borrowing your heart

What has stayed with me amidst the rubble and remaking: these prophetic words from Muriel Rukeseyer:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

Listening to that splitting now, a fig cracking wide and scarlet. From the breathtaking and incendiary poet Nikky Finney:

Sign language

For the man who jumped out in front of the woman with his
arm raised like a machete screaming Abomination! as she
walked the streets of San Francisco holding her lover’s hand
for the first time in public.

There is a woman who goes to sleep
every night wishing she had broken
your sternum reached up inside your
chest momentarily borrowing your
heart to hold before your screaming
face and with her other hand still
clutching her lover’s broke next into
her own sternum plucking next her
own heart dangling them both there
sterling silver sign language for you
tell me what is the difference.

From THE WORLD IS ROUND (Innerlight Publishing, 2003)

Incendiary

 

From poet Nikky Finney’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Head Off & Split:

One: We begin with history. The Slave Codes of SC, 1739:
a fine of one hundred dollars and six months in prison will be imposed for anyone
found teaching a slave to read, or write, and death is the penalty for circulating
any incendiary literature.

…

Dr. Katie Cannon, what I heard you say once still haunts every poem I make,
􀲯Black People were the only people in the United States ever explicitly forbidden
to become literate.􀲰
I am now, officially, speechless.

 

Watch the speech here:

 

acceptance.html

the day’s sweet darkness

Don’t fear your own mistakes, I say to myself on a brittle summer morning, go out and make mistakes that may one day count for something.

The minestra soup, lighter than minestrone, is a ritual of transformation. Each vegetable sauted and simmered in order, gently, with respect — the onions, the new pink garlic, the carrots, celery, stalks of Swiss chard, courgettes, green beans, peeled tomatoes, canellini beans, broken  fragments of pasta. The salty heel of Parmesan, the rolled basil leaves sliced in a chiffonade right at the end, the last flourish.

Outside the wagtails tweet one another to launch an assault on the  spicy chlorophyll that is my newly planted basil. Brave seedlings in their  small nondescript pots, soothed with fado from the Cape Verde islands. Plants love music, to them it is all music, the wind scraping the garage door, the trees shaking foliage like a green bedspread, the rain singing out loud on the hissing tarmac, Bach, Patti Smith, Stravinsky.

Lizards and tobacco-brown grass snakes skitter across gravel. My overgrown pup scans the skies, nose quivering. What does he see there that is missed by human perceptions?

A folder on the desk in my study, a scarred yellowwood desk with its patina of sweet oils. Like all of us, I try not to gnaw my heart to pieces. This is what Chris Hedges says in the page I downloaded and printed out for the folder:

They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.

Who will be spared?

I carry on with quiet rituals of transformation. Letters to prisoners, a bowl of minestra for an unwell friend, the replanting of basil seedlings. The work of hard, practical love. Earning a living the only way I know how.  The getting of courage. Beeswax candles lit for a friend facing the unknown. A leafy green ritual for a friend with writer’s block. The watering of herbs, the grind of laundry, sponging down dusty tiles, picking up dog crap, letting the rose pierce  my consciousness.

The baked earth  thrumming beneath my feet, the grounded heartbeat deep down there that will go on after I  have ceased to walk these paths, these gravel stretches lit by the flickering tongue of the lizard.

It is what it is. It will be what it will be.

And possibility  creeps out from behind the shutter, lurks in the folder on my desk, in the small flame of candles.

Balance
By Adam Zagajewski

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport’s labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.

—translated by Clare Cavanagh

the river that carries the rain to the sea

We need more poetry, more fragments of beauty, more fight in the bloodstream.

At night here, the dense  configurations of stars in the Southern Cross are a white road map to the future, an unfinished diagram of constellated family dysfunction. Trust the fragment, I whisper as tangled hair falls across my face in sticky heat. The war murmurs in the hollow of night, the violence broken into rubble and glimpses.

It may rain before dawn, peace might come with sleep. Your hand in mine.

On Tao Qian

Tao Qian on Tao Qian:

He likes to read and is satisfied with the most simple of explanations.
When he understands what something means, he is so happy he forgets to eat.

Su Dongpo on Tao Qian:
He writes the way someone who is no longer impatient speaks.

Huang Tingjian on Tao Qian:
The poems are of no use
to someone just out of childhood,
but if he rereads them when he is old
it is as if he has made his decisions without knowing enough.

Huang Tingjian says that Su Dongpo is like Tao Qian.

Like two ducks, sleeping next to each other on the bank of the river that carries the rain to the sea while the storm rages on.

Translation of “Over Tao Qian.” © Nachoem Wijnberg. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2011 by David Colmer.

Found at Words without Borders. Images of the DRC/Congo by Guy Tillim and from Queering the Congo

Blake howling amidst the frenzy of greed

I don’t do Christmas in Africa. I shy from the festive  consumerism. The sports-mad revelry. The hue-and-cry around charity. No, I keep my head down and wait for the  craziness to pass. And thankfully I hear William Blake howling in the streets, howling out his  infectious [rabid] truth telling:

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season
When the red blood is fill’d with wine & with the marrow of lambs.
It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;
To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies’ house
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, & the sickness that cuts off his children,

While our olive & vine sing & laugh round our door, & our children bring fruits and flowers.
Then the groan & the dolor are quite forgotten, & the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, & the poor in the prison, & the soldier in the field
When the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

From The Four Zoas h/t wood s lot

Image  from David Goldblatt, more here.

