I went with Ram and Samba to Ousmane Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye. I first met Samba at his table on 40th Street and 7th Avenue where he sells hats and scarves, the hot pink NY baseball hats heavy with a clear glittering crust of rhinestone. Women from Texas, Istanbul, France, Argentina, they all love Samba and his hats. He sells $2,000 of merchandise every week and he takes home $30 a day. His employer is an elderly Senegalese woman known to the vendors as La Mamie. Recently, the African sellers have been undercut by the Latino vendors, who have found a way to sell the $10 hats for $5. Samba doesn’t know how. He says that most people leave the job after a few weeks and once he gets his work permit he’ll leave, too. He’s making plans with the Ghanaian security guard at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Resort, the multi-story restaurant in front of which Samba sets up his table. The two stand face-to-face while they work, with a flow of international tourists streaming between them on the sidewalk. He packs up every night at around 1 AM and heads two blocks north to the 24-story shelter in Times Square where he lives.

Samba arrived after the movie had already begun, calling me from outside the theater. I whispered the premise to him as I showed him back. The film is novelistic, beginning with short and rich vignettes of African infantrymen known as tirailleurs in a transit camp after World War II, awaiting payment before continuing back to their cities and villages. There are scenes of soldiers buying dresses from the camp tailor for their wives (“One big and one small — she’s lost so much weight worrying about me and she’s about to gain it all back!”); one soldier teaching another to ride a bike in exchange for kola nuts; the arrest and assault of an African commanding officer when he tries to go to a segregated French bar near the camp.

The characters of these vignettes slowly coalesce into a clear and urgent struggle when they learn that the French army will exchange their French francs from the war at half the standard rate, effectively stealing 50% of their promised wages. When the tirailleurs revolt, the French army feigns concession, flees the camp, and then sends back tanks in the dark of night, massacring tirailleurs in the hundreds.

After the film, we stood outside the theater to talk for a while. Sembène styles the transit camp as a concentration camp, with barbed wire fences and lookouts on wooden towers. When the soldiers exchange their American-issued uniforms, they toss their combat boots in a big mismatched pile.

Samba said, “That’s a true story. The only thing they got wrong was the grave.”

The morning after the massacre, survivors drop the dead bodies of their fallen compatriots into a long mass trench.

“It’s not like that. The graves are individual.”

Camp de Thiaroye is just outside of Dakar, where Samba grew up. “Each person has his own grave. The grandfather of my mother. His full name is written on his grave. It’s the same as my name. It’s there on his grave.” He made a motion with his hands towards the square of cement before him to indicate a plot of land where his great grandfather lay.

SAMBA MBOW the elder was a Senegalese tirailleur who fought for France in World War II. He survived the war and the Nazis and the concentration camps and he was killed by the French in the Thiaroye massacre. His name is on a gravestone at the cemetery.

Outside Lincoln Center, his great grandson wore a baseball cap with a black jaguar stitched into the front, a golden watch, skinny blue jeans, and a short brown boubou with a multicolor shape like a cathedral across his chest.

As we walked down Broadway, Samba cried, smiling weakly, saying, “That’s why I don’t like the French.”

It was his first time in a movie theater.

Before he invents hustle culture

After he invents hustle culture

I've been reading Kabir's Dohe (his two-line rhyming couplets) and rather than translating them, I've been writing out their dominant messages. Those of you familiar with the poet will know that for Kabir, the same debate rages amongst scholars that rages for many of these older, venerated poets, Shakespeare, Homer etc. Was he one person or many?

Based on my readings of Kabir, I want to help resolve this debate r by suggesting that the singular person, Kabir, underwent a dramatic personal transformation leading to the present confusion about his identity. Specifically, this transformation was precipitated by Kabir's invention of a particularly Indian form of hustle culture which continues to this day. It is possible that this coincides with his notable departure from the Ramananda Ashram, when he relinquished his life of devotion to work hard and earn money for his family. As Tagore himself notes, “He never adopted the life of the professional ascetic,” but instead set to work as a weaver.

For what it is worth, as a young Indian student, I myself was subjected to the grind through these Dohe about hard work and tenacity, which I was forced to memorize by the dozen and recite liltingly in my overcrowded Hindi classroom without understanding a single word. For me, Kabir was the prophet of boredom. This is why I feel secure blaming him for inventing hustle culture or at least translating its proto-ethics into words.

Perhaps this thesis flies in the face of his followers’ belief that he was a simple man. However, I would remind those people that hustle culture in the West, as has been noted, is a simple extension of the Protestant ethic that Weber showed is just another way to apply ascetic ideals to material concerns. It should be easy to imagine hustle culture in pre-capitalist societies minus the opulence.

Nevertheless, I understand if you find my reading of Kabir to be tendentious. In the absence of a strict chronology of the poems or an authoritative biography of the man, we will have to use our literary prowess and a certain amount of creativity to establish the required differences between early Kabir and late Kabir. So far, this aspect of Kabir has been left undertheorized, but I am delighted to share my findings with you, the group. I will also resolve to keep everyone updated on any new discoveries, revisions or counter-histories. I appreciate any suggestions for improvement.

(beginning at 4:40am).

1. A Vietnamese advertisement for a white gelatinous product, about the size and
texture of a large rice cake, that lives in a little sack. The sack is shaped like an
eyeglasses case. The rice cake can be rolled onto your pants and carpets in order to
collect pet fur, and then placed back into its case.
2. A reel that begins with a cheerful-looking woman walking through a field. The capti
says, “I told my boyfriend that I wanted to detox the worms from my body.”
Cut to a jubilant, bearded man of 30 in tall rain boots, grinning at the camera. The
caption reads “That’s great babe! 80% of people have parasitic worms and don’t even
know it.”
Cut to what looks like dried out bits of apple skin on a paper towel. “These are liver
flukes. Comment ‘deworm’” to find out how to detox t
Hundreds comment: “DEWORM”, “OMG DEWORM”, “WTFFF DEWORM”, “DEWORM!”
3. A video of Kamala Harris walking out of a Southern-style diner.
“Madam Vice President, did you hear Hamas has accepted a cease-fi–
“Shrimp and grits! Hahaha” she responds, coyly.