October 9-10, 2010
Najla Said in “Palestine”
13th Annual Harvest Late Brunch Benefit, featuring
Vijay Prashad on “Trembles in the Tropics”
The theme will be internationalist at the Kopkind Colony’s Harvest Festival this year, on the weekend of October 9 and 10.
On Saturday (Oct 9) evening, Najla Said will perform at the Hooker Dunham Theater in her acclaimed one-woman show, “Palestine.”
On Sunday, events move to The Organ Barn at Guilford, where Vijay Prashad, the award-winning author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, will be the featured speaker, following a “late brunch” tapas feast.
Najla Said star of "Palestine"
“Palestine” opened Off-Broadway earlier this year and had an extended run. The play is, by turns, funny and harrowing, a canny, deeply personal, disarmingly political coming-of-age story, written and performed by Najla Said. In “Palestine,” Said, daughter of the eminent scholar and human rights advocate Edward Said (also a member of Kopkind’s honorary board until his death in 2003), engages questions of identity, cultural fluidity, love and suffering from many angles, in many locales, from New York’s Upper West Side to Gaza to Beirut and back. As an actress, Najla Said brings a sense of the absurd even to deadly serious situations, and, in one reviewer’s words, as her “sweetness turns to incredulity … you begin to understand the madness endured in war-torn countries.”
The performance begins at 7 pm, at the Hooker Dunham, 139 Main Street in Brattleboro. Suggested donation is $15 adult, $10 student.
Vijay Prashad will cap the weekend events with a talk titled “Trembles in the Tropics (In which we will consider the projects to end all human pain, and then wonder for ourselves, seeking necessity in the North).” A spirited, original thinker, he is the author of eleven books, including Karma of Brown Folk, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting and Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism. His path-breaking Darker Nations tells the history of the cold war from the perspective of the world’s poor, and limns the life and death of the Third World as an ideological project that had people across the globe “fired up for freedom,” sovereignty and cooperation, and then collapsed under the weight of debt, globalized capital, internal conflict, corruption, militarism and cultural nationalism. His new project, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, will pick up the story from the 1980s to explore why we are in such a morass today, where is the motion, and what the currently amorphous movements for land, water and human rights in every country, on every continent might spell for the future. Prashad was born in Calcutta, educated in India and the US; he directs the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford. He is a contributing editor of Himal South Asia (Kathmandu, Nepal), an editor of Bol (Lahore), a columnist for Frontline (India) and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, ZNET and a host of others US publications. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sunday’s events begin with the tapas feast at 2 pm, at 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford; the talk follows in the Organ Barn. Tickets are $35 adult, $25 student.
This will be the 13th annual Harvest Late Brunch benefit for Kopkind and is our only fundraising event of the year.
“Discussions at the retreats this summer revolved around the interconnection of culture, history and politics, and the relationship between personal stories and larger political or historical currents,” Kopkind programming director JoAnn Wypijewski said. “In different registers, Vijay Prashad and Najla Said bring that all together, while drawing our attention in a new direction, to the wider world, on which our fates depend, whether we recognize it or not.”
Reservations for both events can be made by sending a check payable to the non-profit Kopkind, to 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301, or e mailing stonewal@sover.net. For directions, people can e mail that address or call 802.254.4859.
Vijay Prashad, speaker at Harvest
Kopkind Colony 