Rawls & Me

Liminal character

2009-12-13T16:17:00.005+01:00

Waiting for the flight back through Switzerland. An airfield small enough to not hide the liminal character of the journey in mall-like consumption and unending concourses. Instead, the windows here leave me with all the visual evidence that my 40 hours of intermission in Florence are coming to an end.

I transfer the pictures from my digital camera; there is a Buffyesque graveyard in the foreground and the rest is of course what you would expect. It was a nice walk up there to San Miniato al Monte. And being here was just as uncomplicated "good" as it can be sometimes when things are passing.

//

As for the EUI, it was actually much like I had expected. An incredible beautiful setting, talented people and a sense of college-like isolation. Tomorrow I will be in Gothenburg finishing my post-doc application and then on Wednesday it is time for my “slutseminarium”, the last major checkpoint before the viva in June.

With friends like these...

2009-12-04T13:17:00.005+01:00

Those who have followed Rawls & Me know that I have come to defend a techno-environmentalist position, arguing that the convergence of radical technological change and social innovation offers the most promising path to global sustainability.

Unlike many Greens I believe that a planetary future of high mobility, global prosperity and accelerated technological innovation is compatible with maximizing habitat preservation and natural flourishing. However, from the beginning, I have also argued that in order to facilitate such a future we need lifestyle changes in the present; that we need to reduce our environmental impact at the same time as we make unprecedented investments in scientific research and R&D.

Yesterday evening, Swedish public TV ran a documentary on the new long-term infrastructure bill for the period 2010-2021. Despite a total spending of 217 billion SEK ($30 billion) in new investments, the net reduction in emissions is expected to be a meagre 0.1 percent! With half of the investment going into new roads that number should perhaps not come as a surprise but still. This is 2009. We should know better.

With the transportation sector being the single largest source of direct emissions (not counting land conversion, forestry or, more ominously, imports), it is also a sector where politics can have a direct effect. Unlike more tricky issues such as dietary patterns, it is after all a political decision what infrastructure we want in our society. Either we can continue down the grey fossil road with more external shopping centres, more highways and sprawling suburbia or we can move in the opposite direction towards a bright-green future of dense urbanism, efficient collective transportation and a restoration of the public.

The documentary featured some leading centre-right politicians who insisted that new fuels will make the road investments all “green” (as if the production of cars did not require any material resources). Clearly unable to grasp the complexities and the global dimensions of the issue, they failed to see why a country like Sweden should “lead by example” nor why we need to provide a powerful example of what Green Growth can look like. But what was worse was to listen to their watered-down talk of “innovation”. In it, I could hear a foul echo of my own words, that we cannot hope for “radical” lifestyle changes nor should we put blame on individuals. True as this may be for the global, as I think that we cannot realistically ask billions of Chinese or Indians to not go to McDonalds or to forgo modern sanitation, we sure as hell can tell people that they should not drive excessively, and if they still do, they should at least offset their emissions. And sure as hell, high carbon taxation is the way of sending this message.

But, and this is what I missed in the debate afterwards with Gunnar Falkemark, we also need to project a positive vision of the future, to challenge the Neo-Malthusian logic that says that we are witnessing “peak everything” and that from now on, it is just downhill. We need to talk about space colonization, fusion energy and maglev trains! Or to take another of my favourite examples, there will be Argentinean steakhouses in the future; the only difference is that they will serve in-vitro meat!

Late in November

2009-11-25T12:09:00.006+01:00

Though it is actually “Moominvalley in November” in English, the original title has stayed with me as a long echo of the closing nineties; memories of an approaching winter in that student apartment on Nygatan, back when everything “was simpler and more confused”...

If the Swedish “Sent i november” does a better job in capturing the melancholy of the final days of autumn, so does walking down Köldgatan (sic!) to collect the laundry in the rain. This is as far away from international first class terminals and desert drives that one can get. This is “real”, at least some would insist.

The Manuscript is due in 7 days. After that, more updates will follow, including a planned escape from “reality” to the U.A.E. over New Years.

Riverside

2009-11-12T03:58:00.002+01:00

Finally back at LAX after another two days of post-doc scouting, this time in Southern California. Tomorrow morning I am off to Europe. Have a lot to write so I will leave you for now with a picture of the San Bernardino Mountains, as seen from my hotel room.

