Resistance moon: Hold fast

There are some poets who can cram a lot of idea into a few words. Langston Hughes is certainly among that company. We’ve heard from him in the past—he’s always worth a revisit, though.

Especially during this month of perseverance, his “Dreams” seems appropriate. Short poem, much meaning. And we need to keep it in mind, lest we bend under the daily and hourly onslaught from those who’d like to turn the lives of the people into a barren field.

“Dreams”

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

Resistance moon: The watchful eyes of future generations

Like the Jews, the Chinese know from playing the long game. As a culture, they measure time in terms of centuries and are willing to plant seeds they know they’ll never see grow to fullness, content with the understanding that their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren will taste the fruit.

This means that individuals, communities, whole generations have lived hard lives under successive repressive regimes, but the civilization keeps moving forward.

And their poets understand that if you want to transmit a message, you use language in a way that encodes it. Those not in the know won’t be able break the code, but it’ll reach those who have the key; they’ll be able to decipher it.

Contemporary poet Bei Dao (nom de plume of Zhao Zhenkai) has said that “Each language keeps the secret code of a culture.” Even though China has a unifying written language, “the local accent keeps their secret, keeps their code.” And that’s how poets, especially the group known as the Misty Poets, who resisted the repression of the Cultural Revolution, protested.

As a teenager, Bei Dao was a member of the Red Guards, but as he began to withdraw from pro-Mao activities, he was “re-educated” as a construction worker. But no amount of re-education could suppress his poems.

“The Answer” is one of Bei Dao’s most famous works. It was written in response to the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations and became a focal point of the pro-democracy movement. It was featured on posters during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Bei Dao was out of the country at the time of this second suppression and he has worked in exile ever since. (He did not return to China until 2006.) You can see how it might get up the noses of the Party elite.

“The Answer”

Debasement is the password of the base,

Nobility the epitaph of the noble.

See how the gilded sky is covered

With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,

Why is there ice everywhere?

The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,

Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world

Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,

To proclaim before the judgment

The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,

I—do—not—believe!

If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,

Count me as number thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue;

I don't believe in thunder's echoes;

I don't believe that dreams are false;

I don't believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes

Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;

If the land is destined to rise

Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars

Adorn the unobstructed sky now;

They are the pictographs from five thousand years.

They are the watchful eyes of future generations.

But I find “Accomplices” to be perhaps more applicable in this time of our own cultural revolution. Bei Dao reminds us that freedom lies somewhere between the hunter and the hunted, that it is a 24x7 effort to maintain it. We who do not resist are accomplices.

“Accomplices”

After all those years

mica glints in the mud,

evil as it is bright,

tiny suns in vipers' eyes.

Branch roads appear and disappear

in the hands of trees.

Where did that fawn go?

Only cemeteries could assuage

this desolation, like tiny cities.

Freedom is only the distance

between the hunter and his prey.

As we turn to look,

a bat describes a sweeping arc

across the vast canvas of our inheritance

and vanishes into the dusk.

Nor are we free of guilt.

Long since, in history's mirror,

we became accomplices,

awaiting the day we might

seep down through the layers of stone

into subterranean pools

to contemplate darkness again.

Resistance moon: The strange command

Since it is Pesach in this Month of Resistance, even though I gave you some Jewish poetry just a few days ago, let’s have a couple from one of my favorite writers, Primo Levi.

Levi did not start out to be a writer—he studied chemistry. And in fact, following a little re-accommodation by the Germans during World War II, he worked as a chemist in a paint factory for 30 years. But that involuntary hiatus shaped him indelibly, and his is one of the most powerful voices for both resistance and resilience to come out of the Holocaust. Viz.:

“Reveille”

In the brutal nights we used to dream

Dense violent dreams,

Dreamed with soul and body:

To return; to eat; to tell the story.

Until the dawn command

Sounded brief, low

'Wstawać '

And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our homes again,

Our bellies are full,

We're through telling the story.

It's time. Soon we'll hear again

The strange command:

'Wstawać

“Wstawać” is Polish for “get up”—either to rise from a bed or stand up from a seated position.

