#erasure will never be a privilege because it takes away your voice | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

arcadejohn127-9 · 3 years

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White people like you can be so entitled sometimes. Smh. Why do y'all have to change a characters race and turn they into something there not? Your race shapes your experiences, and your experiences shape most things about you. To to replace a characters race, is changing them. Just admit you have white entitlement and educate yourself. It isn't hard to not be racist. - A WOC who grew up in Texas.

Whilst I'm aware I am not free from internalised entitlement as I grew up with unknown privileges as a white person - I would like to clarify, I do infact educate myself if not Almost daily about perspectives and history. My fyp constantly having non white creators who are willing to educate people in topics I wouldn't think about actively.

I am very grateful to those creator's as it is not anyone's duty to educate the uneducated.

Whilst I can see why you are upset - I would of rather this been a DM discussion so I could actually ask you questions. Was something I said phrased poorly, What can I do better, ect.

But the obey me chatacters don't infact have canon races - canon skintones that are deemed flexible by different artists but canon skin tone in their sprites and most cards being consistent. There is no confirmation from the Devs that the chatacters are a certain race

So that is why I haven't really seen my HC erasure as there is nothing I'm replacing. So I had an HC of their race - making them lighter is just racist and taking away darker skin tones that are already hard to come by in media.

And from what I know; none of the darker characters have experienced racism in the game or anything that would shape them as a person due to their race. Being a demon or an angel has effected their up bringing but from how far I am in story, reading the devilgrams, reading the wiki's and keeping updated from players who've further progressed - this is no racism towards these characters in their universe.

Perhaps that's where my ignorance lies, in that mentality - I would love to be educated as it's never my intention to be disrepectful or insensitive. I still have so much learn and I cannot deny there is a possibility where I'm not seeing the full picture due to my upbringing.

I listen to non white voices and see what they do. When they make all the obey me boys black or turn an anime character blasian. I see that people who aren't white show that this thing is okay and I look into it - people saying it's fine. Just be mindful you're not going into sterotypes, have fun with what you see and think of these characters.

So I also go "wow! I really like these chatacters, I have a headcanon they would be from this community and I like the idea of giving them POC features to match."

Because I also have headcanon races for white characters - are they European white or American white - russian white, ect.

I gave Solomon tanner skin as from the original text outside of the game was that he was middle Eastern or atleast from the middle East. So I gave him tanner skin to reflect that.

I headcanon Simeon as Indian, I didn't really change much other than make him somewhat darker as I dislike the grey tones the artist use for darker characters. Mammon, the biggest change when it comes to tone as he came out alot darker than expected but I didn't really see an issue in that as I thought it would make sense as I see him as a black Indian.

Again, if I am please, I am grateful for people to point it out and educate me. Some things aren't easy to answer with just a Google search and Google is unreliable - someone who actually experiences racism voices is more reliable than an anonymous search engine.

I'm sorry if phrasing is strange or rambly. It's currently 3 am and I do struggle with putting what I think into words especially in serious discussions. I'm also bad with tone so I hope my words haven't come across as disrespectful

#obey me #obey me shall we date #aracadejohn217 9 #cw: race discussion #cw: racism #i don't want peoples pity or them to go out of their way to defend me #if you want to educate me on why my perspective is flawed then please do #its up to you #you don't owe me anything #i hope the anon also comment's back so we can talk #if theres something i can learn from this then i greet it with open arms

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased | Religion | Al Jazeera

This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi. The requests start off the same way: "I am getting married next month, and my fiance and I wanted to celebrate our Muslim background, and we have always loved this poem by Hafez. Could you send us the original?" Or, "My daughter is graduating this month, and I know she loves this quote from Hafez. Can you send me the original so I can recite it to her at the ceremony we are holding for her?"

It is heartbreaking to have to write back time after time and say the words that bring disappointment: The poems that they have come to love so much and that are ubiquitous on the internet are forgeries. Fake. Made up. No relationship to the original poetry of the beloved and popular Hafez of Shiraz.

How did this come to be? How can it be that about 99.9 percent of the quotes and poems attributed to one the most popular and influential of all the Persian poets and Muslim sages ever, one who is seen as a member of the pantheon of "universal" spirituality on the internet are ... fake? It turns out that it is a fascinating story of Western exotification and appropriation of Muslim spirituality.

Let us take a look at some of these quotes attributed to Hafez:

Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky.

You like that one from Hafez? Too bad. Fake Hafez.

Your heart and my heart Are very very old friends.

Like that one from Hafez too? Also Fake Hafez.

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Beautiful. Again, not Hafez.

And the next one you were going to ask about? Also fake. So where do all these fake Hafez quotes come from?

An American poet, named Daniel Ladinsky, has been publishing books under the name of the famed Persian poet Hafez for more than 20 years. These books have become bestsellers. You are likely to find them on the shelves of your local bookstore under the "Sufism" section, alongside books of Rumi, Khalil Gibran, Idries Shah, etc.

It hurts me to say this, because I know so many people love these "Hafez" translations. They are beautiful poetry in English, and do contain some profound wisdom. Yet if you love a tradition, you have to speak the truth: Ladinsky's translations have no earthly connection to what the historical Hafez of Shiraz, the 14th-century Persian sage, ever said.

He is making it up. Ladinsky himself admitted that they are not "translations", or "accurate", and in fact denied having any knowledge of Persian in his 1996 best-selling book, I Heard God Laughing. Ladinsky has another bestseller, The Subject Tonight Is Love.

Persians take poetry seriously. For many, it is their singular contribution to world civilisation: What the Greeks are to philosophy, Persians are to poetry. And in the great pantheon of Persian poetry where Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, 'Attar, Nezami, and Ferdowsi might be the immortals, there is perhaps none whose mastery of the Persian language is as refined as that of Hafez.

In the introduction to a recent book on Hafez, I said that Rumi (whose poetic output is in the tens of thousands) comes at you like you an ocean, pulling you in until you surrender to his mystical wave and are washed back to the ocean. Hafez, on the other hand, is like a luminous diamond, with each facet being a perfect cut. You cannot add or take away a word from his sonnets. So, pray tell, how is someone who admits that they do not know the language going to be translating the language?

Ladinsky is not translating from the Persian original of Hafez. And unlike some "versioners" (Coleman Barks is by far the most gifted here) who translate Rumi by taking the Victorian literal translations and rendering them into American free verse, Ladinsky's relationship with the text of Hafez's poetry is nonexistent. Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English "translations" he is publishing:

"About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to 'my artists and seekers'."

It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works. A great scholar of Persian and Urdu literature, Christopher Shackle, describes Ladinsky's output as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry." Another critic, Murat Nemet-Nejat, described Ladinsky's poems as what they are: original poems of Ladinsky masquerading as a "translation."

I want to give credit where credit is due: I do like Ladinsky's poetry. And they do contain mystical insights. Some of the statements that Ladinsky attributes to Hafez are, in fact, mystical truths that we hear from many different mystics. And he is indeed a gifted poet. See this line, for example:

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

That is good stuff. Powerful. And many mystics, including the 20th-century Sufi master Pir Vilayat, would cast his powerful glance at his students, stating that he would long for them to be able to see themselves and their own worth as he sees them. So yes, Ladinsky's poetry is mystical. And it is great poetry. So good that it is listed on Good Reads as the wisdom of "Hafez of Shiraz." The problem is, Hafez of Shiraz said nothing like that. Daniel Ladinsky of St Louis did.

The poems are indeed beautiful. They are just not ... Hafez. They are ... Hafez-ish? Hafez-esque? So many of us wish that Ladinsky had just published his work under his own name, rather than appropriating Hafez's.

Ladinsky's "translations" have been passed on by Oprah, the BBC, and others. Government officials have used them on occasions where they have wanted to include Persian speakers and Iranians. It is now part of the spiritual wisdom of the East shared in Western circles. Which is great for Ladinsky, but we are missing the chance to hear from the actual, real Hafez. And that is a shame.

So, who was the real Hafez (1315-1390)?

He was a Muslim, Persian-speaking sage whose collection of love poetry rivals only Mawlana Rumi in terms of its popularity and influence. Hafez's given name was Muhammad, and he was called Shams al-Din (The Sun of Religion). Hafez was his honorific because he had memorised the whole of the Quran. His poetry collection, the Divan, was referred to as Lesan al-Ghayb (the Tongue of the Unseen Realms).

A great scholar of Islam, the late Shahab Ahmed, referred to Hafez's Divan as: "the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history." Even accounting for a slight debate, that gives some indication of his immense following. Hafez's poetry is considered the very epitome of Persian in the Ghazal tradition.

Hafez's worldview is inseparable from the world of Medieval Islam, the genre of Persian love poetry, and more. And yet he is deliciously impossible to pin down. He is a mystic, though he pokes fun at ostentatious mystics. His own name is "he who has committed the Quran to heart", yet he loathes religious hypocrisy. He shows his own piety while his poetry is filled with references to intoxication and wine that may be literal or may be symbolic.

The most sublime part of Hafez's poetry is its ambiguity. It is like a Rorschach psychological test in poetry. The mystics see it as a sign of their own yearning, and so do the wine-drinkers, and the anti-religious types. It is perhaps a futile exercise to impose one definitive meaning on Hafez. It would rob him of what makes him ... Hafez.

The tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, a magnificent city in Iran, is a popular pilgrimage site and the honeymoon destination of choice for many Iranian newlyweds. His poetry, alongside that of Rumi and Saadi, are main staples of vocalists in Iran to this day, including beautiful covers by leading maestros like Shahram Nazeri and Mohammadreza Shajarian.

Like many other Persian poets and mystics, the influence of Hafez extended far beyond contemporary Iran and can be felt wherever Persianate culture was a presence, including India and Pakistan, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman realms. Persian was the literary language par excellence from Bengal to Bosnia for almost a millennium, a reality that sadly has been buried under more recent nationalistic and linguistic barrages.

Part of what is going on here is what we also see, to a lesser extent, with Rumi: the voice and genius of the Persian speaking, Muslim, mystical, sensual sage of Shiraz are usurped and erased, and taken over by a white American with no connection to Hafez's Islam or Persian tradition. This is erasure and spiritual colonialism. Which is a shame, because Hafez's poetry deserves to be read worldwide alongside Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Tagore and Whitman, Pablo Neruda and the real Rumi, Tao Te Ching and the Gita, Mahmoud Darwish, and the like.

In a 2013 interview, Ladinsky said of his poems published under the name of Hafez: "Is it Hafez or Danny? I don't know. Does it really matter?" I think it matters a great deal. There are larger issues of language, community, and power involved here.

It is not simply a matter of a translation dispute, nor of alternate models of translations. This is a matter of power, privilege and erasure. There is limited shelf space in any bookstore. Will we see the real Rumi, the real Hafez, or something appropriating their name? How did publishers publish books under the name of Hafez without having someone, anyone, with a modicum of familiarity check these purported translations against the original to see if there is a relationship? Was there anyone in the room when these decisions were made who was connected in a meaningful way to the communities who have lived through Hafez for centuries?

Hafez's poetry has not been sitting idly on a shelf gathering dust. It has been, and continues to be, the lifeline of the poetic and religious imagination of tens of millions of human beings. Hafez has something to say, and to sing, to the whole world, but bypassing these tens of millions who have kept Hafez in their heart as Hafez kept the Quran in his heart is tantamount to erasure and appropriation.