San Gregorio

2009-11-05T20:59:00.004+01:00

12 hours of uninterrupted sleep later and I am still reeling from the cold, maybe not that surprising after all the flying. But visiting the pharmacy in Half Moon Bay helped, and so did a walk on the nearby beach (picture). Afterwards I continued down to San Gregorio State Beach along road number 1, my own tiny interpretation of the classic road adventure. Now Menlo Park and work.

Canadian airspace

2009-11-05T01:10:00.001+01:00

It has been ten months since I last flew a long-haul and since then I had almost rubbed out the physical memory of how far 5358 miles really is, even if one now happens to be enjoying a courtesy upgrade to Economy Plus (the same as the regular Y-cabin but with a lot more legroom, indispensible for those of us who are 1.85+).

Anyway, all those inseparable hours in the air. I listen to Annika Norlin, songs about evaporating life trajectories, thoughts that have grown upon me ever since that hike along Côte d'Azur: that it gets more difficult from here on. Though life of course always has been absolute I am surprised by how tangible the process has been recently.

That it is really make it or break it.

In a shallow sense I am of course thinking about the dissertation, due for its "final seminar" at the department on 16 December. Or the course papers, the article for Environmental Politics or the Wallenberg post-doc application. But obviously there is more to it; the bitter-sweetness of actually growing up.

Seasonal cold

2009-11-03T12:02:00.006+01:00

Cold to the bones I left Gothenburg and the hammering rain. With the weather forecast talking about 20-25 degrees in the Bay Area I guess it is only fair that Murphy endowed me with a decent seasonal cold.

Having spent the last two three days in utter slow-motion, reading good books like this one in bed, I have at least recovered enough to be able to travel. So now I am checked in for the first segment tomorrow morning, SK CPH-LHR and from there on UA all the way to SFO.

Rheinisches Schwarzbrot

2009-10-27T00:42:00.003+01:00

Taking that ICE 654 from Berlin at 06.50 on a Saturday morning. But this time past Wuppertal and instead all the way to Bonn for a few days on the Rhine celebrating that dad is turning sixty. A special feeling to be back travelling together all of us in the family, it must have been four years ago or something since we did anything like this.

A slow upstream cruise with Köln-Düsseldorfer. A day with autumn leaf colours in Heidelberg and some good cheese on the train from Mainz. And now, already back in Gothenburg, trying to re-accelerate and finish all that has to be done before I can leave for California on 4 November. Fleeing moments but the next days will be somewhat more bearable now when we are equipped with half a suitcase of German bread...

The tale of poverty

2009-10-20T06:45:00.001+02:00

In my research I have occasionally made the controversial claim that part of the “resistance” against a just world order is due to the belief that it would mean a “levelling out” of our economic wealth. Closely associated to this view is the idea that we in the industrial countries are rich today because other people in the developing world are poor. In many ways these beliefs reflect a traditional pre-modern understanding of poverty that has been, if not before, thoroughly falsified by the experience of welfare capitalism. To illustrate why this is so we can begin with imagining a traditional agrarian economy. In such a setting it may be true that the rich benefit, at least in a material sense, from having a large class of destitute people who carry out all the hard work necessary to maintain society. But as soon as we move forward in history, the introduction of labour-saving devices and the expansion of the monetary economy mean that the rich have a lot more to gain from growing aggregated purchase power. Continuous productivity gains in fact begin to depend on that more and more people become skilled and also become able to buy all the goods that are produced. By the advent of industrialism, this feedback loop starts to accelerate dramatically as mass production sets in. At this point, capital owners realize that without consumers, the massive productive capacity of their industries is not of much use.

Yet today, in a sense of historical déjà-vu, we are again faced with the belief that it is necessary to keep people poor in order for the economy to function. The argument normally goes that without a constant flow of cheap natural resources and the underpaid work carried out in for instance textiles industries, the world economy would come to a halt. What is missing here is of course the other side of the coin, namely what additional purchase power that all these (previously) poor people would bring to the market. Since economics by definition is a plus-sum game, this would simply mean that all our boats would rise. Most likely, a lot of menial work would then be priced out of the market since no one would be willing to carry it out, yet this should come as a relief and not a threat since it would leave more room for automation.

Fantastic as this tale may sound, I believe that it is a pretty accurate description of what has already happened in many parts of the world. Yet, as you are all aware, the real caveat remains. If the world were to see, and data suggest that it is in fact seeing, such an unprecedented rise in living standards, it would put an enormous strain on the natural environment, possibly unleashing cataclysmic environmental changes. While maybe temporarily halted by the current deep economic recession, some analysts think that we have already missed the turn to a low-emissions path and that the lofty promise of mainstream sustainable development, that poverty reduction would automatically lead to less environmental degradation, has categorically turned sour.

