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It’s the biggest and only anarchist theatre festival in the world, and it’s happening again during the month-long May 2009 Festival of Anarchy in North America’s favourite anarchist playground, Montreal, Quebec.

The fourth annual Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival (MIATF) takes place May 13 and 14, 2009, at Concordia University’s 400 seat D.B. Clarke Theatre, where last year, almost 800 people attended spectacular performances by The Bread & Puppet Theatre and other anarchist artists.

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a review of

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials, by Reza Negarestani. re.press, 2008

This book appears to be (but might not be) a treatise on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Nomadic War Machine, written by someone (said to be an Iranian philosopher) who’s bitten off a bit more French Theory than I can chew. It’s thinly disguised as a SciFi novel as written by or about a brilliant Iranian philosopher named Parsani (“the Persian”) who’s on the verge of paranoid schizophrenic breakdown, in which is embedded a commentary on H.P. Lovecraft and other pulp-horror mashers, in the light of Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian religion and myth (this part is so clever it transcends mere parody), using diagrams of bizarre topology and non-Euclidian geometry, creating fake sources and mixing them with real (but very obscure and erudite) sources--all aimed at an elaborate allegorization of Middle East oil politics and the War on Terror--and analysis that strikes me as partly the work of a genius and partly quite mad, although this is probably the author’s intention, if there is in fact an author.

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a review of

Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, edited by Paul Bogard. University of Nevada Press, 2008

The “Reconsidering Primitivism” issue of Fifth Estate #365 (Summer 2004) carried a short article called “Support for the Forces of Darkness” by Luci Williams that lamented the poisonous infection of the nighttime skies by industrial-commercial lighting and called for “direct action in defense of the dark” against “selfish aggressors waging perpetual war against the night.” Ringing with manifesto-like intentions in that same issue of FE was a piece by Peter Lamborn Wilson warning against electricity: “Some people like Black-Outs: consciously because they enjoy seeing things fucked up, perhaps unconsciously because the filth of dead light and noise suddenly dies with a moan. Other people fear Black-Outs for the same reasons. It depends on your relation with night, with darkness and primitivity.”

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For the past two summers, I accompanied my wife, who speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, to China so we could tour part of the country before she started summer school in a master’s program in Chinese literature in Nanjing, a city famed not only for being pillaged by Japan in World War II, but also as the country’s center of teacher education.

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The autonomist political theorist and strategist Mario Tronti in his classic book Operai e capital argued that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal.

At first glance this easily can come off as a kind of hyperbole or even a contradiction. Has not it often been argued, to use feminist writer Audre Lorde’s phrasing, that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? Despite the contradictions and tensions contained within his argument, Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a social and historical context where this is just what was taking place. Autonomous politics in Italy emerging at this time greatly benefited from borrowing ideas and methods from bourgeois sociology and social sciences, as well as tools of management theory and industrial relations. And using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle that vastly changed the grounds of politics in the country and from which people have drawn much inspiration since then.

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Anarchist Studies vol. 16 #1 (2008)

c/o Lawrence & Wishart,

99a Wallis Rd,

London E9 5LN, UK

www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/anarchiststudies/contents.html

£20.00 subscription

Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #66 (Winter/Fall 2008)

PO Box 3488,

Berkeley, CA 94703

anarchymag.org

$20 / 5 issue subscription

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Between sips of Miller High Life I glance down the length of the bar: there is a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate in mathematics; the assistant to the dean of the graduate school in her early thirties; a girl with more tattoos than fingers; our 53-year-old elder statesmen, and me a window cleaner.

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You pick up the newspaper and it tells you that the governor has just inaugurated a new school in a far-off rural town. You turn on the television and you see a “reality” show where six men compete for the attention of one woman amidst unfathomable luxury on the beaches of Ibiza.

And then you walk out into the street and watch the walls as you walk and the walls tell you that the police assassinate, that 22 murders of activists in your town remain in impunity, and that people keep organizing, people rise up, people fight hack.

