A Jihad For Love

I have been youtubing lately. I was watching historical videos of Somalia and ended up watching a video someone posted on Al Shabab and found these particular comments interesting. To me, it is as if extremes are touching (extreme Muslims, extreme conservatives in the U.S.) on the idea that homesexuality is the ultimate sin. This is interesting because the extreme conservatives here in the U.S. are so anti-Muslim (little did they know they have some hatred in common). Saddest thing about these comments and this video is that the situation in Somalia is worsening.

This all makes me think about how complex and interconnected these issues are- yet the media does not delve into such complexities. They don't dare touch upon or bring up the ties between the U.S. and Ethiopia, they don't dare touch upon the amount of civilians killed in unnecessary U.S. wars, or U.S. greed. Capitalism's greed.

youtube Al Shabab video comments:

"Troy62486 the woman called aisha ibrahim dhuhulow she was over 18 years old and she committed adultry and she confessed and she doesnt have any mental problems she married before so they killed her for sharia rules and i can't see any problem about that, dont believe american anti islam propaganda and how many muslims do american soldiers kill daily can you find me that amount if you can my brother"

"Ever body can write what they want , but us as somalian alshabab r our heroes who protected us from ethopian when they invaded somalia in 2006 after they heard somalia r ruling in sharia law. we muslims we need our sharia law not democracy who let man can marry another man. istaqfurullah. VIVA ALSHABAB....... ALLAHU AKBAR"

Also watched the most ridiculous video news clip from Fox News that was asking why Minnesotans are not enforcing more assimilation tactics for Somalis and then they ended the clip by saying that if Somalis don't want to assimilate (which they equated with practicing Islam?) then they shouldn't have come to the U.S. As if they had said one day said, "yes, I think I'll move to America now." As if their were choice involved at all- running from bullets, living in refugee camps. One comment by a Somali woman that I couldn't find to re-post here talked about how most Americans are of European decent and the only real Americans she recognizes as American are Native Americans. I thought it was the most brilliant comment.


I am not even going to addres the part of the quote above that talks about killing a woman/women and sharia law. That is a post in and of itself.

(breathe)

I have stated a new series piece to accompany "Soo Dhawoow" and "Naturalization." The series itself will be called: FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), and there will be eight crimes/poems. I'm starting with Terroristic Threats. I have no idea how they will play out, but am just collecting language and contemplating doing them experimental persona pieces. I'm interested in backstory and how it can shed some light upon situations that are not always black or white; right or wrong.

Also watched the film/documentary, "A Jihad for Love" the other day and really found it informative. I had no idea that gay Muslims could obtain refugee status in European countries! I have not heard of that happening here within U.S. immigration law. If it hasn't, it should be. Right now the defnition of a refugee under the Immigration and Nationality Act (Sec. 101(a)(42)) states:

(A) any person who is outside any country of such person's nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or...

In any case, go rent "A Jihad for Love"

A Baldwin Fall; A Wonderized Dance

My weekend: Nina Simone. Stevie Wonder. Richie Havens. Dancing in the kitchen and cooking, washing dishes, making turkish coffee. And this man. Lawd. This man-



I am almost through with Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, and I think I might just compete with my lover for the spot of the Baldwin scholar. Although this would mean I might have to relinquish my duties as the Fanny Howe scholar...not ready for that yet. I am so deep into his novel that I didn't even notice that a centipede the size of my thumb had crawled into my nightstand water glass. I just kept picking it up and drinking and reading as the little guy swam in a cool pool of my fiction-coma induced saliva. Sucker probably dropped some eggs in there. If you see wee lil' pedes crawling out my eyes you will know I have been on the books for too long.

