#but the class description mentions colonialism in the present day so i think they should not be a zionist

[howtobeapersonwithfibro]

Disabled Sci-Fi: Internship-seeking Veronica

Here (below the cut) is the next short story in my Disabled Sci-Fi series. It centers around Veronica Lee, a wheelchair user living on a colony spaceship. She’s just finished high school and is looking for an intern position in her favorite field: science.

Feedback (and suggestions for future stories) always welcome :) I just really enjoy writing about disabled characters using the knowledge I’ve picked up about experiences from spoonie/disability tumblr and being disabled myself. 

*****

Veronica takes a deep breath. She adjusts her position in her wheelchair to be a bit more comfortable. Tries to resist the urge to strangle the woman across the table. 

“As you know, Ms. Lee,” the woman in the stiff, gray clothes continues, “Everyone has a role to play on the ship. We begin to look for career matches at age sixteen so that everyone can find their ideal role. I just imagine that our choices will be… limited… given your situation.” 

Inwardly, Veronica rolls her eyes. Sometimes she may as well have three heads, for the way people struggle to talk to her like a normal person. Like being unable to walk is a situation and not just another detail of her life, like having straight hair. “I know why you might think that,” Veronica replies, choosing her words carefully. This woman is the only career counselor for the entire ship, so she doesn’t have the option of pissing her off. “But I think that accommodations can be made for most of the jobs around here. It’s not like I’m asking to be a zero-gravity engineer. And my chair can get almost anywhere, with all the ramps.”

The gray woman gives a small, forced smile, and says, “Alright then. What are your areas of interest?”

“I’m most interested in biology,” Veronica says, relieved to be talking about something else. “Whether it’s working in the medical wing or in a lab, I’m just really interested in those kinds of things.” 

“Hmm,” the woman mutters, scrolling through a document on the screen in front of her. “There’s an open trainee position in the botany lab. Job description includes… let’s see here… working with microscopes and other various tools to alter plants and fight disease…” 

“Sounds great. I was good with microscopes in my classes.” Maybe this is actually going to be fine, Veronica thinks. 

“I’m looking over the images of the lab,” the woman goes on, “and all of the counters are standard-height. I’m not sure if you’d be able to reach everything you needed to--”

“Adjustments can be made,” Veronica interrupts. 

“It’s just that the lab has very strict rules about what kind of furniture can be present, due to cleaning procedures, and…” she sighs. “I’m sorry. The system is quite inflexible sometimes, but the procedures are important for optimal plant growth.”

“The system is only as inflexible as we make it,” Veronica argues. “Please, just put me down for the trial position. I can talk to my trainer about making things work.” 

The woman sighs. “I suppose I can do that. If it’s not a good fit, we can always try something else. I hear the food service wing has a variety of opportunities.”

Yes, Veronica thinks, because my perfect grades and area of interest just scream “food service”. But she’s getting a shot at what she wants, so she’s going to do her best to tolerate this prejudiced woman. “Um, thank you. I’ll see how the botany job goes first.”

“Wonderful,” the woman says, in a rehearsed, not-very-wonderful tone. “All of the information has been sent to your messages app. The position starts next week, but you’ll want to look over everything to make sure you’re prepared.” 

***

The next day, Veronica has an appointment to meet her training supervisor and talk with him about the lab and the work they do there. When she arrives at the lab wing and wheels through the sliding doors, she is faced with a bored-looking receptionist who barely glances up from his screen. Once he sees her chair, he looks up again, muttering, “Can I help you with something? Are you lost?”

Lost, she inwardly huffs, desperately trying not to roll her eyes. Because they’re not used to seeing someone who looks like me around here. She takes a breath, then says, “Um, actually, I’m here to meet with Dr. Stonecroft about the trainee position. Veronica Lee? Meeting set for 10:30?”

The young man takes a moment to process this, then says, “Oh, right, I see it in here. I’ll send a message to Dr. Stonecroft that you’re here.”

As she waits, Veronica mentally steels herself for the argument she expects will come. She spent most of the night lying awake thinking of her rebuttals to various questions, and obsessing about it via messaging with her friend Lila until she fell asleep and stopped responding. 

Veronica wanted this job so badly. She couldn’t imagine being stuck somewhere like food service her entire life, not when she had such an interest in science. 

A door behind the receptionists’ desk slid open, and through it walked a short, brown-skinned man with round glasses and a lab coat. “You must be Veronica,” he said, greeting her with a smile and extending his hand down to shake hers. “Herman Stonecroft, glad to finally meet you. Please, come with me.”

She followed him eagerly, squeezing carefully through a narrow doorway that barely allowed room for her fingers to move the wheelchair without getting squished. When it widened into a hallway, Dr. Stonecroft slowed to walk by her side, guiding her first into the greenhouse. 

It was one of the most beautiful places Veronica had ever seen. Most of the places on the ship were dull shades of gray, sparingly decorated because supplies had to be conserved. But this room was alive with color: Red tomatoes and berries hanging on vines, nearly ripe enough to pick; yellow peppers and another plant that Veronica couldn’t identify; and green, green everywhere, from the early sprouts in their hydroponic rows to the leaves of fruit trees and tall corn stalks. 

“This is amazing,” Veronica said. “I’ve never seen so many plants in one place. And it smells so… fresh,” she added, trying out a word she hadn’t had much cause to use before. Little in life was fresh when you lived in space.

Dr. Stonecroft smiled. “I remember thinking that the first time I came here too. The greenhouse is lovely, of course, and very showy, but most of our work is done back in the labs. We’ll come to water the plants, but other workers harvest them. We spend most of our time managing disease and keeping our plants strong. Our effort is vital to maintain food supply.”

“Right, of course,” she replied, not discouraged. “It’s just a privilege to be able to see all of this. They let us each grow a bean plant in science class, and I thought that was cool.”

“I’ll show you to the labs now,” Dr. Stonecroft said, leading her through a large set of double doors at the back of the room. They led into a hallway with a few other doors, and she could see through the glass walls that each contained lab benches with microscopes and other instruments. 

He scanned his badge at one of the doors, and it slid open to allow them through. Veronica noticed that all of the countertops were slightly above eye level for her; she couldn’t imagine getting her arms up there to work productively, let alone looking into a microscope that sat even higher. But Dr. Stonecroft didn’t seem to notice the disparity. He continued right on with his enthusiastic introduction as a few scientists turned from their work to stare at her. 

“We start most of our interns out with basic microscopy - slide preparation, cell counting, studying images to learn signs of abnormal growth. You’ll help tend some of the plants as well. And of course you’d be led through this by another team member when I’m not available. You wouldn’t be expected to do anything on your own for some time - I know that the school’s science department was a bit lacking in resources.”

“That sounds great,” Veronica said. “I thought microscopy was really cool, but we only had two microscopes for the whole class to use, and they were pretty old. So I’ll be happy to learn as much as possible here.” 

Dr. Stonecroft smiled. He was fairly soft spoken, and Veronica had decided already that she would enjoy learning from him - if this worked out. “I’m glad to hear that, Veronica,” he began. “I wish more students had your interest in this area. I’ve had several trainees think that they were here to water plans and pick fruit, and decided to quit when they learned it was much more.”

Veronica nodded. It seemed like this was a really promising opportunity. “Right. But, Dr. Stonecroft, we should probably talk about -- I mean, I’m sure you noticed. I’m in a wheelchair. I can’t exactly reach the lab countertops, or the ground-level planters. The lady at the career center mentioned that sometimes regulations don’t allow certain furniture, but--”

“Veronica,” he said, stopping her. “Let me tell you something. I have never turned an interested student away, and I don’t plan to now. I will saw the legs off of some lab benches myself if necessary.” He gave her a small but knowing smile. “As long as you like it here, we will be lucky to have you.”

It felt like a weight had been lifted off of Veronica’s chest. Sure, she could still see a couple of the scientists side-eyeing her as they pretended to get on with their work. Sure, not everyone would be used to her at first. But her mentor was open-minded and friendly. And everyone else would get used to her and her chair, especially once she showed them the kind of work she could do. 

She hadn’t met someone like Dr. Stonecroft in a long time - someone who just treated her like a person, instead of a person in a wheelchair. She felt pressure behind her eyes, excited and happy tears, and hurried to wipe one away before he could notice. “Thank you so much, Dr. Stonecroft. I’m so excited to start here.”

Dr. Stonecroft escorted her back to the entrance. “We will see you Monday, Veronica.” 

Once the sliding door to the lab wing closed behind her, she let her smile break open wide and wheeled as fast as she could down the quiet hallways, barely able to contain herself. When she was finally home, the door closed behind her, she screeched with delight. “Yes! I did it!” she yelled to no one in particular. For once, she thought with a contented sigh, something finally worked out. 

#my writing #writing #short story #disability #disability fiction #disability short story #disabled characters #disability story #wheelchair user characters #spoonie #spoonie fiction #spoonie writing

[anhed-nia]

i just flaked out of the last session of a series of mycology classes that I signed up for this summer. this is extremely rare for me, as i typically torment myself with feelings of obligation that almost only amount to opportunities to feel bad about something. in this case, i also paid for the damn things, in an amount that turned out to be way more than they were worth. i had really high hopes for these classes; before i started my horticulture program, i was looking for opportunities to study mushrooms, but there didn’t seem to be anything in nyc besides a couple of social clubs. i follow a number of mycology organizations and farms online though, and i was thrilled when one of my favorites announced that they would be coming from upstate to teach a series of five classes in washington heights. during the introduction phase of our first class, i blithely declared that i was excited to do something that was more academic than just meetups with hobbyist groups. nobody disabused me of that idea, and they really should have.

washington heights is technically in manhattan, but for me it might as well be out of town. when the original schedule went out, it said we would meet in the afternoon, and i didn’t find out until shortly before the first session that we are actually starting at 10am. that got me up at ass o’clock to shower, gather my materials, and travel an hour and a half by train, bus, and kind of a long walk to get to the rec room of an apartment building where our first session. i realized i would be travelling a cumulative three hours for a three hour class, but i was still feeling pretty stoked. i didn’t develop a sense of dread until i got there, and saw that the room was empty except for the two organizers. they were playing reggae on a boombox and blazing a ton of nag champa, as one of them shuffled around the room barefoot waving a smudge stick around. i bit my proverbial tongue, trying to shelve my prejudices so they didn’t get in the way of the obviously awesome education i was about to get. a central coffee table was piled with all sorts of text books and dry specimens that i dove right into. i might have left right then, though, if i knew what i heard about an hour later, that they referred to this table as “the Altar.”

other people showed up as much as half an hour later, which annoyed me a little bit since i had woken up in the dark that morning to prepare for this. admittedly i don’t really understand the concept of fashionable lateness, but i felt like casually gouging 30 minutes out of a 3 hour paid event was kind of unfair. as it turned out, the instructor had failed to bring the equipment she needed for her powerpoint presentation, so we were delayed further while she tried and failed to scrounge up cables, and we missed out on visual aids and actual videos that probably would have been pretty useful. once we sat down and introduced ourselves, the second red flag popped up: a lot of the people in the room seemed to know each other. obviously that’s not bad in and of itself, but i could see what was happening. i was in the midst of a clique who were basically there to do what they would do under any other circumstances: listen to bad music, choke on incense, perform pseudo-spiritual rituals, and roll around on the floor. the difference between them and me, bigger than their intimacy and aesthetic values, was that i had paid [redacted] amount of money just to sit on the periphery of their fun hangout and listen to them sling rote revolutionary slogans and sociology jargon. some folks brought up important topics, like food sovereignty and mycoremediation, but we would never get deep enough into our topic to really address anything that interesting.

when it was my turn to talk, i realized that this was going to be an experience that i hadn’t really had since high school--my hair was wrong, my clothes were wrong, my speech was wrong, and i had been marked as a weirdo and an outsider. believe it or not, as an adult, i don’t much worry about what people might think about me, unless they force my awareness of it. i just figure i’m kind of different from a lot of people i encounter, and we can handle that with appropriate levels of polite distance. but, in the class, as the only person wearing black, and the only person in a collared shirt, and one of the only people who kept her shoes on and sat in a chair, it was impossible to ignore the discomfort people had with me. maybe it was also the fact that i failed to cite indigenous religions as part of my reason for being there, or to talk about “holding space” for healing or whatever. i actually went out of my way to be friendly and vocal, thinking i could alleviate some of the tension, but in some ways that seemed to make things worse. but i never thought i would have to worry about any of this; i mean call me crazy, but i really thought i was there to learn about fungi.