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ANNOUNCER: The leader’s coming. He approaches. He’s bending. He’s unbending. He’s jumping. He’s crossed the river. ‘They’re shaking his hand. He sticks out his thumb.

Can you hear? They’re laughing... Ah ... ! he’s signing autographs. The leader is stroking a hedgehog, a superb hedgehog! The crowd applauds. He’s dancing with the hedgehog in his hand. He’s embracing his dancer. Hurrah! Hurrah! He’s being photographed, with his dancer on one hand and the hedgehog on the other... He greets the crowd ... He spits a tremendous distance.

--from The Leader, Eugene Ionesco (1953)

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The RNC 8 are eight activists from Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota charged with four felony counts of conspiracy, two with “Terrorism Enhancements,” in the first known use of the Minnesota Anti Terrorism Act of 2002 (dubbed the MN PATRIOT Act), for their organizing in response to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC).

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Rachel Pollack is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories, and 21 works of nonfiction, including the classic 78 Degrees of Wisdom, one of the most important contemporary guides to interpreting the tarot. She is the recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Unquenchable Fire and the World Fantasy Award for Godmother Night.

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Captain Nemo the SciFi Stirnerite

lurks beneath our waves of text like

a semantic barracuda. If God

won’t be dead till we kill grammar

as Nietzsche said then Chomsky must be

at least the Pope (Papa not dada)--

scarcely the “brainless luddism” to which

we all aspire. Scorpions ate our

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The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault was not known for offering practical advice. But in a series of interviews from 1981 and 1982 he focused on the major questions then facing the gay liberation movement.

His remarks from that time offer prescient guidance--and pose substantive challenges--for those concerned with sexual liberation today. Though he spoke from his position as a gay man and addressed his comments primarily to a gay audience,

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Last summer, I was talking to a carnival-ride operator at one of those small, itinerant outfits that was crisscrossing its way across the Midwest. The carny looked to be in his mid-50s and said that he had worked all sorts of jobs with different wandering funfair amusement shows since his first gig as a travelling circus roustabout at age 14.

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The long line of lights flickered above where the train passed in the dark tunnel. It was four am and Maggie sat on the wooden seats that were placed about five feet from the platform. Her feet were pressed flat on the cement floor, palms resting on the two seats on either side of her. She was feeling for the vibration the train made when getting nearer.

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Malachi, born Mark David,

wrote his own obituary. “Reportedly,”

he says, “his last words were

rosebud...oops,”

but what he means

is that he lived his life

like a saucer-faced magnolia flower,

a quick burst of bloom and

perfume early each spring

before the pink things wilt away,

falling to the fiery asphalt

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Train sounds.

Stars are showing and the sun is down, and high above us the sky is crested with an even, purple glow. All around us are trees ripened with green leaves, and vesper bats course fireflies while I stand on the edge of the woods with Apple kneeling before me, obscuring herself with wry branches jutting in all directions.

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The passing of graphic artist, Gary Grimshaw, is mourned by his family and all those who knew him, as well as the rock and art community.

Gary was internationally known for his rock posters that began with those he created for Detroit’s Grande Ballroom in the late 1960s and early 70s. A friend of Detroit’s influential MC5 band and the Fifth Estate, he designed logos for both including the one for our then tabloid newspaper on the opposite page.

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Last year saw, at least here in London, a plethora of commemorative events to mark the 40-year anniversary of the events of 1968, with pundits and talking heads emerging from everywhere to offer their accounts and experiences of that year, in which a multitude of movements remade and reclaimed the terrain of everyday life in a variety of ways from the jaws of capitalism.

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Over the past two years, various actors have ruminated over the perceived loss of the “movement” (specifically referring to the counterglobalization movement, but also referring to a sense of momentum, coordinated actions, targeted purpose, and most importantly a sense of effectivity).

Like a drug, Seattle99 was a vehicle that became confused with its effects. The enthusiasm and infectious power of that moment became a lost object of desire, a model whose failure to reappear seemed to diminish possibilities (for more on this see my previous article “Becoming-Seattle” in Fifth Estate #374, Winter 2007).

