bookofdays

crip journo manifesto

How I Will Change the Face of Disability on the Planet
(for the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation)

You already are,’ a friend told me when I told her about the required title of this essay. She meant the writing I’ve done for magazines like New Mobility  and Inside MS,  as well as my work on “The Largest Minority,” a show on WBAI Radio here in New York City. She was also referring to what has driven both of the above: my twenty years of living with multiple sclerosis, a chronic degenerative disease of the nervous system that has at different times left me too dizzy to hold my head up, stammering, unable to walk, or crying in pain with tonic seizures -- each of which episodes has its echoes now in my daily life (intermittent stammer and vertigo, impaired gait). 

But what you want to know, I think, is what I will do with all of the above.  How can a writer, a journalist and storyteller, have a concrete impact on the lives of people with disabilities?

When people ask my journalistic specialties, I have tended to answer that I have three main ones: human rights, military issues, and “the intersection of fitness and disability.”  While the market demands this kind of niche thinking, I’m hoping to break down as many of those barriers as possible – and thus to help shatter the concept that there are people with  disabilities, and then there are “normal people.” As American society ages, awareness is just beginning to grow that most people will eventually join the ranks of the “physically challenged.”  Certainly every phone call from the cousin who’s just started a round of chemotherapy, the mother of a son who just came back from Iraq with a constant ringing in his ears, the grandmother who needs a ride to the grocery store should remind those who consider themselves “not disabled” that our relationship to our own health can alter our lives permanently. But they’re more likely to mutter those immortal words, there but for the grace of God go I. And so far, too few connect those experiences “the disabled.” Those of us who, for whatever reason, have had to grapple with a heavier deck of cards from the beginning aren’t “the disabled,” or “people with disabilities,” or whatever formulation you prefer. What writers can do is make that fact real – so that we’re neither abstract conversations about justice or medical efficacy or perky little “inspirational” stories on the 11 o’clock news just before the weather.

I’ve already been privileged to tell stories of people who’ve refused to accept the categories handed them by doctors, whether it was Jimmie Heuga, former Olympic skier who ignored doctors’ advice, after his diagnosis with MS in 1972, not to exercise, eventually founding a center that helps people with MS integrate exercise into their lives; Barry Wallenstein, a poet and college professor who kept his MS diagnosis under the radar for years while maintaining a full class load and an active performance schedule; competitive swimmer Cheryl Angelleli, whose SCI from a 1983 diving board accident kept  her out of the pool for 14 years, until aquatherapy reminded her what she’d missed (I had  the privilege of interviewing her for New Mobility Magazine before she medaled in the 2004 Paralympics); and Cynthia Nichols, an HIV-positive former drug addict who’s become a certified substance abuse counselor and coordinator of support groups for women with HIV.

Each time, as much as word count allows, I’ve worked to paint a full picture of their lives: Heuga sharing frustrations as well as accomplishments, Angelleli confiding she was about to be married, Wallenstein joking about his wild 1960s lifestyle and the joys of his grown children leaving the nest. And Cynthia and Daria, the two women with HIV, had to share a little of their love lives along the way – as well as economic conditions that highlighted broader issues than even their illness.

That last example stands out a little from the rest; it points to some of where I hope to go as a journalist. I’ve written more about people with MS than others, largely because of my semi-regular gig with Inside MS.  And I’ve categorized most of the work above as “looking at the intersection of fitness and disability.”  But as I expand, after journalism school, to larger markets, as I hope to do, I’m determined to integrate the “disability issues” coverage into broader considerations about health, about resources, about justice and human needs. When we talk about fitness, we don’t ask – fitness for what?  Stories like those of my friend Brendan Costello, the producer of “Largest Minority,” whose vigorous career as a writer and radio journalist is deeply hampered by his constant battles with the New York City subway system, aren’t “disability stories”: they highlight the hazards of our hyper-competitive, Type A society where resources are too rarely directed to human needs (like enough subway elevators for Brendan, who’s been in a wheelchair since 1998, to make his way effectively).

Disability, as it’s generally defined, raises questions about resources public and private. John Hockenberry, whose work awes me, has written about how Israelis in wheelchairs tended to be more affluent and athletic (“What’s your sport?” he was asked) than Palestinians who were busy tricking up wheelchairs from spare parts; in the United States, law firms and earnest nonprofits are kept busy  helping people fight to get Social Security to reimburse them for needed therapies. But why do all the current “Social Security” stories leave out the reality for people whose health has been impaired on a long-term basis? And the environmental implications of autoimmune disease have barely been touched.