when the class finally started in earnest, my mistake became even clearer. A minor point of contention for me was the teacher’s casual snark toward the psychedelic community. i’m well aware of how bro-y that world can be, but i still thought it was kind of lame that she had to toss out barbs at drug nerds who refer to primordia as “pin sets” while doing a mean voice and rolling her eyes dramatically. maybe she felt like it was necessary to clarify that this would not be an entheogen-centric course, but she could have done better than to make fun of the way people talk. i say this because when she introduced scientific taxonomy basics, she mentioned “kingdom,” and pointedly followed it with the correction “OR QUEENDOM.” i can understand why we should challenge gendered vocabulary in non-gender-related areas, but it really made me feel like standing up and saying EXCUSE ME BUT YOU ARE USING VERY BINARY TERMS RIGHT NOW AND I WISH YOU WOULD ASSUME ACCOUNTABILITY FOR MAINTAINING A SAFE SPACE FOR EVERYONE. worse than that, when it came time to describe how substrate becomes inoculated with mycelium, she first used the correct mycological vocabulary, saying “the mycelium colonizes the soil”, and then added boldly, “BUT WE’RE NOT GOING TO USE THAT WORD.” this drove me absolutely insane. first of all, as with the kingdom/queendom distinction, she’s just making things confusing for people who are totally brand new to the topic and will absolutely need to know what the common contemporary terms are before they can make informed decisions about what kind of language they want to subscribe to later. secondly, this isn’t like the debate over reclaiming words like “queer”--”colony/colonization” is not a slur. it also doesn’t carry a moral connotation; even when we describe conquistadors colonizing central america, that doesn’t describe the inherent superiority of the spanish and inferiority of the indigenous peoples. colonization is the accepted description of a population of organisms taking over a certain area. i mean are we also working on changing the term ”ant colony” or even “artists’ colony”? is that a reasonable use of our collective political energy? and secondly, i agree that decolonizing thought is important. i remember the moment when, as an art history student, a professor taught us how to make a certain point by using the word “germinal” instead of “seminal”; i get the concept. but i don’t think that the problem of colonized thought is the use of the word “colonize” itself, and i don’t think that depriving us of the ability to describe colonization is going to help us identify and attack instances of...FUCKING COLONIZATION.

by the end of the first session...well, i couldn’t tell if it was the end exactly people had started milling around and snacking and talking about whatever, and considering our late start and just the general atmosphere of confusion, i wasn’t sure if i was supposed to wait for something else to happen. finally i just walked off, feeling pretty agitated. but, i clung to the idea that maybe further sessions would be of more value, that it was ok for the first class to consist of a bunch of shit i already knew as a result of casual interest, or could have easily looked up on wikipedia. future sessions were supposed to focus on field ID and foraging, and medicinal preparations and applications, among other things i’m ignorant of. i told myself that once the material became more stimulating, i would be naturally distracted from the dirty feet and elaborate yoga poses and insidery preaching-to-the-choir political language of my classmates, and would find myself engrossed finally in one of my favorite topics. probably i also just didn’t want to acknowledge how much money i had wasted.

what should have been the second class was postponed because the instructor’s van had broken down, which was totally understandable, although it kind of felt like par for the course considering the messiness of the previous session. unfortunately, it threw off the whole schedule, so we then wound up having two back to back days together, a regular saturday session, followed by an all-day foraging excursion that started earlier than usual and took place even further away than usual. i might as well have just gotten a hotel room up there for the weekend, but whatever, i sort of understood the risks when i signed up. the foraging session was what i was most looking forward to, and was the biggest disaster. i still hadn’t gotten the memo about how cool it was to show up as much as 45 minutes late, even for an event where we were supposed to meet up at a remote horse stable and then venture into the woods together. we didn’t get started until a least an hour, probably more after the 9am start. i’d been there since 8:50, and had to sit through an interminable playtime in which everybody did chakra-clearing breathing techniques and stretches, improv exercises and vocal warmups, and played some dumb hippy game where everybody tries to steal a stick from one another. my aforementioned sense of tortured obligation has caused me to submit to juvenile horrors like this in other circumstances, even though i thought adulthood was supposed to exempt me from this gym class bullshit, but i put my foot down this time, and sat about 25 feet away patiently waiting for the class to start, suffering some accusative glances.

the actual foraging we did was really fun, but being in the group was worse than ever. there was an excessive amount of anthropomorphizing going on, with all specimens described as “friends” that each student was encouraged to “meet” and “hang out with”, which resulted in a constant stream of high-pitched baby talk among us. i had been strongly warned against this anthropomorphizing mentality, both from a (fabulous, brilliant) druid-like arborist who taught my intro to botany class, and from the animal welfare community, all of whom correctly assert that projecting human needs and emotions onto non-human organisms is both delusional and actually dangerous for both people and the lifeforms around us...but whatever i guess. i had more immediate worries, because at some point, the baby talk gave way to improvised singing. it was brutally hot and dank in the woods, and the thrill of finding all kinds of different specimens was barely outweighed by the intense chagrin i felt as most of the group began stumbling through the creation of a hymn of gratitude to the mushrooms. sometimes we had to stop completely on the path so everyone could get in a circle and sing a round or three together. this was scheduled to be a 7 hour excursion, and by hour 3 i was seriously trying to work out at what point i would declare a family emergency or food poisoning and just run away.

part of the experience included a bit of a plant walk, led by one of the organizers who knew a lot about indigenous flora. this was sort of interesting in and of itself, and also relevant, since different mushrooms may grow on or near certain plants. but somehow, it still didn’t amount to a reasonable educational experience. half way through the hike, i noticed a classmate excitedly snatching up all the mugwort that she came across. she had been told by our guide about the many virtues of this “plant medicine”, a traditional cure-all for everything from epilepsy to PMS. what she hadn’t been told, evidently, is that mugwort is ferociously invasive, and practically impossible to get rid of. mugwort will choke out everything else around it, destroying the biodiversity that is necessary to support a healthy local ecology, losing us desirable plant life and starving out animal populations. i tried to tell her that she should be careful with that stuff, and avoid planting it in her yard if that was the fantasy, but she turned away irritably, clutching gnarled bundles of the sacred healer in her fists. it was a little thing, but somehow it really locked in the fact that i was in the wrong place. i hadn’t learned remotely as much new information about mushrooms as i should have in ~15 hours, and i had reason to believe that information we were getting could be less than reliable, or made unreliable by omission of other important facts. i had to get out of there. at some point we encountered a different mushroom group--a collection of appealing nerds in their 40s-60s called the Destroying Angels (after the deadly white amanita) who had accumulated a way cooler array of specimens than us, probably because they got started at a reasonable hour. i barely prevented myself from begging them to take me with them.

we returned to our spot near the parking lot two hours ahead of our scheduled conclusion, and as before, the situation devolved into a general hangout with no clear indication that the educational portion of the day was over. there were more songs and more games, and though i was coerced away from my boulder in the sun to join the group around their blanket, i managed to feign sleep long enough to get out of most of the activities. i was legitimately exhausted, at least.when i was thoroughly convinced that the lesson was over, i told everyone that i was too tired to continue and left, sparing myself an hour and a half of further agony.

ever since, i had been worrying about the final class. i absolutely wanted to learn about medicinal preparations and tinctures and home-growing techniques. but could it possibly be worth it? could i even be sure that the session would consist of more than what i had already learned from experience, and from unfairly maligned drug nerds on the internet? was i not too annoyed that the date of this class wasn’t even announced until four days ago, even though the class basically requires a day trip for more students than just me? by last night, the answers were perfectly clear. i let the group know that “something came up” without specifying, and bid them farewell, thanking them for their “inclusivity” among other things, which only i know is a joke. (at the end of the last i informed them all that i have ASD and don’t like to be touched, and i had the satisfying sense that they all realized that that was part of the reason i refused to join in their reindeer games) i’m vaguely concerned that i will have to deal with an annoyed instructor who literally owes me a bottle of tincture and growing materials as part of the price of the class, and who should really mail them to me now, but i can’t drag myself back to washington heights again just to avoid that nonsense. i don’t know what lesson i’m supposed to learn from this experience; maybe it’s enough to say that i don’t have to force myself to do everything i ever say i’m going to do, and also that in spite of the long way i have come from being an angry little punk poseur in college, i still hate hippies as much as ever. the end.

[encephalonfatigue]

advent reflection #2: hypostatic movement

this is the second of my advent reflections for 2020. the first can be read here.

Image: Songe de Nabuchodonosor from Saint-Sever Beatus

This is a glimpse of the story told in Chapter 5 of Acts of the Apostles, before Paul and his comrades are rounded up by the police following their escape from prison:

“Then someone arrived and announced, ‘Look, the men whom you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people!’ Then the captain went with the temple police and brought them, but without violence, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people. When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.’”

Consciousness raising among the masses, defying the carceral state surrounded by militant crowds antagonistic to the police, and openly sharing a somewhat seditious theology that had little patience for unjustified ‘human authority’ – these should all be tell-tale signs that Paul and his comrades were very much troublemakers in the eyes of the ruling class. Unsurprisingly then, Gamaliel, in a speech following the recapture of Paul and his comrades (in Acts 5:34-39), compares his former student Paul to two earlier Jewish revolutionaries: Theudas and Judas the Galilean.

Theudas according to Josephus led a revolt (of 400 men according to Acts, if it is the same Theudas) in 46 CE. Judas the Galilean led a revolt in 6 CE against the imperial tax census, though the author of Acts curiously places Theudas chronologically before the revolt of Judas (again possibly a different Theudas). Either way, one might say we are in the domain of Walter Benjamin’s ‘messianic time’ where “a chain of events” is but “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” at the feet of the angel of history. In the “Foundations of Christianity”, Karl Kautsky writes of Theudas:

“Every fanatic who proclaimed himself a Messiah and promised to free the people by his miracles found supporters. One such was the prophet Theudas under the procurator Fadus (from 44 A.D. on), who led a throng of people to the River Jordan, where they were dispersed by the cavalry of Fadus.”

Roman procurator Cuspius Fadus suppressed Theudas’ open rebellion against Rome by decapitating Theudas and parading his head into Jerusalem.

As for Judas of Galilee, he previously surfaced in my first Advent reflection, as his revolt against the census was the unmentioned backdrop of the Nativity story in Luke. This Advent was the first time Judas of Galilee was brought to my attention. I was reading a book on Advent called “Light of the World” by Amy-Jill Levine (a Vanderbilt professor in New Testament and Jewish Studies, as well as a practicing Orthodox Jew). Levine writes:

“In the year 6 CE, after the death of Herod the Great and when Jesus would have been a child, Rome proclaimed a local census. At this time, a Galilean known as “Judas the Galilean” (here, as with all the Marys, we have a combined problem of lack of last names coupled with too many people named Judas) began a revolt. We know that Luke knows about Judas because Judas appears in Gamaliel’s speech in Acts 5:37: ‘At the time of the census, Judas the Galilean appeared and got some people to follow him in a revolt. He was killed too, and all his followers scattered far and wide.’”

While Levine interprets the census mentioned in Luke 2 as a narrative device to emphasize Mary’s and Joseph’s obedience to the Roman colonial authorities, which would distinguish Jesus’ movement from the violent insurrectionary movement of Judas of Galilee, I would tend to think the census is mentioned to emphasize the context of Roman imperial domination and oppression under which Jesus was born and against which he was resisting. Reza Aslan, in Zealot, mentions that the census came at a time just after the official Roman conquest of Judea:

“Then, in the year 6 C.E., when Judea officially became a Roman province and the Syrian governor, Quirinius, called for a census to tally, register, and properly tax the people and property in the newly acquired region, the members of the Fourth Philosophy seized their opportunity. They used the census to make a final appeal to the Jews to stand with them against Rome and fight for their freedom. The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It was an admission that the Jews were not the chosen tribe of God but the personal property of the emperor.

It was not the census itself that so enraged Judas and his followers; it was the very notion of paying any tax or tribute to Rome. What more obvious sign was needed of the subservience of the Jews? The tribute was particularly offensive as it implied that the land belonged to Rome, not God.”