To overcome this apparent trap, and again show why the world does not “need” poor people but rather transformative progressive politics, we urgently need breakthrough innovations capable of challenging the Neo-Malthusian logic prevalent in much contemporary Green thinking.

Shrill trumpets

2009-10-19T22:36:00.006+02:00

Returning home after a long tedious day of work at the library. Meanwhile the blogosphere is boiling with activity after the Swedish xenophobic party Sverigedemokraterna was given a prime media outlet in the form of an opinion piece in Aftonbladet. Traditionally, the leading media has chosen to ignore rather than to engage in debate with these ominous undercurrents in the Swedish society.

So, what do they say when they are given the chance? In a surprisingly academic yet shrill tone, their party leader Jimmie Åkesson trumpets that Sweden is faced with its greatest threat since the Second World War and that that threat is spelled ISLAM. While most of it can be dismissed out of hand (as the prospects of “sharia law” replacing Swedish law any time soon), Åkesson’s article offers an interesting panorama of his strange universe of ideas. Borrowing the terminology of the British neo-reactionary Roger Scruton and his notion of “oikophobia” (as in an unhealthy rejection of one’s own culture), Åkesson writes:

“One of the many inherent paradoxes of multiculturalism is that, despite its universalistic aspirations, it remains a mono-cultural phenomenon that only has found fertile ground in the post-modern oikophobic West. By basing its views solely on Western experiences it sees the West as having attained a higher stage of development that the rest of the world has yet to reach. This is also the reason why the power elites of today are so totally blind for the dangers of Islam and Islamization. [...] one seems to think that Muslims want nothing more than adjusting to a Western way of life [...] this is also why [the multiculturalists] think that they will be able to tame Islam in the same they way that they were able to tame the European Christianity and confine it to the private sphere” (my translation)

Though only an excerpt it is difficult to know where to begin disentangling this conceptual confusion. But to start somewhere it is interesting to note that Åkesson seems to view multiculturalism as having “universalistic aspirations”, something I think most multiculturalists would strongly object to. Also, most defenders of multiculturalism are not at all convinced that Islam or any other religion will cease existing as a public force, this is rather the reason why they argue the value of sustaining co-existing, yet distinct, cultures.

Beyond these easy first misconceptions it is not difficult to recognize that part of the confusion Åkesson experiences is indeed due to the ambiguous relationship to the modern project that multiculturalist thinkers tend to exhibit. By doubting the emancipatoric force of the Enlightenment, and with it the cosmopolitan vision of humanity one day being able to constitute itself as “humanity”, room is given to precisely these kinds of murky views. At the same time, too often has the “human” been nothing but the pseudo-universalism of the privileged few and over-generalizations of Western experiences. That observation however does not invalidate the prospects of, in the future, being able to raise the contingent rationality of a Eurocentric Enlightenment into a new, truly global Enlightenment. And if we believe in that bright future we have to ask ourselves how we can heal the wounds that give rise to people like Åkesson, how we can transcend the deep class divisions that now leave the difficult task of integrating immigrants to those already marginalized while the upper classes are busy exoticizing ethnic food and sending their kids off to “free schools”? Only be reaffirming our allegiance to the founding values of the Enlightenment can we counter these trends and start building a truly universal civilization of mankind.

The planetary dimension

2009-10-14T11:14:00.004+02:00

A cold Wednesday morning, I go running for 10 km in the nearby woods, at a distance I can hear the workers and their machines in the port. This is where Sweden ends to the West.

Also this morning I finished a first draft design for the new CCS-Politics website, as often it was quite liberating to do something hands-on instead of just thinking in the abstract. Of course, there is no permanent escape, today Dagens Nyheter had yet another piece by Christer Sanne on “Living without growth”.

What to say? Maybe that, as much as I agree with some of his basic ideas (for instance the need to shift consumption from the private to the public), the essay obviously fails to understand the global dynamics at stake. Despite its explicit concern with the “poor countries”, it does not at all ask what the responsibilities of the rich world are, except than maybe to simply stop consuming. Instead we should ask ourselves what we productively could contribute with that would fundamentally redefine the “sustainability equation”. Sensible as the language of “one-planet-living” may sound at first, it clearly points in the wrong direction: instead of returning to a romanticized idea of “nature” we should try to de-couple ourselves from that nature and seek to restore the integrity of the natural world. Instead of reducing working hours, we need to intensify our effort in the decades ahead. Maybe in a hundred years we will indeed be the Keynesian grandchildren that Sanne talks about in his book, but for now we certainly have our work cut out for us.

