ETSにはアンジェリーナ・ジョリーファンがいる？

 

Posted at 2019.08.26     Category : 未分類

ナミビアの首都Windhoekを拠点とする宝石商Kalahari Jewelersが6月の韓国公開模試に登場していました。ケニアのナイロビや南アフリカのヨハネスブルグなどは登場ずみですが、TOEICも幅広くカバーしていますね。アンジェリーナ・ジョリーは子供をナミビアで出産したそうで、そんな記事を目にしてこの問題を作ったのでしょうか。

しっかし、このアンジェリーナ・ジョリーの動画はこれでもかというくらいベタなアフリカのイメージを垂れ流しています。Binyavanga Wainainaが最近なくなったので思い出してしまいました。

Binyavanga Wainaina: Kenyan author and gay rights activist dies

22 May 2019

彼のアフリカ自虐エッセイは2005年に出ています。15年が経とうとしても情報化社会がこれだけ発達しても相変わらず僕たちのアフリカはステレオタイプのままです。

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA

Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

あのエッセイの後、2012年にも同様のトーンのエッセイを書いています。

How not to write about Africa in 2012 – a beginner's guide

Binyavanga Wainaina

The booming continent is ripe for new partnerships, but with those who address us as equals not in aid bullet points

Sun 3 Jun 2012 17.02 BST

If there was a new map, Africa would be divided into three: 1) Tiny flares of horribleness – Mugabe, undemocratic, war, Somalia, Congo; 2) Tiny flares of wonderfulness – Mandela, World Cup, safari. Baby4Africa! A little NGO that does amazing things with black babies who squirm happily in white saviours' hands because they were saved from an African war. My favourites are clitoraid.com and Knickers 4 Africa – which collects used panties for African women; 3) The rest. Let's call this the "vast grassroots". This part of Africa is run by nameless warlords. When the warlords fall, these places are run by grassroots organisations that are funded by the EU and provide a good place to send gap year kids to help and see giraffes at the same time. Grassroots Africa is good for backpacking because it is the real Africa (no AK47s to bother you, no German package tourists). The vast grassroots exists to sit and wait for agents of sustainability (Europeans) to come and empower them.

But what cannot be said is that history came surging to the present. Market capitalism is shaking, and all of a sudden the vast grassroots has oil and copper, and willing, driven and ambitious hands. The continent is ripe for new partnerships, new capital – new strong handshakes. China is no angel – but we are, for them, an essential part of the way the world will be. They are in it for their future, not ours; we are in with them for our future. We are real to them, and we have a platform to talk.

ネットが発達しても、日本人の英語力があがったとしてもこのような偏見はそう簡単には無くならないでしょう。それに比べて、TOEICはナミビアと宝石というしっかりと地場産業を押さえつつ、ビジネスをしている普通のナミビアを描き出しています。

 

調査報道の力

 

Posted at 2019.08.26     Category : 未分類

New Yorkerの電子メールは毎週過去のアーカイブからオススメ記事を紹介してくれています。今週のテーマは調査報道でした。

The Power of Investigative Journalism

（前略）

This week, we’re bringing you this report and other highlights from The New Yorker’s long history of investigative journalism. In “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson offers a groundbreaking examination of the environmental impact of DDT and other pesticides. Seymour M. Hersh reports on the My Lai massacre, in Vietnam, in 1972, and Jane Mayer explores how, during the George W. Bush Administration, an internal effort to ban the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay was thwarted. In “Unholy Acts,” which was published nearly a decade before the Boston Globe ran its Spotlight series on the Catholic Church abuse scandal, Paul Wilkes writes about the Church’s failure to confront hundreds of cases of sexual misconduct with children. In “Abuses of Power,” Ronan Farrow shares the harrowing allegations by multiple women of their abuse and harassment by Harvey Weinstein, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood. Susan Sheehan investigates the case of a schizophrenic patient at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, in Queens Village, New York, in 1981, and Ed Caesar chronicles a ten-billion-dollar Russian money-laundering scheme at Deutsche Bank. In “Casualties of War,” Daniel Lang reports on the rape and murder of a village girl by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Finally, in “The Apostate,” Lawrence Wright examines the history of the Church of Scientology and describes the director Paul Haggis’s efforts to leave the Church. At a time of global uncertainty, these stories are a bracing reminder of the power of investigative reporting.

