Voices from the fringes: After what you didn't do

Mai Der Vang was born in Fresno, California, in 1981, the daughter of Hmong refugees who came to the San Joaquin Valley in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Much of her poetry probes the Hmong experiences in America, but “In the Year of Permutations”—written last year—is savagely on point given the trial right now of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Vang dismantles the narrative Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department deployed about doing his job by kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while he lay face down in the street with his hands cuffed behind him. (I’ve found it fascinating over the past week to watch as one after another MPD official tsk-tsks and deplores Chauvin’s actions; last year this was not at all their song.)

In particular, Vang addresses Tou Thao, a nine-year veteran of MPD who stood by while Chauvin literally crushed the life out of Floyd. Thao, a member of the Hmong community, initially backed up Chauvin’s story, although he watered it down by saying he didn’t actually see what was going on, because he was engaged in crowd control. Vang excoriates whatever the Hmong equivalent of Uncle Tom would be.

“In the Year of Permutations”

Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.

Go and be left behind. Pre-package
                              your defense, tell yourself

                                                      you were doing
             your oath, guarding the futility of
            
                   your corrupted good,

              discerning the currency of some.

                                   As if them over all else.
                                         Over us.
                                    Above God and Spirit.
                                        
                          You over me, you think.

This is no shelter in justice not sheltering with
enclosure of soft iron a sheltering of injustices
into an inferno flooding of your crimes committed
and sheltered by most culprit of them all.

                      These nesting days come
outward springs of truth,

                    dismantle the old structures,

their impulse for colony—I am done
                                                    with it, the likes of you.

To perpetrate.
To perpetrate lack of closure, smolders of unrest.
To perpetrate long days alone, centuries gone deprived.

                             To be complicit in adding to the
                   perpetration of power on a neck,
                            there and shamed,

                             court of ancestors to disgrace
              you, seeing and to have done nothing.

Think you can be like them.

Work like them.
Talk like them.

Never truly to be accepted,
                                            always a pawn.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Put a price on nature

I have a back-and-forth relationship with rap and hip hop. It’s taken me a while to get into the focus on the beat, but at the moment I’m expanding my cultural literacy.

Today’s earworm, therefore, is from a member of the Cherokee nation who goes by the professional name of Litefoot (birth name: Gary Davis). Davis is an entrepreneur, activist, actor and hip hop musician. “My Land” riffs on the Woody Guthrie song and winds around the way native peoples have been portrayed in popular culture for centuries. It’s a tough thing to pull off in four minutes. And it's a tough thing to listen to for four minutes.

.

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: The telephone numbers of God

If you wanted to pick a demographic that has historically held the persona of “other”, you’d be hard-pressed to make the argument that anyone but Jews fit the bill. Anti-Semitism has to be the second oldest profession, and it’s still going strong. You want to deflect from [whatever’s going wrong] in your [village, city, country, world], point at the Jews. Anywhere, everywhere; any time, every time.

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, began at sundown yesterday and runs to sundown today. It marks the national program of genocide committed by the Nazis and their allies against European Jews, which resulted in six million dead.

Today’s poem is “After Auschwitz”, by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Amichai was born in Germany; he emigrated to Israel with his family in 1936, when he was 12. I’ve always found his focus on the details of life gripping; he tackles the big things with the same power.

“After Auschwitz”

After Auschwitz, no theology:
From the chimneys of the Vatican, white smoke rises—
a sign the cardinals have chosen themselves a pope.
From the crematoria of Auschwitz, black smoke rises—
a sign the conclave of Gods has not yet chosen the chosen people.
After Auschwitz, no theology:
the numbers on the forearms
of the inmates of extermination are the telephone numbers of God,
numbers that do not answer
and now are disconnected, one by one. After Auschwitz, a new theology:
the Jews who died in the Shoah
have now come to be like their God,
who has no likeness of a body and has no body.
They have no likeness of a body and they have no body.

Voices from the fringes: Never feel tyrannic sway

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from the Eighteenth Century. While its title is insipid, its subject is freedom, and it was written by someone with a unique perspective on the notion.