We live in an age where the president of the United States ran on an Islamophobic campaign of "Islam hates us" and establishing a cruel Muslim ban immediately upon taking office. As Edward Said and other theorists have reminded us, the world of culture is inseparable from the world of politics. So there is something sinister about keeping Muslims out of our borders while stealing their crown jewels and appropriating them not by translating them but simply as decor for poetry that bears no relationship to the original. Without equating the two, the dynamic here is reminiscent of white America's endless fascination with Black culture and music while continuing to perpetuate systems and institutions that leave Black folk unable to breathe.

There is one last element: It is indeed an act of violence to take the Islam out of Rumi and Hafez, as Ladinsky has done. It is another thing to take Rumi and Hafez out of Islam. That is a separate matter, and a mandate for Muslims to reimagine a faith that is steeped in the world of poetry, nuance, mercy, love, spirit, and beauty. Far from merely being content to criticise those who appropriate Muslim sages and erase Muslims' own presence in their legacy, it is also up to us to reimagine Islam where figures like Rumi and Hafez are central voices. This has been part of what many of feel called to, and are pursuing through initiatives like Illuminated Courses.

Oh, and one last thing: It is Haaaaafez, not Hafeeeeez. Please.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

This content was originally published here.

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laynemorgan · 4 years

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These past few weeks -- this past presidency really -- have been wildly eye opening for me. As a liberal white person, I’ve spent the better part of the last few years learning and unlearning, checking myself, checking my peers, etc. But these last few weeks it has been even more so. Unsure of what to do with my voice in the din of twitter, and preferring to elevate voices of people of color around me, I wound up taking to facebook, spending the better part of the last months sharing political posts that I had died off on posting after Trmp’s election, confronting relatives and family friends that i had, a few years ago, decided i’d need to just come to terms with. Through all of it, I have seen a lot of grace. I’ve seen a lot of learning. And I’ve scene a lot of stubborn refusal to learn. And I’ve been those people. I’ve been learning but I’ve also refused to. I’m hoping to change that now.

A few months ago, a girl on twitter approached me. She was angry. She confronted me flat out about how I felt that it was okay for me to preach equality and social issues as someone who had been so bad at confronting and apologizing for my own missteps in the past. As someone who had hurt people without consequence. She was right. I told her that. She told me that my previous apologies had been shitty and selfish. And she was right. I promised her I’d write a new one.

And then I never did.

When our world erupted into protests and marches and major social movement this last month, I became immediately embarrassed. The words I had promised had never made it out. I prioritized a million other things in my life instead of the people I had hurt. I regret that. So so so much. I regret not immediately writing an apology that I truly meant when it was pointed out to me how much I had let it all fall off my radar. I regret only thanking that one girl on twitter for her time and education and not the many, many other voices who had been trying to reach me over the years. I should have done that right away. I should have done that even before, without it having to be brought to my attention. I thought that because I had learned and knew better, because I personally knew where I had gone wrong and wouldn’t do it again, that it was over. But the truth is, that was a lesson I hadn’t been ready to learn either. That the people we’ve hurt don’t go away, that shitty apologies don’t make up for pain, that having selfish things to do with our time doesn’t excuse not prioritizing growth and reflection and acknowledgement. So for starters, I am sorry for that. I am sorry that it took me four years to say anywhere on the internet that i KNEW that apology I wrote was shitty. I’m sorry it took me four years to acknowledge to anyone how wrong it was that I was constantly requiring them to push me toward change. I am so sorry it has still taken me a months since that twitter exchange this year, and a full month since I realize I’d STILL forgotten about it to be here. And writing this. I’ve been selfish. I’ve shoved all of your important words and experiences and thoughts and lessons to a place where I could look at them when it was convenient for me. And that was fucking selfish. And ignorant.

To now skip all of that intro and go into more detail, this whole story begins in my fandom days. When I loved and adored The 100 and was a very active member of that fandom. The reveal of Clarke’s bisexuality, the introduction of their Lesbian character, Lexa were important to me. In making that clear, I said in a tweet that another character, Bellamy (portrayed by Filipino actor Bob Morley) was less important and received preferential treatment by the fans due to his ability to be seen as a “hot white guy.” In short, I entirely erased Bob’s lived experience as a non-white man, I erased the visibility that Bellamy created for men like him, and when it was pointed out to me, I doubled down. I defended my stance, I fumbled to explain myself over and over. I thought that because my intent was not to harm that it excused me from the impact of what I had said. And it didn’t. What I said was wrong. It was erasure, it was ignorant and came from my own unchecked racism. I know that now. I didn’t then. I was embarrassed and upset that people thought the worst of me. When what I should have been was humble and willing to listen. And THAT is what is truly embarrassing.

Then came the apology, several years later. I had spent time arguing about a cause that effected me personally and suddenly, was moved to more properly address what I had done. But again, my apology was about me. It came on my time, a day late and a dollar short. It wasn’t an apology at all. It was an explanation, a plea for understanding, laden with white fragility that I hadn’t yet examined. It was an apology that had learned how to fix what went wrong but hadn’t actually learned what was wrong about what I’d said and done. It stepped over the voices of the people who had been fighting to teach me. It re-centered myself, my experience, my emotions. And again, it was selfish.

To be explicitly clear: the way I behaved toward the people who corrected me and tried to educate me in both of those instances was shameful. My inability to listen something I am actively working on as much as I can. I am so so sorry to those people especially, to Bob whether he knew about this incident or not, and to the entire fandom community at large for setting such a shitty example.

This apology isn’t only about that moment, though. I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately, and I wanted to make sure to talk about other stuff too. Other stuff that no one has been publicly calling me out for, but that is still bad. Whether it’s pointed out to me or not. Because I think growth is important and I think it’s important to humble ourselves to know when we were wrong, to look back on our actions once we have learned better and pull out the bad parts, show people, teach others. In my years in fandom, I made a thousand missteps. I was quick to get upset, when someone said a show or character I loved was racist or had done something racist. I was the person always shouting that not everything is racist. I was a fucking ignorant. I dug my heels in simply to defend things, without taking time to listen, without understanding the history of pain that people of color face when it comes to stories and representation. I thought I was smarter than I was.

I didn’t listen when I was told that you can’t dreamcast a next gen character of a mixed race couple with just one of those races. I didn’t listen when white washing was explained to me. I was too stubbornly wrapped up in the things I wanted and my own perceived kindness and correctness to think that I could get something wrong, that I could need to put in a modicum of effort to change my ways. “There just aren’t that many mixed actors,” I’d say. But because I couldn’t name any off the top of my head didn’t mean they didn’t exist. And frankly, the fact that I couldn’t name any was shameful too. I know now, how important racial representation is. Again, I am sorry for not listening. I am sorry for whitewashing and for thinking that simply dubbing myself a good person and good ally didn’t make it so. I was too proud to learn. I’m working on dismantling that fragility too.

I work in television now. I work in television because I want nothing more than to tell stories about everyone. This year I got my first script. And that same girl who called me on twitter a few months ago told me she didn’t want to support the show I worked on because she didn’t trust a project that I worked on. That fucking devastated me. I wanted to proudly wave the expectational diverse show I loved over my head and say “but look what we did!!” And when that instinct hit me, this time, for the first time, I checked myself. Because what I did didn’t matter without fixing what I had done. Without earning that trust back, without making it abundantly clear where my head and my heart are now. Something that felt “so long ago” to me was fresh and painful for other people. Being able to shove it away was a privilege I had and didn’t see. I had sat in the writers’ room on that show and advocated for our representation and felt proud of the stories we told. But none of that matters if I haven’t checked myself, and fixed the hurt that I’ve caused, personally first.

I am truly sorry. I’m sorry for the mistakes I inevitably forgot about making that did not make this post. I’m sorry for the ignorance that made them less important to me than they are still to the people of color who witnessed them and the things I perpetuated. I’m sorry for not understanding that I can contribute to the problem, that I can BE the problem. I’m sorry for talking over you, for not listening to you, for letting you be the villain in my head and my heart and out here on my public profile for so long. I’m ashamed of my past, but I don’t want to keep letting time go without talking about. I want to bring my selfishness and my ignorance into the light and talk about it. I don’t want to cause anyone hurt for any longer than I need to, and I’m so sorry for never giving anyone closure on any of this before, even when I thought I had gotten it for myself. Thank you for reading this. Thank you for trying so hard to explain shit to me that I just didn’t hear. I know I’m inclined to wordy bullshit. I want you all to know that I’m listening. I’m late. But I’m listening. And again, I am sorry for having hurt you in the first place. I was wrong. I will likely be wrong again. But I promise you that I will do everything in my power to never, ever be as unwilling as I have been to learn. I am educating myself all the time now, in hopes that you won’t ever have to educate me again. But should that day come, I promise to meet you with the grace, humility, and open mind that I should have a long time ago.

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binsofchaos · 3 years

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Toni Morrison | Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.

“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.”

She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”

Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know”, she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: “Is it living or dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all – if the bird is already dead.

She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required – lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.

She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here,” his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the “final word”, the precise “summing up”, acknowledging their “poor power to add or detract”, his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

“Once upon a time, …” visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: “The bird is in your hands”? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was “It’s not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours.”

They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: “Is the bird we hold living or dead?” Perhaps the question meant: “Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?” No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

“Is there no speech,” they ask her, “no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

“We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don’t you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

“Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.

“Why didn’t you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, “nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced.” Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

“You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

“Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse’s void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

“The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed.”

It’s quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

“Finally”, she says, “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/books/best-toni-morrison-books.html

#toni morrison #nobel lecture #1993 #nobel prize #We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.#meaning of life #language

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troubleeveryday · 4 years

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Excerpt from the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, 3/29/2020

“...But these narratives were also vaguely unsettling. A reminder of the weird New World Order we had precariously entered into in the late winter of 2020. The upset and erasure of what was normal life - on that gray, rainy Friday, the power was out in our building. It wasn't sudden, we've been aware for a week that this was going to happen, that the power would be shut down for five hours due to maintenance issues, but on this particular Friday, in the midst of the virus, the pitch black hallways simply seem to me eerier than they would have been otherwise. And since the elevators were out of order, I had to walk down the 11 stories to the garage and the cold and empty stairwell with the flickering fluorescent emergency lights leading the way, though there were floors where the flickering fluorescent emergency lights weren't working. And so I'd resort to fumbling with the flashlight app on my iPhone, guiding my way through the darkness of the stairwell until I landed on the second floor and was warned by a line of yellow tape that this exit was no longer usable and to proceed across the building to the exit on the other side.

I'm moved through another darkened hallway, completely silent. No ambient noise anywhere. The sounds of voices or television sets was nowhere to be heard. And it led me to wonder, as I quickly made my way through the corridor on the second floor, was anybody behind those doors anyway? Or was everyone gone? My imagination could dramatize anything - and I envision dead bodies wiped out by a lethal and fast moving virus sprawled on floors across couches, thrown in bed, naked in bathrooms. And I walked more quickly toward the exit. The garage was darkened. The electric gates propped open, the building's manager was conferring with one of the valets. So many people have fled that the garage had barely any cars in it that day: where had they all gone?