It seems to me that we are always looking for a language that will be heard, understood. Done got. And as I read these parts particulary, I am blown away to some other country where tongues roll out bombs of truth and somehow remain on the edege, the radical steep edge and live in paradox- where the people swirl hot and bothered and resistant and lovely, forever resistant, always looking for the humanity at the core of experience:

"Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain."
-pg. 241

"What a tremendous decision had been made, what a mighty law had been passed, so long ago, and with the roar of universal relief and approval: that only the destruction of another could bring peace to the soul and guarantee the order of the universe! The fire said, in Caleb's voice,Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of? I wondered why it was a virtue, often presented as the highest, to despise oneself and everybody else. What a slimy gang of creeps and cowards those old church fathers must have been; and remained; and what was my brother doing in that company?"
-pg.257-258

"I know that, as I grew older, I became tyrannical. I had no choice, my life was in the balance. Whoever went under, it was not going to be me- and I seem to have been very clear about this from the very beginning of my life. To run meant to turn my back- on lions; to run meant the flying tackle which would bring me down; and, anyway run where? Certainly not to my father and mother, certainly not to Caleb. Therefore, I had to stand. To stand meant that I had to be insane. People who imagine themsevles to be, as they put it, in their "right" minds, have no desire to tangle with the insane. They stay far from them, or they ingratiate them. It took me almost no time to realize this. I used what I knew. I knew that what was sport for others was life or death for me. Therefore, I had to make it a matter of life or death for them. Not many are prepared to go so far, at least not without the sanction of a uniform. But this absolutely single-minded and terrified ruthlessness was masked by my obvious vulnerability, my paradoxical and very real helplessness, and it covered my terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and out of human affection, to be born again."
-pg. 31-32

I have found no other writing passage that resonates with me the way this last one does. Sacred and muddy. The real deal. I hear it like the honking geese chorus I hear in Miles Davis "Bitches Brew" or like the raspy voiced poetics in Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" or the balls-out subversive groove in Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn" or in Fanny Howe's "Plutocracy" or in Ani Difranco's "Subdivision" or Stevie Wonder's "They Won't Go Where I Go" and everything Adrienne Rich. Thank god for these. And for the new generation: Hareyette Mullen, MIA, Guante, Kill the Vultures, Chastity Brown. Thank god there's plenty more I am missing and that artists are grinding out their lives in pursuit of speaking such truths and with such conviction. It must be done. Right now. Forever engaged. Forever dismantling imaginations blooming. Amen.

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James Campbell wrote about Baldwin after studying his letters:

"All the aspects of Baldwin’s character are exposed … He was magnetic, compulsively sociable, elaborately extrovert, darkly introverted, depressive, magnificently generous, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, funny, furious, bubbling with good intentions, seldom hesitating over a breach of promise – capable of exhibiting all these traits between lunch and dinner, and between dinner and the last whisky at 4 am."

-The Times Literary Supplement, June 13, 2007
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In the past couple of months I have come to the realization that there are specific elements I need in my life (and proabably forever):

+I will forever have to remind myself not to judge others, especially folks with money (but it feels so good to blame them, but as Chas points out- everybody has felt pain and try to tap into that- see Baldwin quote)

+I must work part-time/32hrs/week at most. I do not know how mothers and fathers do it. I need time to reflect, to read mostly and to write and to breathe, and to process all that is flashing before me because there are some really beautiful moments that I feel slip through my consciousness that I would like to have stay there so I can feel it in all directions.

+I must constantly read and study writing if I am going to write well. That's that. Just a recent revelation I had while preparing my MFA application materials. Also- drafting my statement of purpose has turned into a really fun project because I am coming to terms with the fact that I must write. And why I must write. And that it must be now. I am forever blown away by the slivers of truth in people, in animals, in nature, in experiences, and I reconcile these gut-wrenching emotional truths, the differences, the utterances of chaos and calm, the experimental partial-yet-coherent meanings all through my writing. Whether this means I need to go through an MFA program- I guess we'll see, but in the meantime I am loving this revelation and it is constantly opening me up. I had a great conversation with a sculptor/visual artist the other day and she pointed out that we have to do what we are supposed to do to better serve others and I feel that I will better serve my community and myself through writing.

+I must do yoga. As a naturally fast-paced person I must reconcile with all that my breath holds. Yogi pants are on folks, watch it, I'm bout to be so grounded you'll think I'm a tree stump.

+I must cultivate friendships. I have felt a lack of people I love lately and realized that this is probably my own doing. I want to reconnect with folks from South Dakota, Scotland, and even here in the Minneapple. To be supportive and intuitive, not so closed off. Also, disagreeing is getting easier so I should remember this when in heated convos and also to honor the multitude of differences between persons.