How will I change the face of disability? By eliminating it, because human rights are redefined to include the right of every human being, whether it’s my autistic nephew, a war veteran, or a child in the South Bronx crippled by asthma, to fulfill his/her potential as a full member of society.

Jim Ferris, a writer from the Midwest, recently came out with a book called Hospital Poems, which I was able to review for American Book Review. He begins his book with the declaration: Let me be a poet of cripples,/of hollow men and boys groping to be whole…. all slipping and falling toward the cavern we carry within, our hidden void.” “Our hidden void.”  With that inclusive “our,” Ferris demands not compassion but empathy. Not just empathy but noise. Not just noise  but the most profound kind of respect. That’s the demand these stories can make.

the statue of liberty sailing away to sea

My dear friend Diane called me after reading yesterday's front-page Times story, about the 2002 death in the prototype gulag at Bagram (read it here, and make yourself look  at the multimedia section).  Like Jeanne and Digby, who both write about it beautifully, she was tormented: "Why do I live in this country?" But I hadn't really let myself feel the piece's impact, thinking rather clinically about Bagram's place in the chronicle of state-sponsored terror (ours).

Nothing like singing in the shower,  remembering lyrics from an a longtime sensei , to open the floodgates and finally get me crying.  At first, I didn't know why I was singing "American Tune," from that odd period between the Simon & Garfunkel years and the profound, world-changing Graceland:

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I’m alright, I’m alright
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far a-way from home, so far away from home

That tired resigned feeling is harder to take when you are at home, I thought, letting the shampoo run through my hands, not yet paying attention to why my unconscious was throwing up this tune. Not until:

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s alright, it’s alright
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

This was post 1960/70s grief,. of course. Simon wrote this as Reagan was cresting the horizon;  this whole song may be his bad dream back then, about what the backlash might entail.

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying

When I heard this line when it came out, at age fifteen, I felt sucker-punched by it then,  but only in a fangirl's quick glimpse of a world without Paul's vision; I felt like calling or writing him to drive safely and take his vitamin C. I didn't pay enough attention, I think, to what followed -- and that is what had me, finally, crying hard in the shower this morning, quite unexpectedly.

And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The statue of liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

Unexpected because as an old lefty and newish journo, I'm aware enough of my country's abuses from Vietnam to El Salvador, been writing about this stuff a long time. And the image itself is sentimental. I shouldn't have been caught by it. But it's  just weird enough to catch you off center, and bring out the force of the ball in my stomach, the combined weight of months and months of this -- of abuse becoming routine, of excuses being made, not "just"about torture but about every human value that doesn't involve money of someone's narrow idea of God. Take me with you, girl. This is not my country.
I didn't know how much the Statue of Liberty symbolized, to me, that openness and willingness to care, fearlessly, about making things better, until that moment.

We come on the ship they called the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune
Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright
You can’t be forever blessed

Is that it? Is it true, as some pundits have been saying, that "America is over?" That Tom J's and Ben Franklin's dream, let alone Harvey Milk's or MLK's, has been dissolved by the likes of Karl Rove?

Simon himself, of course did fly away after writing the song, and came back with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, creating a truly American tune -- a new syncretic form that sent his signature humor (I'd started that shower session singing "You Can Call Me Al," which I'd butchered in an East Village karaoke bar last month thanks to Liz) and lyrical politics ("The Myth of Fingerprints," the most elegant parable of racism since Borges) forward. Music-arrows directed at the heart of apartheid.

I once heard a story I haven't been able to confirm, that the Ladysmith members were astonished -- and pleased, when they came to the States. that they didn't have to register with the police upon arrival. That was Reagan's America -- but before his political grandchildren changed everything in the wake of the events of 11 September. What would Simon say to them now? What about to us?

Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest

Writing this has helped  me get a little of my equilibrium back: the key words here are "another working day," another day to keep singing the american tune. The real one, the dangerous words of inquiry. Or  the satiric  one, like Paul, or like Rachel, whose take on the Saddam photos should help you laugh your way out of my malaise.