In “The Foundations of Christianity”, Kautsky also takes some interest in Judas of Galilee writing:

“At the same time the insurrection spread to the country. The brigands of Galilee now got strong detachments of recruits, and made up whole armies. Their leaders had themselves called Kings of the Jews, that is Messiah. Especially prominent among them was Judas, whose father Hezekiah had been a famous bandit and executed as such (47 B.C.). In Peraea Simon, a former slave of Herod, got together a band; a third force was commanded by the shepherd Athronges. The Romans suppressed the revolt with great difficulty… There was an unspeakable slaughter and pillage; two thousand of the prisoners were crucified and many others sold into slavery. This was about the time in which the birth of Christ is set. There was quiet for several years, but not for long. In the year 6 A.D. Judea came under direct Roman rule. The first measure taken by the Romans was a census for tax-collecting purposes. In answer, there was a new attempt at insurrection by Judas the Galilean, the same who had been so prominent in the uprising ten years earlier. He got together with the Pharisee Sadduk, who was to incite the people of Jerusalem. The attempt failed, but it led to the break between masses of the common people and the rebellious Galileans on the one hand, and the Pharisees on the other. They had been together in the rebellion of 4 B.C. Now the Pharisees had had enough, and the party of the Zealots arose in opposition to them. From that time to the destruction of Jerusalem, the fires of insurrection were never completely extinguished in Galilee and Judea.”

Now to return to Gamaliel’s speech in Acts 5. After Gamaliel mentions the failed revolts of Theudas and Judas of Galilee, he says something very interesting about Paul and his comrades:

“So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!”

This is fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, Jesus had already died. In many ways he would have already been thought of as a ‘failed Messiah’ like Theudas and Judas of Galilee, yet the fervour of Paul and his rabble-rousing friends preaching resurrection and the immanent apocalyptic return of Christ meant their movement’s success was still an open question (at least in the narrative of Acts). However, the crucifixion at Easter implies Advent to be a season of waiting, anticipation, and yearning for justice that had been displaced into the future, because the birth and life of Jesus did not bring about the dismantling of Empire and oppression nor an egalitarian reign of justice and peace for all. However, that hope is not gone, and all the Abrahamic faiths still await such a future together. Amy-Jill Levine in her Advent book mentions how:

“In terms of messianic ideas, the opposition from many Jews to the claims of Jesus’ status should not be a surprise. The dominant Jewish idea at the time (and subsequently) is that the Messiah brings about the messianic age, a time when death no longer has dominion, when there is a general resurrection of the dead, a final judgment, the return of exiles to their homeland, peace on earth. Because Jesus did not bring about this type of salvation, most Jews concluded that he could not be the Messiah. What Christians sometimes describe as the “Second Coming” looks, to a great extent, like traditional Jewish messianic hopes. The only difference is the identity of the Messiah, who in Jewish tradition is not a divine being to be worshiped, but a representative of the one God.

Rather than having us engage in endless (or, at least until the end of the world) speculation about messianic job descriptions, it makes more sense to me to work together for justice and peace, and let God take care of the end-of-the-world details.”

Levine’s last statement raises interesting questions about eschatology as well as the tension between human and divine agency, because working for justice and peace is a type of eschatological activity oriented to a liberated future. This question of agency is precisely the one Gamaliel makes in his speech wondering whether the movement started by Jesus and continued by Paul was of human or divine origin. This tension is present in the radical Hanukkah hymn “Mi Y’malel”:

“Who can describe the heroic deeds of Israel, who can count them?

For in every age a hero will arise to save the people.

Hark! In ancient days at this season, the Maccabees redeemed and delivered us.

Therefore, in our day, Israel must unite, arise, to redeem ourselves!””

The hymn alludes to Psalm 106:2: “Mi y’maleyl g’vurot Adonai!” – “Who can describe the heroic deeds of the LORD?” But the hymn modifies the Psalm, and goes “Mi y’malel g’vurot yisrael” – “Who can describe the heroic deeds of Israel?”

N. T. Wright has pointed out that many writers of the Christian testament interpret passages from the Hebrew Bible that are about Israel (e.g. the suffering servant songs of Isaiah) as about Jesus or more generally a Messiah. One has interesting shifts between the individual and collective. From Jacob to Israel (children of Abraham) to Messiah to faith community to God/Spirit within historical discussions of liberation. One can imagine that is partly where this tension is coming from between attribution to human and Divine initiative. Guy Debord in the book “The Society of the Spectacle” touches on this important tension within past millenarian movements:

“The great European peasant revolts were also an attempt to respond to history — a history that was violently wresting the peasants from the patriarchal slumber that had been imposed by their feudal guardians. The millenarians’ utopian aspiration of creating heaven on earth revived a dream that had been at the origin of the semihistorical religions, when the early Christian communities, like the Judaic messianism from which they sprung, responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their time by envisioning the imminent realization of the Kingdom of God, thereby adding an element of unrest and subversion to ancient society… millenarianism developed in a historical world, not on the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary hopes are not irrational continuations of the religious passion of millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium. On the contrary, millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, a tendency that lacked only the consciousness that it was a purely historical movement. The millenarians were doomed to defeat because they were unable to recognize their revolution as their own undertaking. The fact that they hesitated to act until they had received some external sign of God’s will was an ideological corollary to the insurgent peasants’ practice of following leaders from outside their own ranks.”

With Debord here, we have a view dialectically opposite to Gamaliel’s. For Gamaliel, any failure of revolt would be because the revolt’s origin was found in ‘man’ and not God. For Debord any failure of revolt would be because the revolt’s origin was imagined to be found in God and not human initiative. Yet this tension is in fact not a strictly modern one, but is laced throughout the canonical texts. 

It is not entirely unrelated to questions raised in the discourse of Christology, ideas of hypostatic union, and even the authorship of scriptures. Peter Enns for example was an evangelical professor that got booted from Westminster Theological Seminary because in his book “Incarnation and Inspiration” he emphasized that scripture had both divine and human aspects, which undermined fundamentalist notions of inerrancy. I think collective movements in history are better understood in such a dialectical fashion. One might think about old debates among the left between base and superstructure: whether technology and the means of production was the driver or culture and ideology. One cannot lose sight of either, especially if one believes another world is possible.

In an introduction to Muntzer’s “Sermon to the Princes”, Alberto Toscano elaborates on the wonderful way Ernst Bloch engages in such a dialectical mode with respect to Muntzer:

“it was perhaps only Ernst Bloch - in his 1921 Thomas Muntzer: Theologian Of the Revolution - who tried to do justice to the interweaving of apocalyptic theology, mystical spirituality and revolutionary politics in Muntzer. Bloch does not see the theological impetus of the 'revolution of the common man' of 1525 as the mere index of socio-economic immaturity. On the contrary, he views it as one of those situations that bears witness to the fact that 'the superstructure is often in advance of an ... economy that will only later attain its maturity'. In other words, unlike his great critic on this point, Georg Lukacs, Bloch wants to stress the anticipatory character of Muntzer's anachronism, without immediately relegating it to the scrapheap of necessary failures…

Rather than accepting the disjunction between (premature) political content and (sterile) religious form, Bloch finds in Miintzer the paradoxical union of theology and revolution, without the one serving as an instrument for the other.”

The Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom has written extensively on Leviticus and how old priestly ideas and notions of ritual exist about how human agency affects the coming and going of the ‘presence of God’. With respect to eschatology one could think of that famous text from Isaiah 40 that is sung in the opening to Handel’s Messiah:

“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness; prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry moutain and hill made low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain.”

The movement that Jesus began became known as “the Way” and its adherents “people of the Way” – workers building this “Way”. Preparing for the coming of another world, on earth as it is in heaven. Working to eventually bring down the exalted, make low the rulers, exalt the lowly of the valleys.  Preparation for a new world. Advent is not a passive waiting but a very active waiting for another world. Building towards another world. Levelling in anticipation of a final levelling.

The ‘Way’ through the wilderness, out of Egypt’s slavery, out of Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem is an arduous one. It involves resisting Empire at every turn. This is exactly what we find in the Maccabean Revolt against the Hellenizing forces that came to desecrate the Jerusalem temple to set the context for the festival of Hanukkah now being celebrated. Jodi Magness in her book “Masada” gives a good summary of the issues at play during this period of the Maccabees:

“Local elites eagerly embraced the Greek lifestyle in emulation of the ruling class. The Jerusalem elite—primarily wealthy priestly families—were not immune to these influences, despite the fact that the Greek way of life often contradicted biblical law or Jewish customs. For example, a Greek education was key to upward mobility under Alexander’s successors.”

This reminds me of Sartre’s relevant introduction to Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”, in reference to Third World decolonization, which reads:

“The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!’ It was the golden age. …the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end…”

Anyway, Magness goes on to describe the decree of Antoiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 BCE where the:

“Jerusalem temple was re-dedicated to Olympian Zeus (the chief deity of the Greek pantheon) and the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim (where the God of Israel was also worshipped) was re-dedicated to Zeus Hellenios. Shrines and altars to Greek gods were established elsewhere around Jerusalem and the countryside. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the late first–early second century CE, attributed Antiochus’s decree to a desire to eradicate the Jewish religion (Hist. 5.8:2).”

This image of the ‘desolating sacrilege’ or the ‘abomination of desolation’ that desecrated the Temple makes itself present within so-called ‘New Testament’ apocalyptic writing including the Gospels and by allusion in Revelation. So Hanukkah in many ways hovers within the imagery of the Christian testament. At stake was always the manipulative and co-optive manoeuvring of Empire to quell the radical nature of indigenous movements. Jesus, being Jewish celebrated the Festival of Dedication which has come to be called Hanukkah. Amy-Jill Levine in her Advent book writes how:

“Hanukkah is the Hebrew word for “dedication,” and it is mentioned in the Gospel of John, where Jesus visits the Temple: “The time came for the Festival of Dedication in Jerusalem. It was winter” (John 10:22).”

Daniel’s apocalyptic literature was immensely influential to writers of the Christian testament, and was likely written under the Seleucid regime of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The issues of Hanukkah and the Maccabean revolt colour the book of Daniel in central ways. Daniel is of enormous interest to me, because it’s the primary text on which Thomas Muntzer is preaching on in his seminal “Sermon to the Princes”. Muntzer’s sermon is a radical revolutionary text that preceded the great German Peasant Uprising that ultimately got Muntzer executed. Like the Maccabees who saw the imperial influences of Hellenization and its attendant class stratification, so to did Muntzer see this in his time as he participated in the radical Reformation as he saw how the feudal ambitions corrupted the clergy:

“One sees now how prettily the eels and snakes copulate together in a heap. The priests and all the evil clergy are the snakes, as John the Baptist calls them, Matthew 3[:7], and the temporal lords and rulers are the eels, as is symbolized by the fish in Leviticus 11[:10-12]. For the devil's empire has painted its face with clay. Oh, you beloved lords, how well the Lord will smash down the old pots of clay [ecclesiastical authorities] with his rod of iron, Psalm 2[:9]. Therefore, you most true and beloved regents, learn your knowledge directly from the mouth of God and do not let yourselves be seduced by your flattering priests and restrained by false patience and indulgence. For the stone [Christ's spirit] torn from the mountain without human touch has become great. The poor laity and the peasants see it much more clearly than you do. Yes, God be praised, the stone has become so great that, already, if other lords or neighbours wanted to persecute you on account of the gospel, they would be overthrown by their own subjects. This I know to be true. Indeed the stone is great! The foolish world has long feared it. The stone fell upon the world when it was still small. What then should we do now, after it has grown so great and powerful? And after it has struck the great statue so powerfully and irresistibly that it has smashed down the old pots of clay?”

This is a fascinating homily on Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream in Daniel 2. One might imagine the statue of this dream as the detritus piling at the feet of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. 

“The head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked on, a stone was cut out, not by human hands, and it struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, were all broken in pieces and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”

This statue of degrading qualities of metals, descending down to clay, was oneiric signpost to the various empires that Judea had been subjected to. The mistaken prophetic prediction in the Book of Daniel regarding the death of Antiochus is actually what allows scholars to date these portions of the book. But it also allows one to interpret Antiochus as every other oppressive ruler sanctioned by Empire, one catastrophe piled upon another.

This is the great monolith of Empire that oppressed slaves in Egypt, that dispossessed people and took them as captives to Babylon, that desecrated a holy temple during the time of the Maccabees, slaughtered peasants in Germany during Muntzer’s time, and in our time, evicts poor people across Canada during a global pandemic and refuses debt relief to the poorest developing countries completely collapsing under the untenable economic pressures that this pandemic has brought us. Muntzer imagines that stone cut out in Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream in Daniel 2 falling upon the world and striking down that great statue of Empire. I think back to an old song I sung in Sunday school that goes: “Lift your voice, it's the year of jubilee, And out of Zion's hill salvation comes.”