Lillsjödal

2009-10-04T03:05:00.000+02:00

Muddy fields, a cold lake that has already forgotten those unrelenting summer afternoons, and all these remarkable people who represent the highest and the lowest in us all.

Fragment (consider revising).

Even Word tells me that my thoughts are fragmentary. But it is not like if I could easily synthesize everything into one simple story; it is not like teaching, that I can just force linearity and attention. There is no authority to invoke; I am simply alone here and there is really no silence to hide in. Friends who have followed me since I was seven years old, what can I say that would tell them that something is substantially new and different? How could I possibly prevent falling into those familiar patterns?

Sauna-bathing in that lake despite my cold, Morrissey on the iTunes-playlist, and all these young professionals.

Yesterday in Lund, someone told me that it was a relief then she read my Facebook-update some weeks ago that I had found a pitcher with mojito and “was now crazy drunk”. That she saw it as a hole in the armour, a comfort that I was just as human as she. Undoubtedly an eye-opener, that people can at all think of me as being that hard and unyielding otherwise. Maybe it is a thing about getting older, that one has to revise one’s self-perception.

//

3 a.m.

Tomorrow I have to return the rental car before noon and then work.

And now, England

2009-09-29T23:48:00.001+02:00

From the last warm days in Berlin to a ghostly empty airport hotel in East Anglia.

Abrupt and (even for me) unexpected scene shifts as the international postdoc hunt continues. Yesterday I got into Oxford around 8 p.m., just in time to join the celebrations of a political theorist who had survived her PhD defence earlier in the day and who was now moving on to Graz, Austria. Sitting at a highly archetypal pub with some new and old friends; conversations that make you realize how much we are all in that same boat, that even in Oxford we are all fakin’ until we (hopefully) make it, all trying to come to terms with the unrealistic demands we for some reason like putting on ourselves.

And today, after visiting the Institute for the Future of Humanity at Oxford University, I must say that even if a job there remains a genuine long shot, just the experience of coming over here and talking to all this people has been immensely inspiring. Sorry for sounding this uber-enthusiastic, especially at this late hour, but whenever I do these kind of trips it becomes sort of a “reality check” for me and it certainly helps easing some of the dissertation angst.

Crellerstraße

2009-09-24T14:39:00.014+02:00

I follow Crellerstraße for a while, looking up at all the green-clad balconies while trying to avoid bumping into the few but hurried early-morning residents leaving their homes. It is not even seven yet; if one knows how to capitalize on it, the rather extreme arrival time of the night-train gives you a somewhat unique window to the real Berlin.

Half an hour later I have completed the circle and find myself back at Yorkstrasse, exiting a yellow-red train. I know the terrain here all too well for my own good, better to seek out a nice silent café and isolate myself with the dissertation.

After a few hours of writing and pancakes at "Toronto", I realise that this is inevitably set to become one of those famous last warm days that one should better spend outdoors. Therefore, and despite the heavy backpack with all its books, I head out for some election scouting. The German federal election on Sunday is only three days away. A lot of posters everywhere but it would be a stretch to call it “election fever”. If nothing completely out of ordinary happens, Angela will gain rather substantially on her result from four years ago, right now she and her CDU has a lead of about 9-13 percent on Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his SPD. More interesting I find the political slogans of The Left: “Out of Afghanistan”, “Tax the rich” and the all-encompassing “Damit es im Land gerecht zugeht”. And of course, I just have to mention this one with a gorilla joining the fight against gentrification:

Future talk

2009-09-23T16:58:00.004+02:00

Today I gave the final 2 x 2 hours of lectures this semester. With only four hours of seminars on Friday remaining, I am about to finish what has been three almost insane weeks.

In this final lecture I tried to shift the focus from the past and its ideas towards the future of humanity. It is always an invigorating task to listen to what risks and possibilities the students identify when they are allowed to think more freely about the future. In some ways their answers reconfirmed that strange dualism between personal and global futures that has been observed in a number of more scientific studies; strong optimism about their own life prospects and despairing pessimism about the world at large.

With the teaching drawing to a close, I will spend the next weeks working my way down that long list of to-dos, including the more joyful task of planning a post-doc scout trip to California in early November. But already tonight I am off to Berlin, if only for one day.