, o majick movement of the wave through time

I can't believe it took me this long to blog this. Yerra Sugarman, a good friend I see far too little of, has just won the Joyce Osterweil Poetry Award from PEN -- the same writers'/free speech organization that held that First Amendment event I reported on back when the blog was new.  The prize was for her first collection of poems, Forms of Gone -- whose poems limn love, grief and historical spaces in a way I'd find addictive even if I'd never met her.  I can't think of anyone more deserving of such honors.

Over the buildings a thinning mist, dawn takes a match to.
All the fuzzy, whirring molecules spin a yarn
of oneness, then flare up, flail, and burn
from such crystal, such sobering, spectacular arsons as this.

Thistle, thistle stop your purpling.
Don't listen to the chorus of fog, its unbearable
sophistry, its prayers. How I hate its implausible reasons. O, the body,
the body. . . Body, shmody. To hell with the body.

The body can die alone on an uptown stoop,
seeking refuge from its bug-filled studio. And the damned,
duplicitous mist will weave a pall from its once soft cloak,
its membrane-over-everything. You see, how we're born:
solitary, dying, holy, broken.

And sacred are the broken, sacred the inconstant.
The pain-in-the-ass's politics, the distracted genius, curmudgeon, refugee,
and the one who would offer an only pair of good shoes to a victim of fire.
-Sacred. Sacred.

Still, no one would rename the street for her loneliness.
"Ruth," from the Hebrew whither thou goest, I will go:
half-Jewish, half-German, who spoke good Yiddish, led Vespers.
Still, we climbed the dumpster, that institute of higher learning

her belongings had been dumped into.
Never mind, she danced
for Balanchine. Too short, and so eventually condemned to backstage
after years of swallowing hormones for art's sake, for God's.
Your think artists can't be fascists? Listen, Hitler was an artist.

Never mind, she arrived in 1938, after watching him parade
through the streets of Hamburg. We use such immigrants to filigree
our words. Such immigrants suddenly silver
in memory's convenient dusklight.
And, never mind, dear alma mater, that you'd make her a refugee again
for one more dorm room. And, yes, me too. I'd kill for a place, wouldn't I?

O the body, her body, stained, soaked by its own breaking.
Squat, breathing unsteadily-but beautiful, no?-
when it once had lumbered, limping down 112th Street,
a barge towed by the cathedral.

(stanza break)

She left me a clock with a magnet on the back,
a delicate fruit bowl of amber cut-glass.
Later, my x and I fought to have her ashes
placed in that unfinished cathedral.
He, finally, convincing them. Ha! Everyone believes an historian.

Whereas me: no one believes, and no one should.
I've lied about almost everything. And still do.
An artist of sorts, from birth, you could say, who believes
truth most delicious, best served, over a steaming pasta of artifice.

She left me a black leotard, her white wooden jewelry box
hand-painted in Mexico, a silver-plated measuring cup.
And from that dumpster, we dug up her photo-album's sheer sleeves:

"Ruth on her 18th birthday,"
(in suit and beret, diamonded with sunlight);
"Ruth with Rusty, 1943, 86th Street," (cradling her large orange cat,
leaning on a balustrade);
"Ruth before Swan Lake," (gazing deeply into her own eyes);
"on her proud dad's arm";
and one of a boy, marked "cousin, Hamburg,"
dressed in the uniform of Hitler Youth.

(Who's without lies?
Who sine culpe, without error?) The body,
the body. So solitary can be a body. . .

Once upon a time, the artist I loved best did it solo in a gallery:
fetal, hidden, but heard, under a ramp. "Seed Bed,"
he called his artwork. Opal handfuls of unlastings
glistened in his cracked palms.

Handfuls of unlastings. . .
The body, the body, alone, ejecting its once child.
The scared, scarred and sacred body, broken into, then giving it away. . .
Some say the woman wastes herself if she does not have the one child.
Hers, thirty-years-old, another leaf from her archive in a dumpster.

She and I solitary together, days before she died, watching the sky thistle purple,
listening for the unbearable coming
chorus of fog, when her child, my child, would again be yoked to us,
removed from dawnfire's divisive crystal.

I told you.
I've lied about almost everything.

But while we're on the subject of prizes, I did want to note more explicitly the poem with which my girl Rachel just won City College's James Emanuel Poetry Prize. She wrote it in honor of the poet Jackson Mac Low, whose son Mordecai is one of my oldest and dearest friends.