The guy who lived across the hall from us and worked at Sony, and who we didn't know that well, for example, had left for Palm Springs. I ran into him on his way out - lugging two large suitcases and a shopping cart full of “supplies,” - telling me that he didn't want to be in LA anymore while this was going on. “This,” I took it to mean - was the virus? Or was “this” the hysteria the virus was causing? Since the virus didn't seem to be that much more deadly than previous viruses - so then - what was happening? Was this simply the way we went to live from now on, in a state of irate and implausible victimhood? Oh, it was the most delicious place to be for some I know, their own safe space, that extended state of oppression that they all thought they were under, but I just couldn't join the game.

And even the one guy I somewhat knew who lived down the hall from us, a Gen-Xer like myself: a stoic, no bullshit neighbor who owned and managed rehab centers in Malibu. Even he, who rolled his eyes at everything whenever we ran into each other in the hallway or the elevator. When I asked him what was in the Amazon parcel he was holding, he admitted somewhat sheepishly: “Um... 200 pairs of rubber gloves.”

Since there was no electricity on that Friday morning. I drove through the rainy streets to Norms to have breakfast. I wanted scrambled eggs, hot coffee, toast. Nothing I could have prepared in the apartment on Doheny. I hadn't been to Norms I realized, in 40 years - even though I now passed it three times a week as I drove to the gym I was a member of, just off La Cienega on Beverly Boulevard.

And this had been for about six years now, always driving by Norms. Norms was newly built in 1956, and now was a retro coffee shop diner that had been designated a historic monument. I had not only chosen Norms because it was so close to the gym I was a member of - easy, order breakfast, drive the two blocks of the gym, workout, get home - but also because I was curious as to see how it held up in the 40 years since I had been inside the space.

What I didn't expect, it was also going to be a test of how I held up in the last 40 years as well. Norms was cool in 1981 and 1982 because it was an example of the post-war Southern California style. The Atomic Googie style: sharp angles, sweeping curves, the space age sign with the futurist geometric shapes, intriguingly retro to us in 1982. And it was a place that I remembered from my high school days as a junior and senior - a place open 24 hours that we could hang in after seeing a late movie.

At the newly built Beverly Center, just five or six blocks away between Beverly and Third Street, Norms during that period was usually filled with cool freshmen from UCLA, or seniors from the LA private high school contingent. Yes, the young and privileged denizens of what now seems like a paradisiacal moment compared to where everything landed.

The Norms I remembered from the summer of 1982 - maybe the last time I had been there, I realized when I entered it, the Friday of the coronavirus - was of convertibles parked outside, tins of clove cigarettes hidden in Letterman jackets, vanilla milkshakes half-drunk, the dreamy clean-cut jocks and surfers I tried not to gaze at, the hot cheerleaders and valley girls, a cast of characters that seemed corny and antiquated compared to the youth culture of today I suppose. But that was the starring cast then. Those were the kids who reigned.

I wasn't expecting to see that same cast on that rainy Friday in 2020, when the coronavirus exploded into our consciousness, and it seemed - via the media - that everything was imploding. But I was not expecting to see homeless people begging in the Norms parking lot, or an unholy mess of odors and sounds coming from the one stall in the men's room. Or the Hispanic family of what seemed like 20, congregated around three push together tables, with what seemed like a dozen wailing kids: The whole diner was bustling with despair.

Everyone seemed dampened by the weather, and old men by themselves read newspapers resting on the table next to their half finished fruit cups, and a couple that resembled a flamboyant whore and what seemed like her pimp sashayed to their table, the young men eating alone resembled the worst stereotypes of your average incel: pinched face and brooding. The place was cramped with people, and looked nothing like the place I had once hung out. It was dirtier. It was slightly dingy, even scummy.

I had one of those realizations about time passing: your age, the lost world you grew up in. That is such a jolt, that it only comes around maybe once every few years. There were no tables available, and the sky kept threatening rain. I sat at the edge of one of the counters, surrounded by the dispossessed, the downtrodden - not the damned exactly, but more like the darned.

Everyone seemed miserable and I wasn't projecting.

I found something on the all-day-breakfast menu, and when the toast I'd ordered didn't come with it, I just ignored that omission, scarfed down the food and paid the check and headed out - away from this hellhole.

But what was I, if I had walked into that room as an 18 year old, now in the spring of 2020 - what would I have been looking at when I glimpsed the man at the end of the counter? Who was I? The overweight, 56 year-old man with the greying hair and Adidas sweatpants, a t-shirt and a James Perse hoodie, alone on the counter shoveling scrambled eggs into his craw?

If I had walked into Norms in 1982, and saw this same crowd from 2020 I was experiencing now - I would have looked at myself in the same way I was looking at everything now. I would have been part of that room that I was now judging. I know - my judgment bordered on snobbery, and I was honestly surprised by that. I hate rich people as much as anyone else! But taking a look around Norms, I realized it was confirmed. I hate everybody basically - rich and poor, whoever - even though I like to pride myself on the fact that I really didn't. And yet, this became the dramatic takeaway of my brief 30 minutes in Norms. I would never go back.”

#I transcribed this myself so forgive errors #Bret Easton Ellis #Bret Easton Ellis podcast #American Psycho #Less Than Zero #Coronavirus

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sophieakatz · 5 years

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Thursday Thoughts: “They” Is Not A Neutral Word

My mother sent me a link to a Slate podcast interview with Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times op-ed writer who recently began going by “they/them” pronouns. In the interview, Manjoo states that they are a cisgender man, but they no longer want to be referred to with “he/him” pronouns. They talk about the negative impact that forced gendering has on people – citing their young daughter’s stubborn belief that presidents must be men – and posits that everyone should be referred to as “they” instead of as “he” or “she.”

Manjoo’s idea is initially intriguing. As a society, we slap gender onto our children right away. When a child is born, the first question anyone asks the parent is, “Is it a boy or a girl?” And as innocuous as this may seem, a lot of baggage comes along with this early labeling. Studies show that adults will treat a baby differently if they are told that the baby is a boy than if they are told that the baby is a girl – describing the same baby behavior as “angry” if they think it’s a boy or “happy” if they think it’s a girl, and allowing supposedly-boy babies to take greater risks than supposedly-girl babies. Adults don’t realize that they’re treating the babies differently based on their assumptions, but they are.

Additionally, cross-analyses of studies of the human brain indicate that there is no significant difference between male babies’ brains and female babies’ brains – but there are significant differences between adult male brains and adult female brains. Along the way, the way the children are treated changes them, and Manjoo’s anecdote about his daughter’s early political opinions shows one of the negative results of this differential treatment.

In a world where we didn’t really care about gender at all, where we didn’t tell a baby right from day one the kind of person that they should be, perhaps everyone would be truly free to explore our own gender and figure out our personalities without the impact of stereotypes. If we didn’t split up sports into “men” and “women” categories, and instead had everyone compete based on physical ability, then athletes like Caster Semenya would not be mistreated by the highly problematic sports institution of “sex testing.” We could move on into a world that cares more about individuals than categories. The idea is appealing.

What gives me pause is Manjoo’s assertion that the “just, rational, inclusive” thing to do here is for everyone to go by “they.” Manjoo seems to think that the “they” pronoun is not only a gender-neutral pronoun, but also a completely neutral concept. They also seem to see nothing wrong with a cisgender man telling other people what pronouns to use.

It troubled me that this podcast did not have any voices from the transgender community contributing to the conversation. It further troubles me how difficult it was to sift through the Google results of cisgender people arguing over whether singular “they” is “grammatically correct” (language changes based on the needs of the speaking society, and is not forever beholden to the rules of the past – deal with it) and find a non-cisgender writer commenting on the deeper moral issue here. It isn’t surprising to me that the loudest voices in this conversation about pronouns are people who have never struggled to get other people to use their proper pronouns, because privilege comes with a platform, but that doesn’t make it right.

I finally found Brian Fabry Dorsam, an agender writer. Where Manjoo claims that gender is a cause of “confusion, anxiety, and grief,” Dorsam points out that gender itself is not the cause of these negative things. Misgendering is.

When someone refers to Dorsam as “they,” it is not a neutral statement. For Dorsam, “they” is an acknowledgement of their pronouns, of their identity, of the way they want the world to see them. It is an affirmation, a positive act, a specific act.

Manjoo may not care about their gender – again, they say that they are still a cisgender man, and that they do not mind being called “he” – but Dorsam does, and so does an entire world of transgender people. Manjoo has never had to struggle to get people to take them and their gender seriously. People have always looked at Manjoo and assumed their gender correctly. Perhaps that is why Manjoo thinks that it is no big deal to give up their pronouns, and why they think that everyone should go by the same pronouns.

Manjoo’s mistake is assuming that treating everyone “the same” is the same as being “inclusive.”

If we were to take Manjoo’s advice and slap the same pronoun onto everyone, then we would be treating everyone “the same.” But if you call a transgender man who uses “he/him” pronouns “they,” you are not making a neutral statement. You are saying, “I do not recognize you as ‘he.’ I will not call you what you want to be called. I know better than you what pronouns you should use.”

This is not being inclusive. This is not treating someone with respect. This is being oppressive.

“Nothing is inclusive when it is forced,” says Dorsam. “True inclusivity is the recognition of each individual’s humanity on their own terms. Anything else is erasure.”

Dorsam suggests – and I agree – that there are two things that we must do instead.

First, we must do everything we can to raise our children in a gender-neutral manner. This means recognizing our subconscious biases about gender and putting an active effort into providing our children with access to all kinds of clothing, toys, stories, and role models. This will allow them to develop their own ideas about who they are.

Second, we must stop assuming other people’s pronouns. Instead, when we meet someone, we should ask for the person’s pronouns.

“Hi, I’m Sophie! My pronouns are she/her. How about you?”

It can be as simple as that. “What are your pronouns?” or “May I please have your pronouns of reference?” are other ways to phrase the question. You can also ask a mutual friend about someone’s pronouns, if you don’t yet feel comfortable asking the person directly.

If you do not know someone’s pronouns, it’s okay to use a gender-neutral term – such as “they,” “my friend,” or the person’s name – until you learn the proper pronouns. Once you do know the person’s pronouns, you must use those pronouns.

While chatting with my mother about the podcast and the surrounding issue, she pointed out that having everyone use “they” is the easy way out. Treating everyone the same, she said, is “less work than to care about individuals.”

She’s right. This takes work. Respect and inclusivity always take work. Manjoo is encouraging the easy way out, the way of erasure, the way that lets them feel above the “gender problem” while in reality they are causing more discomfort for people who face a daily struggle to have their genders taken seriously.

I think it’s worth the effort.

#they #pronouns #agender #nonbinary #transgender #gender neutral #farhad manjoo #thursday thoughts #nonfiction #social justice #psychology #neuroscience #gender #inclusivity #respect

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djinmer4 · 5 years

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Heart to Heart (Misnamed Soulmates AU)

Amanda doesn’t know what’s up with Kurt right now but she wishes she’d never started dating him in the first place. Despite the fact he broke up with her weeks ago, he seems to have taken an inordinate interest in her life. First, it was helping her fill out all her college applications, then offering to chauffeur her to and from school then finally it was that disastrous blind date he arranged for her and Bobby when he decided to spy on them all evening. Bobby had actually seemed pretty nice and possibly her type . . . except they’d pretty much both been rendered complete nervous wrecks by Kurt’s heavy-handed monitoring of their date. Amanda considered giving Bobby another chance . . . after she figured out a way to get Kurt off her back. This behavior was downright creepy. He’d been less concerned about her when they were dating; in hindsight, half his mind had always been on Kitty Pryde the whole time. Maybe she had turned him down and he was trying to get back into Amanda’s graces? Well, fat chance of that happening.