The rectification principle

2009-09-14T18:52:00.002+02:00

Next week will see me back teaching political philosophy for the first time in over four years.

Though it will only be two lectures, it is still exciting to reread the classics and try to come up with new smart ideas about how to teach them. For one thing, when covering Nozick, I will put some extra emphasize on his rectification principle since it, at least by some interpretations, has some rather interesting implications for his more general entitlement theory.

As we all know, Nozick argued that the demands of liberty effectively upset any “patterned” distribution. According to him, we have to accept prevailing social inequalities if these are the results of (a) free and voluntary exchanges and based on (b) just initial acquisition. Since we know that human history did not at all unfold along such lines we can reasonably assume that the people who are rich today are, at least partially, rich because of different transgressions in the past (think slavery, colonization or, why not, simply theft). Because of this problem of historical injustices, Nozick (on page 231 in “Anarchy, State and Utopia”) writes:

“For example, lacking much historical information, and assuming (1) that victims of injustices generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendents of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices […], then a rough role of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group end up least well-off in the society.”

On this and some other pages (especially 152-153), Nozick finds himself sliding into acknowledging the need for a one time redistribution according to, yes, the Difference Principle. The problem is, how exactly do we carry out a “one time redistribution”? As many theorists of justice have pointed out, it is not like that we can take all our monetary resources and put them in one big heap that we then divide fairly. Even if carried out that way, it would only take a short while until many of the old injustices would reappear since the most valuable things in a late-capitalist economy tend to be not only immaterial but also very demanding to redistribute. Just think of the role that our upbringing plays in what opportunities we are able to identify and pursue. To avoid the spectre of paternalism in the process of redistribution, there are good reasons why we should opt for “slower” means of redistribution (such as making health insurances universal or higher education free) rather than “faster” means (such as re-education camps)... All in all, it seems that we indirectly have arrived at a justification of a rather extensive welfare state :-)

(which, of course, can be justified on other and more civilized non-Nozickian grounds)

Better

2009-09-04T10:01:00.001+02:00

Better, in every way. The room may still be dark but I traded Anna for The Hives. The presentation went well enough and afterwards we went for some excellent Thai food at Koh Samui on Princess Street.

Marcel brought up Rawls & Me, saying that the weblog does not give away that many juicy details about my private life. True, but unlike other blogs that seamlessly blend the personal and the political, that has never been the programmatic purpose. Yet, I still find a value in not deleting post, in accepting that there are misanthropic days as well as more hopeful ones.

Tomorrow the topic will be democratic deliberation, the role of listening in green political theory and the question of how to cope with intractable controversies. Sounds like useful stuff.

Rochdale Canal

2009-09-03T10:13:00.004+02:00

Overlooking the old industrial waterways of Manchester from the thirteen floor at the Hilton Deansgate. I had to switch off the lights to align my thoughts after this first day of intense academic activity.

As I down a glass of chlorinated water I realize how difficult it can be sometimes, that whatever dreams I had they are being tested by time and my own inadequacies. It is not like I no longer believe, or remain idealistic, it is rather that I recognize, time after time, how difficult communication really is, how easily we give in to ontological insecurity and how uncertain all our futures are.

//

“simply being was easy, just having you there”

There is a certain defeatism in saying that all relationships that are truly worthwhile must end. That “being” in itself ultimately will not suffice, that human beings are after all consumables, that with sufficient intellectual and emotional integrity comes the inability to love over time.

I do not say that it is like that, nor that we should not try our best to extend these aesthetic moments of “simply being”, only that I fear what we could perhaps call the Anna Ternheimification of my soul.

Something in me vehemently objects to this. That instead of reducing human existence into aesthetics, we should think of it as pointing towards the eternal, that it is only a lack of sensitivity that prevents us from experiencing the transcendental in the eyes of those we love. Yet, true as this may be sub species aeternis, we still have our everyday lives, we still go to IKEA, collect airmiles or walk dogs, or laugh at that somewhat inappropriate joke, we are humans, we are not only spirit but also flesh, and we cannot demand others to acknowledge our own concepts of transcendental purity. But if that is so, then we have to accept the flip side of the coin, namely that at the end of the day we might ourselves be considered expendable and, what would be even worse, simply “boring”.

Once more, with feeling!