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Someday, it’s possible that surveillance technology may become sophisticated enough to read your mind as you’re walking down the street. If that dystopian future comes to pass, you’ll probably want one of these stylish thought-blocking accessories: When they detect scanning technology in action, they’ll distract you with a zap or a flashing light.

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A book published several years ago purported to define for its readers what anarchism is and what it isn’t. Probably only the writer was satisfied with his definitions since adherents to anarchy come in many varieties.

However, delete the hyphenated suffix (anarchist-communist or anarcho-syndicalist, etc.) and all perspectives agree that the political state and the capitalist economy have since their inception been destructive of human freedom.

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white blades of light sift through the

stripes hugging the crumpled form

of an empire of

stars crowded together

for warmth

row upon row upon row

sow the earth with shades of

beaten red beaten blue

stars

the greedy glow of the pipe

stars

fireflies comb that brain straight

stars

taper out in twin coal kill pits

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Often when I say “she” or “you” I mean me.

I mean me when I tell you this story but I will say “you.”

I will generalize. I will refer to the broad category that fits my body. The broad category to which my body belongs, in which it has been placed or can be seen from above. The specifics have long been beside the point. I do not agree to be myself.

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<em>

Fifth Estate</em> contributor Marie Mason was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison on February 5 in a Lansing, Michigan federal courtroom, after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage.

(See also Summer and Fall 2008 Fifth Estate.) Mason is now serving the longest sentence of any environmental activist in the US; an appeal is currently underway. Her sentence was one of the latest in a string of recent arrests and convictions of environmental and animal liberation activists, which has been dubbed the Green Scare. Throughout the Green Scare, environmental and animal liberation activists have been charged with inflated sentences (often Life in prison), and have been publicly and legally labeled “terrorists”--though no one has been hurt in their acts of economic sabotage. The term Green Scare is an allusion to the Red Scare of the ’50s, when Communists were persecuted on the basis of new laws targeting them for their beliefs and not their actions, and creating a climate of panic and hysteria in an attempt to intimidate supporters and sympathizers.

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Besides the sentencing of Marie Mason, there have been developments in a number of other Green Scare cases in the Midwest and beyond.

The Rhinelander case has affected a number of activists. Five hundred genetically-modified research trees were destroyed at a federal research facility in Rhinelander, WI in 2000. Activist-turned-government-collaborater Ian Wallace pled guilty in October 2008 to this action, as well as an attempt to damage two buildings at Michigan Technological University. In March 2009 he received three years.

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Send letters to fe — at — fifthestate — dot — org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220. All formats accepted, including typescript & handwritten; letters may be edited for length.

I now live in London, England, but back in 1968 I lived in Walled Lake, Michigan, not far from Detroit. I was in the 10^th grade and angry about Viet Nam.

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In August 2011, thousands of people rioted in several London boroughs and cities and towns across England after a protest in Tottenham following the death of an area youth who was shot to death by police. The resulting looting, arson, and mass deployment of police were called “BlackBerry riots” because people used mobile devices and social media to organize.

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Send letters to fe — AT — fifthestate — DOT — org or Fifth Estate, PO Box 201016, Ferndale, MI 48220

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten; letters may be edited for length.

Sorry to hear about your financial situation. As vile and evil as it is, money is still the life force of the modern world. Without proper funds to sustain a project, more often than not, it will all come tumbling down.

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The Barn, located on the 120-acres of the Pumpkin Hollow Community near Liberty, Tennessee, housed the Fifth Estate office and archive, radical book and zine library, bookstore and distro. It opened with a huge party and radical variety show on Friday the 13^th in September 2002.

As of late June, after days of sorting and discarding, hauling and recycling, packing and stacking, sifting and gifting, The Barn has permanently closed as a physical hub of radical activity in rural DeKalb County, 50 miles east of Nashville. Although the apartment, built into an aging structure by George, our neighbor and former resident, is closed, the barn building itself remains.

