The Saturday Profile: Russia’s Best-Known Gay Activist Has an Uphill Fight

AT first glance, it seemed like a breakthrough for homosexual equality in Russia. After years of battling the authorities, here was Nikolai Alekseyev, Russia’s most visible gay-rights campaigner, on a popular prime-time debate show called “Duel” recently talking about plans to hold a gay pride rally in Moscow.

But the discussion quickly deteriorated, with hostile and bigoted remarks coming not just from Mr. Alekseyev’s opponents but also from the host, who at one point equated homosexuality with pedophilia. When a woman in a Kentucky Derby-style hat started into a screed about “homosexual extremism,” he had had enough.

Calling the woman a lying “hag in a hat,” Mr. Alekseyev charged offstage, stamping a hole through the set as he left.

Any conversation about gay rights in Russia today is bound to be tense. But with Mr. Alekseyev, it can be explosive.

For six years, he has flouted a government ban and held an annual gay-rights event that he calls Moscow Pride. He has weathered arrests and attacks by neo-Nazi thugs, and once got into a shoving match with the press secretary of Yuri M. Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor who has referred to Mr. Alekseyev’s protests as “satanic.”

With short blond hair and a round, youthful face, Mr. Alekseyev, 33, has the air of a maligned schoolboy out for retribution. He decided to become an activist after Moscow State University, where he was enrolled, refused to accept his graduate thesis, “Legal Regulation of the Status of Sexual Minorities.”

He is brash and provocative, even among would-be supporters. He has berated journalists for coverage he disagrees with.

“He is a complicated person and does not have a mild personality,” said Anna Komarova, a transgender activist allied with Mr. Alekseyev. “But laid-back people choose other occupations.”

BEING a gay-rights activist in Russia is not for the timid. At this year’s Moscow Pride, held outside the Kremlin last month, the two dozen or so participants stood little chance against the phalanx of police officers deployed to stop them. Most were arrested seconds after unfurling a rainbow flag or a placard denouncing homophobia. Gangs of muscular men wearing surgical masks and yelling antigay slurs chased away the rest.

Participants suffered only minor cuts and bruises, and all were released the same day. Mr. Alekseyev, who spent this year’s protest coordinating from an apartment — his father was recently found to have cancer, he said, and he could not risk being jailed as a repeat offender — said previous years were bloodier.

Few others in Russia have risked being as publicly outspoken — or just as out — as Mr. Alekseyev. He calls news conferences at fancy Moscow hotels, gives interviews to newspapers and has appeared on television with increasing regularity. He has, for better or for worse, become the face of a budding campaign for gay rights in Russia.

His efforts have attracted news media attention and forced politicians to discuss the issue. But it is a steep uphill battle; asked to weigh in, Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, said homosexuals deepen Russia’s demographic crisis. And Russia joined many African and Muslim-majority countries on Friday in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning discrimination against homosexuals that, nevertheless, passed.

Mr. Alekseyev, who founded the group Gay Russia in 2005, believes that there can be no advance in rights until gay people are allowed to protest publicly.

But in a country where the authorities view any sort of public protest with trepidation, his position has provoked hostility.

“This is a very dangerous thing,” said Aleksandr Khinshtein, a member of Parliament, and Mr. Alekseyev’s principal opponent on the recent debate show. “Homosexuality can never be allowed to be considered normal. It’s a question of survival.”

Even other gay-rights campaigners have criticized Moscow Pride, saying the rallies and the violence that typically accompanies them distort perceptions of the issue in Russia, where there is still significant confusion about what homosexuality is and what exactly gay people want.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 18, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the citizenship of Nikolai Alekseyev as a result of his marriage to his Swiss partner. He is not a Swiss citizen.

View the original article here

The Saturday Profile: Violence Suffocated a Father’s Poetry, but Not His Voice

As a poet, novelist and essayist, Javier Sicilia tapped a deep strain of Catholicism to obsess over “the mystery of God in a broken world,” as he put it two years ago when he was awarded Mexico’s top poetry prize.

Now that his own world had been shattered by the killing of his son in March — an innocent, the police said, caught up in a drug-trafficking attack that captivated the nation — Mr. Sicilia, 56, said he had kept his faith but had felt it sink to a “dark, deep place.” So he turned to that other mystery, poetry.