Amanda had stayed late tonight, half to finish writing her application essay, half to have an excuse not to let Kurt drive her home. She needed some time to think for herself and that wouldn’t happen in the car with his constant chatter. Although that might not have been the best idea.

“Well, look who’s walkin’ alone at night. The mutie-lover.”

God damn Duncan and his loser friends. The jock had kept quiet about what had happened, but everyone in Bayville knew the former Homecoming King had somehow managed to lose his scholarship and been expelled from college. He tried to play it off as him taking a gap year before transferring but rumor had it that whatever had happened had pretty much killed his prospects of joining any reputable institution. Of course, there were plenty of others who’d gladly take an American All-Star even with a ruined reputation. Whatever took Duncan, Amanda was going to avoid like the plague.

“If you must Duncan, you should know that Wagner and I broke up months ago.”

“Yeah, but everyone says he broke up with you, not the other way around.” He circled her like a starving wolf. “Not sure I wanna taint myself with the rat’s sloppy seconds, but you are easy on the eyes. Let me-”

Amanda didn’t wait for him to finish talking. She swung her bag to the side, cold-cocking one of them straight away. Unfortunately, there were five of them and only one of her, so even getting one of them out didn’t improve her odds significantly. Soon enough, they had her pinned down and were ripping her clothes off while Duncan unzipped his jeans. Then suddenly he stopped, and the leer fell off his face.

“You feel that? One good squeeze, and it’s all over for you Duncan.” Amanda couldn’t tilt her head the right way to see but that sounded like Kitty Pryde. “Now, unless the rest of you want to see him die, I suggest you all back off and leave.” The ones holding her down didn’t seem inclined to follow but Kitty must have done something because Duncan ordered them to grab the downed guy and bring him to the hospital in a high-pitched squeal. “They’re gone already! Let the fuck go of my heart!”

Kitty stepped out from behind the blond. “Bitch!” He turned and tried to hit her but he just passed through her . . . and hit the tree instead. There was the distinct cracking of bones breaking and Duncan howled. Kitty didn’t seem at all sympathetic and she boxed him in the ears, knocking him out. Then she came over to Amanda and held her hand out. Gratefully, the black teenager took her hand and let her rival pull her up.

They walked in silence for a while before Amanda cleared her throat. “I didn’t think the Professor allowed you to use your powers like that.”

“Yeah, well, the Professor’s not the one who’s walking into a warzone every day on his way to school. As long as I don’t actually maim or kill anyone, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. And if he does find out, it means he invaded my mind without my permission, making him a hypocrite.”

She side-eyed the younger girl. “And you’re not worried about Duncan running off and turning his friends against you?”

“Duncan’s already gone and poisoned all of Bayville against us. If the choice is between getting raped and killed today versus it happening sometime in the future, then I make the choice that will let me live a little longer. I mean sure, if there were other people who’d get hurt if I didn’t back down right then, I’d reconsider. But if I hadn’t done anything, all that would happen is you’d get hurt instead and I don’t think that’s the better option.”

“Thanks, then.” There was a lull in the conversation then it was Kitty’s turn to break the silence. “Hey, um, I don’t know if this would be your jam or not. But if you like, I could give you some self-defense lessons. I mean, I’m no Logan but wouldn’t you feel better if you had some way to defend yourself against jerks like that?”

Amanda was skeptical. “Self-defense just for Duncan?” she asked dryly.

“Not just Duncan. People like him. Guys in general. The police, maybe.” And abruptly Amanda was reminded of the article one of her classmates had brought in that day for homework. About the young black mother who had just been fatally shot in what should have been a routine speeding stop.

“You know,” her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Self-defense isn’t going to do much good against a bullet.”

“Unless you can phase through them or can move them with kinesis, mutant power isn’t much good against a bullet. If Scott or Ms. Monroe get shot, they’d be in just as much trouble as a normal person.” Kitty took a deep breath and braced herself. “As Kurt pointed out, I can pass and walk away from all this any time I want to. No one just looking at me can tell I’m a Jew or a mutant or even an X-Woman. So the least I can do for people like you who don’t have that choice, I can teach you enough to get away or stall them so you can call for help.”

Amanda hated to admit it but it was surprisingly refreshing to hear someone like Kitty actually acknowledge her privilege. Most white people seemed to think if they acted color-blind, it was enough. “I accept. First lesson this Saturday morning?”

The brunette groaned. “Saturday afternoon, please! I don’t want to get up early on the weekend if I don’t have to.”

Kitty was a good teacher if nothing else. She hadn’t even made a fuss when Amanda had showed up in high heels and a miniskirt for the first lesson. “Barefoot today and you’ll probably want your gym clothes next time. But it’s good to practice in your every day wear too.”

Amanda had pulled out the ballet flats and sweats she’d packed. She wasn’t an idiot after all. But she did ask, “So, you’d be okay with me fighting like that?”

Kitty had answered dryly. “It’s not like a bunch of gangbangers or white terrorists are going to wait for you to change clothes. Work out clothes are good for learning basics and building up your stamina. But you haven’t really learned anything until you can use it out in the real world and not just a dojo.”

“Do you think I should buy some mace?”

“Every woman should buy mace if possible.” Amanda arched an eyebrow at that. “Or else what? It’s the woman’s fault if she ends up dead in a ditch?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course, it isn’t her fault. But if we lived in a perfect world, neither of us would have to learn self-defense in the first place. If you’re going to choose not to use a certain defense that’s fine but make sure it’s your decision and not something that other people force on you.”

“Does that apply to guns as well?”

“Oh, uh . . . “

Kitty and Amanda shared no classes in school. Until Amanda had started dating Kurt, they hadn’t even known the other girl existed. But honestly? It was a relief to talk to someone she could relate with. Both of them were from upper-middle-class families, were only children with no other relatives nearby (in age or location) and both came from marginalized communities (Kitty was Jewish and a mutant while, Amanda was black). They didn’t share many interests (Kitty liked computer science and fashion while Amanda was more interested in history and literature) but it was such a relief to just vent to someone on occasion without having to explain why each little microaggression stung. Sure, the other Insitutue kids got the big picture when someone tried to attack her physically or blatant slurs were muttered in their presence but most of them missed the whole cultural insensitivity or erasure that also occurred. Kitty got it and could empathize with her.

The two of them had just finished up a session in the Danger Room and were cooling down, lying on the floor. Kitty had done some of her techno-mojo and there was a beautiful starscape above their heads. “Hey, can I ask you a favor?”

Kitty rolled over to look at Amanda. “You can always ask. Can’t always promise that I’ll do or follow what you want.”

“It’s about . . . “ the older girl hesitated for a second. “It’s about Kurt.” Kitty didn’t seem the least bit disturbed and gestured that she should go on. “Do you think you could get him to back off a little?”

“What do you mean?”

“Kurt. He was less involved with my life when we were dating than he is now. It’s like I can’t do anything without him hovering over my shoulder.”

“I wondered why I was seeing less of him lately.”

“He didn’t talk about it to you?”

“I, um . . . “

Amanda ignored Kitty’s discomfort. “You know, I should have realized from the very beginning, that it was always going to be you.”

“What makes you say that?”

“No, seriously. Even our first date at the Sadie Hawkins dance, he spent the entire time staring at you until the dinosaurs showed up.”

“He did? I didn’t even notice.”

“Yeah, you were talking to Lance. To be fair, he did try to hide it but every time his mask slipped, he looked pretty devastated.”

“That jerk! We’d agreed a month before then that he should try and get over me.” Kitty frowned, her heart-shaped face and plush lips turning it into a little girl pout. “Going on a date and spending the entire date staring at someone else doesn’t count as getting over anyone.”

“Hey, be nice,” admonished the black girl. “He’d only had a month to try to come to terms and the Sadie Hawkins was probably like rubbing salt into the wound. I don’t like the fact I was the rebound but I don’t think he meant to hurt me.”

“I don’t think Kurt really means to hurt anyone. It’s just not him. But he can be freakin’ insensitive at times.”

“I’m sure we all can be.” A pause while the two of them digested that statement, reflecting on their own peccadilloes. Amanda restarted the conversation. “But no, really, could he stop? Sometimes it’s helpful but the time he spied on my date with Bobby? That was downright creepy.”

“Ugh, yeah, I’ll tell him that. I think he’s trying to get you to forgive him but if he was spying on your date that goes a little too far.”

“I think I’d like to try again with Bobby, but only without the furry, blue chaperone. Seriously, what was he thinking? Why is he going so far anyway?”

Kitty shifted uncomfortably. “That . . . might be my fault.”

“How so?”

“Well . . . I told him I didn’t want to date him until you’d forgiven him.” Amanda sat up to look down at her teacher.

“Why’d you do something like that?”

“Because what he did was pretty terrible. Because he should do something to make up for what he had done to you. And finally, because it just wouldn’t feel right to start a relationship with him when you were still hurting from the break-up. Wouldn’t feel clean.”

“You’re not . . . you didn’t decide to help me to make up for what Kurt did, did you?”

Kitty narrowed crystal blue eyes at her. “Of course not, that would be silly. Kurt’s responsible for his own stupid actions. I helped because a bunch of retarded jocks decided to attack you.” She then reluctantly admitted. “On the other hand, if I hadn’t known you through Kurt I might not have offered to teach you self-defense. I would have escorted you home and that would have been the end of it.”

Amanda sat in silence for a few minutes while Kitty watched her. “I forgive him,” she said abruptly.

“What?”

“I said, I forgive him. I forgive Kurt for what he did to me.”

“You do? But why? He hasn’t really done anything to deserve forgiveness.”

“It’s not about what he’s done, it’s about the way I feel. And I don’t want to think that our friendship is contingent on me being mad at him. That would suck.”

“But-”

“You don’t think starting a relationship while I’m still upset is good. Well, I don’t think the X-Men only becoming friends with me because one of their friends screwed up and the rest of them need to make amends for him is any better. I want to think that our relationship is clean, that it’s based on liking each other and shared interests. Not you just putting up a friendly facade to make me feel better.”

“I guess. But are you sure about it?”

“Yes.” The black girl nodded her head, first hesitantly then did it again with more certainty. “I mean, I’m not going to forget what he’s done anytime soon. But he can stop trying to make up for it or whatever he thinks he’s been doing the past few months. You have my blessing or permission or whatever it is you need to start dating.”

“Thank you, Amanda.”

#misnamed soulmate au #Amanda Sefton #Kitty Pryde #nicest i'll ever be to amanda #rape implications #bechdel test

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theliterateape · 3 years

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I Can't Drive 55 | Lessons Learned in the 55th Year

By Don Hall

In my thirty-second year I felt incredibly sorry for myself. I was getting my first divorce, was living in a one-room studio in Uptown, my theater company was imploding over ego-driven bullshit. I drank myself into a state of suicidal yearning. It was a rough year.

I called my mom. Mom is that voice of reason in good and bad times.

"This has been a really shitty year. Maybe I should move back to Kansas."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-two."

"And in thirty-two years you've lived on the planet, how many of those years were bad?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Really bad? Two. No three. Three years. Why?"