In all the works I’ve read by Levi that deal with his relationship with the Nazis, he breaks from Italian and refers to the camps only by their German term: “lager”. It’s as though the very concept of Bergen-Belsen, Maidanek, Mauthausen and Auschwitz is so repulsive that he refuses to use an Italian word for these places. (Note to future press secretaries of this or any other administration: they were extermination camps, not “Holocaust centers”. You’re welcome.) I’m guessing that the order to get out of bed or stand to attention at Auschwitz, where Levi was a prisoner for eleven months, would have been given in Polish, so that’s the word he chose, and his translators retained it.

I wonder if Levi imagines that Death will also speak in Polish, when the summons comes? 

The second poem today is not strictly to do with resistance, but rather with solidarity, with comradeship, with the kind of connections that shape and strengthen us for the better as human beings. That encourage our decency and give us reasons to resist. As Levi well knew—we survive and build not just for ourselves, but for those who follow behind us.

“To My Friends”

Dear friends, and here I say friends

the broad sense of the word:

Wife, sister, associates, relatives,

Schoolmates of both sexes,

People seen only once

Or frequented all my life;

Provided that between us, for at least a moment,

A line has been stretched,

A well-defined bond.

I speak for you, companions of a crowded

Road, not without its difficulties,

And for you too, who have lost

Soul, courage, the desire to live;

Or no one, or someone, or perhaps only one person, or you

Who are reading me: remember the time

Before the wax hardened,

When everyone was like a seal.

Each of us bears the imprint

Of a friend met along the way;

In each the trace of each.

For good or evil

In wisdom or in folly

Everyone stamped by everyone.

Now that the time crowds in

And the undertakings are finished,

To all of you the humble wish

That autumn will be long and mild.

Resistance moon: Bricks made from my life

Women in pretty much every culture live lives of quiet resistance, learning to persevere possibly as early as through their mothers’ milk. No matter where you are, part of the tradition is almost certainly to make women less-than [whatever men are].

So we have learned to resist in small ways as well as large, despite being told over the centuries to shut up and make sandwiches. Poetry, of course, is one way of doing this. Poems are subject to interpretation, and somewhat like ciphers, unless you have the key, you can miss the message.

This is certainly the case with Iranian women poets. They call on the rich heritage of Persian poetry to frame their depiction of life under the ayatollahs, finding brightness where they can, facing darkness with resolution. The weapons of poetry—language, form, words—can strike with the force of a club, or slice like the sharpest Shamshir.

Siminbar Khalili, who wrote under the name Simin Behbahani, was one such. Coming from a progressive and literary family, she produced a body of work that earned her the sobriquet “The Lioness of Iran”. It also earned her nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice, in 1999 and 2002. (The Laureates for those years were, respectively, Günter Grass and Imre Kertész.)

As you might imagine for anyone known as a lioness, Behbahani made authorities uncomfortable. In 2010 at age 82, she was refused permission to leave the country; arrested and detained as she attempted to board a flight to Paris. She was released, but without her passport. If they thought to contain her strength, they were mistaken. She died in 2014, having never been allowed out of Iran, but her poetry remains as a source of strength and hope for us all. Viz.:

“My Country, I Will Build You Again”

My country, I will build you again,

If need be, with bricks made from my life.

I will build columns to support your roof,

If need be, with my bones.

I will inhale again the perfume of flowers

Favored by your youth.

I will wash again the blood off your body

With torrents of my tears.

Once more, the darkness will leave this house.

I will paint my poems blue with the color of our sky.

The resurrector of “old bones” will grant me in his bounty

a mountains splendor in his testing grounds.

Old I may be, but given the chance, I will learn.

I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.

I will recite the Hadith of love and country

With such fervor as to make each word bear life.

There still burns a fire in my breast

to keep undiminished the warmth of kinship

I feel for my people.

Once more you will grant me strength,

though my poems have settled in blood.

Once more I will build you with my life,

though it be beyond my means.

This next one paints a grim picture of men’s relationship to women. It’s tough to read.

“I want a cup of sin”

He said I want that which cannot be found.
-Mowlavi

I want a cup of sin, a cup of corruption,

and some clay mixed with darkness,

from which I shall mold an image shaped like man,

wooden-armed and straw-haired.

His mouth is big.

He has lost all his teeth.

His looks reflect his ugliness within.