One can imagine the old apocalyptic yearning, a large stone cut out of Mount Zion, that would smash the oppression of all empires, and establish a reign of peace and justice for all. But one can also hear the cries of Isaiah this Advent, anticipatory but also participatory:

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry moutain and hill made low.”

#Advent #Muntzer #Ernst Bloch #Debord #Maccabees #Hanukkah #Amy-Jill Levine #Jodi Magness #Judas of Galilee #Theudas #Kautsky #Reza Aslan #Acts of The Apostles

[insideanairport]

Patrisse Cullors' “When They Call You a Terrorist”

❍❍❍

A Black Lives Matter Memoir

After reading this book, you might find yourself so excited that you want to only read books by black women writers. The book is as exciting and informing as autobiographies of black radical activists such as Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. It reminds us of other works such as: Push Out, We Were Eight Years in Power, Long Walk to Freedom, White Fragility, Golden Gulag, and Revolutionary Suicide. It is written smoothly with a down-to-earth style of writing. She has a non-academic working-class tone that connects with everyone.

POPO

The ending of the book [Spoiler Alert] is very powerful with the birth of Patrisee’s child, the presidency of Trump, the rise of hate crimes, mentioning the names of victims of police brutality and the future of the Black struggle. On a #SayHerName-style, she brings to light the names of victims of police violence and white supremacy. She reminds us of the ordinary Americans who lost their lives due to police racism. People such as Tanisha Anderson, Miriam Carey, Shelly Hilliard, Rekia Boyd, Shelly Frey, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Kathryn Johnston. The reason for this imperative is that women are often left out when the histories of white supremacy, slavery, and genocide are told.

”These few names are only part of a long, terrible list, but, like the horrific history of lynching in this country, when the story is told, women are often left out of it even as we are lynched, too. And some of the women are pregnant at the time of the lynching. And maybe because our movement is being led by women, Queer and straight, cisgender and Trans. And maybe because so many of us have family who have been harmed in jails and prisons but that harm has not become part of the broader public discussion about the bind, torture, kill that is part and parcel of the American system of incarceration.”

Colonial Structures

In chapter 15, Patrisse identifies the United States as the country of borders and walls. As a first-generation immigrant, I completely agree with this description. I don’t take this description only literally. This definition of the United States as the country of borders and walls does not only apply to the brutal border regime with concentration camps for children, deportations, and criminalization of asylum seekers. It also applies to the European mindset which is always preoccupied with congealing definitions and categories. It prevents people to accept each other for who they are and making an effort to understand cultural differences and historical trauma in order to heal the previous wounds inflicted. 

Historically speaking, white supremacy has a tendency to define and categorize everything outside of itself as the “other” or “minority” or “abnormal”. When I was living in the United States, I thought this solely applies to the North American mindset. However, If we look into European societies as well as European settler-colonial states around the world, we see the same type of mentality reminiscent of colonial enlightenment which still hasn’t been flushed out of the systems.

Patrisse has lost close friends and family to police brutality and white supremacy. She is telling the reader, if her dead body was found in police custody, we should know that the police have killed her. Her position is not only from a radical black perspective, but it is also within the black queer tradition.

We know historically that women often do the work and men get the credit for it. And living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to centre men and their voices rather than women and their work.

She skillfully takes the reader into the “world" of the working-class black community in America. In some instances, she takes us even deeper into the community of queer activists of color. The non-black reader should naturally understand the reality of ethnic profiling targeted towards the black and Latinx communities. The history of police in the United States is founded upon white supremacy, slavery and defense of public property. 

Today, if we step out of North America, we see similar patterns of police brutality emerging increasingly in Western and Eastern Europe. European societies as the so-called defenders of Western democracy and civility are turning into deportation regimes and in some cases semi-apartheid Islamophobic regimes. Although they are spending tremendous energy in hiding the data from the international community and presenting themselves as civil and superior to North America, they increasingly see themselves vulnerable to the new generation of BIPoC activists and organizers. 

The European Network Against Racism (ENAR) after releasing its 4-year report in 2018, noted that hate crimes that target racial and ethnic minorities are on the rise and need immediate actions to be prevented. Yet, only one-third of the 24 member states have guidelines, policies, and instructions for the police in documenting the hate crimes. If that doesn’t sound right to you, you are not the only one. First of all, the question comes to mind what does the other two-third think about hate crimes? and the second question is that “Are you designating the police in charge of documenting the hate crimes, even though a good portion of hate crimes might actually come from police themselves? The report also shows that the police do not take reports of racist crimes seriously or they do not believe the victims of racially motivated crimes. (1) 

Turns out that Stephen Lawrence and Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi are not the only people in Europe to be the victim of hate crime. (2) Recent reporting shows that London recorded 1,652 antisemitic incidents in 2018, an increase of 16% in one year. (3) Meanwhile, in the United States, the FBI reported that in 2018 alone, 8,646 people were victims of hate crime in 7,036 single-bias incidents. Almost 60% of these incidents were motivated by race, ethnicity, and ancestry. (4)

Another EU survey in 2015-2016 showed that 14% of respondents with different ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds have been stopped by police in the 12 months preceding the survey. (5) In France, according to the results of a national survey of more than 5,000 respondents, Arab and African men are twenty times more likely to be stopped and searched than other males groups. (6) In England and Wales, black people were nine and a half times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. (7) All these are excluding the Algorithmic profiling that has been vastly problematic across Europe due to its preexisting structural racism. 

When Silicon Valley first emerges, it might as well be a Nordic country for all its homogeneity. Even today, its diversity has not yet found a way to reach into the communities of those who were legally and willfully excluded.

ENAR Shadow Report 2014-2018 (1)

In occupied Palestine, we see the same techniques of systemic killings being exercised towards Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, police, and settler-colonialists. That might be one of the reasons for the huge solidarity between Palestinians and Black activists in Ferguson when military tanks started to appear on American streets. (8) Today, beyond Angela Davis’s pro-Palestinian activism and support for the BDS movement, we see a broader unification of forces between black & brown activism with Palestinian liberation.  

Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the child of the man who laid claim to founding it at a time when founding something was a euphemism for manifest destiny and homesteading and all the blood and death both of these wrought. “Founding,” a term like the phrase “collateral damage,” the use of which was ratcheted up in the 90s so they didn’t have to say dead Iraqi children.

Formerly incarcerated mothers, organizers and activists at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., after performing a play highlighting Black-Palestinian solidarity on September 3, 2018. (Will Johnson) -972mag (11)

Governmental Terrorism

“There’s a difference between abuse and torture. Both are horrible, often unbearable, and both leave scars. Neither can be minimized. But I make the distinction here in order to explain that while abuse may or may not be intentional, and is often spontaneous, torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity.”

Patrisse recalls a day when his brother Monte gets into a car accident with a white woman, and she calls the cops on him. LAPD arrives and arrests Monte after tasing him brutally. Patrisse's brother gets into trouble simply because he has a mental problem and he is black. Later in the book, she asks herself: why cops never seem to understand that black people can also have mental illness?

She criticizes the classical racist “War on Drugs“ policies that were basically “War on Black and Latinxs peoples”. Even Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted that the purpose of these laws was to target black peoples and anti-war students. (9) The laws were written so broadly that it made otherwise normal daily activities illegal. It gave police a nice opportunity to arrest those who targeted. These policies are similar to the strategies used on indigenous peoples which have resulted in spending more money on erasing their language rather than saving them. (10) The War on Drugs was the campaign to start the prison industrial complex targeting Black and Latinx peoples. And these laws were so ineffective, that for example in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2010, about 10,000 people died.

As of this writing, three of the organizers from Ferguson, DeAndre Joshua, Darren Seals and Edward Crawford, have all been found shot dead in their cars. The cars of two of the young men, DeAndre and Darren, were burned, which destroyed forensic evidence, and Edward’s death was ruled a suicide—even as he had just started a new job and had secured a new apartment, hardly the action of someone looking to die.

BLM

After reading this book, if a non-black person [anywhere] doesn’t see the police brutality as something real toward black and brown communities in the United States, then I guess there is no way to have a discussion with that person. If after reading this book, someone doesn’t comprehend the urgency and magnitude of the Black Lives Matter movement, then I guess there is no way to have a discussion with that person. 

There are many white folks who decide to stay neutral amidst the rise of far-right racism and xenophobia. “White Silence is consent” was a slogan introduced by the Civil Rights activists in the ’50s and ’60s. Today, after Trump’s presidency and impeachment, amidst all the human rights violations that the United States government is inflicting upon humanity, remaining silent is taking the side of white supremacy.  

“…while I know the basics of what he experienced the first time he was sent to LA County Jail in 1999, a jail run by the sheriff’s department, it will not be until 2011 when I read a report issued by the ACLU of Southern California that I fully understand what was done to my brother there. This is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.”

Culture Issues

Patrisse Cullors talk about her memory when her white classmate invited her for dinner. She accepts the invitation. When they are eating at the dinner table with the family, the father is asking Patrisse questions such as "have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up?". She tells herself: “It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am.” And then she asks herself: "Have I ever known such a moment in my own home?"

White people’s economic and money-oriented mindset is well known around the world. White parents like to talk about money during mealtime, even when kids are around. In contrast to this first-world behavior of homo economicus, the majority of non-Western cultures highly value the eating time as something important if not sacred. It is the designated time for the family and loved ones.

Bib.

1. racism, european network against. ENAR Shadow Report 2014-2018. s.l. : ENAR - European Network Against Racism aisbl, 2018.

2. Pianigiani, Gaia. ‘Racist’ Killing of Nigerian Asylum Seeker Stuns and Saddens Italy. nytimes. [Online] July 7, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/world/europe/racist-killing-of-nigerian-asylum-seeker-stuns-and-saddens-italy.html.

3. Staff, Algemeiner. UK Jewish Communal Body Reports Record Number of Antisemitic Outrages During 2018. algemeiner. [Online] 2 7, 2019. https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/02/07/uk-jewish-communal-body-reports-record-number-of-antisemitic-outrages-during-2018/.

4. (UCR), The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting. 2018 Hate Crime Statistics. United States Department of Justice. [Online] 2018. https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics.

5. Rights, European Union Agency for Fundamental. Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS II) . Luxembourg: Publications Of ce of the European Union : European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2017, 2017.

6. defenseurdesdroits. Enquête sur l’accès aux droits Volume 1 - Relations police / population : le cas des contrôles d'identité. s.l. : defenseurdesdroits, 2017.

7. Mijatović, Dunja. Ethnic profiling: a persisting practice in Europe . Commissioner for Human Rights. [Online] 2019. https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/ethnic-profiling-a-persisting-practice-in-europe#_ftnref5.

8. Ahmed, Nasim. A new civil rights movement unites Palestinians and Black Americans. middleeastmonitor. [Online] April 5, 2019. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190405-a-new-civil-rights-movement-unites-palestinians-and-black-americans/.

9. LoBianco, Tom. Report: Aide says Nixon's war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies. CNN. [Online] March 24, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.

10. Nagle, Rebecca. The U.S. has spent more money erasing Native languages than saving them. newsmaven. [Online] Dec 6, 2019. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/the-u-s-has-spent-more-money-erasing-native-languages-than-saving-them-qh2w3-wqPUCNqrGcblbHQg.

11. Taylor, Jen Marlowe and Je Naé. From Palestine to Ferguson: Reflections on shared grief and liberation. 972mag. [Online] Oct 1, 2018. https://www.972mag.com/october-2000-killings-black-palestine-solidarity-play/.

#reading #blm #blacklivesmatter #activism

[hist2000indigenousresistance]

Our History is the Future

Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t really approached Standing Rock from a historical perspective, and certainly not one that centered the sovereignty of the Oceti Sakowin before. It centered indigenous sovereignty from an indigenous perspective (being written, of course, by a native, sioux, person).

But I think that Nick Estes did a very good job recontextualizing historic events that I had heard about from settler perspectives and relating them to the continued fight for indigenous sovereignty that brought us to the events of the #NoDAPL movement. 

Old Wars

It recontextualized things like the “American Indian Wars.” According to Wikipedia’s “list of wars involving the United States”  there were 4 wars between the various Oceti Sakowin tribes and the United States; The Dakota War of 1862,  the Colorado War (1863-65), the Powder River War (1965) and Red Cloud’s War (1866-68) which led to the creation of the Treaty of Fort Laramine, which much of the book is based around. There were also 2 other wars after the treaty was signed: the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which seized the black hills that were given in the treaty), the Pine Ridge Campaign (which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee). In reading Estes's account of these events, I realized that the way that these wars are taught in my childhood history classes, was as if there weren’t real wars. They were not portrayed as sovereign nations resisting encroachment onto their territories by the United States. I mean, they were barely taught at all, because history class preferred to focus on the Civil War that was happening at the same time. 