"Well, three out of thirty-two is a pretty solid track record. Seems to me that you weathered those other bad years and had good years to spare. Maybe you decide to quit wallowing in how bad this year has been and get to work on next year because based on your experience you probably have another cluster of good years in store."

Some have the Dali Lama. Others have a priest or a shelf of self-help books. I have my mom.

My fifty-fifth year (or the specter of 2020) was a rough year for so many people in the world it's almost a joke. The whole year has been covered in shit—from the campaign to unseat the least capable and most destructive president in my lifetime to three months in a pandemic shutting down the planet and economic hardship most of us have only read about in Steinbeck novels—2020 looks like the toilet bowl moments after a morning constitutional from a night of White Castle and rum.

Sure, the act of comparing one's life with those around is a narcissistic self-loathing experiment best suited for recently jilted lesbians and Instagram junkies, but while the entire world has been burning down in both literal and figurative ways, fifty-five has been a damn good year for me.

In January, I was well into my year and a half managing a casino on the corner of I-15 and Tropicana. I had done my due diligence in training and had hit the sweet spot of knowing enough about the business to be an effective leader on the floor. I knew my high rollers and had figured out the best approach to dealing with the meth-addicts and prostitutes. I could fix 90 percent of the machines and could process a jackpot inside of four minutes consistently.

Then came the pandemic and the economic shutdown of Las Vegas in March. Most were laid off and in free fall but I had stumbled into working for one of two gambling corporations in Nevada that committed to keeping the payroll rolling despite losing millions per day.

The three months of closure saw me coming in to work every day, cleaning the bar and the machines, and hanging out to make sure no one ransacked the place while it was closed. I did a lot of writing in my office during that time.

In terms of personal tragedy, my nineteen year old nephew overdosed in a parking lot in April and, virus be damned, Dana and I flew out the next day to help my sister.

We re-opened the casino in June.

Seven months of balancing life in a pandemic with idiots motivated to gamble, arguing with people about the necessity to wear masks, and submitting essays to everyone. Getting paid to write (even in small increments) was a genuine drug.

Over the summer both Dana and I were asked to write for an anthology of essays. Las Vegas writers writing about Las Vegas. It was a boost, man. Don't get me wrong, the casino gig was solid and, for the most part, enjoyable. Getting paid to write words and sentences was fucking delicious.

The book came out in October launched with a Zoomesque gathering.

The casino gig, while solid and simple, was becoming dull. Rote. Combining the fact that my best (and meager) talents were not usable during a pandemic in a struggling casino, I told my General Manager that I needed more money for such routine grind and that I’d start looking aggressively for something more in tune with my skills that also paid a bit more on my year-and-a-half mark.

Six days after I started the search, I was hired by a Denver-based firm as a Senior Copywriter.

Turns out I’m pretty good at it. Getting a salary for writing words and sentences is sweet and working from home as the pandemic continues to rage on is smart and comfortable. No longer a slave to the swings shift, my schedule is my own.

I can, for the first time in my life when asked what I do for a living, answer “I am a writer.” In a career path marked by ten year gigs followed by "gotta pay the bills" gigs, it looks like Casino Manager is the latter and "Writer" is the former. Now it’s time to write some books, yeah?

It’s been a year, my friends.

Here are the lessons that landed in my 55th annum.

Always Leave ‘Em Wanting More

Over the course of my bizarre career as a “Writer. Teacher. Storyteller. Consultant.” to refer to my donhall.vegas website, I’ve had a tendency to overstay my welcome.

Instead of leaving circumstances on good terms, by the time I was ready to go, I was all Fuck these people! What a bunch of dickseeds! and at least a few of the people were Fuck him! What a dickseed!

I stayed one year longer than I should have as a public school teacher. I stayed at least a year too long in my second marriage and, despite some incredible shows toward the end of the WNEP Theater years, I stayed too long with that company. I should’ve left WBEZ at least a year earlier and I waited until things got weird in the storytelling scene before leaving Chicago.

With the casino, I left long before things become too rote or sour. I found the new gig, jumped on it, and was told if it didn’t work out, I always had a place to land. That I was a part of the Station Casinos “family.” My staff bought me booze and when I swung by just to see them, they are happy to be seen.

Hell, the GM even gave me one of the chairs from the Craps Table for my home office!

As I get older, recognizing the signs that perhaps it’s time to go is an essential skill. At fifty-five, maybe I’m finally into that.

Family is Always More Important Than Work

Last year, working the first 24/7/365 job in my life, I was told I had to work on Christmas. It was the first Christmas in decades I hadn’t spent with my family in Kansas. It wasn’t bad—Joe flew in from Chicago, he took Dana and I to see Penn Gillette at Rio, Kelli joined Dana and Joe on the casino floor while I worked.

This year, especially after the death of my nephew, it became obvious that family had to come first. Months before I landed the writing gig, I let my GM know I was taking the week of Christmas off, COVID be damned. I was clear that if the company couldn’t pay me for the time off I understood and if I was to be let go because of it, then that was fine, too.

The casino was incredibly cool about the request that wasn’t really a request. In fact, even though I gave my two week’s notice before the Christmas vacation pay would kick in, my GM allowed me to be paid for it anyway (see that first lesson again).

It was in every possible way the correct call. My sister needed me. I needed my mom and dad. We got to reconnect with a cousin I hadn’t seen in years. Turns out she’s a professional copywriter in Austin, TX. It was a soul-filling holiday and I’ll never miss Christmas in Kansas again.

It’s Pointless to Argue with Zealots

Maybe it’s in part due to my new-found desert surroundings or my distance from the increasingly Woke Chicago Arts scene but this last year of Trump and the ridiculous nature of angrier social media has pushed me closer to Left Center than Full-On Progressive.

As a younger man I decided that religion was simply not for me. Too emotionally charged without a sense of rationality. At the distance Nevada gives me I can see how irrational both the Extreme Right—the overtly white nationalist taint with the individualism bordering on sociopathy—and the Progressive Left—the quasi-religious circular logic of white privilege, erasure of women as a category, and focus on tribalism over all—have become. Or maybe they were always this way and it took some time away from a major urban center to see it.

Whichever the case, arguing with either side has become synonymous with filing my teeth with a dremel. Besides being as productive as screaming into an Amazon Box, taping it up, and shipping it to Congress, it’s fucking annoying.

If there is a resolution I’m attempting to adopt in the latter half of my fifties, it is this: find common ground with everyone and if I encounter someone so far into conspiracy territory that I cannot, walk away and don’t look back.

Social Media Enables the Very Worst in Us (and Me)

I can’t remember if I shed myself of Faceborg, Twitter, Instagram, and the host of social media this or last year but I’ve spent most (if not all) of my fifty-fifth year absent the noise and it was an excellent decision.

Mobs of imbeciles canceling professors, trolling J.K. Rowling, threatening violence to strangers, and organizing a breach of the Capitol all using tools for communication that should be extraordinary made me hate people I had never met. This cannot be a good ‘chicken soup for the soul’ arena to spend time in.

I’ll admit that I do feel left out of the mix some yet I’m happier for it. I jumped back recently with a new LinkedIn account (which is sortof like social media but with jobs) and the only good thing about that has been being able to message with Rob Kozlowski.

I’m a Social Distancing Jedi

Five years ago, Dana threw me a birthday party and there was a room full of friends in attendance. This year, I’ll be lucky if even Dana remembers my birthday.

The culling effect of both getting rid of social media and the pandemic has been like a hoarder finally ridding himself of boxes of empty Altoid tins and those square plastic bread ties. Always a bit of a misanthrope, this year has cleared out so much noise and my new gig at home has me isolated from the wash of the unwashed.

Turns out I’m good with this. My interactions with people are more intentional rather than surface level and while life has made me more cautious when it comes to whom I genuinely trust, those whom I do choose teach me things I wouldn’t know and enrich my dwindling time on the planet.

Your Reality is Dictated by Your Optimism

Optimism isn’t merely hope. It isn’t happiness or a cheery disposition.

Optimism is an act of resilience against the brutal harshness of living the existential crisis.

It’s darkest just before the dawn implies that there will be a dawn. What if there won’t be? What if it’s just more darkness? If the implacable timpani of human greed, a self correcting planetary environment, and the algorithm that defines our modern interaction has no end, should that result in giving in to the despair?

As optimism is a breeze when things are going your way, despair is the path of least resistance when things turn to shit. Seeing through the mist at a better future takes effort and commitment like a solid marriage or a massive novel you’ve committed to writing. It’s a project to be managed not a feeling to languish within.

One cannot truly call himself an optimist who refuses to see the horror. Pretending that people are essentially kind and generous is stuffing the ostrich head in the sand. People are apes with higher brain functions and follow the rules of the jungle. Tribalism, essentialism, war for resources, the history of brutality of all humanity goes far beyond Hannah Jones 1619 Project. Taken in whole, we aren’t a very enlightened and forgiving species.

Further, optimism is an individual choice. It’s not something that can be enforced but it is something that can be inspired. The American Experiment, despite its many missteps and flaws, is grounded in a belief that humans can govern themselves justly and effectively. Given the larger picture, belief in democracy is only slightly more delusional than the guy playing slots so he can pay his rent. The odds are astronomically against success and yet the choice to persevere is made.

When you see someone who has one of those death camp tattoos on their arm you are witnessing a genuine, tried and true, bona fide optimist.

Optimism is hardest when things turn to shit but it is then when it is most necessary.

Becoming Antique is a Journey

For the first time I see that more of my life has been lived than I have left to live.

I recognize that I wish I could give the years I have left to my nephew because I have done a lot in my five and a half decades and he didn't get the chance. I wonder, absent the obsessive drive to achieve I had in my younger days, what I have to offer in the next ten years? What value does my existence provide to others and how do I manifest that value in pragmatic terms?

Like an old car or a pair of worn-out shoes, we all must acknowledge a certain sense of obsolescence. The pandemic has up-ended so many of the fictions we lived with up until this point and finding North on the compass is a challenge these days. Becoming irrelevant is like that boiling frog—slowly and without even recognizing the boil—we all find ourselves as vintage.

Perhaps that's what I've become. Not the rusted Coca Cola sign in the corner but the "like new" vinyl Def Leppard album with slightly tattered and stained liner notes.

In my next ten years (if I have that much time in store or more) I'd like to read more. Write a lot more. Listen to more live music. Be a better husband. Become that cool old man on the block with good advise and a snort of rye in case it's a little chilly. Christ, I already smoke a pipe.

There is so much more to learn that, in order to avoid feeling useless, I need to learn more.

In a Pandemic, Look For the Simple Things to Keep You Sane

A really well-made sandwich

A cold beer in 115˚ weather

A road trip with your Soul Mate

A book by a new author

A slideshow of you and your Soul Mate doing things together

A long walk

Recognizing that you have a Soul Mate

Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything else. I wonder if I’d miss anything important if I simply ceased to breathe on the couch I bought back in Chicago as it sits in Nevada.

In those moments of melodramatic existentialism, I remind myself that the experience of living is this annual letter to you. A summation of the things I’ve learned and the life I’ve lived.

If I had finished this race last year, my mettle wouldn’t have been tested by a pandemic. I wouldn't have found my sister again. I wouldn’t have seen Trump slink away to Florida. I wouldn’t be sitting in a Craps Chair in a home office of my design.