Lust has made him violate all prohibitions

and to grow on his brow an “organ of shame.”

His eyes are like two scarlet beams,

one focused on a sack of gold,

the other on the pleasures found in bed.

He changes masks like a chameleon,

has a two-timing heart like an eel.

He grows tall like a giant branch,

as if his body has acquired vegetable properties.

Then, he will come to me,

intent on my oppression.

I will protest and scream against his horror.

And that ogre called man

will tame me with his insults.

As I gaze into his eyes

innocently and full of shame,

I will scold myself: you see,

how you spent a lifetime wishing for “Adam.”

Here you have what you asked for.

*    *    *    *

And here’s one more, in her own voice:

“For the dream to ride”

Resistance moon: Trying to show them our green cards

Today’s poem takes us to the heart of what’s happening under the current administration’s policies denying humanity to The Other—the black, the brown, the yellow, the red. Especially the psycthotic break towards Latinos: the rich, old, white Republicans somehow want all the donkey work (bussing restaurant tables and washing dishes; building additions to houses; landscaping and maintaining yards; cleaning office buildings; harvesting crops) done for less-than-living wages, and without importing laborers.

They demonize those who do this work, call them leeches on society, paint them with the “rapists and murderers” brush, and yet essentially give the individuals and businesses that hire them a bonus for maximizing their cost savings. (Along with, by the way, avoiding contributing taxes into the system, with their under-the-table cash payments to the laborers.)

Blas Manuel de Luna was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and worked alongside his parents, brothers and sisters in the agricultural fields of California’s San Juaquin Valley (whence comes a cornucopia of produce that goes out to the nation and the world). 

If farmers had to pay workers a living wage, we’ve been told for at least a hundred years, they couldn’t afford to stay in business. So, every salad we toss, every handful of almonds or walnuts we snack on, every cherry, peach, tomato and other summer pleasure we savor comes off the backs of men, women and children who work double-digit hours per day for heartbreakingly low amounts of money, under the ever-present threat of visits from La Migra if they complain about anything.

Even decades after the dedicated work of César Chávez, neither conditions nor pay has improved much for these workers, as de Luna well knows. He managed to leave the fields physically, earning degrees in English from Cal State Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Washington, but they’ve stayed with him. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin for a while, but now teaches English at a high school in California. I don’t expect “Bent to the Earth” really needs much of an introduction. But consider its truths when you consume anything that was produced by campesinos in the fields or obreros in the cities.

“Bent to the Earth”

They had hit Ruben

with the high beams, had blinded

him so that the van

he was driving, full of Mexicans

going to pick tomatoes,

would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,

spun the five-year-old me awake

to immigration officers,

their batons already out,

already looking for the soft spots on the body,

to my mother being handcuffed

and dragged to a van, to my father

trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro

was going back.

So was his brother Fernando.

So was their sister Sonia. Their mother

did not escape,

and so was going back. Their father

was somewhere in the field,

and was free. There were no great truths

Resistance moon: Somewhere within me

This is Holy Week for Western Christians (and, this year, for Eastern Orthodox Christians, too), the run-up to Easter, and tonight marks the beginning of Pesach, when Jews celebrate the liberation of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. The story goes that when the Angel of Death passed through the land to kill the first-born, he passed over the houses that had been marked with lambs’ blood on the lintels—i.e., those of the Jews.

The cumulative toll of various plagues prompted Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. They were understandably in so much of a hurry to shake the dust of Egypt from their heels, they didn’t bother to wait for the bread to rise; they just upped sticks and headed for Israel.

If we’re going to talk resistance, persistence and resilience, the ne plus ultra of those qualities has to be the Jewish people. A lot of folks—evangelicals among them—focus on the Biblical suffering: Nebuchadnezzar, Goliath, Pharaoh, Caesar. After that they get pretty fuzzy. Many among them are Holocaust deniers; many others only focus on modern-day Israel as a component of the End Times. And they sure as hell don’t want actual Jews living anywhere near them. (They don’t even want me living near them.)

Plus—I remember a time when Catholics referred to Jews as Christ-killers, and every year on Palm Sunday the mass includes the congregation taking the part of the Hebrews before Pilate and yelling, “Crucify him!” several times. It was only six years ago that Pope Benedict XVI exonerated the Jews from this alleged crime, and there was a lot of pushback on it from the faithful.