Clack! So now jam.

a jackdaw song
a gas, a gas in collision with dust and time
the trombone part playing particle and wave
breve breve
certainly they whirr where hims are sung
in minced frequencies
yellow light bounced back to the street
purple light filters through tha balcony, the milk crate
to reach toward the stage, joining other light entertainments
controlling the siren of the theramin, not the air raid
particles of Krakatoa
to Utica by waves
to the self-defined virgin
frequency
movement of the wave through time
two hours
nostalgia postscript wavers
there are many ways to use strayers
a children's tune bathed in blood
washed clean by further juxtaposition
gift of cloudrider sub fossa
behold, the squicker putter-downer
more reels unspooled
mortal coils laid upon rice
what is the alternative to vegetable soybeans?
correspondence with iroha erased
coca? mj? no; walks
--o, c'mon slack jaw!
--clack! So now jam
slipping the tongue to
massmusik fur jungen,
ashcanned and kettledrummed off.
ectoplasmic slack now, o majick
movement of the wave through time,
on pace
pa che pa che
yo soy poisson rouge
in maple leaves
sharing the raincloth
two hours
with the impact of jellied gasoline
and dice
breve

ghazals clear and rainy

I'm having my students write ghazals tonight (or try to). An excuse to remind everyone of our sadly-lost Agha Shahid Ali . I remember him at Bread Loaf 1998 so vividly, his voice is still in my ears.

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

Of this pear-shaped orange's perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

This is God's site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.        

Agha Shahid Ali

Meanwhile, over at The Ghazal Page,  my dear bud Elizabeth has given us a new ghazal for one of its most renowned aims, as  a love poem:

Brooklyn Ghazal

by Elizabeth Willse

Hungry for a kiss, take the train to Brooklyn,
Speeding under the river to your arms in Brooklyn.

Sunset paints the sky through the Manhattan Bridge,
Train stalls.  The sky stretches between me and Brooklyn.

Crimson leaves underfoot, the incense of woodsmoke
Rises through the burnished brass air of Brooklyn.

In your doorway, I savor the rich kitchen smells,
I kiss the nape of your neck from behind, in Brooklyn.

We both love stout cheddar's dark filigreed veins,
We'll be bankrupted by that cheese shop in Brooklyn.

Whispers and laughter, holding you warm and close,
Fall asleep in your arms and wake up in Brooklyn.

Spiced  black tea sweetens one last kiss, and one more
Grudging return to the world beyond Brooklyn.

Sentences dangle, the story unfinished,
I left the book I've been reading in Brooklyn.

On either side of the river, I'm leaving home,
An Elizabeth-shaped absence, here and in Brooklyn.

every day is remembrance day....

Thursday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, where in Israel sirens go off all over the country at noon. My first effort at a novel, now comfortably in a drawer, featured  a teen stoner who, when told about it, says "If they had that here, you'd have sirens going off all the time." Even so, I think it's vital to keep sounding notes, audible and perhaps singular, when the rest of our lives is full of such noise.

The few mentions of Yam Hashoah that I did see also made the tenuous and real connection to Darfur  - a subject I've not written about, for fear of over-simplifying, or  simply adding to the noise. But it also feels, just as with torture, like complicity if I say nothing at all; so I kept my notebook close to hand when I went last week to hear Dina Temple-Ralston read from her book Justice on the Grass.

The room at the Chelsea Barnes&Noble was jammed, far more than I expected: all there to hear  about Rwanda   -- hardly most people's idea of a fun night out.  These were people for whom, for one reason or another, the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda was vitally important. Perhaps they'd seen either Hotel Rwanda or Sometime in April; perhaps they'd read Philip Gourevitch's iconic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, or the excerpt from John Hatzfield's upcoming Machete Season, just published in Harper's, which included the following testimony from one of the army of perpetrators:

Some offenders claim that we changed into wild animals, that we were blinded by ferocity, that we buried our civilization under branches, and that's why we are unable to find the right words to talk properly about it.

That is a trick to sidetrack the truth. I can say this: outside the marshes, our lives seemed quite ordinary. We sang on the paths, we downed some beer, we had our choice amid abundance. We chatted about our good fortune, we soaped off our bloodstains in the basin, and our noses enjoyed the aromas of full cooking pots. We rejoiced in the new life about to begin by feasting on leg of veal. We were hot at night atop our wives, and we scolded our rowdy children. Although no longer willing to feel pity, we were still greedy for good feelings.