After burying his son, Juan Francisco, 24, a university student who was found bound and shot along with six friends in the city of Cuernavaca, Mr. Sicilia stood before well-wishers and read his latest work, an ode to his son:

The world is not worthy of words

they have been suffocated from the inside

as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs ...

the pain does not leave me

all that remains is a world

through the silence of the righteous,

only through your silence and my silence, Juanelo.

Then, Mr. Sicilia, one of the country’s most acclaimed poets, told those who had gathered that they had just heard the last poem he would ever write.

“Poetry doesn’t exist in me anymore,” he explained later in an interview.

But that does not mean Mr. Sicilia has any intention of remaining quiet.

Since his unlikely tragedy, he has led two marches with the slogan “?Hasta la madre!” — which roughly translates as “We have had it!” — and has issued a series of public denunciations, providing an exclamation point to this country’s campaign against drug cartel violence, which has left nearly 40,000 people dead in the four years since President Felipe Calderón began a crackdown on organized crime.

“What my son did was give a name and a face to the 40,000 dead,” Mr. Sicilia said. “My pain gave a face to the pain of other families. I think a country is like a house, and the destruction of someone is the destruction of our families.”

Previous mass demonstrations here claiming to be the vanguard of a new movement against violence eventually petered out, with mixed results. Mr. Sicilia’s own call for the resignation of Mr. Calderón’s public safety director went nowhere.

But Mr. Sicilia, not a household name here but well known in political and media circles through his literature and regular columns in Proceso magazine, has achieved what others have failed to do: he has provoked serial public responses from the Calderón administration.

Mr. Calderón appeared on national television a couple of days before the most recent march, on Sunday, both to defend his policies and express sympathy for the victims, including the more than 300 whose bodies have been dug up from mass graves in two states in recent weeks.

As he left Monday on a trip to New York and Washington, Mr. Calderón issued five messages on Twitter expressing solidarity with the marchers.

“I celebrate the March for Peace, and its legitimate and just intentions to put an end to the problem of insecurity,” said one. Others called for a national dialogue to find solutions to the crisis.

Mr. Calderón also met privately with Mr. Sicilia more than a week ago, and Mr. Sicilia said he had extracted a confession of sorts from the president.

“He said, ‘I agree I made a mistake but I can’t go back now,’?” Mr. Sicilia said in an interview.

He said Mr. Calderón agreed that he should have focused more on rebuilding the nation’s social and judicial institutions than on battering the cartels with the military and federal police. A spokesman for Mr. Calderón gave a different account, though, saying he might have critiqued a policy point or two but had never expressed regret over his strategy and remained committed to it.

WHATEVER the case, Mr. Sicilia has kept up his campaign, which seeks a “pact” between citizens and political leaders to thoroughly investigate the drug war deaths, de-emphasize combat with cartels in favor of fighting corruption and impunity, and put more attention on youth and social services.

 

The Saturday Profile: An Iranian Filmmaker Tiptoes Around the Censors to Explore Risky Subjects

But he is determined, seeing the publication of hundreds of these photographic relics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a way to reconstruct a part of Iran’s visual history, filling a vacuum left by a government that lives in constant denial of its pre-revolutionary past.

“There should be a whole office doing this, and I don’t even have an assistant,” he said. “But I believe in it.”

For Mr. Oskouei (pronounced os-koo-WEE), picture postcards are as much a part of the cultural healing process as the documentaries for which he was a recipient of a 2010 Prince Claus Award of 25,000 euros (about $37,000) from the Dutch Foreign Ministry. His films have broached delicate issues like female suicide in traditional communities, juvenile drug addiction and Iran’s crisis of youth identity, themes that could easily land an Iranian in jail.

He is best known outside Iran for his 2006 film, “Nose, Iranian Style,” about the prevalence of nose jobs in Iran, a world leader, per capita, with 60,000 to 70,000 operations a year. That reflects in part the fierce competition among young women for marriageable men after the 1980s war with Iraq, in which 400,000 Iranian men died. But the film’s real target, Mr. Oskouei says, is the consumerism and nihilism of contemporary Iran, compared with the years after the 1979 revolution, when people were prepared to die for their ideals.

In his 2004 film, “The Other Side of Burqa,” Mr. Oskouei’s camera captures the hurried night burial of a young bride who hanged herself from a ceiling fan in a fishing village on the Persian Gulf island of Qeshm, an all-too-common occurrence in a traditionalist society where young women can feel trapped.