The woman we know as Phillis Wheatley was taken from her home somewhere in what’s now known as Gambia or Senegal in 1760. She was shipped to America, ending up in Boston because she was deemed not strong enough to work in the sugar cane fields of the West Indies or the plantations of the South. John Wheatley, a prominent tailor, bought the little girl to be a domestic servant for his wife; the Wheatleys named her Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that transported her. They reckoned her to be about seven because she was still losing her milk teeth.

If you’re going to be enslaved as a child, I guess the Wheatleys are about as good as it’s going to get for you. They recognized Phillis’s intelligence and gave her an education in the classics—unheard of for either slaves or most women. She could read Ovid, Horace, Virgil and Homer in the original Greek and Latin, and she was heavily influenced by Milton and Pope. She began writing poetry in her early teens.

The Wheatleys encouraged her, even sending her to London with their son in 1771 because they thought the climate change would help her asthma, and so she could find subscribers to sponsor publication of her collection of poems. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was issued two years later.

The Wheatleys emancipated her in 1774, but life was not kind to her. She married an improvident grocer; the war for American independence rendered their economic condition even more parlous. Phillis took work as a scullery maid while her husband was imprisoned for debts, and she died in 1784. By that time, she had lost two babies and her remaining son died soon enough that he was buried with her.

The poem for today, as I said, is about freedom. Wheatley wrote it in 1772 while in London as an entreaty to the newly-appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies, William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth. The hope was that Dartmouth would be less of an arrogant prick than his predecessor. (I do not know what the outcome was.)

I confess that Wheatley’s style is not my cup of tea. But poetry casts a wide net, and her perspective on freedom lends considerable influence on my willingness to listen to her. I frankly can’t imagine that Dartmouth paid the slave poetess any more heed than he did the colonists; that would be one of the reasons why we are not part of Britain, or even of the Commonwealth.

I wonder how much of her early childhood Wheatley recalled, after 19 years in Boston? How much of her mother tongue did she still carry with her after all that Ovid, Milton, Homer and the Bible? And I wonder the same about the thousands who were brought to the New World and sold into chattel slavery, who didn’t have the language Wheatley wielded to make even the tiniest cut into the peculiar institution?

“To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America, etc.”

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

 

Voices from the fringes: Someone will talk

Eight years ago I gave you a poem by Iraqui-American poet Dunya Mikhail. (Wow—I’ve been doing National Poetry Month for eight years?!) I’d heard her read “The War Works Hard” on NPR years before and bought her first collection that same day. It was one of the four books I carried with me when I moved to Seattle that were meant to tide me over until my shipped goods arrived.

A Chaldean Catholic and a critic of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Mikhail fled Iraq in 1995 at age 30, eventually settling in Michigan, where she works as a lecturer in Arabic at Oakland University.

Today I’m giving you “The Iraqi Nights”. I can feel, hear, see, smell and taste her longing for normalcy in her homeland, even though she sets it up as probably being a fairy tale (by using “a thousand and one nights” to frame the timeline). After the past five years, and especially since January of last year, I think you could substitute any national descriptor (and especially “American”) for “Iraqi”—and any stream for the Tigris—and it would still resonate with us all.

“The Iraqi Nights”

In Iraq,

after a thousand and one nights,

someone will talk to someone else.

Markets will open

for regular customers.

Small feet will tickle

the giant feet of the Tigris.

Gulls will spread their wings

and no one will fire at them.

Women will walk the streets

without looking back in fear.

Men will give their real names

without putting their lives at risk.

Children will go to school

and come home again.

Chickens in the villages

won’t peck at human flesh

on the grass.

Disputes will take place

without any explosives.

A cloud will pass over cars

heading to work as usual.

A hand will wave

to someone leaving

or returning.

The sunrise will be the same

for those who wake

and those who never will.

And every moment

something ordinary

will happen

under the sun.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: blooms and birds

I was engaged in my usual Saturday round of cleaning house when my Gift Fairy friend dropped off an Easter Basket of peach cobbler mix, a chocolate egg, daffodils and dried mealworms. Everything but the last one is for me; the worms are to tempt wrens in my back yard.

