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27 de Septiembre 2008
the darfur readings
Dear Darfur,
I wrote you a letter and then remembered you couldn't read it.
I sent you money and you used the paper to wrap your wounds
Where does your hope come from? Why is hope the uncommon commodity here? We hoard it and bury it, like treasure in the sand.
How easy it is for me. I assume you have no hope but what I might accidentally send
I think I have it all
At 27 I bought a house and knit a scarf. That same year you buried a child and worshipped in a desert. I took a class on global constraints, you took up a sword and walked ten miles to use it.
One day when I know enough to help you it will be too late and so I try to sit still and listen for your voice on the wind. For the cries of the newborn before he knows hunger and anger, before he has to stand on his own feet and shake his own fist.
And so Selfishly, I take the time to think my way through the territory of your problems, your future, because mine is wrapped up in it.
I am not the refugee and yet
I am wrapped in the sogging blankets of your story, huddled close and very afraid because I have so much to lose.
I have no need to be the refugee but I run from your story because, even in a desert time,
You rain on my parade, the way hurricanes seem to swarm and swallow all that we possess over night,
the way a monsoon season requires a pointed preparation or leaves room for none at all.
I am not the refugee
I am not the refugee and yet
I know you and use your story to escape the pain of my own past. Images of you fill my mind and displace the nightmare knives come down to slay my slumbering innocence or the drivers of my so-called destiny wildly maneuvering toward the last crash.
I have you, in pictures, as real as possible. In the silken glossed desserts of the National Geographic you are smiling at your brother, squatting over a family meal. Once, I wanted so badly to keep you with me
I tore at the black and white photos of the dentist office Smithsonian. I swore out loud when I nearly ripped your ear off. The hygenist looked up from her chart in shock. What could possibly be so upsetting
in the kind pink florescence of the waiting room, your toothless face?
Three squares of you: in the first you greet a friend, in the next your son dies and in the last you smell a rotting pig corpse. I think it was some kind of experiment: when do you grin, when do you chagrin? And I, barely able
to rip you from the text,
(the lines and circles surrounding you, trying so hard to explain you)
without destroying you.
You,. You are upsetting. Your face tells the truth I thought I wanted to see.
I lie to myself, I tell myself that
Everyday I nearly destroy You And it terrifies me to think that you may have already been starved or murdered before the photo was even color-corrected by some lackey, working to earn his own cubicle, or the next telephoto lens with which he can hold you at a distance.
He sits,
hunched and maligned over a computer screen, having given up even a modest dream of changing the world through the whining pathos of stills.
I am not a refugee,
I could send a thank you note to you, for your suffering. I may one day learn how to compose such a thing, because you teach me what pain is, what the end of my road looks like, even as you come to me, pixilated and two dimensional.
But I won't send the thank you just yet, because tonight I may fall into one final sleep and wake up to the oasis for your thirsty soldier sons and the end of the road no longer dragging out beyond the strength of your sisters, because tonight, like many nights, I am still terrified by my mother in the grip of her angry husband, by my father's stoic absence still boring a hole in my heart and I may meet you there, to deliver my thanks
myself.
Sincerely,
...
Dear America,
First I will say that I was asked not to swear so you will have to insert the four letter words as you imagine them. I trust you to be insecure enough to imagine more than I would have anyway.
I am angry with you. You betray and cheat.
I am ashamed of you. You lie and complain. I am afraid of you. You hoard and yell. I know you can't face yourself because you can't answer me, you can't look me in the face and hope I will forgive you
Which of us calls you father anymore?
you are the angry step-father, claiming me as your own only so you can exploit me, disregard my first fathers. Every night you drink yourself into an oblivion just to dull the pain. Even though your beer is mediocre, your cars are slow and your philanthropy is laughable compared to your reality television and football team expenditures.
My real father is the son of immigrants who ate beans and rice through the depression, bending tenderly over lettuce in the fields of your San Fernando valley, my grandfather noticed the blonde children waiting for meat and milk until they starved to death. My real father was a guard at the prison where you sent Charles Manson to be punished by a lifetime supply of toilet paper and snickers bars.
And just like that wrinkled old murderer,
You lead with a limp and pretend you will recover.
Recover what? A memory drives you to strive for super-hero global status. But the memory was always just a memory. When did you ever have your you-know-what together? When did you ever take care of me, my family or the other?
There is something sparkly about you, but even as we have added more stars to the flag, the unlucky 13 stripes, the legacy of divide and conquer, the blind hoping to subdue and fill, the pilgrimage to the holy land of consume and develop haunts us.
But how could I leave you?
I remember when we were young together and I heard stories scrubbed clean of prejudice and poverty. I was told you were kind and broad, that you had a thrilling geography and enough buffalo
the endless plains their thriving bivouac.
It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't true. There was blood on the cotton gin and now there is talk of more fencing at the border.
How can you wrap barbed wire around your heartland? How can you claim to care about the deserted peoples? I know you, you sneak:
you hope you won't have to take care of them unless, against all odds, we all vote for love
i stay because I can't leave you. I feel something like Stockholm syndrome when I think of your clear cutting and smog. You haven't killed me yet, why would I leave? As long as I stay there is a chance I might see you repent.
I would say I wander your streets looking for signs of hope but I am too smart to risk the knife fight and too scared I might meet your rapists. It isn't safe to look for hope here.
I don't know how to live with you or without you. If I could choose a new problem, a new country, I don't think I would.
So I vote angry and often, I write hard and hope to die free. I wash my hands of this overworked soil and then dig another flower bed in what is left. Like an idiot, like an asylum escapee, like a former prozac addict I paint my pain on your walls even though you call it graffiti and threaten to arrest me. I bake cakes for my neighbors and invest in your shaken, not stirred mutual funds. I watch your movies and laugh when I see myself there, behaving recklessly, well-dressed and eating out--seeking pleasure in your sterile, emotional art forms.
American community is held together by one bobby pin for the flyaways and a strip of scotch tape for the campaign posters but held together nonetheless and I guess that will have to do, for the endless now.
God knows how you suffer, how you hide it and why. I would rather not.
And so I remain, affectionately, ambivalently yours,
...
help yourself | By crymytinyflood | 4:16 PM