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The ludicrous charges against the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act Four (AETA4) show the absolute depths to which the Green Scare has plummeted. According to the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), the four animal liberation activists are charged with “terrorism” under the AETA for (and, we kid you not, because I could not make up something so ridiculous if I wanted to) “protesting, chalking the sidewalk, chanting and leafleting--and the alleged use of ‘the Internet to find information on bio-medical researchers.’”

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a review of Twilight of the Machines, John Zerzan, Feral House, 2009; 140 pages, $12, www.feralhouse.com

John Zerzan has infuriated and fascinated readers for decades. His sweeping critique of the modern world condemns not just capitalism, the state, technology and even “civilization,” but he openly calls for the abolition of all forms of symbolic representation and a return to a hunting and gathering existence.

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While the idea for Nashville’s Firebrand Community Center and Infoshop was born in 2003, the collective finally found its current home in 2008 as part of the shared Little Hamilton Collective space on Little Hamilton Road near the city’s downtown.

A member of the original organizing group, Ryan Kaldari explains the roots of the project: “The idea for the Firebrand was conceived immediately after the 2003 Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) protests in Miami. The idea that emerged was to set up an infoshop so that political radicals in Nashville could have a public space to use for events, education, and organizing.”

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Longtime contributor Penelope Rosemont has given the Fifth Estate a great many articles and graphics, all of them insightful and inciting to revolt (See her Fall 2013, “The Poisonous Cobra of Surrealism” essay). Her achievements go beyond writing and graphic arts. In 1966, along with her late comrade and partner, Franklin Rosemont, she was instrumental in founding the Chicago Surrealist Group.

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“History,” Stephen said, “is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”

To resist, that is to create, is this waking--in the sense of waking up from the nightmare of history: of the accumulation of capital, state power, the vast concentration of hierarchies and fields of power embodied through society--extended through colonization.

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Nikolay Vavilov (1887–1943)

“It seemed that We had finally passed this very difficult trail so that we could mount the horses and continue on. But suddenly from the Cliff above the trail, two gigantic eagles flew out from a nest, circling on enormous wings. My Horse shied and bolted, galloping along the trail and the ovring. The rein was unexpectedly torn out of my hand and I had to hang on to the mane.

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In these excerpts from their book, Catastrophisme, administration du desastre et soumission durable, René Riesel and Jaime Semprun warn against State-administered management of the global ecological and social crisis.

Riesel is an activist who destroyed GMO seeds at Monsanto’s facility as well as author of Du progres dans la domestication. Semprun, a major contributor to the influential French journal Encyclopedie des Nuisances, first pointed out many of the sinister aspects of planet-saving when it is carried out under the joint venture of Capital and the State.

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Federico Arcos, Franklin Rosemont, Paul Avrich, Waldheim Cemetary, May 3, 1998 at the dedication of the Haymarket Monument as a National Historic Landmark. — photo Julie Herrada

Writer, painter, and publisher Franklin Rosemont died on April 12 in Chicago. He was buried in a private ceremony some forty feet from the Haymarket Monument in Waldheim Cemetery amid the graves and scattered ashes of Fred W. Thompson, Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman, Lucy Parsons, Nina Van Zandt Spies, Slim Brundage, Voltairine de Cleyre, and a number of other subversives and Wobblies.

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A review of:

Swift Winds, Ron Sakolsky, artwork by Anais LaRue, Eberhardt Press, 2009, 128 pp., $8

The prolific anarchist Ron Sakolsky--formerly of Fool’s Paradise, Illinois and now a resident of Inner Island, British Columbia--has published another book.

Billed as a “backpocket compendium,” the volume borrows its shape and size from the legendary City Lights pocket poetry series and professes the insurrectionary properties of poetic desire in such a fashion as to make it a worthy descendant of such legendary and incendiary texts as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Diane DiPrima’s Revolutionary Letters.

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“Freejazz reaches back to what jazz was originally, rebelling against the ultra-sophisticated art form it has become.”

