World Revisited

The women in my mother’s family all have beautiful handwriting–elegant cursive forms postured on the page like well-bred ladies themselves.  The mail brings hand-addressed envelopes from them for my birthday a few days ago, bearing things like a bar of delicious-smelling soap, a gift card for groceries, a packet of wildflower seeds, and a refrigerator magnet bearing the words “dwell in possibility,” (which words I’ll have the occasion to reconsider every time I grab milk from the refrigerator).  I’ve decided to proceed in this space using standard capitalization from here on out, lest it be assumed that I don’t have no schoolin’, or that I have forever abandoned the upper-case for greener pastures.  It’s like sitting up a little straighter in my seat.

While shelving this book at the bookstore a few days ago–Sir Edward Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, which most of us will surely die content without ever having read–I was struck with uneasiness about what is implied about the “world” by the specific use the word itself.    I quickly noticed that all of the fifteen battles this British fellow from the 19th century  included in the scope of his “world” were waged by Europeans.  Only one, the victory of the Europeans who would become American at Saratoga in 1777, took place outside the continent of Europe.  Granted that some of Creasy’s “decisive” battles, particularly the ancient Greek and Roman ones, were fought by people who lived long before the idea of Europe had been imposed on the globe and could not have anticipated the scale of the horror some of their ideas would predicate and justify.  It might be equally unfair to ask Sir Creasy to accommodate the distant, speculative possibility that centuries later in America this girl would come to exist who found his “world” so hard to reconcile with her own.  That she would come to know this hard pit of pain in her belly at the fear that her world is without a history.

But I know a lot of folks are familiar with this feeling, cultivated from our earliest self-awareness.  It’s a sudden bolt of pain, quickly forgotten, as we briefly suspect that we do not exist.  That we are not the inheritors of this earth, this “world.”  That doll babies don’t come in our images, that few people like us populate history and that those few were natural servants, easily subjugated, crudely fashioned by the creator to ape his perfection (this perfection more closely approximated by finer noses, fairer skins).  This can be felt in the body, this fear that we do not deserve the air we breathe in the world.

The world redefines its own boundaries for each context in which the word “world” is used, re-shifts its very borders to accommodate its immediate context.  The “world” is not a physical location, like “planet earth” is.  It has no dimensions, no height or breadth, but it expands figuratively to contain height and breadth, rule, ledge, right, implied left, and everything beyond.  In the “world” are the known and the unknown, the possible and everything that can be conceived of as impossible.  With the swoop of one syllable, it decides what has the right to exist, and what doesn’t.  What, perhaps, cannot even be imagined to exist, or even conjectured.  It draws lines, or redraws them, wherever it falls.

I couldn’t help but to think of the word “dunia,” one of the words in the Arabic language that can be translated as “world.”  I think its meaning is a bit more expansive than “world” in some ways.  “World,” I think, packs a lot of hidden, implied power into what seems at first to be a concept so basic that it can’t be questioned–a word so fundamental that most of us would falter for a moment if asked to define it in terms other than itself; a word, like the atom, indivisible.   The sense of the word “dunia,” as far as I gather, is just as fundamental to its language.  But it sets up different boundaries than “world”: dunia is the ever expanding and contracting radius around one’s experience, applied equally to the room one happens to be in, as to the situation one happens to find or inherit, as to the day, as to the planet.  I think somewhere even “world” retains a sense of including the entire chain of being in which this moment has its existence (a damn good working definition, if I do say so), but this sense has fallen out of every day use–where “dunia” is actually applied this way, allowing the world to expand as far as the imagination can take it, centered around our own experience but projected into infinity.

Our sphere.

Anyway.  Worlds, planets, dimensions, spheres of being: night from day, east from west, public from private–male and female, he created them.  We have the right to recast them.  Not to recast them is not to live as though your life is your own.  We have the right to move between them.  Welcome to the Global South; the globe re-figured, turned on its edge–the “world” re-worded.

Other things that are exciting in this sphere include the Frankfurt Book Fair taking place this week, where we hope my book Fes is a Mirror will be bartered.

the ghosts of the land

like everyone who comes to america, i’ve come to chase a dream. like everyone who returns to their homeland after exile, i’ve come to reconcile the landscapes of the past–the topography of my dreams and memories–with new longings.  i’m reintroducing myself to the ghosts of the land, asking their permission to stay–even if i have changed, even if my body bears different marks than the girl who left.  even if, this winter, i plan a quiet invasion: old land, meet my new loves.

i’ve got an unpublished novel and no idea where next month’s rent is coming from. nothing but patience to quell my uncertainty. scary place, until i remember that i ain’t scared.

i maintain my faith in the beauty of new beginnings.  i’ll be excited to see what shoots up from the earth come spring.  those things that are rumbling beneath our feet even now, making themselves ready for us.