I wouldn’t have learned anything at all (you know, because dead people stop moving forward).

Here’s to another year and what adventures I will have!

#Fifty-Fifth Birthday #Birthday Lessons

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sramirezvillage · 6 years

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Sara Ramirez receives Trailblazer Award (Speech Transcript)

This is a beautiful recognition and it means the world. Robyn Ochs, Faith Cheltenham, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for all that you’ve done to center the bisexual+ community and our histories, our needs and our beautiful stories. No trailblazer can trail blaze without standing on the shoulders of others who fought for our visibility. I thank you and all of the hardworking bisexual+ community leaders and activists and allies for empowering me to stand here before you tonight to receive this honor. At the same time, I must name the painful reality that while I am being honored for who I am and what I’ve done there’s so many LGBTQ institutions and spaces where I don’t feel safe, where I don’t feel recognized as a bisexual, pansexual, queer person of color. While my platform has given me important access, I am so blessed to have the many privileges that I do. Every time bisexual+ people are erased, every time I am erased, as a bisexual+, queer person of color in the movement spaces that are supposed to be my home, the pain can feel unbearable. If I’m going to be recognized, you must also recognize my community’s vulnerabilities and needs. Whether you are comfortable with labels or not, the fact is, the ability to be seen, to name our truth, to find community and build power around who we are is such a critical part of any political movement for true liberation.

Recently, at a conference focused on ending youth homelessness I had an experience that exemplifies this type of pain. I was in attendance as a representative of the board of directors for the organization hosting the event as well as to listen and learn. After one panel, I was sitting at a table when I was approached by a white gay identified woman who eagerly wanted to get a picture with me for her wife, I told her I wasn’t doing pictures at that time, we then talked. We started talking about the gay rights and gay pride work that she does and I am a curious person, so I asked questions, including questions about how people of color and bisexual+ people were integrated into the work, she seemed uncomfortable, after some more awkward exchanges, the conversation ended naturally and we went our separate ways. Hours later, the same woman tracked me down to say “I didn’t have my glasses on earlier, but now I do and you’re not who I thought you were.” And with that she walked away. “You’re not who I thought you were.” “You’re not who I thought you were.” I remembered those words so clearly, because this exchange is a microcosm of how I often feel as a bisexual, pansexual, queer woman of color in LGBTQ spaces. I am desired until I am inconvenient; I am useful until I am disruptive. This is the experience not just of celebrities or others with platforms but the entire bisexual, pansexual, fluid, non-monosexual, queer identified community, especially those of us whose lives intersect with multiple margins. Those of us who are immigrants, poor, brown, black, disabled, asylum seekers and bisexual, pansexual, fluid, queer, trans and or non-binary. When I thought about what to say here tonight, I considered asking folks in this room who identify as bisexual, pansexual, fluid or non-monosexual to identify themselves, so we could see one another, celebrate one another and maybe feel less alone. But the anticipation of almost no one standing up with me because so many of us don’t feel safe to, can’t, was too painful for me to risk. I have felt so vulnerable, so often.

No matter where I turn, there’s so few resources specifically for bisexual+ people generally, and especially bisexual+ people of color. We are suffering because we don’t have a community, we’re fractured, we’re isolated and this experience of not being seen or recognized or of being out right excluded with hostility, takes a toll. It’s part of why we see such negative health outcomes for bisexual+ people, it is being reported by the CDC that bisexual, pansexual, fluid individuals have the highest rates of suicidality and depression among our lgbtq community and the most recent study published in 2016 by [Heron Greenesmith BiNet USA, Bisexual Organizing Project, Bisexual Resource Center and MAP(Movement Advancement Project)] it is being documented yet again that over 50% of the lgbtq+ community identifies as bisexual, fluid, non-monosexual and yet we are often neglected and erased. There is rarely programming specific to our needs, rarely speakers, trainers and staff for bi+ and can lead bi+ specific work. But it is time for that to change. For us to see bi+ staff at large in LGBTQ institutions, to see brown and black bisexual+ people in top leadership positions. To have bi+ specific programming, to have clear, easy access to culturally competent bi+ resources when going to lgbtq organization websites, to see signs up in their lobby that explicitly celebrate bi+ people, to direct funding to the bisexual+ community’s needs, to have leaders whether they identify as bisexual+ or not. Naming our identities and sharing our stories. Our needs are not identical to the needs of gay and lesbian individuals and it’s okay. People who aren’t bisexual, pansexual or fluid will never understand what it means to be bisexual, pansexual or fluid. Please respect our human dignity despite your lack of ability to understand us. Please stop tokenizing bisexual, pansexual, fluid identified, cis gender, transgender, and or non-binary life experiences to further policies that don’t actually support our lives and experiences. Our stories and history are important and cannot be lost. Tonight I urge us all, to think about whether we have contributed to the erasure of bisexual+ people, whether we’ve thought to ourselves “mm bisexual, pansexual, fluid people are really just straight or really just gay” or any number of other insidious stereotypes. We can do so much together, if we take a step back and reflect on the fears that may drive our discomfort, the assumptions that may cause us to exclude, we all do this and we can all work to change. There is so much struggle right now, but we are also at a critical juncture where movements are building, we are calling out cultural normalization of sexual harassment, we are standing up and naming the importance of black lives, transgender lives, we are uniting on so many fronts and we need to unite here too. We need to honor our bisexual+ elders, fight for our bisexual+ youth and give space and voice to the entire bisexual+ community. I thank you again for this award and I thank you all for joining us here tonight.

I know that there are people in this room who don’t feel safe, or comfortable to openly identify as bisexual, pansexual or fluid. I want you to know that despite this, I see you, I was you, I am you, I love you and maybe in a couple of years we will feel safe enough to show ourselves and celebrate one another openly without fear. Thank you.

#sara ramirez #lgbt center nyc #bisexual #pansexual #lgbt #queer #speech transcript #2017

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kattipatang · 7 years

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Narratives of Punjab's Partition (I'm addressing specifically Punjab's rn- Bengal and Kashmir were also partioned, and the impact was horrible, but at the moment I'm just focusing on Punjab) really expose people's anti-Sikh sentiments on both sides of the border.

Sikhs are blamed for "erasure" of the experiences of Muslims and Hindus in Punjab's Partition. We are blamed for allegedly saying that the identifier of Punjabi is solely ours. However, in reality, we are only louder because we are one of the populations that lost the most. That fact is glossed over by people on both sides of the border, so we need to speak loud enough for you to hear us. We are not being loud to drown out your voice. We are being loud not to be drowned out by yours, because yours is hegemonic.

The truth is that during the pre-partition meetings Sikhs were duped into believing that they would receive an autonomous Punjabi sooba in the new country of India if they sided with Gandhi and Nehru. This was a lie and the Punjabi sooba wouldn't be formed for another two decades, and not without the flowing of Sikh blood, and the removal of Himachal and Haryana from Punjab- making the remnants of the state unrecognizable.

The truth is that on the western side of the border our places of worship were taken away from us. The power vacuum partition created gave rise to small gangs taking control of Nankana Sahib and other places of worship. Sikhs who tried to access these Dharm Isthhaans would be butchered. Now Sikhs can visit these places, but they are still occupied by the Pakistani government and Sikhs still don't have jurisdiction over these places of worship- something we pray to regain on a daily basis. That's the equivalent to a non-Muslim government laying claim to the Prophet's Mosque in Medina and not giving Muslims the rightful jurisdiction to run it.

The truth is that while Sikh activists in the 50s and 60s gave their lives for language rights of Punjabi, a large majority of Muslim Pakistanis and Hindu Indians in East Punjab and West Punjab pushed for Urdu and Hindi to be their only identifier, not Punjabi.

The truth is that today on both sides of the border Sikh history and the legacy of Sikhs has been erased. In Pakistan, schools gloss over the Sikh Raaj under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and through my research during my undergrad I have seen that Pakistani academics have framed Sikh leaders like Baba Banda Singh Bahadur as uncivilized brutes. In India, our identity is treated as a joke, and we are told that Sikhs aren't a distinct community of their own, but simply a sect of Hinduism.

The truth is, even to this day, many people amongst Pakistani Punjabis and Indian Hindu Punjabis at their community centers here in Canada rallied their communities not to mark Punjabi as their language, but rather Urdu and Hindi during the last Canadian census.

The truth is that Punjabi is ridiculed on both sides of the border and is seen as inferior. It is seen as a crude language only fit for comedic relief. In West Punjab, Urdu is seen as superior, and despite long standing activist from a minority of Muslim Pakistani Punjabis, little has been done to protect Punjabi. The same is the case with India, where Punjabi is seeing a decline in schools and academia.

Punjabi youth in West Punjab would rather identify themselves with Arab/Persian culture, and Hindu Punjabi youth in East Punjab would much rather identify themselves with the pan-Indian Hindu identity. You have the privilege to do that, we don't. Our faith and our language are so ingrained in the land and culture of Punjab, a land that has faced erasure and neglect.

We never claimed you are not Punjabi, or stripped you of your Punjabiness, but the truth is that many non-Sikh Punjabis DID strip themselves of their Punjabiness. Your lack of ability to identify with the culture of Punjab is not because we push you away, it's because you are in a sociopolitical group that has historically moved away from Punjabiyat. If you wish to identify with Punjab, no one is stopping you and no one is saying you have no claim to it.

However, something does need to be said about this knee-jerk reaction against Sikhs. As a minority on both sides of the border, we are vocal, because colonialism and Partition stripped us from everything our community worked for. It left us trauma that cannot be undone- trauma that was inflicted by both Pakistan and India. We aren't quiet about that, and a loud minority speaking up in a hegemony will sadly always be seen as a nuisance.

I'm not saying Muslims and Hindus didn't also face trauma. The pain everyone felt during this time is unimaginable. I'm not stopping you from sharing their stories. And yes, there are community narratives that are not often spoken about, such as the case of Christians and Dalits and how those intersections played out.

However, while sharing these narratives, you don't need to silence Sikhs, or claim that somehow we are committing erasure. The reality is, that we are the ones who have faced erasure for far too many years and we are not about to be silent about that.

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lodelss · 4 years

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,569 words)

“Can I talk to you in private?” No one wants to hear those words. The impulse is to assume you’ve done something egregiously wrong. The expectation is that you are about to be punished. The conviction is so strong that the only good thing about it is that, at least initially, you can suffer without anyone else knowing about it. You might even thank the punisher for coming to you directly, for keeping it between just the two of you. It’s the least someone can do when they are about to theoretically ruin your life.

A lot has been written about privacy online, in terms of information, in terms of being policed. Ecuador is currently rushing to pass a data protection law after a breach affected as many as 20 million people — more than the country’s population. A lot has also been written about callout and cancel culture, about people being targeted and cast off (if only temporarily), their entire history dredged up and subjected to ex post facto judgement; Caroline Flack, the British television presenter who recently committed suicide while being hounded in the press and online amid allegations she had assaulted her on-again, off-again boyfriend, was seen as its latest casualty. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk about the hazier in-between, about interpersonal privacy online, about missteps once dealt with confidentially by a friend or a colleague or a boss, about the discrete errors we make that teach equally discrete lessons so as not to be repeated in public. That’s not how it is anymore, not in a world tied together by social media. Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep. We’re all primed — and able — to admonish institutions and individuals: “Because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” Sarah Hagi wrote in Time last year. “That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to.”