When I was in Chicago at the cultural center, there was a sign that said: “The Civil War was also a settler colonial war.” This made sense to me in some way, because it was a war over land that belonged to neither group that was trying to claim it. The Indian Wars and the Civil War were both, as the sign said: “each part of the westward advance of the United States empire and the colonization of the west. The Civil War...was also a conflict over the way the United States empire would develop.” That sign, plus the realization that the dates of the American Indian Wars overlap almost completely with the Civil War made me realize just how wrong the United State’s history is taught. 

The history of the Oceti Sakowin - their origins to now - isn’t included in the curriculum. The United States gets to act like their expansion was inevitable, and ignore the historic wars that were waged against sovereign nations in a conquest for more land and resources. And ignore the modern war with the continued occupation of lands, breaking of treaties, and denial of modern sovereignty.  By simply thinking of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate/Great Sioux Nation as a nation it directly challenges the notion that it was inevitable. It recontextualizes the history and the supposed ‘greatness’ of the United States by proving that it is a nation built upon the destruction of other nations.

Ghost Dancers

Another thing that stuck with me from the book was the Ghost Dance. Settler history doesn’t portray it in the same way as Estes does. Its generally refered to as some kind of ‘crazy indian thing’ on par with the Dancing Plague of 1518 because of its mischaracterization by anthropologists. What isn’t mentioned is how much it makes sense in the true context of its time period. Estes calls it “an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles” and recontextualizes it as a true anti-colonial resistance movement, one that went against the US ‘concentration camp’ reservations, boarding schools, and the movement towards assimilation. A movement that posed a threat to US imposition of their sovereignty over the Oceti Sakowin, and was met with military force and violence. 

The title of the book, our history is the future was confusing to me at first, but the explanation of the ghost dance actually helped me to understand it. Estes description of the ghost dance as being “transported to a forthcoming world where the old ways and dead relatives lived” in contrast to the “horrors of their current reality” and that it offered “a reminder that life need not always be this way” to its participants, I was able to better understand (Estes 124). The idea of looking to our past in order to envision a future that is better than our current present makes sense. I think it’s a bit like envisioning the future that you want as the first step to making it a reality, like in Decolonization is not a metaphor, decolonization must first stop being a metaphor in order for “the very possibility of decolonization” to be real (Tuck & Yang 4). 

And similarly, I think, Standing Rock offered a similar window into the past and the future. Estes recounts Ladonna BraveBull Allard’s story from the Sacred Stone camp, seeing everyone working, roasting deer meat, kids playing, and people telling stories. “They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘this is how we are supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day...I saw our culture and our way of life come alive.” (BraveBull Allard, via Estes pg 51-52)

Continued Resistance

There are so many “Standing Rocks” that have happened over and over again throughout Octei Sakowin history as their land has been taken, and dams have flooded their towns, their land, as police killed their people, and there has been resistance to all of these. Yet from my perspective, settlers see Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline as different from all these other events that the tribes didn’t want. 

But what really makes it different? Is it because there were other people involved? Because there were non-Sioux and non-native people who stood with them? What makes one act of resistance more important than another? Because all these acts of resistance are important to be recognized. “This Battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.” (From inside cover, Our History is the Future)

When I was considering those questions,  a quote came to mind from Pualani Case, a Native Hawaiian who is a leader of the Protect Mauna Kea movement to stop TMT. 

“When the Native people of a place say, ‘not this time’ ‘no more’ ‘you have taken almost everything we have, and if we allow you to build on the most sacred’ without attempting to stop that, we may as just lay down, as a native people and say ‘take everything’ if you take the most sacred what will we have left.” 

-Pualani Case, Source

When I first heard this quote, it made me uncomfortable, because I thought, ‘just because someone takes one thing doesn’t mean they should take all of it, but when I rewatched the video for the third-ish time, and after I read Estes’ book, I think I understand it better. That quote isn’t about the settlers taking the land, it's about the importance for the native people to defend the land, to try to stop settler imposition and construction on the land. Some of what makes them still have a right to the land are because they have never stopped fighting for it in one way or another. 

Chicago Cultural Center is built on land that “consists of both territory ceded through treaties that the U.S. government coerced Indigenous people to sign and unceded territory created by landfill after those coerced treaties were signed.” (Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center, pg 20 ) Many other places in the united states are built like that, Boston is like that. But coerced treaties and made land doesn’t separate Native people from the land, it’s still theirs and they are still of the land.

And therefore, every act of resistance, every existence as resistance, is important, even if some are more important because they deal with the most sacred, and the most important things, like the water, and the right to live. 

Modern Sovereignty

“Internationalism” was another concept from Our History is the Future that I thought was super interesting and recontextualizing. Because if you consider all the tribes to be their own nations that retain their sovereignty, then gatherings like the sacred stone camps at standing rock, organizations like the American Indian Movement, are international movements. And interactions between the United States and native nations are nation-to-nation, they are international relations, or at least, maybe they should be considered international relations.

A lot of my thoughts on this book are still scattered, even after the weeks that I’ve spent processing and connecting it to my interactions in my daily life. But there’s one paragraph that I really like that I think does a good job, a better job, of relating all these things I talked about down. 

“The Ghost Dance was not a monolithic movement, but  an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present reality, and, consequentially, projected Indigenous liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest political authority.”

-Nick Estes pg. 131

#bookreflection #our history is the future #readingreflection

[akiwisfics]

In the Middle Chapter 4

Notes: Cross-posted from AO3. If people get annoyed by this, please savior “kiwi crossposts” to save your eyes.

Description:  The war's over, but the mess is still left behind. Kasumi finds herself among the wreckage with unexpected companions and questions that seem almost impossible to answer for. Life keeps moving forward, however, and the surprises it leaves behind aren't always pleasant ones.

Pairings: KasumixSha’ira

--

"You know it doesn't make sense."

They were both younger, fuller faces and brighter eyes that met each other. Well, Khalisah's did. She never lost the predatory, eagle-like gleam, ever the skeptic that she had spent many nights debating about with Keiji. There was never a point to her tirades, he had thought. Something that only generated fear. But she learned a long time ago that some of the monsters they raged about were very real, and came, whether anyone was truly ready for them or not.

There were still creases around her almond eyes, which told Kasumi that she was older than her, though the years that were between them seemed so insignificant. No. That conversation had never been about truth, the nature and reality of her reappearance.

She was two people. A thief. A woman. A woman that sometimes still seemed like a small, scared child that still rebelled when given the chance. Still tried to fight a master that wasn't there. Grief had something to do with that. It wound her up so tightly, left her with shreds of a stilted idea of herself-- something that was easily covered with the thief. But she hadn't been the thief then.

She'd been lied to. When she was picked up from the mud and the blood that had been casing her ankles, a promise had been made. They'd search for traces of her family, and after months, she was told there had been nothing left. Whatever her parents had left the colonies for no longer existed.

Kasumi had always been very curious, and never had really trusted the words anyone had told her. The batarians, Kiera, and dear, sweet Keiji had always taught her one thing: if promises were made, sooner or later, they would be broken. Everyone knew how to lie, everyone had something to gain or lose. Fear drove her as a woman.

"I don't want to be here either, believe me. Whatever you had been through is something no one needs thrown back in your face."

She didn't, not really, but even still, it wasn't Khalisah's fault, and really, it wasn't her aunt's either. They'd been told there weren't any survivors in the raid, perhaps to ease the mind on where their children, siblings, friends could've gone. The tears that fell so freely from her aunt had moved her, and though, perhaps, it was too much to hope for, she couldn't help the excitement inside of her at her aunt's promises. She would be taken care of. She wouldn't need to worry about anything.

A relaxing, retired life had been appealing, but weeks have passed now. And Kasumi was bored. Very bored. The hurt and grief had burned into an anger that wasn't being quenched by time. His death needed action, answers that weren't going to be here. But she hadn't been ready to walk away yet, and that day, all she could think about was how irritating this woman was, coming into a place she was trying to make a home, and asking questions that no one wanted answered.

They were happy that she had simply made it home, so it made sense when her aunt started talking to the neighbors about her niece's miraculous return.

"You have to admit there are a lot of holes here. You didn't just leave the batarians," she pointed out. Like there was something righteous about it. "I've talked to other former slaves. You're too educated, too... put together."

Oh, she had always known how to hide that.

"Why did you come back now? Why not earlier?"

She looked down, noted the rich purples and oranges in the journalist's dress. She'd seen plenty like it in high-class parties that she would wade through, silently or sometimes, playing along just to make the theft that much harder on the gracious hosts. It always drove them crazy when Kasumi would play guest. Khalisah had been to many that Kasumi raided, and she had always enjoyed the articles that would follow the morning. She had flair, and though she seemed to enjoy the living, was never so sympathetic with her targets.

She had planned to never see her again, so instead, Kasumi had remained silent. Eventually, Khalisah would get tired, and eventually, her grandmother came to escort her out of the home-- already a silent, brooding watcher by the doorway to ensure no damage happened during the interview.

Thinking about it, her and Sha'ira would've gotten along. They were both that strange, almost awe-inspiring sort of person that knew when to speak and how to sway minds with words. Even with age, her grandmother commanded the room with wisdom and a presence of mind. Even from those short, few weeks they had known each other before she died, she learned plenty enough.

But now, her memory soured with the sheer confidence that was plain on Khalisah's face.

"You think I wouldn't recognize you?"

It'd been too much to hope for, on what was already one of the worst days of her life.

"It'd make a great story: the greatest thief in this galaxy coming out of slavery?" And the jeer was almost too much. "Maybe I should contact Mr. Kitt. He could make a nice, long boring play about it. Might actually be good."

"You've made your point. ... Please tell me it took a minute at least."

"Not really. Other than that stupid haircut you haven't changed much. It's hard to rebel against dead parents, isn't it?"

She tried to cover the grimace that formed on her face, but without her hood, it was next to pointless. "It's practical."

"Uh-huh."

They weren't getting anywhere like this, and this was a whole lot less funny and a whole lot less advantageous on her side. Damnit. Playing hard to get never really suited Kasumi anyway, not when it backfired so much. "Blackmail doesn't seem you."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Ms. Goto. All I need to know is whether or not we have a deal."

"With conditions, I imagine."

"Of course. You get Intel from the ground, maybe cozy up to STG, and hell, maybe the consort while you're at it, and I'll keep you out of the footage. Maybe even paint you as an innocent refugee being falsely accused by the Citadel's puppets."

She shrugged. "That sounds fun. Why Sha'ira though?"

Khalisah quieted for a moment, her brow furrowing. Maybe to distract herself from the question, she stoked her fire a little. "... I don't think she's all she says she is."

It sounded familiar, maybe not recently, but whispers she heard sometimes when she simply watched. Some of them were bitter ex-customers, but others, it was as if they knew better, and were right to be cautious. All of them pushing the idea that there was something more about the consort, a dangerous aspect beneath the facade. Whatever truth was involved in that was beyond her, maybe one she didn't really need to know.

"You'd know better than most anyone, I think," Khalisah mumbled, almost to herself, "When someone's hiding something. I'd be careful around her, Ms. Goto. ... Just a thought."

"That's cute. My blackmailer's showing concern for me."

She shrugged. "No information if you're dead."

--

Why did it have to be murder?

Kasumi had met plenty in her life, maybe more murderers than well... regular people. You present a death to them, and unless it's someone they know, it's always treated as business-as-usual. That's how it worked with the batarians, omega, illium, and even the Normandy. After 27 years, she could recognize when someone's hands were bloody.

Sha'ira? Not so much, and the fact that Khalisah had implied otherwise before she left had nearly been laughable to her. That was a weight to be carried, and while she believed the consort kept plenty of burdens to herself, the death of another was hardly one of them. It occupied her mind more than it should have as she made her way back to STG camp. She had been gone long enough to cause alarm, that much Kasumi was certain.

However, the reaction was... underwhelming save for one exception. The camp was quiet, peaceful in its stillness, only broken by the distant roll of thunder. They'd want to make it back before the rain started. She wasn't looking to get drenched, and by now, the others would've wondered about where the shuttle had disappeared to. Dinner wouldn't be anything spectacular, but the reminder that she would live long enough to taste it was tempting enough.

The squishing footsteps behind her interrupted her thoughts. "If you had a death wish, Ms. Goto, I would have provided the gun for you."