His knack, experts say, is to capture these deeply personal scenes almost as if neither he nor his cameras were in the room. “He gets what he wants without any disturbance in the process,” said Ahmad Alasti, a professor of film studies at the University of Tehran.

Mr. Oskouei even penetrates the pagan exorcism ritual of zaar, a dance that originated in East Africa but is practiced in the coastal regions and islands of southern Iran. It is a wildly expressive dance performed to the driving rhythms of drums and the chants of men, and provides a rare outlet for women to unleash their passions in a restrictive society. Many of the women in the film speak frankly of their struggles with patriarchy and economic hardship, which severely limit their development as individuals.

But perhaps his most remarkable accomplishment is to handle these subjects mostly without running afoul of the clerics, the censors or other artists, some of whom have accused him of being too accommodating.

“In the Western world it is enough just to be an artist, but not here,” said Ali Dehbashi, the editor of a cultural magazine, Bukhara. “Knowing the censors, knowing how things are monitored, is the most important thing.”

“Art is not having one film banned and running to Los Angeles or Paris,” Mr. Dehbashi added. “The point is to stay, to work and to continue.”

When asked about his ability to take on apparently taboo topics without retribution, Mr. Oskouei said in measured tones, “We live in a very particular social and political situation.” His own extensive footage of supporters of both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the top opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, during the 2009 election campaign remains unedited — perhaps for historians to examine in a later age.

“Should I make a film that means I get thrown out of this society?” he asked. “I don’t want that. Should I make a film and use it to seek asylum in another country? I don’t want that at all. In the end, people have to be flexible. I think about how far I can go.”

Many of the giants of Iranian cinema, like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as well as the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, have avoided the issue by shifting their base of operations abroad. But for Mr. Oskouei, that would risk what a close friend, Nasser Fakouhi, described in an article as a “slow death,” far away from all the “little rascals and desperate women” who populate his films.

View the original article here

The Saturday Profile: A Prolific Father of Haitian Letters, Busier Than Ever

Frankétienne has had prophecies of death (his own) and destruction (Haiti’s).

The earthquake that wrecked this country in January 2010? It was foreseen, said Frankétienne, the man known as the father of Haitian letters, in his play “The Trap.” It was written two months before the disaster and depicts two men in a postapocalyptic landscape, now a familiar sight in his Delmas neighborhood here.

“The voice of God spoke to me,” said Frankétienne, 75, later noting he had also long dwelt on the ecological ruin he believes the planet is hurtling toward. As for his death, that will come in nine years, in 2020, he says, at age 84. He is not sick, he says, but he has learned to “listen to the divine music in all of us.”

And so the prolific novelist, poet and painter — often all three in a single work — hears his coda. He is vowing to complete a multivolume memoir “before I leave, physically,” while keeping up an increasingly busy schedule of exhibitions and conferences.

“I am going to talk about everything I have seen from age 5 or 6,” he said recently at his house-cum-museum and gallery. “And stuff that hasn’t happened yet because I am a prophet.”

Eccentric. Abstract. A “spiralist,” who rejects realism and embraces disorder. Frankétienne — he combined his first and last names years ago — embraces chaos as a style he believes befits a country with a long, tumultuous history birthed in a slave revolt more than 200 years ago and scarred by a cascade of natural and man-made disasters.

In chaos he finds order.

“I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life,” he said, his baritone voice rising as it does when he gets worked up over a point. “What I don’t like is nonmanagement of chaos. The reason why Haiti looks more chaotic is because of nonmanagement. In other countries it is managed better. Haiti, they should take as reference for what could happen in the rest of world.”

Scholars widely view Frankétienne as Haiti’s most important writer. He wrote what many consider the first modern novel entirely in Haitian Creole, “Dezafi,” in 1975, and a play well known here that challenged political oppression, “Pelin Tet.” It is a biting work from 1978 that is aimed, not so subtly, at Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of the dictator Fran?ois Duvalier and himself a former dictator known as Baby Doc, who returned here from exile in January.

Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Frankétienne has star status in French- and Creole-speaking countries and was rumored to be on the short list for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.

After the quake, his works gained more international attention, particularly in Canada and France. “The Trap” debuted in March 2010 at a Unesco forum in Paris that named him an artist for peace; galleries in New York have organized shows featuring his artwork. Still, he also holds informal Sunday workshops with young artists in Haiti to talk about and critique their work.