+I want to live minimally. This makes sense as the only way to harmonize with my desire to work/advocate part-time and have more time to reflect and write and travel. This goes against everything I was told (more so, not told) growing up. I observed my parents work 40hrs/wk my entire life. I respect their ability to give themselves entirely and work themselves from the bottom up, in fact, I am amazed at their work-ethic and am so thankful, but I do not have that in me, nor do I care for material goods/needs at all.

+Talk to myself when I am lost. Do not go to my lover for all things. Venture by myself. Sit in the silence, embrace the awkward and my embarrassments because this allows me to be. To truly effing be.
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New journal obssession: jubilat

I am going to submit:
Blue-Glass Prairie Graffiti
Dynamo
Man O' Livin
White Buffalo Song

but am not sure if they are "experimental" in the way that this journal's aesthetic leans towards.

From an interview with Peter Gizzi:

"We record the pieces of other songs, of people and their everyday struggle of living, of things coming into being even as they are lost within a larger story."

"Sound tends to work in a number of ways for me, to keep new information coming in and to handle it- the present, I mean."

"For me if a poem is a closed, contained vessel, it's dead on arrival; instead, I want to leave some part of the poem open so that I or another reader can enter it again and again."

I have much to learn in the way of this journal and my own writing. I am excited to think about writing with all these new elements to factor in. I have this big ambitious idea of writing in an open, experimental way, yet retaining the emotional truth rides a narrative provides. That resistance can be innovative and still accessible. I am pretty sure I am not the only person who has thought such things, but for me, right now, it seems like a good way to exlpore while drafting new pieces.

Also, in the African American Experimental Poetry Forum:

"The root of narrative, of the sentence itself, is experience, coming to terms with it....By capture, I mean how much of the experience in question one can actually represent in language."

"I am drawn to poetry because in its often fragmented nature there is room to grapple with the utterance of experience, to break it down to even the phonetic level...they hyperawareness makes you exploratory."
-Renee Gladman

"Thus, it extends from poems and enjoyment of poetry to how we inscribe and perceive difference. When I write an experimental poem, my ambition is to encourage the readers to read more than the poem, my ambition is to use the poem as a Danger Room in which they can practice strategies for reading the world and their own texts within it...A successful experimental poem for me must provide a space in which its particular challenges are rewarded ultimately with the ache and pleasure that comes with a new way of thinking."
-Douglas Kearney

"It is ironic that experimentalism can be that to which an appeal is made in the interest of a disavowal of the experiement. And what is more terrible than to have been born/e into the lust for and aversion to difference? But that is everybody's story."
-Fred Moten
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Quote of the week (in lieu of "the poem of the week" I'm slackin on):

"I'd totally knock you up if I could babe"
(woman to woman)

Makes me want to re-read Stein's "Lifting Belly"
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I am about as funk-ified as can be thanks to Stevie Wonder. Where have you been all my life? This is me lung rattling, neck veins a poppin': "You can FEEL IT...FEEL IT SPIRIT...come on now you can FeeeEEEEEEEEL IT FEEL IT SPIRIT!"

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Well I'm off to go see Ani D. at First Ave. tonight (close to my 10th show of hers), but first I've got to pull some radishes out of the ground and look totally amazed that I planted the damn things and that they grew and that I can eat them...did I say amazing? It's amazin grazin yer own garden. Have also got some kale and chard to cut back and cook up- maybe tonight for dinner!

Mama Moose

Am reading James Baldwin's, Tell Me How Long the Trains Been Gone. Am shy. Am tyrannical. Am humiliated. Am silent.

Also always this:
"Normalizing the abnormal is a disorder that is rampant accross cultures."
-Clarissa Pinkola in Women Who run with the Wolves

"everything has its own language"
-Maggie

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Working on a new piece that needs an anchor, a known inspiration. Right now it is a boots up, poached woman with sappy hands and sheer glee. A bit berserk and hysterical- even zenned out at times. Mostly it involves talking dirty to the garden.