Which is to say that a lot of white people are fucking up, as usual, but now everyone, including white people and people of color, are publicly vilifying them for it as tech’s unicorn herders cash in on the eternal flames. And it’s even worse than in the scarlet letter days: the more attention the worse the punishment, and humiliation online has the capacity for infinite reach. As Sarah John tweeted after one particular incident that left a person hospitalized, “No one knows how to handle cancel culture versus accountability.”

* * *

“Is that blood?” That was my first question after a friend of mine sent me a message with a link to a few tweets by a person I’d never heard of, the editor-in-chief of a small site. The majority of the site’s staff had just resigned, the impetus being a semi-viral tweet, since deleted, of a DM the editor had sent a Twitter chat in 2016: “I was gonna reply to this with ‘nigga say what?’ Then I was like holy shite that’s racist, I can’t say that on twitter.” According to Robert Daniels at the Balder and Dash blog on rogerebert.com, tweeters, mostly white, piled on — some even called the EIC’s workplace demanding they be fired — before the office-wide resignation. Videos embedded in the tweets I saw showed the editor crying through an apology. (Longreads contacted the editor for comment; they’ve asked to remain anonymous for their health and safety.)

Initially I thought the videos were just a mea culpa, but then I saw a flash of red. Though the details are muddied by a scrubbed social media history, the editor appeared to have harmed themselves. Ex-colleagues rushed to their aid, however, and they were eventually hospitalized. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a filmmaker named Jason Lei Howden decided to avenge the EIC. With scant information, apparently, he targeted individuals on Twitter who weren’t involved in the initial pile-on, specifically blaming two people of color for the crisis — Valerie Complex and Dark Sky Lady, who had not in fact bullied anyone but had blogged about Howden. The official Twitter account of Howden’s new film, Guns Akimbo, got mixed up in the targeted attacks, threatening the release of the film.

There are multiple levels to this that I don’t understand. First, why that DM was released; why didn’t the person simply confront the EIC directly? Second, why did the editor’s staff, people who knew them personally, each issue individual public statements about their resignations into an already-growing pile-on? (I don’t so much wonder about the pile-on itself because I know about the online disinhibition effect, about how the less you know a person online, the more you are willing to destroy them.) Third, why the hell did that filmmaker get involved, and without any information? Why did the white man with all the clout attack a nebulous entity he called “woke twitter” — presumably code for “people of color” — and point a finger at specific individuals while also denying their response to one of the most inflammatory words in the English language (didn’t they realize it was an “ironic joke,” he scoffed)? As Daniels wrote, “This became a cycle of blindspots, and a constant blockage of discussing race, suicide, and alliance.” Why, at no point, did anyone stop to think about the actual people involved, about maybe taking this private, to a place where everything wasn’t telegraphed and distorted?

Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep.

I had the same question after the BFI/Thirst Aid Kit controversy. In mid-February, the British Film Institute officially announced the monthlong film series THIRST: Female Desire on Screen, curated by film critic Christina Newland and timed to coincide with the release of her first book, She Found It at the Movies (full disclosure: I was asked to participate, but my pitch was not accepted). The promotional image included an illustration of a woman biting her lip, artwork similar to that of three-year-old podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), a show that covers the intersection of pop culture and thirst. Newland later told The Guardian she wondered about the “optics,” but as a freelancer with no say on the final design, she deferred to the BFI. She had in fact twice approached TAK cohost Nichole Perkins to contribute to her book (the podcast’s other cohost is Bim Adewunmi). Perkins told me in an email that she wanted to, but her work load eventually prevented her. And while TAK did share the book’s preorder link, the BFI ultimately failed to include the podcasters in the film series as speakers, or even just as shout-outs in the publicity notes — doubly odd, given that Adewunmi is London-based. Quote-tweeting the BFI’s announcement and tagging both the institute and Newland, TAK responded, “Wow! This sounds great. Hope our invitation arrives soon!”

The predictable result was a Newland pile-on in which she was accused of erasing black women’s work, followed by a TAK pile-on — though Perkins told me her personal account was “full of support and kindness” — for claiming ownership over a term that preceded them. All three women ended up taking time away from Twitter (which is a sacrifice for journalists whose audience depends on social media) though Newland has since returned. I asked Perkins if she had thought about dealing with the situation privately at first. “I did consider reaching out to Christina before quote-tweeting, yes,” she wrote. “I wonder if she considered reaching out to us, especially after she saw the artwork for the season and admittedly noticed ‘something going on with the optics,’ as she is quoted as saying in The Guardian.” Eventually, the BFI contacted Perkins and Adewunmi and released a statement apologizing “for their erasure from the conversation we are hoping to create from this season” and announcing a change of imagery. They also noted that Newland, as a guest programmer, was not responsible for their marketing mistake, though no reason was given for their omission. “I have no idea why the BFI or Ms Newland didn’t include Thirst Aid Kit in the literature about the Thirst season,” Adewunmi wrote to me. “I was glad, however, to see the institution acknowledge that initial erasure, as well as issue an apology, in their released statement.”

At around the same time, a similar situation was unravelling in the food industry. Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices, an anthology edited by former Food Network VP Katherine Alford and NPR’s Kathy Gunst, was published in early February. The collection of more than 50 recipes and essays presents baking as “a way to defend, resist, and protest” and was supposedly inspired by the 2016 election. The hashtag #ragebaking was used to promote the book on social media in January, which brought it to the attention of a woman named Tangerine Jones, whose Instagram followers believed the idea had been stolen from her and alerted her — and the rest of the world. Unprompted by Jones, Alford and Gunst DM’d her to say they had learned the term elsewhere and that the book was “a celebration of this movement.” Jones called them out publicly, publishing their DMs in a Medium essay entitled “The Privilege of Rage,” in which she described how she came up with the concept of rage baking — using the #ragebaking hashtag and the ragebaking.com URL — five years ago, as an outlet for racial injustice. “In my kitchen, I was reminded that I wasn’t powerless in the face of f**kery,” she wrote. Jones’s supporters started a pile-on, her article shared by big names like Rebecca Traister, who had contributed to the collection and requested that her contribution be removed from future editions.

In an abrupt turn of events, the Jones advocates were promptly confronted with advocates of the book, who redirected the pile-on back at Jones for kicking up a fuss. “It is beyond f**ked up that my questioning the authors’ intentions and actions is being framed as detrimental to the success of other black women,” she tweeted. Their silence resounding, the Simon and Schuster imprint ultimately issued a statement that failed to acknowledge their mistake and instead proposed “in the spirit of communal activism” to include Jones in subsequent printings. Unappeased, the baker called out the “apology” she received privately from Alford and Gunst, who told her they were donating a portion of the proceeds to the causes she included in her post (though their public apology didn’t mention that), and asked if she would be interviewed as part of the reprint. “Throwing black women under the bus is part of White Feminist legacy,” Jones tweeted. “That is not the legacy I stand in, nor will I step in that trap.”

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According to Lisa Nakamura, a University of Michigan professor who studies digital media, race, and intersectionality, cancel culture comes from trying to wrest control in a context in which there is little. It’s almost become a running joke the way Twitter protects right-wing zealots while everyone else gets pummeled by them. It follows then that marginalized populations, the worst hit, would attempt to use the platform to reclaim the power they have so often been denied. But as much as social media may sometimes seem like the only place to claim accountability, it is also the worst place to do it. In a Medium post following their Howden hounding, Dark Sky Lady argued that calling out is not bullying, which is true — but the effects on Twitter are often the same. “The goal of bullying is to destroy,” they wrote. “The goal of calling out and criticizing is to improve.” Online, there appears to be no improvement without destruction in every direction, including the destruction of those seeking change. On one end, a group of white people — the EIC, Newland, Alford, Gunst — was destroyed professionally for erring; on the other were the POC — Perkins, Adewunmi, Jones — who were personally destroyed, whose pain was minimized, whose sympathy was expected when they got none. The anger was undoubtedly justified. Less justified was the lack of responsibility for how it was deployed — publicly, disproportionately, with countless people’s hurt revisited on specific individuals, all at once.

We know how pile-ons work now; it’s no defense to claim good intentions (or lack of bad intentions). There were few gains for either side in any of these cases, with the biggest going to the social media machine that feeds on public shame and provides no solution, gorging on the pain of everyone involved without actually providing constructive way forward, creating an ever-renewing cycle of suffering. A former intern for the ousted EIC tweeted that she understood the impulse to critique cancel culture and support the editor, but noted that “there is something sad about the fact that my boss used a racial slur, and I am not allowed to criticize.”

* * *

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed author Jon Ronson told Maclean’s in 2015 that one of his biggest fears is being defined by one mistake, and that a number of journalists had basically told him, “I live in terror.” I am no exception. Just recently I experienced a comparatively tame callout on Twitter, and even that moderate critique made me drop an entire book project, wonder about a job opportunity that subsequently dissolved, and second-guess every story idea I’ve had since. The situation was somewhat helpful in making me a more considerate person but was exponentially more helpful in making me anxious and in inspiring hateful fantasies about people I had never met. I am 100 percent certain that the first gain would have been made just as successfully had people spoken to me privately and would have saved me from the second part becoming so extreme that I had to leave social media to recalibrate. The overwhelming sense I’m left with is that if I say something that someone doesn’t like, even something justifiable, my detractors will counter with disproportionate force to make whatever point it is they want to make about an issue that’s larger than just me. What kind of discourse is that which mutes from the start, which turns every disagreement into a fight to the death, which provides no opportunity for anyone to learn from their failures? How do we progress with no space to do it?

“I think we need to remember democracy. When somebody transgresses in a democracy, other people give them their points of view, they tell them what they’ve done wrong, there’s a debate, people listen to each other. That’s how democracy should be,” Ronson told Vox five years ago. “Whereas, on social media, it’s not a democracy. Everybody’s agreeing with each other and approving each other, and then, if somebody transgresses, we disproportionately punish them. We tear them apart, and we don’t want to listen to them.” The payment for us is huge — almost as big as the payout for the tech bros who feign impartiality when their priority is clearly capital and nothing else. This is a punitive environment in which we are treating one another like dogs, shoving each other’s noses into the messes we have made. Offline, people are not defined by the errors they make, but by the changes they make when they are confronted with those errors, a kind of long game that contradicts the very definition of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. The irony of public shaming on social media is that social media itself is the only thing that deserves it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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jillmckenzie1 · 5 years

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Interview with Colorado Prize for Poetry Winner: Gillian Cummings

Gillian Cummings is the Author of The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter, winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry selected by John Yau, forthcoming this November from The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. I reached out to Gillian Cummings directly regarding her success, and she enthusiastically consented to an interview.

About The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter:

The title The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter originates from a line spoken by Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet whose grief and guilt at which point have overwhelmed her into a sort of psychosis. The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter harkens to a disempowered, grief-struck tragic female figure and muse. In four parts, the fragile narrator grapples with her own deteriorating mental state in a way that is both liquidly lyrical and powerfully melancholy to behold. Each poem offers an evocative examination of and attempted liberation from depression through several interwoven, extended and stunning nature representations. Water is invoked during many of these pleading pieces, an eerie foreshadowing of her death by drowning: “The speech of rain: it was only a matter / of something asking to be let in.” The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter follows the profoundly wounded interior workings of a devastated, deranged character from her psychotic breaking point to that final point of departure—her suicide.