“He is not only a major Haitian writer, he is probably the major Haitian writer, forever,” said Jean Jonassaint, a Haitian literature scholar at Syracuse University.

Frankétienne’s output, about 40 written works and, by his count, 2,000 paintings and sketches, comprises dense, baroque affairs. He invents new words, blending French and Haitian Creole. Long digressions are de rigueur. His paintings, which he says are selling particularly well these days, blur swirling blacks, blues and reds, often covered with poems.

He admires James Joyce, and it shows. “?‘Finnegan’s Wake’ was like a crazy book, just like I write crazy books,” he said.

Still, the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat said Frankétienne remained popular among Haitians, in part because some of his plays had been videotaped and passed around in Haiti and in immigrant communities in the United States.

“Pelin Tet,” in which the grim life of two Haitian immigrants in New York deliberately echoes the oppression of the Duvalier era on the island, is a touchstone for many Haitians, said Ms. Danticat, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Frankétienne and was, in part, inspired to write by his rise to the top.

“His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble,” she said. “It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.”

 

The Saturday Profile: An Evangelical Preacher’s Message Catches Fire in Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine

EVERY Sunday, thousands of worshipers crowd into an arena here for a rollicking evangelical Christian service. A choir and rock band belt out gospel tunes in Russian. People sing along and clap and shimmy in the aisles. They dash up to the stage for a chance to grab the microphone and declare how their new faith has changed their lives.

It is as if a Sunbelt megachurch had been transplanted to Kiev, birthplace of Slavic Orthodoxy, land of onion-domed cathedrals and incense-shrouded icons. But the preacher at the podium has little if any connection to the United States. Could there be a more unlikely success story in the former Soviet Union than the Rev. Sunday Adelaja, an immigrant from Nigeria who has developed an ardent — and enormous — following across Ukraine?

From his start with a prayer group in a ramshackle apartment soon after the Soviet collapse two decades ago, Mr. Adelaja has built a vast religious organization under the banner of his church, Embassy of God. He has become one of Ukraine’s best known public figures, advocating a Christianity that pairs evangelical tenets with an up-from-the-bootstraps philosophy found in religiously oriented self-help books. (Several of which Mr. Adelaja has published.)

He has throngs of admirers, but is also reviled by some in the Ukrainian establishment who resent a black man from Africa luring white Slavs away from their religious traditions. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church calls him a cult leader, and law enforcement officials have repeatedly investigated him, once accusing him of involvement in a pyramid scheme. Around Kiev, it is not hard to find racial caricatures of him.

The Russian government, too, has taken offense, barring him from entering the country, though he has a growing number of adherents in Russia. Mr. Adelaja said he believed that he was declared persona non grata because he was a staunch supporter of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the pro-Western uprising in 2004 that the Kremlin opposed.

MR. Adelaja, who has a boisterous laugh and a relentlessly sunny personality, tries to brush aside the insults. He said his church’s popularity showed that Ukrainians were on a spiritual quest after having weathered the state-mandated atheism of the Soviet era. He said that more than 100,000 people attended services regularly at the main arena in Kiev or his affiliates across Ukraine, which has a population of 46 million.

“I came to this country disadvantaged as a black person,” he said in an interview, adding that he was blistered with slurs and epithets. “But still, with all my disadvantages, with my accented Russian language, I went out and said, ‘Hey, this will help you.’ And people have responded to it.”

Mr. Adelaja, 43, arrived in the Soviet Union in 1986 as a college student, then stayed after the Soviet collapse in 1991, later moving to Kiev. His wife, Bose, is also Nigerian and often conducts services at the church. They speak fluent Russian, which is the native language for many here and is understood by most speakers of Ukrainian, the country’s other main language.

Embassy of God has sprouted affiliates throughout the world, and Mr. Adelaja has been praised by some American evangelicals for bringing their brand of Christianity to the former Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, Embassy of God undertakes a wide array of charitable activities, feeding thousands of people a month at soup kitchens and running treatment centers for alcohol and drug addiction. But it has also thrived because Mr. Adelaja has tapped into a desire of people in formerly Communist countries to learn entrepreneurial skills and make money.

Mr. Adelaja did not study in the United States, but says he has learned from the teachings of American pastors. His views sometimes reflect the so-called prosperity gospel — a belief among some strains of evangelical Christianity that God wants the faithful to attain material wealth.