The days all seemed much alike. We put on our field clothes. We swapped gossip, we made bets on our victims, spoke mockingly of cut girls, squabbled foolishly over looted grain. We sharpened our tools on whetting stones. We traded stories about desperate Tutsi tricks, we made fun of every "Mercy!" cried by someone hunted down, we counted up and stashed away our goods.

We went about all sorts of human business without a care in the world—provided we concentrated on killing during the day, naturally.

At the end of that season in the marshes, we were so disappointed that we had failed. We were disheartened by what we would lose, and truly frightened by the misfortune and vengeance reaching out for us. But deep down, we weren't tired of anything.

Ralston, now city editor of the New York Sun, has written a narrative of Rwanda far different from the novelistic and influential Philip Gourevitch text  (which I teach from when I want to demonstrate the concept of lyricism in nonfiction narratives) yet far more like it than Hatzfield's impassive interviewing.  Ralston spends equal time with victim-survivors and with the other survivors, those involved both in major and minor ways with the deaths of 800,000 people -- like the ones quoted above as well as the trials of journalists who crossed the line and used their outlets to inflame the crowds. Lke Gourevitch, like Dr. Sheri Fink writing about Srebrenica, she  draws sharp portraits of the latter in describing how the latter intentionally twisted history:

It is easy to underestimate the damage historical confusion can wreak. For that reason Rwanda needed responsible academics to help set the record straight. University of Rwanda history professor Ferdinand Nahimana believed he was the man to do just that. Born in 1950 to a farming family, Nahimana was the youngest of nine children. He managed to get an education in spite of the fact that he was poor and Hutu. He even received a doctorate in France, where his study of Hutu history was lauded as a step toward helping peace return to his country.

A slender man with a wide forehead and sympathetic eyes, Nahimana spoke in the soft, even tones of an intellectual. He saw no need to raise his voice. Some said his gentle demeanor belied the turmoil that raged inside him. People said that he secretly harbored hatred of the Tutsi and he had come to the conclusion that a history needed to be written that extolled the virtue of the majority people, the Hutu. Nahimana had focused his research on what he perceived were the overlooked contributions the Hutu had made to Rwandan culture.

Nahimana's "new history" was a rejection of an inherited body of understandings that could be traced back to [Belgian eugenicist, who theorised the Tutsi were "European"] Speke's writings from the Mountains of the Moon. Nahimana felt the Tutsi were not just wrongheaded about their perceived right to pull the levers of power in Rwanda; they were a natural enemy of the Hutu majority. Anything that provided a boost to the Tutsi came at the expense of the Hutu, he said. The Tutsi had no right to rule. Their goal was to return Rwanda to its days as a monarchy. Nahimana had taken his theory to the University of Paris in 1986 and written a dissertation on the Hutu kingdoms of northwest Rwanda. His professor, Jean-Paul Chrétien, awarded him the highest honors for "demystifying Rwandan history."

Such willful distortion became fact to millions of Rwandans (putting me in mind of Chris Hedges' comments , in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning , on"ancient hatreds" that are enhanced and fed by not-so-ancient power struggles.) Nahimana goes on to found RTLM, the radio station that directed the genocidaires. (The comment by the French professor a brisk reminder that as much as we decry the Clinton Administration's inaction on Rwanda, France has had a longer history of abetting one side or the other -- including helping  hundreds of perpetrators escape into Congo, after the events of April 1994). About that inaction in 1994: Ralston pointed out, during the Q&A, that "They killed 800,000 in 100 days. How long do you think it takes to equip and deploy an invasion force? Nearly sixty."

Not to mention the slow politics of decisionmaking, which I thought we were watching this year on Darfur --  despite the efforts of an odd but seemingly potent combination of usual suspect activists and evangelical Christians. Though I was mindful of what Temple-Ralston also mentioned that day: that  by using the word "genocide" and not acting immediately, the profound if limited power of the word, in an international context, has been badly depleted.

As it turns out, Bush' s use of the word is more like his Clear Skies Initiative, or No Child Left Behind: words that mask damage.