Okay, let’s have a couple of poems of resilience from Jews, starting with Psalm 142 (KJV):

I cried unto the Lord with my voice; with my voice unto the Lord did I make my supplication.

² I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble.

³ When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path. In the way wherein I walked have they privily laid a snare for me.

⁴ I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.

⁵ I cried unto thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.

⁶ Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low: deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I.

⁷ Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the righteous shall compass me about; for thou shalt deal bountifully with me.

For something more recent, let’s turn to the Hungarian Miklós Radnóti, considered one of the premiere Holocaust poets. Last year I gave you “The Hunted” by him. This time round, let’s have “Postcard 1”, in which we are reminded of what inspires people to persevere in the face of the uttermost cruelty. Victor Frankl spoke about this at length in Man’s Search for Meaning; those around him in Auschwitz who found something worth living for—a loved one, a focus of study, a hope for the future—all things being roughly equal, those people survived. Those who lost hope died.

“Postcard 1”

Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,

resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence

while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;

the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;

and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,

glowing within my conscience — incandescent, intense.

Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever —

still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death

or a beetle hiding in the heart of a rotting tree.

And finally, here’s a reminder of what constitutes resistance—it is not always taking up arms or marching in streets. It is a mindset of refusing to believe the false narrative of propaganda no matter how many times or how loudly it is repeated. It is an individual act of kindness or generosity, multiplied by tens of thousands of kindnesses and generosity. It is obstructing the oppressors at every possible turn. It is amassing a repository of evidence to everything that’s done and said. It is never surrendering. Haim Gouri is an Israeli journalist, poet and film documentarian. Monia Avrahami was general director of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, and collaborated with Gouri on the film Flames in the Ashes, in which this poem appeared. Avrahami died in 2014.

 (Avrahami)

(Gouri)

“Resistance is…”

To smuggle a loaf of bread - was to resist.
To teach in secret - was to resist.
To gather information and distribute an underground newsletter - was to resist.
To cry out warning and shatter illusions - was to resist.
To rescue a Torah scroll - was to resist.
To forge documents - was to resist.
To smuggle people across borders - was to resist.
To chronicle events and conceal the records - was to resist.
To extend a helping hand to those in need - was to resist.
To dare to speak out, at the risk of one's life  - was to resist. 
To stand empty-handed against the killers - was to resist. 
To reach the besieged, smuggling weapons and commands - was to resist.
To take up arms in streets, mountains and forests - was to resist.
To rebel in the death camps - was to resist.
To rise up in the ghettos, amid tumbling walls,
in the most desperate revolt humanity has ever known ...

Gratitude Monday: Plagues and questions

As I mentioned in today’s entry for National Poetry Month, tonight is the first night of Pesach. And I’m so grateful that I’ll be attending the large gathering at the house of friends once again.

It’s like being in an extended family, only but with rotating relatives. I’m looking forward to learning how people know the hosts, to being part of the ritual and to the Seder meal.

So I’m feeling very grateful indeed that I’m in the neighborhood for this celebration.

Resistance moon: Empty joy

I have a bad feeling about the events of the past week. The Kleptocrat’s son-in-law (known around the Web as the Secretary of Everything) toured military installations in Iraq in Ray-Ban® Wayfarers and a Kevlar vest over his navy blazer, and the Kleptocrat himself learned that if he wants to raise his abysmal approval ratings, all he has to do is fire off a few Tomahawk missiles at an empty “enemy” air base.

After all, it won’t be his sons and son-in-law who’ll get any closer to shots being fired than a canned big-game “hunt” or a photo op. Nor will the children of those lickspittle Repugnants in Congress be in harm’s way. No—it’ll be other people’s babies doing that clean-up work.

Well, on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, I think revisiting the poetry of World War I is in order. Siegfried Sassoon is one of the pre-eminent British war poets—an enthusiastic volunteer in 1914 who came to view war in general, and this one in particular, as an appalling venture. And he spoke out about it. It was only his family’s prominent position in society and his own valorous war record that saved him from court martial.

