Word: barber
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...case was exceptional. But it is the burden of Caryl Phillips' latest searching meditation on outsiders in England that Turpin's story is much too typical. Beside him, in the triptych that makes up Foreigners: Three English Lives, is the story of Samuel Johnson's Jamaican servant, Francis Barber, who ended up in penury, though Phillips' narrator remembers him as "at one time, probably the foremost negro in England." Then there's the story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian who stowed away as a teenager to come to England in 1949, dreaming of becoming an engineer, was greeted with...
...voice of a friend of Johnson's, the closing one in a collection of voices (white, West Indian, African), recalling the quiet, solitary-seeming Oluwale as he walked around the streets of Leeds. Yet all the pieces are linked by a sense of deep loneliness and the bitterest ironies. Barber, like Oluwale, is found in an infirmary, dressed in his late master's clothes and looking "as sad and as broken as any man can be." Oluwale, discovered dead in a river, after police harassment, is described by one cop as a "wild animal, not a human being...
...about their tragedies. Born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts himself, though brought to Leeds as a boy, and now living in New York, Phillips has seen the struggle from both sides. What gives his accounts their particular sting is that even good intentions seem of no avail. Barber, for example, was treated with unwavering kindness by Johnson, who had him educated, saw him almost as a son and worried about what would happen to him after his own death. The Barber story is narrated by a self-styled philanthropist who wishes that "all ebony personages" be resettled...
...Eastern Promises (a flaccid title for such a taut film) has some sensational set pieces: a barber-shop murder in the first few minutes, and a long, brutal fight in a bathhouse between Mortensen and two thugs; they're armed, he's naked. But at heart it's a two-family drama, one being Anna's sensible English aunt (Sinead Cusack) and crabby Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), the other Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill is like a mutant Corleone: he has Sonny's hair-trigger impulses and Fredo's drug-addled weak streak, stemming from a need...
Only if business owners like my barber succeed will normality return to Gaza. Mohammed Telbani owns the largest factory in Gaza, making cookies and ice cream. But he can't get his raw materials and packaging through the Israeli embargo, and he can't send his finished products to the West Bank, where distributors have started buying cookies from Lebanon instead. "I've worked on creating that market for 30 years, and now it's gone," Telbani said. Gaza's beaches may be packed and its streets safe, but its factories are shut, and its stores have almost no customers...