That same week of the tenth anniversary of Rwanda's dark time, with 300,000 bodies already sluicing into Darfur's desert sands, the Bush administration turned aside from its bold declarations about Darfur, including the once-nuclear use of the G-word, and welcomed the head of Sudan's notorious security services -- because of Sudan's role in that other war. Nicholas Kristof says meekly:

Sudan's leaders have increased their cooperation with the C.I.A. As The Los Angeles Times reported, the C.I.A. recently flew Sudan's intelligence chief to Washington for consultations about the war on terror, and the White House doesn't want to jeopardize that channel.

Oh, Signor Kristof, there's more to it than a back channel. There's a deep and cozy relationshuo with the  Mukhabarat , Sudan's KGB -- whose leader,  Salah Abdalla Gosh, was named by no less an authority than Samantha Power as "one of the principal architects of Khartoum’s war in Darfur." Jeanne, at Body and Soul , fills in bits of that back channel:

Even before September 11, the Bush administration was attempting to improve relations with Sudan, and since then has formed a close intelligence partnership. The Mukhabarat detains suspects for the CIA to interrogate, and has expelled others to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

But guess what! It's even more fun than that! Katherine, the brilliant voice at Obsidian Wings, enlightened us further in comments on Jeanne's post:

In my research for the rendition paper--there's a case where five guys were flown out of Malawi, disappeared off the face of the earth for a few months, probably at some secret CIA facility, and where did they resurface but Khartoum...This is from The Guardian, August 21, 2003, p. 18:

"Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan, all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after the C.I.A. decided they were innocent."

They weren't tortured for once, so I assume they remained in U.S. custody, but, there's another piece of evidence of some secret CIA interrogation center in Sudan.

In other words, we can't condemn them for genocide when they're busy helping us construct an infrastructure worthy of a James Bond villain. It's as if our policymakers, rather than the straight and narrow Nixon Boys they present, took WAY too much mescaline and decided to use the result -- with its flashbacks to Vietnam and El Salvador, its Orwell-reversals and Roy Cohn manques -- as the new Constitution.

But now I'm veering way off the topic of remembrance. This is remembrance:

Human Rights Watch researchers had given children in Darfur crayons and paper, to occupy them while the grownups talked. On their own, they drew what they knew.

 

And I don't mean to make facile equivalences. but I have pages of not-dissimilar photos of drawings from a refugee camp at Jalazon, in the West Bank: they drew helicopters, terror, blood. No active genocide, perhaps, but children only know what they see.  (And that was 1990, before the intifada was so deeply militarized on both sides). While I looked at the photos, I thought of my visit to Israel's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, a day earlier, and its images by the children in the camps (click here for samples from a book that displays them; I'm prevented by smart copyright protectors from giving you the images).

Those of us who think it's time to move "past" these offenses don't know what the kids know: that remembrance is the only starting point that's possible. Given the above, the accuracy of the memory is as important as its existence: but without its existence we're at the end of Hamlet.

In my ill-fated novel, my teenage protagonist takes solace in collage art, after the death of a dear friend (from AIDS: this was a 1980s novel) helps catalyze a shift away from her earlier indifference. She decides that her earlier declaration was completely correct -- but that constant sirens are therefore necessary.

I kneeled down and started to work, slowly, using chalks in a number of colors. I wrote the word "SIRENS" in big slanted block letters right across his body. I would have to be the siren, calling out sound in place of his voice, just like the ones in Jerusalem: calling up memory from underneath manufactured dream, until every day becomes remembrance day.

 

lose your watchfulness and your bitterness

As National Poetry Month draws to a close, I can't leave behind those closer to home.

Though any poem from this poet feels like an arm extended in a half- empty hug: Barry Wallenstein, who I  met in 2000 but feel I've known all my life, is a secret rock star, and all his poems go best with musical accompaniment (often from the estimable John Hicks). More recently his work's turned more elliptical, fabulously dense, like C.D. Wright, below; this is from an earlier series featuring a character, like Berryman's Henry, who finds some rare solace in unexpected spaces.

Tony Visits Hotel Splendide

After a week with my arms
around very little--
nothing really to talk about,
after my pet spider quit being a spider,
I had a will to splurge--
moved into the Hotel Splendide.

The drinks at the lounge bar
need neither mixer nor chaser;
tipping back and getting the glad-eye.
Conversation too goes down like rain
with faces moving in, personal
in the middle of time off at the Hotel Splendide.