“Suicide in the Trenches” was written in 1917, published a year later. It reminds me a lot of the ways Vietnam changed boys I knew in school, and how the various Middle East adventures over the past 25 years have affected the men and women who put on body armor for a reason, not a photo op, and faced sand and scorpions instead of mud and lice in support of national policy.

It also reminds me of cummings’ “next to god of course america”.

“Suicide in the Trenches”

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

I wish to God someone in the White House would pick up a book of poetry—or a history book—and read it.

The high ground

There’s a reason for the expression “to be holding the high ground”; that’s the position of strength. Uphill attackers are always at a disadvantage. Think Seminary Ridge or Little Round Top; think Chapultepec; think Omaha Beach.

Canadians think Vimy Ridge, the battle that many came to believe forged their national identity, which began 100 years ago today.

Germans had held Vimy since October 1914. The French tried twice in 1915 to take it back (including momentary success in May by the First Moroccan Division that ultimately collapsed due to lack of reinforcements). The attempts cost the French around 150,000 casualties, and for a while both sides basically cautiously coexisted.

In February 1916 the British, under Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng, relieved the French so the latter could deploy around Verdun. When they arrived, they discovered that the Germans had dug numerous tunnels for the purpose of setting off mines under French positions in an attack. The Royal Engineers began countering the mining works. In May 1916 German infantry attacked, pushing back the British, although they were unable to consolidate their gains.

The Canadian Corps—four divisions that heretofore had been deployed in other British armies and were for the first time amalgamated into a national unit—relieved the British on the western slopes of Vimy Ridge in October 1916.

In developing a strategy for a spring offensive along the Arras front, the Brits and Canadians consulted with French commanders to learn lessons from the Battle of Verdun. They also did something rather novel for that war—they gave their troops, including the Canadians, intensive training: communicating objectives down to the platoon level, and subjecting them to repeated exercises on what to expect and how to adapt to combat conditions. Men were cross-trained for their comrades’ jobs, in the expectation that, when a soldier was knocked out of action, someone else would have to fulfill his function. They knew the purpose of the operation, the purpose of their unit and their own and their comrades’ purpose.

(I contend that this kind of thing—clear understanding of what was at stake in the operation; communicating each unit’s and each soldier’s role in that overall goal; detailed information on objectives; topographical familiarization; and those repeated combat-simulation exercises—were in large part responsible for the success of American troops at Omaha Beach, despite being landed in the wrong places and encountering much greater German resistance than had been expected. They knew their onions, and they pulled it off.)

Well, the training paid off for the Canadians, too. They commenced their attack on the morning of 9 April, Easter Monday, a cold day that later on brought sleet and snow. The attackers moved so quickly that the Germans couldn’t process it fast enough to react decisively.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t until 12 April that the Canadian Corps had control of the ridge. The battle had cost them 10,600 casualties (including 3600 killed). Sadly, there was no full-scale breakthrough on the Arras front. The Germans did not attempt to retake the position; instead they implemented a scorched earth policy and retreated to the Oppy-Méricourt line.

Whether or not Vimy Ridge was the forge of Canada as a nation, it has been a point of pride ever since. In 1922 France gave Canada perpetual use of a 100-hectare section of the highest part of the battlefield as a commemoration of the battle and of Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed during the First World War. The park is staffed by bi-lingual Canadian students, who lead visitors on short tours of the battle. You are limited to specified walking areas because of unexploded shells still buried in the ground. They use sheep to keep down the grass, because the weight of lawn mowers can set off explosions. Still, a hundred years on.

Some of the trenches have been preserved in concrete. You get an idea of them, but not the sense of constant mud, rats and lice; or of the artillery roar or the other sounds of war. I was appalled to realize that the forward observation trenches from the two sides were barely 50 meters apart. I just sat down and cried right there.

There’s also a monument, with sculptural representations of Canada’s sacrifice throughout the war.

There are two mourning parents; here’s one of them:

And the names of every Canadian soldier killed in action, for whom there is no known grave—the ones I call The Lost but Never Found. There are 11,285 of them there.

The legal age for enlisting as a volunteer was 17, but boys of 15 or 16 would take the name of an older man; so on the monument’s roster “served as” usually means someone not yet 17. There are many of them listed on that memorial.

And it is right for us to remember them all.