Marcello Di Cintio

I enjoyed this book about the back-stories and lives of Canada's taxi drivers. The author has not given us the usual tales of sex and drug deals. Nor has he further explored the theme of drivers with professional credentials from their home countries whose credentials aren't recognized here. Instead, he takes us into the lives of several drivers, showing why they came to Canada (most weren't born here) and how and why they found themselves driving a taxi. The stories are all interesting, and the writing is great.… (lisätietoja)

Marcello Di Cintio begins his new book, Pay no heed to the rockets, with a poem and an image: a girl in a green dress. The poem is “Apology to a Faraway Soldier” by [a:Mourid Barghouti|16083673|Mourid Barghouti|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1520787914p2/16083673.jpg], the eminent Palestinian poet and novelist born near Ramallah and officially stateless since 1967. For Barghouti, “Writing is a displacement—a displacement from the normal social contract—a displacement from the common roads of love and enmity. The poet strives to escape from the dominant, used language—to a language that speaks for the first time. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free—he becomes a stranger at the same time. The poet is a stranger—in the same degree as he is free.” Di Cintio takes us on a different path into a conflict that for many has become cloaked in years of violence, misinformation, propaganda, and deadening familiarity. Places become their tragedies. Marcello calls that the “cruel accounting of death and despair.” The different path he chooses in this beautiful book is through the arts and that girl – through the “longing for beauty” her image awoke in him, the desire to go beyond the cruel accounting and find the life and art that stubbornly refuses to be shaped only by conflict. This is not to say that art is somehow immune of above the conflict. In crushing detail Di Cintio describes an Israeli attack on an the Sakakini cultural and arts center in Ramallah. Why destroy a center devoted to writing, concerts and the arts? “They wanted to give us a message that nobody is immune,” the Paletninian poet [a:Mahmoud Darwish|75055|Mahmoud Darwish|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414535868p2/75055.jpg] said.

Here is his beautiful description of the girl that starts the book, from a photo taken during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014: "The girl-around ten years old- wore a green dress and pink leggings, and her long hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. She pulled books from beneath shattered concrete and cinderblocks and stacked them in her arms. The books were tattered and filthy, their covers dangling from their bindings. But in the last photograph, the girl walked away smiling.”

“Nothing is more beautiful than a story,” Marcello writes. In this book he takes us on a familiar journey, yet makes it deeply, wonderfully unfamiliar, through his unflinching eye – an eye that takes in the pathos and the suffering and the complexity as well as the exquisite persistence of life.
… (lisätietoja)

I found this book fascinating. The author visits various walls that are separating people and examines the psychology of living with a physical barrier. He weaves the stories of people who live near walls in Africa, Ireland, North America together in a compelling way ... although I would have liked to know even more about the people he met.

I also would have liked to see maps, and have just a bit more context or history provided.

This book is very though-provoking: about how walls create an "us" and a "them" and may prevent the devleopment of alternative solutions to conflict; about how seemingly small decisions can change your life (see the story of Teena's wrist tattoos); and even on how invisible walls can affect us.

Definitely worth reading.… (lisätietoja)

3.5 stars

Marcello di Cintio decided to travel to various walls/fences/borders to not only see them, but to talk to the people living alongside them and others about how the walls affect their lives. Included in this is some history and politics about how and why the walls went up. Some of the places di Cintio visited included the Western Sahara, the Israel/Palestine border, India/Bangladesh, Cyprus (there is a wall that divides the city), Arizona/Mexico, Belfast, and even one in my (and the author's) home country, Canada (in Montreal).

This was interesting. People are affected in so many different ways – farmers are divided from their fields in some cases, Protestants divided from Catholics, the US is trying to keep out Mexican immigrants, and in Montreal, the wall simply divides one of the affluent areas from a poor immigrant neighbourhood. I have to admit that I found the “Western” areas more interesting (Belfast, US, Canada), but I think that's – in part – because I feel more able to “picture” them, as I've never been anywhere where the military is guarding walls or borders with guns and such... though Belfast sounds super-scary, as the violence seems to continue there for no reason. One thing I think I would have liked in the book was maps, so I could “see” where these walls were, exactly. Overall, though, a good, interesting read on a different kind of topic.… (lisätietoja)