Speaking with a person named Randy,
I remembered how ill I'd felt one time
running to meet another Randy,
falling down on my way.
The current Randy is my mate
lately met and smiling at the Hotel Splendide.

Another character, call him Joe,
told me about his wife of some 30 years
and how his travels divided him,
sometimes quartered him--but he
never lost his memory,
stopping off at the Hotel Splendide.

They say if you stay a week
(and no one dies at the Hotel Splendide
and the topic itself never comes up)
then, chances are, you'll extend the visit
and lose your watchfulness,
your bitterness.

But, myself, I scan the daily papers now,
study first the box scores
then the obituaries.
There's the need to know
who's won and lost
off the grounds of Hotel Splendide.

Who wouldn't give up love
or such a dream as being loved,
for needed facts--the ones that can't be fudged?
Hotel Splendide, come to on a whim,
has provided armfuls and respite--
-- not cold truths; I'm on my way home.

 

talking to saints in north england

Quick post: I saw this sweet movie last night.  Millions  brings all of us back to that moment, at nine or ten years old, when we  mused intensely, with an intensity others called weird, on BIG questions.  The small protagonist of this film, Damian, talks to saints as if they were his drunk old uncles. With their hints, he spends most of the film trying hard "to be good," to do what he thinks is right. I'm suddenly curious if this is what  Danny Boyle, the director, was once like, long before the Trainspotting years.

Though the trailer might make it seem a little saccharine, it's worth the glimpse, and the film  feels not sentimental but honestly emotional. Also funny, whimsical and entirely new: a distant cousin, of course,  to  Joan of Arcadia (consoling me a little about the latter, which has betrayed me these last weeks by opting to become a faux Buffy.) 

I'll leave it to more cinematically-minded people, like Rachel, whose  review and meditation on the film is well worth reading.  and to critics like Manohla Dargis to identify all the elements that make it work.  I also want to shout out to Dargis, who like me almost didn't graduate Hunter High School in 1979 because of the math Regents: her writing here, and often in her work for the Times, is lyrical , as when  she outlines the movie's premise:

Damian has moved into new digs, mostly, it seems, because their old home is where once upon a time they lived with a loving wife and mother. Recently deceased, the missing woman hangs over this woeful threesome like a sigh. Her absence shapes their days and nights, driving Ronnie to cuddle the pillows in his big empty bed and sending his children deep into worlds of their own making, one shaped by pre-adolescent tremors, the other by ecstatic faith.

Alex Etel, who plays Damian,  makes Haley Joel Osment look like a cereal box image. (Not for nothing does Salon call Etel "unreasonably appealing." )   The wild poet locked in this small pre-monk is just waiting for the next movie. Or rather, the wild young activist, as the film's fantastic ending suggests. As Jehanne Darc knew, all that truck with saints can drive you into the future.

we see a little further now and further still

I still remember seeing C.D. Wright read  at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in 1998. One of the poems she read included the excerpt below; my head is, I think, still spinning from it.

   Everyone in their car needs love. Car love. Meat love. Money
   love. Pass with care.

   Deepstep, Baby. Deepstep.

   The boneman said he would take the blinded driver to the river. With
   a mirror. And then what.

   The boneman said he would take the blinded into a darkened
   room. And put a hot-herb poultice on their sightless face.

   Mellein for this mullein for that. We called it flannel.

   Then leave them there.

   The baby sister of the color photographer had a baby girl in the
   hills. Born with scooped-out sockets in the head. Born near the
   tracks they sprayed with Agent Orange. The railroad's denials,
   ditto the army's.

   They would have been blue. The eyes. She did not have. Blue
   as the chicory in yonder ditch.

            We see a little further now and a little further still

            She said her lights would be on and they were

            Groping around the sleeping house in our gowns

            Peeping into the unseen

            Beautiful things fill every vacancy

                                            -- C.D. Wright.

National Poetry Month, which  ends this week, is a silly concept. All year long, we should start our days with poems.

as we fall apart, will you let me hear?

Yes, I know it's National Poetry Month, not National Berryman month, but ....

I don't know one damned butterfly from another
my ignorance of the stars is formidable,
also of dogs & ferns
except that around my house one destroys the other
When I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,
I mumble "many returns"—

next time it will be nature & Thoreau
this time is Baudelaire if one had the skill
and even those problems O
At the mysterious urging of the body or Poe
reeled I with chance, insubordinate & a killer
O formal & elaborate I choose you

but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,
the mad, I sometimes can't    always tell them apart
As we fall apart, will you let me hear?
That would be good, that would be halfway to bliss
You said will you answer back? I cross my heart
& hope to die but not this year.        

