative peace agreement with Israel in 1993 (the so-called Oslo Accords), which Said predicted would not lead to statehood but to deepening occupation. By the end of his life, he was politically isolated; his books were even banned in the Palestinian Authority over his criticism of Yasser Arafat’s authoritarianism.
Said’s high hopes for literary studies—that they would lead the expansion of the world’s political options—also proved fleeting. Said’s career, in fact, was not only a rare exception but also a product of broad intellectual sources. It emerged from the 1970s and 1980s, when debates about the literary canon roiled institutions of higher learning and figures like Paul de Man and Alan Bloom were famous.
But by the early twenty-first century, the humanities began to decline. Students were beginning to abandon them, a trickle that would soon become a flood. In such a world, Said was quickly becoming a monument for a passing era. He was one of the last literary scholars to gain the public’s attention; when he lamented being the “last Jewish intellectual,” he in part recognized he was not likely to be followed by others. His increasing alienation from his adoptive country was reflected in the location of his grave. At his request, it stands not in New York, where he spent most of his career, but in Beirut, where he was only an occasional visitor.
If Said’s words still resonate today, it is because the evils he helped expose are as powerful as ever. In the two decades since the 2001 attacks, orientalist sentiments have only intensified: Western politicians still treat Muslims and Arabs as fanatical terrorists, and Western media still perpetuate those narratives. As historian Maha Nassar recently noted*, of the thousands of pieces run by The New York Times and The Washington Post on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, barely 1 percent were written by Palestinians.
The grip of orientalism on U.S. knowledge production has in fact only tightened since Said’s passing. In 2002, the historian Daniel Pipes, who began his career with a campaign against Orientalism, founded the organization Campus Watch, which has targeted scholars who express sympathy with Palestinians. The case of Fresno State University in California was probably the most on-the-nose expression of Said’s lasting relevance. In 2016, the university’s leadership posted a job ad for its newly created Edward Said chair in Middle Eastern studies, only to abruptly call off the search by summer of 2017.
Just like his life, Said’s legacy is a paradox. His ideas are relevant exactly because their political impact was limited: The vast campaign he launched in scholarship, the media, and political activism could not dislodge orientalist bigotry. Similarly, Said looms so large in the humanities because a career like his is now hard to imagine. Rather than blazing a path for other literary scholars to become influential political commentators, he turned out to be among the last humanists with a public presence. Those who share in his quest for a more equal and humane world still face the question that always vexed him: If one has a humanist story to tell, how to make others listen?
When stealing street metal covers is a new business activity: Lebanon faites comme chez vous. And the resolution?
Posted on: May 8, 2021
Ziad Abi Chaker wants to replacing stolen metal drain covers with recycled materials that last longer and cost less (and do Not entice the robbers to resume their beneficial enterprises?)
Saving Lebanon’s streets: the engineer with a sustainable fix
Using recycled single-use plastic, the industrial and environmental engineer applies a technique known as extrusion to melt the raw material and form it into the required shape.
In this case, Mr Abi Chaker repurposes plastic waste to make drain covers to replace stolen ones.
Where other people see rubbish, he sees opportunity.
“I’m an industrial engineer, so my job is to find resources for manufacturing,” But I’m also an environmental engineer, so I find these resources among discarded, recyclable material.” Mr Abi Chaker told The National
Mr Abi Chaker makes use of all single-use plastic, such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, food packaging and more, and turns them into long-term sources of raw material to give them a new life.
His line of thinking offers a creative solution to a mounting problem in Lebanon.
Metal theft is becoming increasingly common as the country’s economic situation continues to deteriorate.
The stolen materials are being sold for scrap in US dollars as people grow increasingly desperate to generate income in a country with scarce jobs and a depreciating currency.
Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces confirmed the increase in these crimes to The National, with at least one person arrested for stealing a drain cover off the streets.
Other recent thefts included steel wires and pylons from power stations, plunging Lebanon further into darkness in March.
Eleven metal graveyard doors were also stolen from a small Lebanese town in Bekaa on April 4, prompting protests against sanctity violation.
Yasa, a Lebanese NGO for road safety, warned of the dangers of missing drain covers after a car got stuck in an uncovered manhole in Jnah, Beirut in April.
But with his simple and sustainable approach, Mr Abi Chaker is saving the environment and the streets.
So far, the engineer has been able to manufacture three manhole covers, with 20 more in the works, out of his own pocket.
Capable of supporting 100 kilogrammes, up to 400kg, they are fit for human and road traffic. He is also producing a cover able to carry up to 800kg.
The first manhole was set to replace a missing lid in the south of Lebanon, while the two others were placed near Beirut River.
According to Mr Abi Chaker, the plastic covers are much more cost-effective than metal ones.
“The human traffic covers are between $20 and $30, while the vehicular ones cost between $40 and $60,” he told The National. “They’re 50 per cent cheaper than steel covers.”
The plastic drain covers are also faster to make, taking two to three days to complete each piece, which is “a record compared to casting iron”.
Although the plastic covers are a highly efficient quick fix, Mr Abi Chaker cannot carry the cost burden on his own.
He is on the lookout for contributions from supporters of the project in the Lebanese community. “It’s the best way to go,” he said.
Beirut Mayor Jamal Itani showed interest in the project, telling The National he is open to receiving a proposal from Mr Abi Chaker team on the details of the initiative to study potential collaboration and methods of implementation.
“Of course we’re interested in an alternative, replacing the metal covers with new metal ones costs a fortune,” he said.
But Mr Abi Chaker would rather secure funds independently from the municipality owing to the urgency of the matter and lack of faith in Lebanon’s officials – a sentiment shared by many who took to the streets in October 2019 against political corruption and mismanagement.
Mr Abi Chaker is working with lawyers to pursue legal action against the municipality for “failing to properly and hastily respond to an imminent danger affecting vehicles and pedestrians of the city”.
Manholes in Lebanon have been coverless for some time after the thefts began during the first quarter of 2021.
Despite the huge risk to pedestrians and vehicles, authorities have yet to take action. The open drains join a long list of malfunctioning public properties, alongside failing traffic lights and low-grade infrastructure.
The manhole covers are not the first initiative by Mr Abi Chaker to take the country by storm.
One of his projects, the Green Glass Recycling Initiative Lebanon, was ranked eighth out of 10 most innovative companies in 2021 for the Europe/Mena region after recycling 125 tonnes of discarded glass after the Beirut port blast.
The August 4 explosion killed more than 200 people, injured more than 7,000 and destroyed large parts of the city, leaving huge piles of shattered glass in the streets.
Instead of discarding the glass in Lebanon’s overrun landfills, the initiative collected the material and provided it to the few remaining glass packaging factories in the northern city of Tripoli, supporting the country’s glass industry and one of the poorest cities in the Middle East.
When asked why he continues to give to a country that does not give back, Mr Abi Chaker said: “When you love someone, do you give up on them in their time of need?
“Our country is afflicted with a disease of the ruling class, and I won’t give up on it now. Even though I was tempted by numerous offers to do the work I do over the world, I love being here, I love the work I do here, I love the impact we make here, I love the people and places here, and this is why I won’t leave.”
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