I have been in an emotional whirlpool-foaming and all. I realize that even when I am sober, I still have this urge to self-destruct. Which is why I bike like a mad woman all over this town and try to burn out that feeling instead of letting it scorch me from the inside.

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Discovered: Sarah Fox. Poet here in Minneapolis. Yes. Thank you poetry for opening my brain a wee bit more everyday.

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Listened to Beruit in the car ride home from a Boundary Waters trip with friends and watched the sun slowly swallow Lake Superior. I whispered prayers out the window of the car and over the curve of the landscape hoping they'd reach my Grandma.

We saw a mama moose with two baby moose crunching on lily pads and it left me in the canoe, wind blowing the nose, spinning circles with my mouth closed, full of swaying pine trees, nothing to say.

Pics from the Boundary Waters trip and my b-day jazz fest in the living room!

Harlem, Boston, Montpelier, Claremont

A trip it was...


Mt. Ascutney near Claremont, NH.


Montpelier, VT.


Davis Square Boston.


Morningside Park.


Banjo Jim's.


Central Park.

It was great to come back to Minneapolis...this trip, specifically the NH bit, made me realize how lucky I am to work as an immigration advcoate in a progressive city. There is an anti-Muslim sentiment that is freakishly pervasive in rural America- no matter what region you are in. I grew up in a small town and I remember what it was like...folks are always putting their own self-hate and anger onto whatever marginalized group is vulnerable at the time. Some group of people that eveyone that is privileged can agree on and come together and identify over and feel part of as a community. It is a weird group psychology thing. The opposite of community, really.

On a lighter note. Chas and I did yoga in Claremont while we were there and I had this moment of blood-spilling meditation. My body warmed in a way that made me want to do it on a regular basis. I felt as if I was on the train ride still-from NYC to Boston- and I could feel the breaks squealing...and myself pouring after the whistling stopped.

post zen weekend in vegas

Well what can I say. It is difficult to find time to blog in the summertime.

******
I've spent the majority of my day putting in a raised-bed garden in our cooperative like run apartment. Today I just put in the herbs: garlic chives, fennel, sweet majoram, sweet basil, rosemary, and dill. Am at the very end of The Ominvore's Deliemma and feel strongly about trying to eat even more local than I already am. The book is astonishingly brilliant- a look at natural history through the lens of food, including, the evolutinary, existential, and economical theories that drive such a thesis. It is good to get confirmation that it is more important to eat local than to eat organic--particularly "industry organic."

******
I was sick as a dog while at the immigration conference in Vegas--barely spoke a word to anyone, except to re-fill my hot water for tea. Afterwards, I realized it was quite profound, to be that silent for that long in one of the loudest, raunchiest cities I've ever wandered. I felt like Curly Sue in my hotel room at the Palazzo.

******
Am feeling a bit anti-industry after this trip and reading and gardening. It is not in my blood to push for numbers or money. The older I get the slower I go and I am loving it. I am grateful for dinners with friends and family where we sit and talk the night away. Truly connect. Wild connect. The romance in conversation.


happy belated Chastity!

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I revised my sequence/series piece, "Naturalization" and am thinking that I'll include it in almost all of my MFA writing samples this fall. My best friend, and writing comrade, gave some excellent suggestions about how to distinguish the characters, which now are indeterminite pronouns. And also how each section weaves with the larger engine of the piece but still has its own trajectory and how to think of the order of the sections with this in mind.

working on four new pieces-that are swilling in me simultaneously:

1)"FOIA" (Freedom of Information Act) w/ a quote: "I don't know someone's insides." Am thinking of doing this as a fragments poem. Had an interesting conversation at work about Islam and domestic violence and being a Westerner..may surface in this piece, will see where it goes as I draft.
2)"Hound Me" (result of processing the loss of eye contact with a dog/intution/death-backwards birth
3)"Atomic Potter" (twirling beauties/moonwalking time)
4) "Virgins" (south dakota cowboy)

So, am just collecting bits here and there to shape these in the next couple of weeks which might be difficult as Chas and I leave for NYC next weekend. As a side note she booked a gig at Banjo's Jim's on the 4th! Am looking forward to traveling with a lover to a new place.