John Berryman

humans live out of curiosity

From  an unbelievably good book of short stories called Sarajevo Marlboro, by  Miljenko Jergovic (translated by Stela Tomasevic):

-------------------------.
I flick through books, and wait for the carrots, parsnips and the lettuce to grow. Humans live out of curiosity. That's the best way, and the most honest way. Anything else is just a false way of  courting other people's tears. Camus demanded and gave melodramatic explanations. For those whose death isn't accidental, the situation is as follows: women and homosexuals slit their wrists, soldiers and boors shoot themselves in the head, actors and romantics swallow pills, the clumsy and neurotic shoot themselves in the heart, the ignorant and the perverse hang themselves, the ambitious and the weak jump off bridges, sad cases and intellectuals jump from roofs or top floors.

The parsnips are the first to sprout, followed by lettuce and finally the carrots. The tiny leaves are as soft as a newborn baby's hair.

-----------------------

As Voltaire suggests, sometimes the garden is all we have .

The rest of the book -- which I hope to review for ABR, and will blog my notes as usual -- features stuff like this:

------------
Elena was happy and successful. Zlaja was happy and unrealistic, Often she accompanied him on his drinking bouts but only when there was a gap in her busy schedule.....As a couple, they hadn't reckoned on the non-stop shellings:  it couldn't be ignored or avoided; it destroyed real as well as imaginary worlds.

-------------------------
No wonder some characters revert to parsnips. The only other choices are on the menu at the suicide cafe.   (Link is to another TSP excerpt, which a few of you may have heard me read in public.)

Writing about it, even to work it out, is an option only if you're not an illegal immigrant some bored FBI agent wants to nab.  From Detainment, the blog set up to support the girls in Queens:

-----------------------------
In fact, an FBI official told The New York Daily News, "Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers." Another official at the Department of Homeland Security commented, "We're not spun up about this case." So why, then, are these young women in jail, cut off from their families? Why are their lives being ruined? This is an insane injustice.

Please open your hearts to both families. The family of A., the young Guinean woman, is in urgent need, and owes money to their lawyer. They have also lost their income, as the father has also been detained on immigration violations. As we learn more details about her situation, we may find they have other needs as well.

The young Bangladeshi woman, T., and her loved ones also face an enormous challenge. Her family needs to raise approximately $10,000 in the next three months just to get by. There are three children. The vast majority of the money would go towards housing, because the family has had to give up their apartment out of fear of surveillance or other threats to their safety.

-------------------

Ed, my little brother, commented rather poetically on this case: "I would rather we recieve comment for being wrong than cry later for doing nothing. "  I won't argue here that those FBI agents could have been doing something more productive than reading teenn girls' high school essays; I'd just love for him, and the silent hordes who agree, to concede that there's no there there. It's  time for someone bright at HSA to hear the comments, and to decide this is getting to be more of a pain than it's worth.  And it's our job, I guess, to keep telling the story till something actually happens.

It's been on NPR as well as continuing Times coverage (though the latter will insist on mentioning a suicide bomb fear). but the girls are still detained. I feel proud of having been the first to throw this up in the commentish blogosphere (Body and Soul , The Heretik, and Bitch Ph.D. since made sure it got proper notice)  and now wonder what else is possible. The power of the press, even the Times,  is severely limited, at least against these monsters. (Click that NPR link and hear Nina Bernstein's frustration.)

I hope the girl who wrote the sincere essay about suicide and Islam is taking good notes in detention. Send her Dostoevsky and Malcolm X. Send her Jergovic as well (who some have compared favorably to Calvino), though he may be a little scatological for her current level of Islamic devotion. But voices from hell deserve such clear notes, and wide distribution.

I'm, certainly going to read more Jergovic if I can (he has two novels also). Knowing a little about translation, I looked up Tomasevic as well -- only to find that she has mostly done nonfiction before, and now works for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I hope she realized from this book that she's a poet, and years from now writes her own fiction or narrative nonfiction. She could certainly draw it  from the ICTY commedia: Milosevic's clowning self-defense, rich NGO buzzards in their expensive jackets .