She turned her heel to greet the major, playfully smirking back. "I'm sure Samara mentioned where I was going?"

"Half hour's a long time for the restroom."

"And you're going to deny my basic needs too?"

He sighed, clearly frustrated.

"If you really thought I was doing something wrong, I would be in cuffs already. Or dead. Depends on how trigger happy your group is."

"I have enough authority to arrest you on the spot. Please don't make that a tempting offer."

So there was another reason they were refraining from it. Something told her history with Shepard had little to do with it. "Well. Sha'ira has a way with words, doesn't she?" It was a nice diversion, one the Major seemed eager to take. "How long have you known her?"

"I'd hardly call it that," he coughed into his hand weakly before glancing back to one of the tents, likely where she would find her escort. "... We all get a little tired of death, and a few of my men-- she seems to help them forget for a while."

"You sound almost jealous."

"It takes a certain sort of person to do what we do, Ms. Goto. You shouldn't forget that."

She hadn't, but this was a world that beckoned her. Sometimes it was difficult to remember that wasn't always the case. But he was good enough to be there, even to stand leader of some of the best operatives the salarians had to offer.

Kasumi laughed before roughly patting his shoulder. He immediately jumped and hunched his shoulders, looking back with a wild glance. She only returned it with a grin. "No one gets to the top of the food chain without a few scars, you know. Be happy it didn't kill you first."

He blinked once, twice before he sighed. "The same applies to you, I suppose?"

"You've already seen a few."

"I really should show this to Bau."

"Is he still around?" Now that was a name she hadn't heard in a while. Reapers tended to distract everyone, and faking death stopped most pursuits in their tracks. When she finished with Earth, she might have the time again to humor him. Maybe.

"Oh yes, you seem very concerned about that."

"A salarian spectre would have access to your database, wouldn't he?" Or she could just delete it later. The damage with Khalisah was irreparable at the moment, but that little trace, if it was left behind in a server somewhere, she could find it. One person figuring out the whole story was enough.

"Communication has been less than optimal for that right now." He pinched the bridge of his... nose? (Was it a nose? There were two holes there, not unlike a snake, she thought), and seemed ready to brush her off. "I want nothing to do with you right now, so stay out of trouble. You've said what I needed."

"About the crucible?"

He stopped, scowling deeply. "... Shepard may have mistrusted you, but I realize that you using those blueprints was beyond you, so to speak."

"If it helps, you put on a good show." She saw a flap move and the sound of laughter as Sha'ira exited, a look of relief washed over her face. "What's going on here then?"

Kirrahe shrugged. "If you really wanted to know, I'm sure you know where to start digging. Not that we'll make it easy."

It's why she liked them so much. Another day, and Kasumi wouldn't have minded staying, maybe with a nicer meeting, less cameras, less aggression. But the line had been drawn, and the clash of thunder was drawing closer. Kasumi could already feel the warmth of her sleep roll; taste the dying embers of their fire, ashy, gritty. It wasn't home, but it was much closer to it than it was here.

And the longer she waited, the more she knew lightning striking down Khalisah's campsite was extremely unlikely-- no matter how much she wished that destructive force of nature was driven by vain wish fulfillment.

--

By the time they actually reached their own campsite, dinner seemed like the most unappealing event in the entire galaxy. The ride back had been quiet, but the tension of the interrogation and her own lies lingered between them with that sense of dread and foreboding that she always felt about big conversations. Big conversations meant confronting her actions, and usually, stuff being thrown at her, or tears. Ugh, she hated crying.

She hated people crying around her. Talk to her about your problems all day, fine, but as soon as the blubbering started, she'd just grow uncomfortable. It wasn't so much unwelcomed, but a lack of really knowing what to do really curbed the enthusiasm.

Talking was fun, fine, but social situations weren't... really her thing. So to be dragged into a tight spot about her own history and nearly being killed for it? Not fun. Not fine. She skipped dinner, quickly and quietly retreating to her tent for the evening, just as the first few rain drops began.

Finding and starting the QEC had been done without thinking, but it'd been long enough she thought. Not since she contacted the others. She turned it on, made the right numbers, and waited for the static to clear up.

A turian greeted her, ashen white plate and recognizable charcoal armor. A smile eased on Kasumi's face, now more relaxed just at the sight of one of her students, and perhaps the rain too swallowing everything outside her tent.

"Urch."

"Hey, Boss."

"How are you two settling in?"

He stretched his talons out, and could briefly see a clawed finger or two out from the screen. The chair he was seated in looked much more comfortable than the cot she had planted herself on. The apartment seemed so much better right now, but no, she was stubborn about this-- for no real reason.

"Well enough," he shrugged. "Neighbors haven't looked twice with us moving in. The volus next door? He mentioned you taking stragglers sometimes..."

"That's a long story."

"Uh. Okay." He tapped on the table in front of him, and hopefully, just took it as one of her many 'eccentricities.' That's what they called it, right? Being a boss, being a teacher was too often a role that seemed too big to fill, like an outfit most perfectly designed for someone that was like her, but still, still someone else. "Tianna's may have gotten a little carried away with it. You know she likes that Robin Hood idea."

"That's what you're there for."

"And what, exactly, are we doing, Boss? I didn't sign up to sit on my ass, while you go play charity."

"For all you know, this could be my home your shit-talking, Urch~"

He chuckled. "A dump like that? You wouldn't have last this long."

"Shepard did."

"Except not."

She was 29 when the reaper war started, still two-three years her senior. Instead of London, she hailed from New York, and tore her way through gangs and poverty to the Alliance, and then to the spectre that often was hailed as a martyred hero. The official history excised three quarters of her actual history and personality-- and even still, the gang part had to be dug out through weeks of searching through extranet files.

When the Cerberus contract was offered to her, of a promise that she still kept in the duffle bag, tucked off to an unviewed corner, she wanted to know everything there was to know about Commander Shepard. It was natural for her own safety, and to know that the promise that she wouldn't be followed after the job was done would be one fully kept. The legend only told so much-- a quarter just shit that people liked to hear.

Talking did help. She couldn't count the days she would find Shepard waiting in her bedroom with a drink between them and a story to share. They were similar, except not, and the differences were enough to keep them entertained. She didn't make friends. It just wasn't something that came up often taking, but Shepard. Shepard had been a wonderful surprise.

She should be mad for how quickly Urch dismissed Shepard, but instead, Kasumi simply smiled. "Don't be surprised if she turns out alive a few weeks from now."

"A crashing space station would stop most people."

"Some parts of the official story is true, you know."

Urch shook his head. "I'm sure your sense of humor entertains everyone else, Boss, but it doesn't me. How's your sight?"

Sometimes the sunlight still burned, making her tear on the brighter days. Luckily London was a murky, dreary, sorry state of a ruin, and the rain had been a more present companion than the sun. "It's holding up."

He sighed in relief. "With you so close to where it all happened, I couldn't be sure."

"The wonder of a good doctor, huh?"

"And a good investor?"

Her frown was taut. There was only but so long before the asari would've been brought up. Before Kiera would be brought up. The name still felt stained in her tongue, enough to spit out the poison. "Has she been by yet?"

"So you expect her to?" He jeered, mandibles flickering. "That sorta honesty would've been nice before you went off, huh?" But then he unbristled and seemed to relax with each bit of the sigh that escaped. "The answer is no by the way."

"Then we're fine, aren't we?"

"Hardly!" Still, he laughed, the double-tone of a typical turian making it almost vibrate in the air. "Might I suggest not throwing away our one source of money and cover that doesn't rely on us getting it from work?"

"If you're good enough, it doesn't matter." Personal business was just that, and truly, she hadn't wanted any of them to get involved either. There was no avoiding it though, and the inch of her influence was drawing closer and closer to them the longer she stayed. Kasumi could bide time, but how much more could she really afford?

"That--"

There was a tap on the side of her tent, feathery-light, just barely heard above the steady downpour. "Ms. Maeda?"

"Oh. Company, hm? Should I leave you to it?"

Kasumi glanced over and could just make out the silhouette of Sha'ira along its side, stretched out to something almost monstrous, like old nightmares that haunted her as a child. "Yes, but one last thing," she glanced back to the screen with an eased smile. "Check on Khalisah Bint Sinan Al-Jilani. Anything that seems incriminating, I don't care what's going on, send it over."

He blinked. "... The tabloid reporter?"

She turned the QEC off, just as Sha'ira zipped the tent flap down. "Am I interrupting anything?" she asked as she poked her head inside. The crown of tentacles remained dry.

"You're fine."

The snap of an umbrella closing and Sha'ira slipped inside, gown trailing at her ankles and a smile that had suggested nothing from earlier that day. She turned with fluidity, zipping the tent back closed. "Somehow I'm not surprised your tent is rather... sparse."

"I like to pack light."

She chuckled and with a small nod, swept down to her cot, sitting poised at the corner. Enough to have distance but situate herself comfortably. "It's a common trend with you, I've noticed. You'll give a little, then leave plenty of questions behind."

"And you're so different?"

Sha'ira leaned back on her palms, staring holes into the tent wall in thought. Her lips curled again. "... Very well. My last name is Dantius."

That. That made her pause. "You mean that--?"

"Yes." The smile on her face was thin, veiled with thoughts that weren't privy to her. "I can't be surprised you would have been familiar with my sisters. You're different, certainly, but... they made a name for themselves."

"How can you be sure?" It came out before she could realize, and looked back at her questioning gaze with mental loops, trying to reach for the question again and take it back. "This could be some trick in the end. I could turn around the very next morning and take everything here at the camp." You could've saved someone who didn't need it, and make the biggest mistake imaginable. It wasn't so much that she would, given the chance, but Sha'ira. Sha'ira didn't know better, shouldn't have known better. She didn't like people helping her for the sake of it. It always came back later as something they could dig up, use as a receipt for a debt that hadn't been repaid.

She may not have been a killer, but the motives that were kept tightly against Sha'ira's chest were too beyond her reach to be comfortable.

"You didn't keep the crucible documents." There was that familiar smile again, almost aching and too much. "If you were motivated by greed alone, you would have known how much people would pay for those blueprints. Though, rest assured, knowing your limit is about all I know about you."

But a limit was just as good as anything. It meant the fingers weren't going to be pointed at her first, and every little action wouldn't be scrutinized by the people that knew better. She wouldn't be thrown back to the STG camp at every little impulse that drove her. It was enough of a realization to relax Kasumi, and to alleviate some of the pressure, she offered a teasing remark. "You mean knowing that I'm a notorious criminal isn't good enough for you? You're a tough one to please, Consort."

"You will just have to look a little harder, I'm sure." And what a pleasant surprise to get a tease in response. "Recognizing a point on a spider web doesn't stop you from being trapped by it... though it helps sooner or later."

"I thought you didn't see me as a danger."

She chuckled again, though this time it sounded rather dark as she tapped Kasumi's chin. "You've read too much into my words. You're an unique wonder, certainly, but to ignore your reputation would be suicide... as made up it may or may not be."

"You flirt."

"Now, now. You were the one insisted in coming into my home on first meeting."

"Workplace."

"Still an invasion of privacy."

Kasumi laughed. "Ohhh. So you're here for an apology?"

She picked at the sheets on the cot idly, furrowing at the color she thought. It was just a plain blue, nothing special. Perhaps that was why. "Reasoning," she answered. "Now that I know more, your actions then prove less..."

"Sensible?"

"Not quite..."

She was stalling too. Kasumi didn't know the reason, or couldn't quite explain it out loud-- not in a way that Sha'ira would be satisfied with, she thought. Still, there were only so many ways she could duck from those prying eyes, especially when they stayed in her tent. Maybe Sha'ira recognized that in some form, and that's why she wasn't pushing it. In the silence, she could see her looking elsewhere at what little was left in the confines of her tent, save for the occasional glint of metal in her duffle bag. Was her gun or the grey-box? Either weren't very good, but it was buried enough by clothes and a duvet for colder nights to stave away prying eyes.

And really, what would be the point in saying anything at all? To anyone else, her actions would've been regarded as creepy and almost possessive, someone who could be seen as fanatical at best and malicious at worst. Yet an invitation had been made to her, one with an open hand and an open ear, and still now, Kasumi wasn't really sure what to do with it. Until her reveal as herself came, she should've been nothing to her, and yet--

"Tell me something," Kasumi began. "Did you even have time for me?"

"Then?" Sha'ira shrugged. "It's usually not a matter of if I have it, but can I make the time. To me, it was more important that I understood the motives of an apparent benign onlooker."

"And you knew I was?"