--Archie Shepp

Freejazz, according to the great tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, is a rebellion against the bourgeois world of “high art.” It is a music that self-consciously identifies as a kind of sonic insurrection, both within and against music itself. It makes good sense to begin this article with a quote from Shepp.

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Hong Kong, a steamy, enchanting, green pearl of an island with an amazingly efficient public transit system is also the ultimate temple to last gasp, fast buck, crass consumerism.

Mega-towering, teetering, multi-national corporate headquarters ablaze with over-sized neon logos that are sometimes lost in the clouds, dominate the skyline, but can’t quite obliterate the dreamy and defiant mountains behind them.

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The week of April 12 was a very bad one for pirates. It began that Sunday when Navy SEALs executed three pirates off the coast of Somalia who had captured an American ship’s captain. For days, the “daring” rescue dominated headlines in the U.S., without any mention of the socio-economic circumstances that have led to a resurgence of piracy in the region--or of the role the West has played in contributing to those circumstances. Rather, countless stories focused on the Hollywood-style operation: how three snipers parachuted under cover of darkness into the sea, swam to a nearby ship and took out the pirates with three bullets fired nearly simultaneously.

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This issue was edited and produced in Detroit with extensive assistance from our friends and comrades of the FE collective around the country. Also, thanks is due to our contributing artists and photographers.

Jim Feast has contributed essays for the last three issues. He is one of the Unbearables who co-edited The Worst Book I Ever Read (Autonomedia 2009).

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Robert Neuwirth, in his important book, Shadow Cities, says squatters in countries such as Turkey, Brazil, and India, are the poor, usually excluded from the adequate wage work, who do not have the wherewithal to enter the capitalist real estate market either as owners or renters.

They are “simply people who came to the city, needed a place to live that they and their families could afford, and, not being able to find it on the private market, built it for themselves on land that wasn’t theirs.” Of special note here are the numbers. “Estimates are that there are about a billion squatters in the world today [2005]--one of every six humans on the planet.” The best guesses see this group as swelling to about one in four by 2030.

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Bakunin is often credited with being the “father of anarchism.” While he rejected the title, he was the first to write extensively, systematically, and explicitly on anarchist principles. These ranged from organization from the bottom up, the rejection of the state and the vanguard party, the nature of the social, as opposed to the political, revolution, the nature of authority, and communism.

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“With Conviction: Art and Letters from Behind Prison Walls,” was displayed in January at Sacramento’s Exhibit S Gallery featuring prisoner art, letters, and zines. Chicago-based Anthony Rayson and Michael Ploski, amassed hundreds of pieces of original artwork rarely before exhibited beyond prison walls including four acrylics from Marie Mason seen above.

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Responses welcome; see Questions & Guidelines in this issue.

Which is most consistent with anarchist ideals? Supporting sex workers as an act of solidarity or calls to stop men from consuming women’s bodies?

On December 20, 2013, many anarchists and radical feminists in Canada celebrated an historic ruling of the country’s Supreme Court which unanimously struck down three major laws regulating prostitution, effectively paving the way for the decriminalization of sex work. The laws prohibited the operation of a “common bawdy house” (a brothel), communication for the purposes of sex work, and living from the proceeds of prostitution. The government of Canada now has one year to rewrite the laws.

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On Page 4, Aaron Lakoff begins a discussion bearing further conversation. Letters limit: 250 words; ideas for essays should be submitted. See our contact info here.

Things to consider which will expand the discussion:

Can sex work be contained within capitalist wage work as solely another job category or does the nature of it deserve special definition and analysis?

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Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this fine bit of gangster rap in 1883:

Fifteen men of the whole ship’s list

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Dead and bedamned and the rest gone whist!

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

The skipper lay with his nob in gore

Where the scullion’s axe his cheek had shore

And the scullion he was stabbed four times four

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from the Guardian (London)

I am 42 years old and have nine children. I am a boss with boats operating in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

I finished high school and wanted to go to university but there was no money. So, I became a fisherman in Eyl in Puntland like my father, even though I still dreamed of working for a company. That never happened as the Somali government was destroyed [in 1991] and the country became unstable.

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