On a recent Saturday night here, Mr. Adelaja conducted a seminar with a few dozen people in a church annex. Reading from an iPad, he recited passages from the Bible and discussed how Christian principles could assist in business.

Mr. Adelaja and a parishioner, Ishtvan Birov, 35, bantered about how to innovate in life, personally and professionally. The conversation veered from Jesus to Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, back to Jesus again.

“Apple takes a model and keeps improving on it,” Mr. Birov said.

Mr. Adelaja responded, “That is the principle of God — to always keep making it better.”

He added, “God is strategy, God is strategic thinking.”

 

The Saturday Profile: An Evangelical Preacher’s Message Catches Fire in Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine

EVERY Sunday, thousands of worshipers crowd into an arena here for a rollicking evangelical Christian service. A choir and rock band belt out gospel tunes in Russian. People sing along and clap and shimmy in the aisles. They dash up to the stage for a chance to grab the microphone and declare how their new faith has changed their lives.

It is as if a Sunbelt megachurch had been transplanted to Kiev, birthplace of Slavic Orthodoxy, land of onion-domed cathedrals and incense-shrouded icons. But the preacher at the podium has little if any connection to the United States. Could there be a more unlikely success story in the former Soviet Union than the Rev. Sunday Adelaja, an immigrant from Nigeria who has developed an ardent — and enormous — following across Ukraine?

From his start with a prayer group in a ramshackle apartment soon after the Soviet collapse two decades ago, Mr. Adelaja has built a vast religious organization under the banner of his church, Embassy of God. He has become one of Ukraine’s best known public figures, advocating a Christianity that pairs evangelical tenets with an up-from-the-bootstraps philosophy found in religiously oriented self-help books. (Several of which Mr. Adelaja has published.)

He has throngs of admirers, but is also reviled by some in the Ukrainian establishment who resent a black man from Africa luring white Slavs away from their religious traditions. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church calls him a cult leader, and law enforcement officials have repeatedly investigated him, once accusing him of involvement in a pyramid scheme. Around Kiev, it is not hard to find racial caricatures of him.

The Russian government, too, has taken offense, barring him from entering the country, though he has a growing number of adherents in Russia. Mr. Adelaja said he believed that he was declared persona non grata because he was a staunch supporter of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the pro-Western uprising in 2004 that the Kremlin opposed.

MR. Adelaja, who has a boisterous laugh and a relentlessly sunny personality, tries to brush aside the insults. He said his church’s popularity showed that Ukrainians were on a spiritual quest after having weathered the state-mandated atheism of the Soviet era. He said that more than 100,000 people attended services regularly at the main arena in Kiev or his affiliates across Ukraine, which has a population of 46 million.

“I came to this country disadvantaged as a black person,” he said in an interview, adding that he was blistered with slurs and epithets. “But still, with all my disadvantages, with my accented Russian language, I went out and said, ‘Hey, this will help you.’ And people have responded to it.”

Mr. Adelaja, 43, arrived in the Soviet Union in 1986 as a college student, then stayed after the Soviet collapse in 1991, later moving to Kiev. His wife, Bose, is also Nigerian and often conducts services at the church. They speak fluent Russian, which is the native language for many here and is understood by most speakers of Ukrainian, the country’s other main language.

Embassy of God has sprouted affiliates throughout the world, and Mr. Adelaja has been praised by some American evangelicals for bringing their brand of Christianity to the former Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, Embassy of God undertakes a wide array of charitable activities, feeding thousands of people a month at soup kitchens and running treatment centers for alcohol and drug addiction. But it has also thrived because Mr. Adelaja has tapped into a desire of people in formerly Communist countries to learn entrepreneurial skills and make money.

Mr. Adelaja did not study in the United States, but says he has learned from the teachings of American pastors. His views sometimes reflect the so-called prosperity gospel — a belief among some strains of evangelical Christianity that God wants the faithful to attain material wealth.

On a recent Saturday night here, Mr. Adelaja conducted a seminar with a few dozen people in a church annex. Reading from an iPad, he recited passages from the Bible and discussed how Christian principles could assist in business.

Mr. Adelaja and a parishioner, Ishtvan Birov, 35, bantered about how to innovate in life, personally and professionally. The conversation veered from Jesus to Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, back to Jesus again.

“Apple takes a model and keeps improving on it,” Mr. Birov said.

Mr. Adelaja responded, “That is the principle of God — to always keep making it better.”

He added, “God is strategy, God is strategic thinking.”