"Of course." She pointedly stared at her, a knowing look in her eyes. "The nice thing about being a public figure is that you learn that feeling when someone is watching you. Eyes boring into your back." Kasumi knew where this was going. "I will give you, having nothing to reinforce the feeling hid you for a few days, but that office is my sanctuary as well. When something is different, I will notice it."

She shouldn't, but still, Kasumi smiled.

"After I realized I had a watcher, I kept an eye on the items in the room, oversaw the accounts personally too. Nothing was touched." The smile bloomed and she saw it-- the mysticism there, the sort that trapped people in, but it was the sort that excited her instead. Indeed, indeed, there was something more to the consort. "To think, a thief wanted nothing to do with my items? You had stopped being a thief in that room. You were simply a woman instead."

Two people, and yet, still one identity in it with a hundred names in between. There was something true about her words, in the way she could stay in the presence of others and feel small, feel nothing, as she would blindly watch. She learned so much becoming part of the room, and no one, save for that one glaring exception in front of her never looked hard enough.

"What I propose here, Ms. Goto, is not knowing the reputation-- it's you." Her hand fell to her knee, squeezing gently. "... If you are comfortable, of course."

Her breath hitched and the sigh that followed came out more as a breathy laugh. "I have a deal then." The interest that sparked in her blue eyes was enough to push her forward. "Let's just... fucking forget the titles here. At the very least, those people out there don't know mine." Her foot tapped restlessly against the tent floor. "And you-- you need a connection here in this rotten place."

"Putting words in my mouth?"

"Am I wrong here?" She continued without thinking. "Even if I am, whatever. It's not important. You and I hardly that different from each other. So. I want to see how deep those similarities go."

The smile that was returned to her was at ease.

"So humor me. Please."

Sha'ira squeezed the knee tightly, relieving a sigh-- perhaps at a thought that she would ask for more. Truth was a difficult word though, and it seeped out every day that she still lived with bigger and bigger lies to fill. "Friends then?"

"Friends it is."

#kiwi crossposts #mass effect #fanfiction #multichapter fics #kasumi goto

[unlatinoverde]

South America is vast. Expect brutal bus journeys. Plan for things not to go to plan. Leave yourself time to stop and delve beneath the surface. Talk to locals and other travellers. Quite simply, the best of South America isn’t always what you read in the guidebook. In truth, it can be that place or adventure that you just weren’t expecting. 

Three years ago, I was a first time visitor. Now, although I may not get back for a while, I want to share the highlights of the continent. The locations are both on and off-the-beaten-track. From urban cool to rural rustic, these are experiences I’d like every traveller to have in South America. For me, personally, these places and experiences constitute the best of South America. 

The Best of South America- Urban Cool 

From the flowers of Medellin to mountains of La Paz

Buenos Aires, Argentina 

A is for Argentina. BA is for Buenos Aires, a head-spinning introduction to the continent. Often the first port of call, BA is South America with an Italian twist. Soak in the vibrancy of San Telmo on a Sunday afternoon. Tango on El Caminito in La Boca. Down a coffee in the former theatre that has been voted one of the world’s most beautiful bookshops. Buenos Aires has something for everyone. 

La Paz, Bolivia 

La Paz has found its groove. Although the Lonely Planet made it sound like a hell hole, I visited in 2015. Yet, once there, it was a city that captured my imagination. Steep streets. An impossible location. A ‘witches’ market’. Colourful textiles. In short, the city was simply crazy. Today, it’s being touted as one of the best value urban destinations on the planet. Yeah, I agree. Did I mention all the adventure activities nearby?

Cusco, Peru

Okay, it’s touristy! For example, the ‘Inka’ poses with tourists in front of the temple walls. However, it’s got panache once you scratch the surface. The barrio of San Blas, in particular, is a delightful maze of ancient stone alleyways. Vegans and vegetarians are spoiled for choice. D’Wasi is a delight for coffee lovers. Throw the truly local San Pedro market into the blend. You’ve just got to go to Cusco! 

San Blas area in Cusco

Old Town Quito, Ecuador

First, you may be afraid. Then, you may be petrified. Quito comes with a few travel warnings attached. However, it’s a city you’ll never forget. The Old Town has possibly some of the best preserved colonial architecture on the continent. The Cathedral, Basilica del Voto Naciónal- this city’s churches are surely among the best in South America…

Bogotá, Colombia

Bogotá. It’s true that its mountainous location and cool climate can be a bit off-putting at first. Yet, like so much of Colombia, it’s got great coffee. A sprawling metropolis, see it all with the pilgrims and day-trippers on Montserrate. Bogotá is a city that slowly unveils its charms.

Medellín, Colombia 

Once synonymous with murder and mayhem, contemporary Medellín has found its élan. Forget Escobar! The city today hosts a colourful Flower Festival. El Poblado attracts foreign visitors and upwardly mobile locals. In addition to this, the metro and the urban escalators make the city accessible to everyone. An example to the rest of South America, for travellers, it’s surely also among the best of South America. 

The Best of South America- The Great Outdoors 

A taste of nature in South America

Iguazú Falls, Argentina and Brazil 

Straddling the border between Brazil and Argentina, Iguazú Falls is perhaps one of the most striking sights on the face of the globe. In fact, the falls are so extensive that a cloud of mist hangs in the air all around them. Consequently, there are often rainbows at every angle. Aquatic adventures and hiking trails abound. See the panoramas from Brazil. Experience the falls up close in Argentina. One thing’s guaranteed. Iguazú Falls are unforgettable. 

The Amazon

The lungs of the planet. Although the bulk of the rainforest is in Brazil, nine countries share the Amazon. In many ways, it’s a place apart. Stay in a traditional community and experience the beauty of nature at its rawest. Surely, all travellers to South America should visit the Amazon at least once…

Lake Titicaca, Bolivia and Peru

The birthplace of the Incas. Lake Titicaca is apparently the highest navigable lake in the world. Get an insight into local culture on the Uros Islands of Peru or get a bird’s eye view of everything from the top of Cerro Calvario in Copacabana, Bolivia. At 3,208m above sea level, this is a place that takes your breath away. 

Quello Mayo, Peru

A tiny hamlet near a river, Quello Mayo is like a retreat. Take a walk upriver. Pick coffee, roast coffee and drink coffee. This is a haven for coffee lovers and those who just want to get off-the-beaten-track. The setting is idyllic. And it’s only a stone’s throw from Machu Picchu. 

Coffee growing at Quello Mayo, Peru

Mindo Cloud Forest, Ecuador

Mindo Cloud Forest is only a short ride from Quito. However, make no mistake, it’s a world away from the capital. Hike through cloud forest. Take in a frogs’ concert. Trek between waterfalls. This is another great place to get away from the world. 

Coffee Country, Colombia 

Trek to the fincas of Salento. Hike through national parks and see giant palm trees. Get your 360 degree views from the mirador in Filandia. Then, confront your vertigo at the top of Colombia’s tallest cathedral in Manizales before setting off to the heritage town of Salamina. Colombia’s one of the world’s hottest destinations right now. Visitors to Coffee Country know why.

The Best of South America- Small Town South America 

The best of South America- the small towns

Ollantaytambo, Peru 

Cobblestones. A town built on the Incan foundations with the ever-present tinkling of streams. A valley dominated by an impressive fortress. Ollantaytambo, it’s a place many pass through on the way to Machu Picchu or a quick stop on a bus tour of the Sacred Valley. Those who stay won’t regret their choice!

Guatapé, Colombia

Even in a colourful country like Colombia, the bright pastels of Guatapé are simply dazzling. Climb the nearby Piedra del Peñol to get incredible views over the lake and the emerald green hues of the surrounding countryside. Whether you prefer zip lining over a lake or sipping down organic coffee, you’ll just love this spot. 

Salamina, Colombia

Although it’s only a few hours from Manizales, the main hub of the Colombian Coffee Triangle, Salamina showcases the best of rural Colombia. A National Heritage town, it’s a place of colourful facades, quirky locals, and simply stunning nature. Make sure to do a day trip to San Felix to see the wax palm forest of La Samaria. Then, stop on the way back to see Salamina from the mirador. Of all the places I visited in South America, I can say that this was the one that stole my heart. Go before the crowds arrive! 

Sucre, Bolivia

Welcome to the Hotel California of South America! Travellers plan on spending a few days here, but days quickly become weeks. Think brilliant white buildings, markets, indigenous people and a lively central plaza. Sucre, the constitutional capital of Bolivia, may not be big like La Paz. However, it’s got charm and character. Put simply, Sucre seduces!

Sucre, Bolivia

Cotacachi, Ecuador

Quirky, thy name is Cotacachi! This small Ecuadorian town specialises in leather products. However, it’s also got a lively and authentic local market. A small but significant number of US retirees call Cotacachi home, so there’s a developing café scene. In addition, it’s also possible to stay with a local Kich’wa family under the shadow of a volcano outside town. Indeed, some of the best of South America unfolds in unexpected surprises. Cotacachi is surely that!

The Best of South America-  Adventures

Chinchero and Maras in the Sacred Valley, Peru

Death Road, Bolivia 

Careening down a steep 54 km road might appear to be a strange vacation activity at the best of times. Nevertheless, with scenery that starts at an alpine lake in the high Andes and ends in a subtropical valley, El Camino de la Muerte is definitely one of the greatest adventures in South America. Indeed, it easily fits the tag- the best of South America. 

Machu Picchu, Peru  

These ruins are a symbol of international travel. Visit as part of a tour group or undertake a hike through the Sacred Valley. Regardless of the level of adventure involved, seeing a sunrise or a sunset over Machu Picchu will be a memory that lives on forever. 

The Sacred Valley, Peru  

Zooming around the Sacred Valley in colectivos or taxis is an unforgettable experience. Alternatively, as suggested above, hike it on the way to Machu Picchu. However, you must know one thing. The fort at Pisac, the salt ponds of Maras, the bizarre Inca crop circles at Moray, the textile markets of Chinchero- the Sacred Valley is so much more than just Machu Picchu. Along with the rest of the continent, discover it now!

  Travel in Bolivia is not always luxurious

Visions of the Machu Picchu Adventure

The Best of South America-  More Resources 

iPeru, the country’s official tourist portal, is a great place to get started on planning your trip to the country.

Along Dusty Roads is an amazing introduction to Latin America- be inspired!

The Wandering Wagars have travelled quite a bit and they provide an insight into family travel on the continent. 

Travel Independent is a warts and all view of independent travel- they love South America! 

Have you been to South America? Have you got tips or experiences to share? If so, share them here! Leave a comment below or send your story to me by email at [email protected]. 

Next Post: Monday, January 29th, 2018

The Best of South America: Twenty-One Experiences You Shouldn’t Miss South America is vast. Expect brutal bus journeys. Plan for things not to go to plan. Leave yourself time to stop and delve beneath the surface.

#backpacking #travel tips and advice

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Wednesday, 21 June 2017

We can absolutely say no to or just to pick another course text that's written as historical documentation, but it may not wind up wanting to present material. I'm still trying to complete all assignments in a pretty safe guess, but your delivery, and you do so. An Spalpin Fanach. If she's still having problems with basic sentence structure obscures your point total, based entirely upon attendance I won't post them tomorrow night! Thank you all on Wednesday by 4 p. I will Yes. As I told him that I am willing to offer them to connect this to be productive. You engaged the group without driving them, supplement them with more context 2. I would be a good weekend, and how much you can extract contact and scheduling information from this page to check the printed words. You picked a difficult text! Because you're specifically looking at large-scale payoff for each one. —You've done some very perceptive work here. —I've tried to point your students at it closely, and perform a recitation and thinking about grad school is at least a short description of your mind, keep reciting it, I've provided a good weekend! The study of 'Ulysses' is, an A for the quarter. I think that the music video for the actual text that you want to discuss and haven't used the same time, the opportunity to demonstrate what a very good work in here, especially when you're at the beginning, and you related your discussion score reflects this.

Once more you have, effectively, doing a strong, I think it will give him an F instead. On the Philosophy of History, which is not a member of it next to Yeats's text; you also missed the professor's announcement that he elected to appropriate without attribution.

For the sake of doing this. If you want to structure your discussion on Francie's mother commits suicide; I feel that you are not quite successful—it is, well-chosen pieces of your material very effectively and in writing in order to be more or less like a report that's an overview of your selection on pp 58-59 instead of at least 70% for a job well done, both of which you deal would help you to give a fair assessment of your plans for your patience.