(Someone ate the first handful I tossed out, but I didn’t see who. I put the second on the table next to the birdbath. At least I know squirrels don’t like them.)

I’ll plant the daffs later this week. For now, they’re the centerpiece on my dining table.

Also—the other morning on my walk, I ran into one of my neighbors. It was a brief meeting, but still.

And these are the things I’m grateful for today: an Easter basket and a wading bird.

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: The naming of names

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from a daughter of Filipino immigrants. "Michelle Peñaloza was born in Detroit, raised in Tennessee and currently lives in Seattle. But her experience is that of being the “other”; many of her poems express this delta between the culture of her family and what she finds around her.

I mean—Tennessee…

The history of the Philippines is awash in the empires of others. It was part of the Spanish empire from 1565 until 1898, when the Americans assumed control. Then the Americans were chucked out in 1942 by the Japanese, who managed to compress savagery, racism and contempt for “lesser peoples” into three years of concentrated misery. Since the end of World War II, the Filipino people have struggled with democracy, authoritarianism, the geopolitics of post-Cold War economics and a lot of other things. A lot of their challenges, in my opinion, are the residuum of having been sucked dry by successive empires and then dumped out like yesterday’s garbage.

If you want to completely undermine a nation under your control, you ban their language. The British did that to Ireland for centuries, and the Irish have been struggling for a hundred years to revive the language. For 35 years the Japanese occupiers of Korea banned the Korean language; it was illegal for any Korean to speak or write the language, and they had to take Japanese names. (Two Korean runners in the 1936 Olympics were forced to compete in the Marathon under Japanese names. They won gold and bronze but endured the humiliation of hearing the Japanese national anthem played in their honor. Their real names, for the record, were Sohn Kee-chun and Nam Sung-yong. You can watch the race in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.)

In “Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, or Why My Last Name Is Peñaloza”, the poet takes on the inheritance of colonialism and the imposition of the conquering culture on the conquered.

“Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, or
Why My last Name Is Peñaloza”

People name us
with the separation of their teeth,
the long z of our naming.

It used to be
we were named for our proximity:
kato tabing dagat, the parentage of the sea;
the forest’s lineage, kato ginubatan.

Or we were named for our parents—
anak ni Lina, bunso ni Boyet.
The song of our names
led to the discovery of garlic
growing from our palms,
the scapes forming a second green hand.

But it was in the name of good King Philip
that songs changed to names
and the naming of names became law.

A governor general made a name for himself
with the Catalogo de Apellidos—
a dissemination of empire, a naming of parts
to trace and tax everyone:
whole provinces renamed with efficient alphabetical phenomena:
Padilla, Pacheco, Palma, Paz, Perez, Portillo, Puente, Peñaloza.

Still, there were names we kept to ourselves,
a shorthand between us:

windows lined with votives
jars of holy water

the papaya’s
lush coral and beaded seeds,
shining fish roe

Can legacy exist in short hand?

Papal papa
papel papaya
paalam permission
please

What are the root words
for what we simply know?

How do children born of empire
once removed,

possess the history
of their naming?

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Fragile bell of silver rime

For Easter Sunday in National Poetry Month, let’s have something from the Harlem Renaissance. Festus Claudius McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889. He came to the USA to study at the Tuskegee Institute in 1912 but quickly moved on to Kansas State University. The racism he encountered in this country shocked him. In 1919 he traveled to the UK, where he was active in socialist circles. He returned to the US two years later and wrote for various progressive publications. From 1923 to 1934 decade he traveled and worked around Europe, North Africa and the Soviet Union. When he returned to the States, he settled in Harlem.

A relentless atheist for most of his life, McKay fell out of love with communism (although remaining a social activist and anti-racist) and converted to Roman Catholicism. His writings—novels, poems and other pieces—reflect his experiences as a bisexual Black immigrant man in a nation that was (and still is) afraid of most of those descriptors.

I do not know when in his journey McKay wrote “The Easter Flower”; considering the last two lines, it could well have been around the time of his conversion. It works at that level, and it works as an appreciation of the regeneration of Spring.

“The Easter Flower”

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.