2009-09-02T13:04:00.004+02:00

Back at that very same Nero in Manchester. Again it is one hour until the conference starts and again Marcel has written a thought-provoking paper, this time on “Zero-growth libertarianism: Population Growth and environmental sustainability”. Reminds me of a paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy by Thomas Young who asks if overconsumption and procreation are morally equivalent, a question he, fully in line with the Neo-Malthusian paradigm, also answers in the affirmative.

Other highlights this time will be Andrew Dobson’s text on William Ophuls or “Political Theory for a Closed World”. Clearly, the stage is set :-)

”A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith”

2009-08-24T18:47:00.003+02:00

A good friend just pointed my attention to what must be one of the more unexpected literature reviews this summer, namely Carl Rudbeck's review of Rawls's bachelor thesis in Dagens Nyheter.

For those curious, I have a post about the same piece here.

I shot Paulo Coelho

2009-08-21T10:56:00.004+02:00

A few days ago I handed in the first chapters of the dissertation to my supervisor. Despite my best intentions I still have about ten pages to write until I can say that the manuscript is complete (for now). Once done, September looms on the horizon as one of the busiest months ever with fifty hours of teaching, one article to revise for Environmental Politics and several new conference abstracts to write.

In the midst of all this, I began reading a brief novel by Staffan Vahlquist. It is a sinister fantasy, the kind of exaggerated tale one can dream up after too many bottles of wine on a winter night, a furious assault on all the metaphysical mumbojumbo making up “New Age” and its prevailing hegemony of superficiality. All the things that one could say, yet seconds later realize that it will only lead to further estrangement and meta-ontological rupture rather than bridge-building and understanding. But sometimes, one just have to let it out :-)

Wordle

2009-07-21T15:40:00.010+02:00

Inspired by my friend and colleague Nils I decided to take the first chapters of my dissertation through Wordle. The result is pretty impressive and also sets the right tone for the coming weeks...

Next stop for Rawls & Me will (probably) be Manchester Metropolitian University in early September where I will attend their annual workshop in political theory. Bis dann!

The Old Vicarage

2009-07-14T22:14:00.012+02:00

“Here am I, sweating, sick and hot,
And there the shadowed water fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh”

We took our thoughts with us and packed us into a cramped Luton-bound flight. Another summer of apparently seamless travel, before long the world had changed again and we were under that well-known apple tree in the Grantchester orchard, reading the poem above by Rupert Brooke.

This time, the feeling was even stronger, this must urgently become the common right of all humanity. While some temporary restrictions on personal mobility may be called for, it is imperative that we do not forget the vision of a world without borders. It is obviously unacceptable that “nationality”, a completely arbitrary category that people are simply given at birth, should dictate so much.

Yet, any such vision remains futile unless paired with an equal strong vision of a world of global prosperity, a world in which cultural curiosity has come to replace economic necessity and political oppression as the main motives behind migration. I believe that such a world can be achieved within our lifetime. Apparently, the policy wonks behind the newly proposed “Stockholm Programme“ do not. Instead they imagine a world of fear, militarized security and social instability in which borders have to be fearfully protected and a “digital tsunami” of surveillance has to be launched to “protect citizens’ rights”.

We must resist these waves of Newspeak and together work to protect the fundamental values that we again find to be in peril.

Riad Due

2009-07-13T23:55:00.008+02:00

From Essaouira we took the spiffy white bus back to Marrakech. Travelling in Morocco quickly brings back that long shadow of colonial divide, arriving behind the thick wooden door at Riad Due simply completes the picture. Outside, the myriads of ancient alleyways making up the market souks. Inside, futuristic shots worthy of any glossy interior design magazine. An environment so sparkling clean that you would barely find it in Europe; the magic touch of Milanese photographer and designer Giovanna Cinel which caught my attention years ago when reading the travel magazine RES.

An old riad turned into top notch suites and luxury rooms. The jasmine hand wash welcoming you, the generous breakfast and the smiling hospitality. All those small things that still leave me ambivalent. Are we contributing to something good and sustainable here? Or just reinforcing the public/private divide that the wooden door represents?

Alizee

2009-07-06T14:52:00.001+02:00

It is here in Essaouira that the Atlantic trade wind, the beautifully named Alizee, comes ashore. The wind follows your every step here, through the narrow alleyways, along the wave-lashed ramparts and into the night when only the silent shuffle of kaftans may occasionally blend into its infinite melodies.

This morning, I woke up to the sad news that my dear grandmother had passed away. Her name “Alice”, though cognate with the wind, was always something reserved exclusively for formalities. To me and my sister she was simply “grandmother” and as one she took very good care of us both.

She will be deeply missed.