—Erin Overbey, archive editor

エンタメ業界を揺るがせた文春砲といえばワインスティンのセクハラ・パワハラ暴露記事。もう2年が経とうとしているんですね。

October 23, 2017 Issue

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their StoriesMultiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive.

By Ronan Farrow

ルワンダのジェノサイド発生前に警告があっという調査報道も紹介されています。

May 11, 1998 Issue

The Genocide FaxThe United Nations was warned about Rwanda. Did anyone care?

By Philip Gourevitch

環境問題告発の先駆け『沈黙の春』もNew Yorkerで掲載されていたんんですね。

Silent Spring—I

By Rachel Carson

（オックスフォード）

Rachel Carson

(1907-64) a US scientist and author. Her book Silent Spring (1963), about the threat to animals from farm chemicals, helped to change the way such chemicals are used. She also wrote The Sea Around Us (1951).

ソンミ村虐殺事件の初出はこの雑誌ではないようですが、調査報道の見本みたいな扱いになっているものですね。動画は昨年の事件発生50年の時のもの。

January 22, 1972 Issue

The Massacre at My Lai

A mass killing and its coverup.

By Seymour M. Hersh

英英辞典でもしっかり扱われている事件です。

（ロングマン）

My Lai massacre, the

a village in Vietnam where, in 1968, a group of US soldiers cruelly killed several hundred people, mostly old people, women, and children, during the Vietnam War. The officer who led this attack, Lt William Calley, was later put on trial and sent to prison, but he was allowed to go free after a short time. This event influenced many Americans to oppose the war.

（オックスフォード）

the My Lai massacre

an incident that occurred during the Vietnam War on 16 March 1968. A group of US soldiers killed 347 ordinary people, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. In 1971, the officer who ordered the attack, Lieutenant William Calley, was sent to prison for life, but this was later reduced to 10 years and he was in fact released in 1974. Many Americans were shocked by the incident, and as a result protests against the war increased.

昔は調査報道がしやすかったのかというとそうではないようです。昨年でた彼の本Reporterを読みましたが、最初はLifeなどにも断られていたようですし、報道した後も色々と嫌がらせもあったようです。

 

あれから８年　Kindleでは値段に注意

 

Posted at 2019.08.18     Category : 未分類

Tiger's Wifeで衝撃デビューを果たしたTéa Obrehtが８年ぶりに小説を出したことが話題になっています。

Kindleでは922円で買えるものがあります。Weidenfeld & Nicolsonというイギリス出版社によるUK版が安いようです。アメリカの出版社Random Houseが出しているKindle版は2767円とずいぶん高くなっているのでご注意ください。

今週のTIMEでも彼女が取り上げられていたので、Tiger's wifeの彼女であることに気づきました。

'I Put 1,400 Pages in the Trash.' The Tiger's Wife Author Téa Obreht on Killing Two Books to Create Her New Novel

BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE AUGUST 13, 2019

英語学習者として彼女を羨ましく思うのは母語でない英語で本を出せるまでになっていること。She could quote entire English-language movies before she understood what they meant, just by learning the sounds.とありますので、音から入ったようですね。

She never lived for seven years in one place again until moving to New York City as an adult. It created a resilience in her, a sense that she knew she could just stand up, stretch into a new shape and start again. She doesn’t even really have a mother tongue. English is her best language, but not her first. She could quote entire English-language movies before she understood what they meant, just by learning the sounds. “Home for me has never really been tied to a sense of physical place,” she says. Thus, she’s fascinated by the sense of agreement her Irish husband, writer Dan Sheehan, and his old friends and family have about certain places or events, a shared wealth of fixed points from which to navigate life. “Certainty is home,” she says. “This notion of feeling at home in a place, or feeling at home in a situation; it’s anchored to certainty.”

Colson WhiteheadのThe Nickel Boysも読めていませんが、こちらも絶対に読もうと思います。オバマ大統領もオススメの夏の読書リストに彼女を入れていました。

Inland by Téa Obreht just came out yesterday, so I won’t spoil anything. But those of you who’ve been waiting for Obreht’s next novel won’t be disappointed.

ちなみに、この本ででてくるラクダ部隊は冒頭の動画で説明しているようにアメリカ南部で1850年代に実際に試された実話だそうですね。下記の記事がもう少し詳しく説明してくれています。

The history of the Army Camel Corps

By James A. Harvey IIIMay 2, 2016

実験結果は上々だっだようですが、南北戦争が始まったことで実験が中断されてそのままになったそうです。