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Am feeling blissed out right now. Am just about to bike to a club to go dancing for pride weekend and have had a relatively slow day reflecting and will be trippin next week. I had been stressin about finding time to write and started reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, particularly the section on "Nourishing the Creative Life":

"It is up to her to inform them that when she has "that look" in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to creat a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart."

--and other bits that talk about over-responsibility (i.e. cleaning the entire house before sitting down to do whatever it is that you love to do/whatever burns inside you to get out)
--how to be insistent on my own tempo and to venture by myself, keeping the wild psyche intact and not lose it to domesticity, over-anaylzing, or work
--how to be in my body with certainty and how stories are medicine

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Also just rediscovered this favorite line in Fanny Howe's collection On the Ground.

from "Kneeling Bus"

"How disassemble

the hypocritical
crippling factor in every body?"

I saw her read this poem at the Loft Literary center a year or so ago and almost sunk into the floor when she got to this line.

*****
watched: The Reader and Revolutionary Road and thinking: the heightened level of communication and honesty that is needed in a relationship in order to make sure each partner is going towards their own individualism while growing as a couple towards new journeys--and how hopefully, mystery underlies even our most certain decisions, whether they be yes or no

*****
listening to: DeYarmond Edison "Silent Signs"

*****

putting on: dancing shoes

human superiority

I read this over at my friend's mother's blog:

"The more technology allows us to prop ourselves up by putting everyone else down, the more we'll level our blunderbusses at every passing ant."
This idea of "better than vs less than" caught my attention this morning. The image of feeling superior and separate from nature is inviting. Human superiority over the animals, the belief that we are in control of animals and that we are free to exercise power over them, bending their natural instincts to our will at whim.


And it got me thinking. I remember the first time I had a conversation about why we humans act as if we are superior to nature and animals. It was over a cold glass of red wine while I was looking out my flat window, talking with a friend I had travelled to Edinburgh, Scotland with. She was an anthropology major and was working at the natural history museum and I had just graduated in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. To say the least, my friend opened my eyes to this invitation spoken about above. It dismantled a lot of what I had studied in cultural studies and I was angry at the time, but in the last couple of years I have realized that I was completely not in tune with the natural world. I always thought consciousness, language, social movement-that these were the driving force in this world. I was so wrong. I mean, culturally these work in conjunction with the natural world. I think I may have rolled seven ciggarettes in this one sitting and maybe even drank the whole bottle of wine. I remember focusing on the moss and the viney green leaves that climbed the building, almost swallowing it, as my friend explained to me that homosexuals are still partaking in the evolutionary drive to reproduce because they are looking for a mate and they are having sex-it's just that they happen not to reproduce. At the time, I was caught up in social construction and I hadn't fit into my world view, how I, as a queer woman, fit into this picture of natural history. The idea that humans had only been around for a teeny bit in the large scale of history blew my mind. It is funny how you don't feel yourself changing until you look back and acknowledge where you were then and where you are at now. And all of a sudden, BAM. Here you are. Thank you mam.

Also, I have been reflecting on what triggers me to control my immediate surroundings, whether it is in nature, another human, or my writing. Asserting control over any situation is the easiest way to affirm to the self that it will prevail. However, in most cases, when I am asserting control-the kind that intrudes on the natural rhythms in nature, relationships, even creative spirit-I feel that I am the furthest I can be from growth.

What drives people to feel/act as superior over others? Does this tie into instinctual evolutionary drives? I know it has everything to do with power and control, but on the level of-where does this come from, why?

Did I mention that living with Early made me realize that the most spiritual experiences are often the animal warm kind? The kind that are so close to the ground, so far from right or wrong, the kind that are locked in the instinctual. Poetry is held here, I think. Maybe right above instinct- where the skin of consciousness covers and cases it.

here's when i gush

saw him last time he was in town at the Cedar and it was a great, almost spiritual show. i listened to his albums all winter and am hooked.
favorite song: Daughter of the Sun

tonight i plan on taking chas out to the Ecopolitan for some raw food goodness and then we'll go get settled into what i hope will be a soul filled evening.