A more robust sense of lives lived elsewhere

My favourite  quotation this week, Teju Cole, (author of the brilliant Open City)  countering Eurocentrism and First World kneejerk nonsense:

I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion’s technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is–quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

the point is not to surrender

Yesterday was Black Tuesday in South Africa: the notorious Protection of State Information Bill, also known as the Secrecy Bill, was passed through parliament yesterday while hundreds of black-clad activists protested outside. The implications for press freedom are of great concern and many see this as the beginning of State dictatorship.

 

It’s This Way

by Nazim Hikmet

I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.
My eyes can’t get enough of the trees–
they’re so hopeful, so green.
A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.
I can’t smell the medicines–
carnations must be blooming nearby.
It’s this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.

Self-defining beyond fetish: Lee Miller

 

For years  a guiding motif in the search for archetypes, inspirations, women in resistance has been the famous line from Virginia Woolf: ‘If we are women, we think back through our mothers.’ For some time now I have been exploring and reclaiming  for myself women artists and writers who  worked within the troubling and challenging paradigms of Surrealism and Modernism.

Via the witty and irresistible Bookslut, a link to this moving and thoughtful  article on the photographer Lee Miller and her relationship with Man Ray and with Surrealism. How does a beautiful and gifted woman  break away from  the status of fetish?

To be a fetish implies representing something invisible rather than concrete, so that the fetishistic object is a metaphor for as well as a document or artifact of a belief system…For Miller, the camera and the photograph as objects cut two ways. They were the vehicles for objectifying her, initially by her father the amateur photographer and then by photographers from the worlds of fashion, journalism, and art. In her hands, in the studio or the field, they were also the means to establish her independence and identity from these very circumstances.

To do battle where we are standing

The mundane and glorious work of turning the wheel. Helping with LGBT posters for the library (that may cease to be a library and become a computerised information centre, but that is battle for another day).

Subdividing  succulents to be planted out, the mysterious luminosity of Aeonium ‘Zwartkops’ in black and gold. Cuttings of indigenous pelargoniums once growing wild in the Karoo and the dusty mountains of the Soutpansberg. Slicing  off grey rosettes of echeveria.

A special birthday for my beloved housemate. We are family, albeit unorthodox. Sitting together in the garden surrounded by dogs, the calico cat from next door and a number of curious geckos, pouring out cups of  senna green tea and admiring malachite sunbirds in the olive trees. In the raised herb beds the rocket is flourishing, peppery and fresh. Handfuls of a rambly little orange-scented thyme, low-growing but potent.

In times of revolution, our more inspiring brave  revolutionaries are recalled — tribute to black poet and lesbian activist Audre Lorde in the Guardian:

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena, and the manner of our revolutions, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.”

Unbelievably, next month it will be 50 years since the dead of Frantz Fanon. Fanon who used the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. And today in 2011, women are still the object of men’s proprietary gaze everywhere. Fanon who fought against colonial psychiatry and the  ignorance around mental illness, the oppression of those  trapped in emotional illness. From the profile by Richard Pithouse in Pambazuka:

In 1953 Fanon took up a post at a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria. His colleague Alice Cherki, who would become his comrade and biographer, recalls that the racism of white Algeria was ‘habitual; it was unperturbed, understood, and viewed as entirely natural.’ Moreover the hospital was run more like a prison than a place where people were healed. Fanon immediately had the patients unchained and he tried to organise the hospital as a therapeutic community. In November 1954 an anti-colonial insurrection began and Fanon began covertly working with the Algerian national liberation movement, the FLN, early in the following year. Two years later he wrote a letter of resignation from the hospital declaring, in effect, that colonial society was more insane than his patients.

There is the struggle to limit the wild galloping growth of mint, in a pot but sending out roots and sneaking into the earth around the pot. Mint runs to fresh ground. Shouldn’t we all?

And, too, the struggle against Eurocentrism. Jaswinder Bolina on Writing  like  a White Guy.

…the woman who says she enjoyed my poems very much and follows this quickly with an admiring “You’re so Americanized, what nationality are you?” She doesn’t pick up on the oxymoron in her question. She doesn’t hear the hint of tiredness in my reply. “I was born and raised in Chicago, but my parents are from northern India.”

Parting shot from the brilliant and acerbic Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainiana on how African writers face a similar lack of comprehension when their books are published in the UK.

“The rhetoric of pity, which began in the 1980s, “is something which every educated African finds great, great offence in”.

“We are not interested in Oxfam, we are not interested in Tony Blair, we are not interested in what Oxfam is doing for Africa, we are not interested in what aid donors are doing, we are not interested in the partnership those people have with global media to be the voice of Africa to the world,” he said. “We never have been. We don’t talk about it, we don’t discuss it.”

Like authors all around the world, African writers are interested in the lives of the people around them, he continued.

“If you are to ask me what are the greatest issues in Africa, I would say it is that people love, people fuck, people kiss, people speak.”

Fairytales for summer nights

Stealthy moonlight like a white hand edging over the window sill at night. I plant by the moon: seedlings of basil, cherry tomato, wild rocket. Scented pelargoniums sifting a fine medley of lemon, rose and mint. Rose petals tumbling onto the wet grass, the black earth. The lizard’s cold flicker, the pewter glint of earthworm. And as I work, patiently, thoughtfully, the fairytales spin their gold just there, on the boundary of consciousness, there where the hand slides through the window glass.

Fairy-tale Logic

By A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:

Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,

Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks

And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,

Or learn the phone directory by rote.

Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

 

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe

That you have something impossible up your sleeve,

The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,

An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,

The will to do whatever must be done:

Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.