About the Poet:

Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry and My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has also written three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, the Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Verse Daily, in other journals and in two anthologies.

Here’s just a glimpse into the work:

Unwriting the Sentence

Nightly, it flaps out, flaps out— not a cry but a quietness, it had become bigger, empty of starlight. Sleep tucked it far beneath a bed of wings and smoke-moon, beneath the room rocking a slow tug at her boatlessness. It would come for her. Mornings, she knew this better than curtains know to keep out light. She once feared this would be more than she would ever know: the book of pages left unturned, sullied with some phantom coffee stains, underlines, mostly the erasures. It was the erasures. In the end, it was the erasures of love that hurt most.

The owl was a baker’s daughter

If earth is oven enough for my father’s body, I won’t eat a cake that flies. No, no, no—but night hears Who? as a question and cherry pies come out feathered in silvers, golds. Brown at the throat where words turned to molten syrup under crust—whose edges? Who? Where do we end? Ah, stir us with no spoon but a knife, dirt is all our company. Would I were the moon. Misted over and round as a chipped china plate. It’s late to dine but too early for worms, so let me shine eerily upon you. I’ll enter the hall quietly, slippered, my body gossamered white.

Moon-Girls of the Medicine

You were about to float away so they taught you not to. Softly into quiet they come, finely, into spooked light—winged ones they bring, goldfinch, marlin, wren in enormous nest: the begin again, spring to startle your winter out of sleep’s either you’ll wake to wind that washes you like song or you’ll open eyes on sky untrumpeted in old tempests of stars; either you’ll come back to your body or you won’t. But the girls hover over you with their grass- messes of hair, their eyes mercy-mild, and what the birds teach in such communal twig- tangle is simple: how alone, we break; how we’re saved by one another.

Gillian Cummings, “Unwriting the Sentence,” “The owl was a baker’s daughter,” and “Moon-Girls of the Medicine” from The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, published by THE CENTER FOR LITERARY PUBLISHING. Copyright © 2018 by Gillian Cummings. Reprinted by permission of THE CENTER FOR LITERARY PUBLISHING.

How does the Ophelia portrayed in this work relate to Shakespeare’s? Is a reader’s grasp of the Shakespearean backstory essential to understanding this work?

That’s a good question. All of the poems, from beginning to end, take as their subject the topic of suicide, suicidal ideation, and the life that can come back to one after an experience of coma, though of course Ophelia dies in Hamlet, as she also dies in this book.

This book is divided into four sections, the first and third sections being made up of short poems that were once all sonnets, and the second and fourth sections being taken from a sequence of prose poems I expressly wrote in a voice I imagined to be Ophelia’s. I think the poems that I will call for convenience the “once-sonnets” are easier for the reader to approach than the twelve prose poems, because they came out of my direct experience as someone who lived for over six years with suicidal depression.

The prose poems that take on the persona of Ophelia, these are a little different. In writing them, I read Hamlet over and over, I’d say about fifteen times. I wanted those poems to sound like Ophelia’s voice as Shakespeare had expressed it, only prismed through the crystal of a woman’s (my) consciousness. I think that with the prose poems, the reader may be able to experience the mind of a woman from the past who has experienced a profound and profoundly disturbing loss (Hamlet’s odd and often cruel behavior towards her that turns to an outright rejection of her love and then his mistaken murder of her father). But honestly, I do leave out the backstory, the scaffolding, so to speak, that is Shakespeare’s play. I let the reader imagine exactly what is going on, in part because I do want the experience to be disorienting, to feel like madness.

After the express privilege of reading your work, Keats’ idea of the chameleon poet, one that “has no identity, [who] is continually filling some other body” came to mind. In this work, that “other body” seems to be Ophelia. How does this process of distance from self-affect the writing process? How would you describe your own overall aesthetic?

I think that John Yau, who judged the Colorado Prize, had that same experience from reading these poems, that in my writing I inhabit other selves. And it’s true. It’s very hard for me to write as an “I.” It’s hard to even say “I,” if the “I” is really myself. So, I have developed a habit of speaking in persona poems or of writing as myself but using the pronoun “she” or “you” to create a necessary distance. I also make things up, fictionalize my life in poems, to further that distance. I think that there are some poems in this book that are so intensely personal that they still frighten me when I read them. One is the poem “Unwriting the Sentence.” I wrote that poem when I was very, very close to taking my life. It is my “Edge” poem and even quotes Plath. I tried to make it very, very quiet, eerily so. I think I may do these kinds of things in my writing because in life I’m a very shy person with a need for privacy in an increasingly publicly oriented society. And my mind may be more fractured than a normal person’s.

In tandem, Keats’ idea of negative capability, or “the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science” feels simultaneously relevant. Through poetry and prose that evade straightforward sense, Ophelia’s voice proffers its own bent wisdom. How would you say this concept affects the reading experience of The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter and the reception of its inner logic?

As I said, I think that in the writing of this book, I was trying to create an experience for the reader that resembles the disorientation of madness. I hope that that comes across. I was also, in the third section of the book, the section that is more a coming back to life, trying to ground the poems in a deeply felt appreciation of the natural world, what remains of it, as a source of healing, a balm to the disturbed mind. I like your phrase “bent wisdom.” In The Owl, I lean upon and try to learn from certain Buddhist sutras that I incorporate obliquely. I never quite understood how to live the wisdom of Zen, though I studied under a Buddhist teacher for six years and took the Zen precepts called “Jukai” at the same time that I was starting to fall apart from several unbearably sad rifts in my life. Ophelia, as I saw and still see her, was inordinately wise in her madness, and the things Shakespeare had her say when she lost hold of her senses seemed to challenge even the patriarchal authority of King Claudius. I love that. And I love the beauty of her lack of logic. It’s “bent wisdom.” But it’s not so much my own as it is Shakespeare’s.

Your work My Dim Aviary (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), inhabits the voice of Miss Fernande—a Parisian model, prostitute, rumored mistress of Picasso. Observing the parallel explorations of the Damsel in Distress archetype, what draws you towards these subject matters and their musings?

The reasons for choosing both of these women as subjects may just come out of my life experience as someone who has a hard time seeing the side of life that is not tragic. I wrote in the voice of a sex-worker from a time past in My Dim Aviary because it was a way of my trying to heal myself from sexual abuse I suffered when I was young. I am someone who does not like sex and I thought that if I could imagine myself as someone comfortable in a very sexualized and even commodified body, I could face this terrible fear I have of not being safe as a woman. Sadly, for me, writing that first book did not help me at all with this problem. Nothing has so far… And then with the poems about Ophelia: I think she came so easily to mind simply because at the time I was obsessed with suicide, and she has long been one of my favorite Shakespeare characters.

One of the simplest ways people can promote poetry is by highly recommending other works. With that in mind, what poetry are you currently reading? Are there any poets, dead or alive, who you credit as your influences?

Thank you for asking this question. Certain poets’ works were central to the writing of this book, namely those of Cynthia Cruz, Allison Benis White, and Chloe Honum, who have written with great restraint about extreme states, not necessarily always their own. Also, Sylvia Plath, whose poetry has long been a touchstone for me, and Emily Dickinson. In recent years, I have loved—though not for that same kind of subject matter—Carolina Ebeid’s You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Jennifer Chang’s Some Say the Lark, and Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf. There really are too many poets to name—I could go on and on. Most recently, I have turned to reading the Polish poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because I’m now working on a novel that takes place, partially, in Poland. And to speak of novels, not poetry, I feel a great debt to Virginia Woolf, who is always a great teacher for me.

When and where can one purchase your work?

The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter has a release date of November 15, 2018. But it just went live for pre-sale orders.

It’s available through The University Press of Colorado’s website: https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3522-the-owl-was-a-baker-s-daughter.

And it’s also available through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Bakers-Daughter-Colorado-Prize-Poetry/dp/1885635656/

And, of course, you can order it at your local independent bookstore.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/interview-with-colorado-book-award-winner-gillian-cummings/

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newcatwords · 7 years

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toni morrison’s nobel prize for literature acceptance lecture (1993)

i copied the full text of the lecture from http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/tonimorrisonnobellecture.htm . they also have an audio version of the lecture on that site.

i love this speech. especially the parts about using dead language and the overall focus on the power of narrative. is that self-serving? sure! and guess what: it’s self-serving for me to post this as well cuz i believe in the gospel of the story and am happy to proselytize for it! ^_^

i love this line, said by the young people to the old woman:

Is there no context for our lives, no song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong?

i don’t get this: “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.” how can narrative create us? because it creates an “us”? or creates each of us individually? just not sure what this means.

i also don’t get the meaning of the closing (if anyone has any suggestions for how i can interpret it, i’d be happy to read anything you send my way). i need to re-read it and read more toni morrison!

Thank you. My sincere thanks to the Swedish Academy. And thank you all for this very warm welcome.

Fiction has never been entertainment for me. It has been the work I have done for most of my adult life. I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information is via narrative. So I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with what I believe to be the first sentence of our childhood that we all remember -- the phrase "Once upon a time...."

"Once upon a time there was an old woman, blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I've heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures. "Once upon a time there was an old woman, blind...wise...."

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement. One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: They enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability -- her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."

She doesn't answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?" She still doesn't answer. She's blind. She can't see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She doesn't know their color, their gender, or their homeland. She only knows their motive. The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands." Her answer can be taken to mean: If it's dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it's your decision. Whatever the case, it's your responsibility.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now -- thinking, as I have been -- about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She’s worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency -- as an act with consequences.

So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental -- exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, and absence of esteem, indifference, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It’s common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek -- it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language -- all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pâté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all -- if the bird is already dead. She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required -- lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would’ve been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.

She wouldn't want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, and writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it’s not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here; but it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties, because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word," the precise "summing up," acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, the recognition that -- that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all -- nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who doesn’t know of literature banned, because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue? Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it’s generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference -- the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? And what did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures toward possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I'm old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours." They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one, an old one. And if the old and the wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she doesn’t. She keeps her secret, her good opinion of herself, her gnomic pronouncements, her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, reenforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space. Nothing, no word follows her declarations of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all, because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said, to the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom. "We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you couldn’t bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing? "Do we have to begin our consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation, a made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands. "Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the soundbite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young, unripe. We’ve heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it’s already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

"You trivialize us and you trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives, no song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult; the old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly -- once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

"Tell us what it is to be a woman, so that we may know what it is to be a man; what moves at the margin; what it is to have no home in this place; to be set adrift from the one you knew; what it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company."

"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow; how they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last; how, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then suns; lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking, turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp, leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves, and its hiss and melt is the envy of the freezing slaves."

"The inn door opens. A girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed." It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence. "Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands, because you have truly caught it. How lovely it is, this thing we have done -- together."

Thank you.

#toni morrison #narrative #story #survival

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sohlkim · 7 years

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"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures. "Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise." In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement. One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead." She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?" Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive. The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands." Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility. For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised. Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public. She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness. Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead. She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required - lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded. The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life. She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue? Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. "Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours." They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can? But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space. Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot. "Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom? "We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing? "Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands. "Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past? "You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation. "Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. "Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves. "The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed." It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence. "Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."

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lodelss · 4 years

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A Crying Public Shame

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,569 words)

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