Image: the floating villages of the Marsh Arabs (عرب الأهوار) of Iraq, the “Venice of Mesopotamia”
Image: a meeting hall called a ‘mudhif’ (المضيف) made from a long grass ‘qasab’ (قصب)
Image: inside the mudhif. The marshes were drained by Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the Marsh Arabs lost their livelihoods. Read more here.
Hello
How has your week been? Mine has been OK. Max and I are both getting over an odd, half-hearted cold. We can still smell and taste and breathe and do some exercise, so we’re ruling the omnipresent topic out.
If you’re living in Melbourne, I wish you the resilience to get through the next 6 weeks at home in lockdown. The recent surge in COVID-19 cases there is quite alarming considering Australia had flattened the curve quite successfully before then. It just goes to show how volatile the virus is, and how this could happen anywhere else in the country over the coming months (years?) until there’s a vaccine.
What’s become clear over the course of the week is the clear biases this country has towards the poor and poor ethnic minorities. Nine heavily policed public housing apartments became the centre of attention as the new locally-transmitted cases were being reported. The paternalistic use of force keeping the residents in their homes revealed the double standard of the government that didn’t also patrol the wealthy white hotbed suburbs. And it shone a spotlight on the ongoing lack of investment in public housing in this country, generally. To read more on that, here’s a great piece by human rights lawyer and ‘proud houso’, David Mejia-Canales.
To continue the theme of ‘home’, the Australian Government has also just slashed the number of its citizens allowed back in the country. This is in order to take the pressure off the quarantine systems in each state and to not overwork medical workers who will need to focus on the Melbourne outbreak.
Also in news this week, the Government has decided to extend the temporary work and student visas of Hong Kong residents, and make pathways to residency easier. This has come as a reaction to the new security laws around dissent I wrote about last week. The Government has also suspended its extradition agreement with China over the change. This is to protect both Australian and Hong Kongers who may have reason to be charged under the new laws. Follow prominent HK freedom activist, Joshua Wong on Twitter for the best coverage. There’s also a documentary on Netflix about his work.
This week’s things of interest:
Sparrows in Canada have changed their song — and it’s gone viral!
This is from another one of my favourite YouTube channels, LangFocus. I’m embarrassed to admit that growing up I was ignorant of how fully-formed AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is and got frustrated by what I perceived as ‘uneducated’ speech. This is an in depth look at the syntax, vocabulary and grammar of it:
This improvised response from drag queen, Jujubee, who’s impersonating Eartha Kitt in last week’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. The whole performance was gold, but this line had us rolling on the floor:
The new single from Rita Indiana, a queer Dominican author and songwriter:
In newsletter news, I have new, BIGGER ideas for what to do with this publication. I am trying to get a bigger readership so that I can make a payment option for it. If I can spend more time researching and writing, I’d like to divide the letter into world regions and share interesting news stories and cultural titbits from each. Let me know what you think!
That’s all from me this week! Please share with whoever you think might enjoy it, too.
Until next time xxx