The food crisis has captured international attention, but the coverage is stripping hungry individuals of their dignity by portraying them without names or narratives in photographs that may refer to them only as “scavengers,” writes Karen Coates for Words Without Borders.

“What really irks me is when the photograph captions have no names,” writes Coates, a Words Without Borders contributor and Asia correspondent for Gourmet. “You know the shots—the grubby kids with frazzled hair and thin, dark skin stretched across fragile bone.”

Each “nameless kid” has his or her own story of hunger, Coates argues, like 12-year-old Kath Piya (pictured at left). Piya scavenges at the Stung Meanchey dump in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh:

“I eat twice a day,” at 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., she said. No breakfast before work. “For dinner I eat rice with salt. Sometimes I eat vegetables and meat, but not usually.” As we chatted, a tourist came up and took her picture, then left without talking to her. Tourists sometimes traipse through the dump for a glimpse of the “real” Cambodia, but this was a rare encounter for Kath Piya. Usually, she said, no one paid much attention to her at all.

Image courtesy of Jerry Redfern.

Tokyo-born, Germany-based writer Yoko Tawada has been called “a surrealist with a funky, abrasive sense of humor,” according to World Literature Today. “Hair Tax,” a short piece of her fiction featured in the May-June 2008 issue (article not available online), is a wry case in point.

“After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved,” Tawada writes (translated from German into English). “The Hamster Lovers’ Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd.”

Sounds fairly reasonable, no? From there, Tawada traces the increasingly surreal repercussions: Calculating tax based on “surface area,” of course, could be deemed discriminatory against obese animals, so the term “furred surface” is adopted, presenting certain problems for fans of new-fangled furry furniture (brought to you by genetic engineering), and on and on it goes....

In taking regular ideas to irregular lengths, Tawada’s “Hair Tax” pleasantly jostles the brain; the piece is at once familiar and unexpected, begging reflection on the world as it is. "Hair Tax" is available to read online via Words Without Borders, a web-based magazine of international literature recently profiled in the University of Chicago magazine.

And after reading it, if a hair tax still seems a bit, well, surreal, consider this: A Minnesota state representative proposed just such a follicular tax not so long ago. Rep. Jim Abeler carried what began as a snarky suggestion through to its over-the-top end—proposal of an amendment—hoping to make a point about how simple it is to create new programs, reports the Minnesota Monitor. Life imitates art, it would seem.

Image by annia316 , licensed under Creative Commons.