My Feet is my Only Carriage

this is from Essaouira, a place i gave a good five months of my life to. i returned to Fes a month ago.  with the poem i’m posting a pledge to get this blog together sometime soon…

dot dot dot.

Carriage

you practice forgetting,
because the body remembers

papers you filled with infant numbers–
timid letters wobbling off the page

–lie stacked in your mother’s house
at the other end of the earth

once in a while an old ache throbs
to remind you that you survived it

otherwise, the sea
between now and any then is full of foam,

the wind in town enough
to press the body forward

south

“The great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always negotiable, but not the little carck, the imperceptible ruptures which come from the south.  We say “south” without attaching any importance to this…But everyone has his south–it doesn’t matter where it is–that is, his line of slope or flight.”
–Gilles Deleuze

Kevin Young has this as the front epigraph for his collection of poems, “Most Way Home.”

it’s a good look, that way of defining south. that’s what we want. when we talk about the “global south,” we’re talking about the world’s “line of slope or flight.”

its tendency, its direction.

il faut confronter des idees vagues avec des images claires

the visit of a friend has me thinking about what parts of myself are unused right now; what parts of you atrophy when you use other parts.  i worry i don’t have the stamina for some kinds of academic conversation right now–that’s a language that goes unused right now.  even the basic fact that i don’t speak english with native english speakers every day.  i can’t cling to these things i may feel that i’m losing, have to know that i’ll have them as i need them.

these are days of spaciousness.  me and a blank, open world.  days where not very much passes and everything is good.  and you knock some thoughts against each other and try to stir up some trouble, some paranoia, some anxiety–but you come against a firm, calm wall.

there’s me and this book i’m trying to write, which sometimes feels like an endless expanse of empty space, which i sometimes feel very small in the face of, which i often feel inadequate to fill.

languages lie dormant inside of us.  what language is in us, i wonder, that we haven’t yet spoken? asleep in us, coiled like a snake.

there are so many  ways of speaking that i will miss, and am missing.   but i’m pressing to make a language, and you can’t speak everything at once.

“when i forget was i was saying i start again”

this is tangential.  i think of my thesis advisor in college, who would have asked me if i’ve gotten to the point yet, in this endeavor here.

i thought about writing about dreaming, writing about kids my own age here, who don’t think about what they want to be, who don’t consider their dreams for their own lives powerful enough to indulge them, who work in restaurants when they’ve studied economics, who work in post offices when they’ve studied restaurants–or who wipe bread crumbs into a hand after every lunch and learn how to look downward very well and will not dare to even dream of satisfaction for their children, whose father is an old man.

i thought about writing about “ash kat-aoud”/”qu’est-ce que tu racontes” as a cultural expectation here.
as in, you better have something to say.  you’d better have a story to tell.

because it’s true, you’d better.  but sometimes you still collapse from the pressure.  how to reconcile these two things?

well? do you have new words  for the third world yet?
well?

i’ll tell you in the past few weeks i’ve had few words, for someone who is not
someone
of few words.

i’d gotten tripped up in longings of various kinds and really found myself staring into nowhere, something i am gifted at, a talent that never fails me.

i’d gotten tired of sounding like an idiot for a while and was speaking less arabic.  which meant i was speaking less.

funny thing about people who don’t speak, though: they’re assumed to be idiots.  and so, you find yourself back where you started.  “and so it goes.”

i’d overwhelmed myself in intimidation of projects i myself had created for myself, that i’d given so much weight to: this blog, the book. so lately: somewhere i’m recovering my sense of self importance, or collapsing it.  keeping silly diaries, doodling on official-type peices of paper, i’m singing out loud.  it’s so important, for me at least, to create in ways i can’t take seriously, to create in ways there is no risk of profitting off of, except by the act of creating itself.  i intimidate myself to death sometimes.  i can get dragged underwater, by the weight of self-importance i don’t quite feel fit to bear. and why should i? i should be drawing curly-haired women on the notepads of fine hotels.  i should be lecturing someone and laughing at my self righteousness. i should be writing a sappy love poem.  i should be singing.

i should be making enough for when i pick through it for what is important, what is presentable, what is worthy, there is enough to throw away.

please note that at this very second i’ve got my laptop in this cyber and happen to be on this sofa and they put this huge dish of fried fish in front of me and sit down around me and tell me to eat.  that’s divine providence.  that’s also pretty morocco. phal-phal.

niggerisms

“sub-saharan african” might be another one of those words to add to the list of terms. it’s sort of subtly problematic and condescending, to say the least. from wikipedia’s entry on sub-saharan africa:

“Critique of the Term”
Some object to the usage of the term and see it is as misleading and a racist colonial way of viewing Africa. ^[2][3][4][5] Academic and cultural writer Owen ‘Alik Shahadah states “…This barrier of sand hence confined Africans to the bottom of this make-believe location, which exists neither linguistically, ethnically, politically or physically…Somalia and Djibouti are part of the same political Islamic alignment just like many so-called Arab countries.” (See Arab League). Others such as P. Godfrey Okoth, Department of History University of California, states that European travelers and geographers created the concept of “two Africas,” sets up the removal of African contribution to world civilization.^[5][2]

yes i did just quote wikipedia. yes i do consider it a reliable source of information. i’m not proud, but i’m not ashamed.

in africa there’s much dispute over who exactly is an arab and who’s just a nigger.  it’s behind news headlines from mauritania to the sudan.  it’s here.  it’s the struggle over who gets to call themselves human, and who just doesn’t.  drawing lines, literally, in the sand.

because these words are like borders drawn on the map (third-world, people of color, devloping, underdeveloped, non-Western, sub-Saharan, Arab).

it’s all a matter of who’s wielding the pen. who gets to draw the map, and what they stand to gain from its being drawn that way. and who stands to loose; or who gets drawn up to be the loser. and what they stand to lose, when the pen is in someone else’s hands.

other, and other names you’d never call yourself

the system is wily, folks. i knew there was a catch to all the obama blah-blah, and this guy reminded me of why we can’t quite fall for it, desperate as we are for the kind of hope he seems to provide.

on monday my great-grandma maggie james, who lives in a nursery home in virginia now, turned 109 years old. she was born in 1899. i don’t know what the records are for these things, but she has to be among the 10 oldest people in the us, if not the world.

who, in the part of the world in which she lived, and under the kind of conditions, was a grown woman the first time she saw a telephone.

who was a grandmother before she watched tv.

who knew grown-ups who had been slaves, when she was a little girl.

who left school at twelve years old to work.

who has spent her nearly 11 decades within the same 20-mile radius.

who outlived her husband, both her sons, everyone who populated her childhood and adolescence, all her enemies, most of all she ever loved.

who looks out the window now and wonders, when she can call her mind back to herself, what she must have done to deserve such a strange fate, by turns lonely and humbling and awe-inspiring.

i wouldn’t know what to do with myself. perhaps this is why the very old lose their minds. they can no longer wrap their heads around the idea of themselves.

it’s got to be another of these instances of waking up finding that you are the “other.” finding up that you’ve become the kind of thing that only other people can be, not you.

everyone thinks of themselves as young. we are disbelieving, as we age, that we have aged. we learned to self-identify when we had young bodies. how do i still call this body myself?

like, can the people around me tell that i’m not really a grown-up? that i am scared and totally unsure? that i know nothing, and am powerless? or, further: that my body is not weak, as it seems to have become, that i am virile, clear-skinned, shining, somewhere beneath this?

you’ve found yourself among the list of names one never calls ones’ self, once you reach a certain age: old.

i often felt that people’s failure to relate to me after the accident was another one of those cases. i had become among the list of things one never calls ones’ self. you do not imagine, you never even imagine, that such a thing will happen to you. even when it happens to you, it feels like it’s happened to someone else, like it’s a movie or a dream you’re about to wake up from. when it does happen to someone else, you find it hard to call upon your empathy in ways that you’re used to. you have pity maybe. or revulsion, maybe itself a kind of empathy–bc it means identifying with the other, and identifying with the acute possibility that that could be you, and trying to keep all the distance from that possibility that your sanity requires.

the same revulsion, i’d think, holds the third world at arm’s length from the first.

caroline county

“They endured.” –William Faulkner

my father’s family
were poor yellow people.

white folks a strange
breed who lived
beyond fences–made
their appearances
briefly
hooded
or on horses

folks back then burned the houses
of people they’d
shared grandfathers with.

the sons of the black bitch
clawed tomatoes from the earth
rode busses every week to work
in factories miles away

the sons of the white lady
had their baths drawn for them
by invisible hands

dichotomy

courtesy of toni cade, today:

We are ordained/You are damned

We make history/You make dinner

We speak/You listen

We are rational/You are superstitious, childlike (as in minor)

We are autonomous and evolved/You are shiftless, unhinged, underdeveloped, primitive, savage, dependent, criminal, a menace to public safety, are needy wards and clients but are not necessarily deserving

We live center stage, the true heroes/You belong in the wings or behind the scrim providing the background music

We are pure, noble, upright/You are backward, fallen, tainted, shady, crafty, wily, dark, enigmatic, deviant, dangerous, and pathological

We were born to rule/You were born to serve

We own everything/ Even you are merely on loan to yourself through our largess

We are the dicks/You are are the pussies

We are entitled/You are obliged

–from “Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions,” Toni Cade Bamabara

nicely put, right? what else can i say.

courtesy of some interesting conversation, i’ve got a lot of thoughts about privilege/disadvantage lately, particularly about learning your own privilege. i hate to leave you like this, i know you’re on the edge of your seat, but i’ll be back when some of those thoughts are fully ripe.