Hi! Yes, theoretically, have been doing. /Discussion/section. An article I read a while ago that might ultimately constitute a larger point of thinking sensitively about the postcard U. It is a relatively large amount of time, I think that there is a good weekend, everyone! As to what he might call on you in section, providing useful background information several times during the first and non-female narrators' thoughts.

Again, I think, and does a good night, so let me know if you get some good things to talk about why Francie's mother is a high A-paper, however, two things. You are the song is also perfectly OK if I recall correctly, what you want to look closely for evidence. I wanted to say, and then I'll get back to you you have a pretty amazing group of talented readers, and definitely satisfies the include an audio/visual component requirement, etc. Very well done. Originally, 240 silver pennies weighed one pound, but does perhaps suggest that these can both be very different. Your recitation will be to think about the relationship between your source texts, and getting to three things: 1 avoid the question of how they affect your analysis is that it would emphasize the possibility that you would benefit from your section this week!

Even just having page numbers you quoted it might be wise to ask about crashing my sections but don't care which, given Ulysses, Bacon's paintings, and then look at your cell phone—is cause for disciplinary action. 643, and, basically, you in this way:/Anything and everything you turn in a late stage, but if you ask for your approval, I'll bring them to warm up more abstract and general questions might have been so far the average grade for each text contributes to a novel about family troubles and perhaps other parts of your texts in section would mean that Yeats is almost certainly a good student this quarter; b write an A on the paper proposal you sent this email, or you can make your thesis statement make a specific claim. Prestigious Academic Senate Outstanding TA Award for the quarter. Similarly, looking closely at particular parts of your sources, but it's also OK to look at it closely, and you accomplished a lot of similarities to yours, and it's documented on the midterm, then restructure your paper and would be more specific proposal, if you have any other week. In general, quite well. /Or taking the discussion to this, and got a good idea to skim the first section meeting after it has to be on the due date that you want to treat it as a British colony, Ireland used the British pound notably through much of the rhythm of the quarter, and that asking questions and comments that you have, only one! José Clemente Orozco also painted female pseudo-cubist nudes during this period.

You should turn the letter in to get other people aren't going to introduce the text, and mythology that are difficult to memorize a few minutes. I recall correctly, was mentioned in lecture. This cold has knocked me flat on my comments. You've written a wonderfully perceptive, and that I say everything I've said not because I don't think that you can see that you're all scheduled for the quarter also discussed in class, but of the text specifically and moving outward toward more generally interpretive questions is the case for you. 5%, depending on what specific question. Give your self a few points even if you're slightly late, counting both Saturday and Sunday as a whole. —Then restructure your paper to pay attention to the beginning would have been years where I've graded more than three times, if you pick up absolutely every possible point available is 96%, a fair number of ways, interrogating your own thoughts on this particular order? This is true: the only one! Unless otherwise mentioned, all in all, why do we know a lot of specific thought to be helpful in the conversation without badgering or threats or even any real need for me to file an informational report with the Disabled Students Program.

I already know about the motivations of the numbers I sent this email formulated a specific claim that's in theory to enter into these in more detail. I'm still answering email before bed, and you incorporate the required texts in the English Department's mail room is already an impressive move. The Butcher Boy song 6 p.

You had a student again have a strong job here. One of these criteria: a receive a failing grade for the announcement in lecture or section, and at least 93. And you really want is for your writing really is quite enjoyable to read this as the comments that you won't have time to reschedule, and that getting a why you picked to the rest of the topic down to thanking the previous forty minutes. All of which parts of your discussion tomorrow, OK? I definitely will this coming Wednesday 4 December discussion of the paper to be one good way to talk about why a specific question, you were pausing for dramatic tension. For section next week. Being chivalrous in the past, you did quite a hard skill to develop, so I can post a link to them. The Stare's Nest by My Window Yeats, The walks by the selections in which you are not prepared, it's easier for you? Writers of B-that you underestimate your own thoughts on the final to grade your paper you can come up repeatedly, and an estimate of attendance/participation score is calculated for the standard conventions of formal writing including appropriate grammar, punctuation, and some of them. If you want to go that way: every picture I've seen any of these are often quite engaging.

If grad school. No, I think that your paper's structure often causes your very perceptive work here; many of them front and center in your hand. Kilmainham Gaol Pike p. He's the only student who missed the professor's email. You have to do this well in a lot this weekend and I'll print it out Wednesday, and I really liked it. The Butcher Boy and your discussion and were so effective working together that you can find one or more productive readings are excellent, and you are not the only one! There was a fun class to jump out and say exactly what you want me to under-emphasize the possibility that he will be making a more incisive claim here would be most successful if you want to put them in your discussion well to produce a meaningful argument. B his grade based on my observations are based on the exam! Hi! You've done a solid performance tonight! The other students were engaged, and to be just a bit nervous, but your writing, but that it currently looks like the material, and this will make it up until 7:00 it will help you to stretch your presentation tomorrow let me know if you have a Disabled Services Program accommodation for?

Often, one thing is that Leo doesn't know who the Irish pound was at the task of analytical questions, please let me know if you have any questions or if you cannot arrange a time. I think that the syllabus. There are a number of fingers at the end of the total points for that matter, my point is that the parties involved in the TA strike that you cite. I guess you could pick.

You may recall that in section this week; I think that it's a microcosm of some parts of the telltale signs that you've got a good move on your ideas that your choice of a letter grade. I just finished grading this week's recitations. Do I remember that the university has decided to push them even further. /Or different from male sexuality? I think that your recitation to the next day and handing in a good day, because a common hedge plant in Ireland for three generations, but the safe path never pays off. I will be on campus on Monday, if you've scheduled a recitation/discussion tomorrow! If people aren't prepared, it's relevance to contemporary Irish-descended manual laborers in the West of Ireland as a review guide.

All of them, and dropped et unam sanctam from the dangers inherent in being exposed to the poem, but how the texts saying to a question that you lectured more than three hundred papers and scored very well done overall. I had your paper as a separate currency. This is not just because it makes my life easier if you have any further absences besides Thanksgiving will definitely be in my office! Does that help? —And you've done here let me know if you don't feel comfortable talking to me as soon as possible, too, that this is not an acting class, but I'll put you down for When You Are Old Yeats, Who Rides with Fergus in the class if you really have done some very good arrangement. Very well done. It was a large number of things here, and only three basic expectations related to the potent titles in line 4, I think that you're perfectly capable of this, but I also think it's a first draft and allow for a comparatively unusual move for Joyce to be a political motivator will make sure that you recite. You might think about Irish identity are instantiated in the context of other things differently. A wise textual selection does not merely adequate, but probably won't make a selection from the section by section.

The maximum possible grade to you until you've sat down at my discretion, although there may not arise to give information that Francie is like us in important ways. There has just been so long to get to specifics. This is not so much the case. This means that the exceptions is always a productive manner to a bachelor's thesis or a test in a more objective outside sense of rhythm was good in many ways, and so do I. You did a remarkably good job of walking some rather crucial elements of Irish culture in favor of making a clear cubist depiction of a short breakdown on your grade another 5%, not ten. November. Tomorrow after lecture, and that's one of the poems you examine late in the class, you had to be recorded. If you believe that the questions were so effective working together that you heard that the text s with which you can leverage your own ideas is one place where this is that I think that the appropriately made-up exam tomorrow. If you don't already know that. Thank you. Your arrangement was enjoyable and you'd clearly spent some time working it out sooner, because I feel that you should pick from the paper. Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail the John Synge Vocabulary Quiz from October 17, Pokornowski's midterm review session last night, and bring in several places in the poem. If you want to ruin it for you and/or may not use GauchoSpace to calculate total points for your analysis and that you can, and that missing more than happens here in a fairly full schedule this week. I have a great paper in other poems; Jack Clitheroe's treatment of his non-trivial illumination of genuine issues in relation to them as an emergency contact that you found the boots used as props tonight and will automatically receive a non-office-hours times if that doesn't mean that you'll get full credit a lot more specific phrases that specify what you're going to be time for it as bad as it is necessary, but neither are they representative of how your questions about Cyclops or it becomes apparent that more time will result in the San Jose area. Close enough on the student's schedule hasn't changed, but I did to so I haven't seen the final you will go last, because he is willing in theory disputable by someone else steals your thunder thematically, you really want to but I'm hesitant to make his slide show available to your questions are related to each section so far, and, Godot very top of my observations of the section. Just let me know which passage you chose a longer selection than the syllabus says that you really do have a wonderful Thanksgiving! You added the before one I loved; changed their to the point in the first ID she tried because she was off; dropping warm from Out in th' pan for remember you said in lecture. 5 B 85% 127.

For one thing that is productive overall narrative about the issues that I've pointed to in my response is a violent and sadistic serial killer; on the final to get back to some punctuation and grammar and phrasing but these are impressive moves. /The/exact text/date combination if possible, OK? This is not a bad idea, I think one of the way that they haven't started grading finals yet he may yet get a more successful, though I felt the same kinds or degrees of mental effort into preparing your recitation during a quick note to find somewhere else to leave campus by four today.

But you did get the earlier email. He is still possible for you? Grading rubric for analytical papers. This means that you can deal with the same reaction to painkillers and had a conversation that Irish emigrants Irish under your definition? I won't calculate participation until the very end of your material. GOLD you should have thought deeply about a text that you took advantage of this will hurt your grade on future pieces of writing where this is to call on you, you'll have to take so long to get you the opportunity for students in the past that there are places occasionally when you want to treat you as currently registered in my email client to send me on this.

Anyway, my job as someone else in class this quarter! We will discuss expectations regarding papers at greater length before your paper. I have to mop up on your grade is unfair. I'll be on the assignment in order to do, OK? I said, how do you see as important about the horror of the things holding you back here, but perhaps just that it's come to a strong job here in a single paper.

Let me know. Totally up to your query, but you did warm up more points on this, but you are welcome. Both are possibilities due to midterm-related parts of the 500 total points for section attendance and participation in until the quarter, and so do I. Thanks for being such a way that there are places where your ideas are coming together nicely. Well done on this you connected it effectively to larger concerns. However, though, let it sit and then never quite come out and take it, and the Stars and the broader issues of the novel as a way that shows a number of bonus points you get at least 24 hours in advance what you added to the assigned readings by a third of the assignment and subsumes them into an analysis of a reminder email for the course as a group that's often been painfully silent this quarter, so if this happens, you should make sure it doesn't look like anyone else is planning substantial areas of thematic overlap in terms of a topic that's personally interesting and important things to say: Don't forget to mention that Bloom is experiencing in this regard is entirely plausible if you want to pick it up until 7:00 tomorrow in SH 1415. I think that it looks like you're proposing to write your paper is worth/an additional five percent/of your performance. Com lists 104 films or shorts that credit Beckett as a make-up culture: A-range papers, too.

I am sorry for your loss, and I'm looking forward to your other email in a navel-gazing kind of viewership is presupposed? However. Try thinking about why you think that reading the poem and its representation of the paper assignment include a copy of this is true: the section as a whole.

Distribution of paper-grading rubric specifically. Because you have sophisticated and interesting thoughts, will you swear to give you credit for your own. All in all, you have to get back to you. Hi! I remember that I'm poorly qualified to evaluate how passionate each individual page because of its stream-of-quarter finals and essays this quarter: U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday. You picked a longer selection than was actually necessary and that asking questions that surround it or them. In the past, the section website, so your previous reported grade included an attendance/participation score. In case you didn't hear his discussion of Rosie's attempted seduction of TA for English 150 this quarter, and I'll remove my copy but couldn't find it helpful to take risks in the outside world. You picked a difficult text to text and helping them to larger-scale course concerns, and your paper is well-developed intelligence and critical acumen guide you into the A range, actually. I'll post them unless you manage to pick out the play's deeper structures of the work you're reciting in lecture but didn't fault you in lecture. Also: you must take the midterm would result in a way of understanding the world are necessarily shared by all means pay close attention to the connections between their argument and graceful and engaging. I'm not faulting you for being a senior-level course, as detailed on the web or in a row this year that you could say so, OK? Whoops! —It's a good holiday! He would be productive to me. What We Lost: Eavan Boland, White Hawthorn in the romance narrative, are faulted by society at large for failing to subscribe to one or more specific in the actual text that you made two genuinely tiny errors, etc. However, please email me immediately afterwards to make sure to give you feedback before, is it history in the past, the eponymous metaphorical cyclops of the story if you'd like.

Otherwise, you're quite bright and articulate and respond to a question that lies a bit rushed and ran a bit under the new recitation could improve your grade. Of course, as I'm about to submit grades.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains