TERROR AUSTERITY GENDER EXCESS THEATER — RUTH WILSON GILMORE

Los Angeles (1992)

What kinds of terror are enacted by and on behalf of the U.S. Crisis State, both as response to and mystification of power shifts occasioned by the new international economic order during the past decade? How do local—that is, intranational—forms of state terrorism work to create and maintain alienated publics in the current crisis, publics who are contingently united, if at all, in cul-de-sacs of identity politics, most frighteningly realized locally as resurgent American nationalism? By American nationalism I mean an allegedly restorative tendency (back to family values and all that), normatively white, in patriotic revolution against the “stark utopia” of both late capitalism’s exportation and the state’s domestic squandering of the possibilities of household-based economic security. What’s at issue is not simply that things are getting worse (and they are) but that they are getting worse in stark contradiction to still-rising expectations—the ideology of progress embedded in American commonsense consciousness. In no way an anticapitalist movement per se, this revolution seeks to explain contemporary disorders and structural adjustments in U.S. political, cultural, and libidinal economies in natural terms, as though transcendent discourse would guarantee the transcendent innocence of the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced nation-state in the history of the world. The contradictions of fascism deny the social but not the constructed character of U.S. hierarchies. For the new American nationalism, hierarchy is naturally a result of specific “work,” the glory of constructing world power (identical with household-based progress toward the good life) in the empty yet threatening wilderness of continental North America. In this formulation, the U.S. is a muscular achievement of ideological simplicity: “White men built this nation!! White men are this nation!!!” Antonio Gramsci reminds us that work mediates society and nature. The hierarchical divides of who performs what work define cultural tendencies of gender, race, sexuality, authority; the divides also enforce multiple and, in this moment of danger, competing economies of being. When all this identity chat is en route somewhere beyond “self” toward subjectivity, in motion from object to agency, its politics are about these competitions and their possible outcomes.

...

In a sense, 1992 is the year of the rehabilitation of white, male heterosexuality: its return to sites of centeredness, beauty, prosperity, power. Such a rehabilitation is central both to the European community and to the Columbian quincentenary. The rehabilitation extends to resurrections of some of those legendary dead white men—JFK, Columbus—as well as those who are trying to stay undead: from WAR’s Tom Metzger on the ultra “right” to name your pundit on the other side. Metzger’s laissez-faire terrorism, stage-managed for spontaneous, natural effect, is of a piece with the nationalist power theater which the U.S. tuned in to with the invasion of Grenada in 1983. The shifts in the production of profit in the U.S. during the several years immediately preceding that invasion reflect how the circulation of value was less and less a function of productive labor and more and more the direct transfer of capital among competing traders—investment bankers, corporate raiders—and the exportation of labor relations. The major warfare matériel and engineering transnationals are located in the U.S—the principal but by no means only state to which the transnationals pay tribute in exchange for defense, both for protection and for patronage. By 1983 they needed the kind of ideological zap (and subsequent funding spurt) which Sputnik provided the military-industrial complex in 1958. (The historical connection between the military-industrial complex and contemporary U.S. white-racist nationalism is explicit, and current; for example, Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nation, recolonized northern Idaho to maintain and produce the pure.) These ideological zaps are certainly a function of the “I’m proud to be an American” rah-rah, but more, they work—the dramatically arouse the sorts of sensations that last even unto the voting box and other fora where Americans are emptying their pockets into the valises of the rich—if cemented by blood and anger. Thus the need for an enemy whose threat obligates endless budgetary consideration (“I could see him look through me.” He was on something.”) and who can perhaps be found and fought as well by the brave American nationals who are sacrificing all for the sake of the nation-state: the dead and undead white men and their cadres who, Tom Metzger’s windshield flyers assure us, built and (therefore) are this nation. Contenders.

...

The attempts to get major, in particular televised, coverage of this series of murders, and of deaths in similar circumstances as far away as Kansas City and Florida, encounter no dramaturgical zeal. After all, what work would this revelation do to extend coercion of the least powerful segment of the social formation? And, further, the coverage would result in an excess of something else, of attention paid to black women who are not individually upwardly mobile objects of rape and other male abuses (Hill, Givens, Washington, Winfrey). The coercion is already effectively in place, carried by fear and the antigospel gossip circuit; women get on the phone and talk, like the women who tried to turn on a suspect word—and say we’ll talk some more when (when?) we meet again. We are the accused (like Anita Hill, who also accuses us), we who conspire  to prevent the American nation from regaining ancient heritage, its accessible white-male identity, clothed in whatever melanogender fits the needs of the political economy of the crisis-capitalist state. Spectators at our own undoing, we are filthy vessels of unwanted offspring, body parts that just won’t work in bodies of those who can afford to buy a spleen, a kidney, a heart—not even Fordism can save us now—separated by the excess of genetics, the fact of race in this era of neo-biologism, from any work/act/performance that does not run up in the face of state terror over and over and over again. I can stay in the mountains for this show; it won’t be televised.

Stand ins. What is so perfect, so perfectly austere in this theater is how nobody is a star—American equality in action. We’re stand-ins, as Gloria Anzaldua says, and so are all objects of state torture, of state terrorism, targets cast for the fit, the lighting, the camera, the angle, the story, in place of anyone who dares perform a comparable excess of being. But even stand-ins, in times of austerity, might unionize, might move from being objects of organized abandonment, red-lined along with the buildings and neighborhoods, to subjects who refuse—who refuse to bear the weight of late capitalism’s stark utopia, the abstraction of abandonment, the violence of abstraction. We are poised in a performance I’ve yet to plot, or map, or systematically to theorize the semiotics and histrionics of, beyond these preliminary remarks. I believe it is too late to fight nationalism with nationalism; that bloodily disintegrating process must result in planetary death. I also believe it is not too late to act, to make work work, through rearticulation of the “complex skein of relatedness”: organic integrations of the earth, technology, desire.

The Great Leveler Thomas Rainboro said it in 1637: “Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy.” If we start from where we’re at, and organize in and for work, conceived in the fullness of our imaginative powers, we might push and pull the current tendency of crisis away from a national resolution in fascism: terrorism, imprisonment, deportation, sterilization, state-supervised death. All of these features are everyday elements of life in California, in Arkansas, in Texas, New York, you name it. This is where we’re at; where are we headed?

Excerpts from: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Terror Austerity Gender Excess Theater,” in Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York and London: Routledge, 1993)

BREAK THE PRESENT

Ramallah (1988)

At the barricades the pain is over. The transformation is complete. It is completed by a shout from the rooftops that the soldiers are advancing. Suddenly there is nothing to regret. The barricades are between their defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future.  

Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. The barricades break that present.

John Berger, G. (1972)  

It is in the nature of a demonstration to provoke violence upon itself. Its provocation may also be violent. But in the end it is bound to suffer more than it inflicts. This is a tactical truth and an historical one. The historical role of demonstrations is to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority. Demonstrations are protests of innocence.

But the innocence is of two kinds, which can only be treated as though they were one at a symbolic level. For the purposes of political analysis and the planning of revolutionary action, they must be separated. There is an innocence to be defended and an innocence which must finally be lost: an innocence which derives from justice, and an innocence which is the consequence of a lack of experience.

Demonstrations express political ambitions before the political means necessary to realise them have been created. Demonstrations predict the realisation of their own ambitions and thus may contribute to that realisation, but they cannot themselves achieve them.

The question which revolutionaries must decide in any given historical situation is whether or not further symbolic rehearsals are necessary. The next stage is training in tactics and strategy for the performance itself.

John Berger, "The Nature of Mass Demonstrations" (1968)

MARXISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS — C.L.R. JAMES

Antonio Berni, "Manifestación" (1934)

Thus, although the working class has its own special problems, the state of the nation is pushing it towards some action. Any action that it may take involves at once the national solution of the national and international problems. But history warns us that a class, forced into independent action, will think its own thoughts and act to solve its own problems. It is to me certain that if the American working class should find itself, not necessarily at the very start, but rapidly enough, forced to intervene independently in the task of national regeneration, that one of the first things it will do is to reorganize the process of production. If it will act at all – and either it will act or the degeneration of American society (and world society) will continue – its main, perhaps its first action will be to reorganize its daily life, that is to say the labor process. This, I have to repeat, is not merely nationalization or more wages in less hours. It cannot mean another mobilization for continuous fighting with the capitalist class or with a class of bureaucrats or managers (capitalist bosses under a new name). It must mean a total reorganization of the labor process, with the working class in complete charge of production and its energies and experience devoted to making production a fully human occupation. America is the country of production, and more than any other will be able to understand and accept such a transformation. American workers, more than all others, accept production as a way of life. They know that it is production which has made the American nation what it is. They have the experience of production being boldly changed to suit the necessities of production. They will not fail to change production for the necessity of a human existence and national regeneration. No one else but they themselves can do it. 

But there will be bitter opposition. And it is regrettable that those intellectuals and labor leaders who have been talking most loudly about the new society will be the most dangerous opposition. Most dangerous because from their previous interest in and sympathy with the working class, they are likely to gain positions and voices of leadership. The dyed-in-the-wool capitalist reaction will recognize that for the time being they will have to accept other leadership and they will rally behind them, waiting for the time and the opportunity when these fail, as they are bound to fail, once more to take control. 

This is the perspective. Without it you may do good work, but you weaken the first condition of success – the belief of the workers in themselves. The Marxist organization and above all the Marxist propaganda knows this. He knows that his great task is to work side by side with the workers on day-to-day problems, welcoming and in fact encouraging all possible allies. As a Marxist he is on guard always himself to avoid and to be in militant opposition to whoever and whatever will lessen the confidence of the working class in itself and in its own independent action. How exactly to do this is a difficult and at times apparently impossible problem. That is our daily burden, even if solved today, appearing in new forms tomorrow. But unless you know the problem and daily strengthen yourself in it, you will not only go wrong, but your best intentioned actions will do great harm to the very cause for which you are working. 

Let me end with a historic weakness. As the crisis deepens numbers of the middle class and stray intellectuals become deeply perturbed and in their usual intemperate manner wish “to do something.” They may even attempt some independent actions. In America their record of recognizing the power of the working-class is very bad. Small Marxist organizations, hitherto confined to propaganda, may catch the fever, forget the special responsibilities which they have as Marxists and even find or indicate the solution of the ills of the day in the ideas and temper of these groups. Particularly they are inclined to do this if, as often happens, the working class, is watching and weighing the situation, knowing the gravity of its problems and its own heavy responsibility. Here Lenin can be, as always, a model of policy. In 1905 when Russian capitalism received a dreadful blow from its defeat by the Japanese, Lenin warned that even reactionary classes might be moved to fight against Tsarism and the disasters it had brought upon the nation. He advocated support of these. But in 1905 as in 1917 friends observed that when the party was deep in action and excitement over the revolutionary upheavals, Lenin (though leading the concrete struggle) used every spare moment to reread the classics of Marx. The great Marxist, although the leader of a mass party, was holding tight to the fundamental principles. He knew how easy it was to slip away from them. 

The working class did not disappoint him. In 1905 it initiated the first general strike in history. It created the Soviet. It was in his mastery of Marxism that Lenin was able to expect and recognize these creative achievements for what they were.

Excerpt from: C.L.R. James, “Marxism and the Intellectuals,” Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby Ltd., 1980).

CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE LITERARY CANON — AMIRI BARAKA

"Noah Purifoy making artwork with students" Via: Hammer Museum

Amiri Baraka was among the most cogent critics of U.S. literary scholarship. Baraka’s poetry, plays, and organizing always confronted the imbrications of race, class and empire in American life, and sometimes, in the life of American ideas. Like the rest of his work, Baraka’s literary and cultural criticism was unabashedly political. Indeed, for Baraka, criticism's significance—in the scheme of intellectual and artistic production—was almost paramount. As he wrote in 1980: “the main line is that class struggle is as much a part of the arts as it is anyplace else. (And criticism especially, as Mao instructed us in the "Yenan Forum," is one place where open class struggle always rages.)” But his criticism of criticism was not confined to his essays. In his poem “Sin Soars!,” he skewers the New Critics:

English Department Skull & Crossbones

New Critic Klansman is

Deconstructing the day

Name for night slaughter

They laugh, They soul they do not have

Baraka’s critique, elaborated in prose below, extends to the whole academic and cultural field. His plea is for politically engaged intellectual and cultural work that goes beyond the university. Baraka's is a demand for a revolutionary art and critical practice beyond the individual. As Robin D.G. Kelley put it: "Like most scholars and other voyeurs, we are always listening for, and looking at, art for personal tragedy rather than collective memory, collective histories. Amiri Baraka understood the fallacy of this approach." Here, Baraka’s writing echoes that of Edward Said in his 1979 essay on American “Left” literary criticism, as he ironically named it:

One's impression is that the young critic has a well-developed political sense, yet close examination of this sense reveals a haphazard anecdotal content enriched neither by much knowledge of what politics and political issues are all about nor by any very developed awareness that politics is something more than liking or disliking some intellectual orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature.

****

The reactionary trend of the 1950s which produced McCarthyism and the Hollywood and academic purges, the Korean War, and Eisenhower was reflected in American literature by its domination by a punishingly dry, highly mannered magazine verse equipped with hot and cold running Latin and Greek phrases mit footnotes and the emotional significance of a New York Times crossword puzzle.

This kind of literature was trumpeted and proselytized by the so-called New Criticism, which sought to remove all social relationship from poetry, from literature generally, making it a completely solipsistic and elitist artifact that jingled stiffly about its not not self.

As it turned out the New Critics were hardly that. Their leaders like Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren were identified with the Southern Agrarian Movement. (Allen Tate's book Reactionary Essays says most of it!) The Southern Agrarians preached a national chauvinist and metaphysical sentimentalization of the Chattel Slave Empire, claiming that industrialization was destroying the South, and a culture that ranked with the Greek Attic.

But the raised level of U.S. productive forces after WWII and the Korean War ex- panded advanced industrial labor and educational access to a much broader segment of the U.S. population, particularly to the second-generation immigrants and new generations of blacks. There were ideas set in motion that disrupted the basic dis- position of class forces in post-Korean War U.S., that challenged the basic social relations of the society, particularly to class privilege in the U.S. and white supremacy, the fundamental social organization of imperialist U.S. society...

...We are in the midst of a deep reactionary period when revolution is once again held up as fantastic and only cynicism and betrayal and upholding the status quo qualify as realism. In the 1960s indeed, "Revolution Is the Main Trend in the World Today," that's what we used to say. "Countries want Independence, Nations want Liberation, People want Revolution." But that is when the principal contradiction in the world was Imperialism vs. the People and Nations. But soon after, the contradiction of Imperialism vs. Imperialism, which is the trend that leads to imperialist war, became principal, and the revolutionary movements were turned around by rising fascism.

We are at a crossroads in that struggle today. The attempt to restore the so-called literary canon to make political prisoners of world art and culture in the name of some self-aggrandizing superculture with neither origins nor relationship to the rest of the world is simply white supremacy returned. You cannot speak of Greek culture without relating it to the whole of the ancient world from which it sprang and which it continues to reflect.

In the Channel 13 bit of Goebbelsmania called The Art of the Western World, a statement was made that "Creativity began in Greece." Naturally I wrote letters to them and a number of other folks challenging this mindless protofascism. A white rock critic for the Star Ledger told me "Creativity did begin in Greece . . . for the Europeans." Any way you take this it's gas chamber logic, but then this was Boy speaking not Tarzan.

There is no life or culture, no art or philosophy separated from the whole expression of human life and being on the planet. It is the separation that is the first strand of barbed wire for the fences at Auschwitz, the more modern versions of southern plantations.

For those of us in the arts or the universities, those of us involved with the institutions and ideas of the U.S. superstructure, we must see that the only positive direction we can go, that is the direction of life supported over death, is cultural revolution. We must oppose the reinstitution of the racist canon, like we resist Part 25 of Friday the 13th or Rambo 11.

For instance, we must join forces to socialize the university and all institutions that affect our lives. By socialize I mean to make the university deal with real life and the actual society in which it stands. If the university is the repository for higher learning, advanced philosophy, and innovative technology, why are the cities in which they stand so bereft of these resources? There is no other way to measure ideas' usefulness except in the crucible of real life.

The university professor is never made to measure his ideas in relationship to the real world, in relation to how much change (i.e., human advance) or how close to reality the world measures those ideas to be, but is valorized only by the abstract and frankly elitist interacademic dialogue. We publish for each other or to get tenure, we create and do research for the same reasons. While the great challenge, real life, real society, stands ailing and ill because our resources have been removed.

Why poor education, unemployment, no housing, drug panics in these cities and communities of our world if the universities are full of so many self-proclaimed geniuses and mountains of ominously profound conclusions? The university must be made to relate to these cities, to establish partnerships in developing real life to higher and higher levels of understanding and sophistication, not stand aside and praise itself for being so clean and so heavy and so outside everything, as is mostly now the case.

The cultural revolution at the university must see Black Studies, Latino Studies, Woman and Labor Studies as the missing links of progressive education and preparation for a new and more humanized world society. Ignorance and lack of education must be made extinct. It is dangerous to the whole world for uneducated masses to exist. The extent to which we raise the world educational level is the extent to which we raise our own consciousness and the level of human life on the planet.

Such studies must also be extended to the high schools and elementary schools, and used in psychological tests for public employees to make sure none of them suffers from the vicious illness of racism and male chauvinism or some other fascist malady which we will lament once we see another black youth stretched out on the ground with a bullet in his head, not for playing his radio too loud, but for being black or Latino, or raped, not for playing her radio too loud, but for being a woman.

Another critical aspect of Cultural Revolution is that we must support the presence of art and artists in the educational process from elementary through university. Art is the main force against Arent. It is the creative aspect of being through which it is maintained. The development and destiny of humanity is contained more directly in essence in its art than any other dimension. The very devaluing of art is evident throughout society. There is no university without art. Art is the social life of humanity, its philosophical expression the ideological reflection of human life. To devalue it is to devalue creativity. Talk about creativity to the big money guys, and its, ha ha, a joke, you know. Yet their big money comes from the control of people and society the control of their art, from the most basic art, the creation of society itself, to the articles of its expression. Whether clothes, furniture, music, food, houses, it is all art. Let us be clear it is not academic life that is principal but creative life, the question of human development and evolution. The critical, the academic, are secondary aspects, absolutely necessary, but not to be confused with the making of what is, the continuing of life in opposition to death.

Excerpt from: Amiri Baraka, “Cultural Revolution and the Literary Canon,” Calaloo 14:1 (1991)

NOTES ON LIVING AND WRITING IN AMERIKA PT. III

Etel Adnan, "Blessed Day" (1990)

And so I did not reject these poems, I did not despise them saying, "How is this possible? Sixteen different manuscripts of poetry written in 1985 and not one of them uses the terms of my own Black life! Not one of them writes about the police murder of Eleanor Bumpurs or the Bernard Goetz shooting of four Black boys or apartheid in South Africa, or unemployment, or famine in Ethiopia, or rape, or fire escapes, or cruise missiles in the New York harbor, or medicare, or alleyways, or napalm, or $4.00 an hour, and no time off for lunch.  

I did not and I would not presume to impose my urgencies upon white poets writing in America. But the miracle of Black poetry in America, the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as “political” or “topical” or “sloganeering” and “crude” and ‘insignificant” because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague, or grizzlies at the rain barrel under the dwarf willow trees. We will write, published or not, however we may, like Phillis Wheatley, of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we “neither sought nor knew,” as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.  

But not otherwise. And yet we persist. 

— June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” (February, 1985)    

I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language. 

— Adrienne Rich, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1986)  

I am not a metaphor. My place of origin is not a metaphor. I inhabit my language, my imagination, more and more completely. It becomes me. I do not exist as a text. I am spoken into being—as Léopold Sédar Senghor said of the world. I speak myself into being and with that speech my place of origin. I use this speech to craft fiction, which is not a record of myself, which is self-consciously—self-confidently—political. I do believe in the word, that a new world may be spoken into being.  

— Michelle Cliff, “Sites of Memory” (2008)

OF PALESTINIANS AND NATIVE AMERICANS — MU'IN BSEISO

The Gaza-born writer and activist Mu’in Bseiso (1926-1984) is best known for his many volumes of poetry. His lesser known but also voluminous memoirs, plays, and essays share this political bent along with a propensity for allegory and a biting wit.  The curious piece below—which summons, through a white man's novel, the foil of Native Americans to condemn the inaction of Arabs—comes from a 1972 collection of his literary essays. Throughout, Bseiso uses the Arabic term "al-Hindi al-Ahmar" or "the Red Indian." Despite the problems with this term, I have elected to stay true to Bseiso's Arabic, although today even in Arabic "al-Amerikan al-Asliyeen" or "the Original Americans" is sometimes used.

°°°°

Left: Heard Museum, Phoenix. Right: Dar al-Nimr, Beirut

The Bottle of Milk and the Newspaper

The most honest literary account of the extermination of an entire race is a novel written by the American Howard Fast about the physical liquidation of the Red Indians, The Last Frontier [1941]. In it, the shadow of bullets chases the Red Indians who fall from their naked horses with their feathered warbonnets. No one escapes the massacre except for one Red Indian who reaches the frontier injured, spiritless, with hardly a breath left. But this story does not end with the final Red Indian reaching the frontier, it extends deeply into into last third of the twentieth century, when we now only see Red Indians in America’s museums, their garb exhibited.

In the end of Fast's novel, that wounded, last surviving Red Indian was given to the United States of America. Perhaps the best doctor treated his injuries. Perhaps they offered him a home for himself. Perhaps, one way or another, they found for him the last Indian woman too, and they married. Thus they preserved that species from extinction. Then of course they introduced laws banning the hunting of Red Indians—fearing the extinction of the species—in the same way they’ve introduced laws banning the hunting of endangered animals… fear of extinction?!!

Howard Fast, if he lived today [Fast was alive... he died in 2003] and made some edits to the margins of his old novel, and released it in a new edition, he wouldn’t be wrong to title it: The Last Frontier for the Last Palestinian instead of The Last Frontier. If he changed the Indians' names and wrote in their place Palestinian names, and changed the names of cities, the Palestinian novel would not be so different from the old American novel about the Indians. The pursuit is the same pursuit, and the determination to exterminate is the same determination to exterminate, and the silence heavy artillery makes would be the same. But, will the last Palestinian reach the last frontier? Will he have the same opportunity as the last Indian? Will the Arabs—with the same shrewdness and cleverness of the Americans who treated their final Indian, and surrounded him with all their care—keep the species from extermination? It is wrong in this century, to keep our Arab museums empty of the Palestinian species in the same way as the Americans, but rather we should draw on their example and bring Palestinians into every field of our production. Use Palestinians in our artistic and literary lives etc. Represent Palestinians in the cinema and television and short stories and novels and plays and painting. It’s best to just consume the greatest tragedy of this era from the comfort of our homes where at our doors every morning a bottle of milk and the newspaper sit, and we have the capacity after all this to look at ourselves in the mirror without shame!

Translated into English by Esmat Elhalaby from the original Arabic in: Mu’in Bseiso, Adab al-Qafz bi-al-Mizallat (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1972)

TRAVELING REVOLUTION — RASHID HUSSEIN

In his introduction to the volume where this poem is published, the Palestinian poet and critic Izzedine al-Manasrah writes that Rashid Hussein’s “angry poetry condemns the period of bourgeois Arab domination of the Palestine problem.” Below, a poem emblematic of Hussein’s condemnation, “Thawra ‘ala Safar.”

°°°° 

What is left of the revolutions?

What is left of my sweetest dreams ?

Besides ruins and banquets

and stars on the shoulders

of those who explain away our defeats!?

****

What’s left but an army of articles filling

the coffers of journalists?

And explanations justifying the crime?

What’s left but a singer weeping over Haifa and Jaffa?

And banks sweating dinars looted from Jerusalem?!

What’s left but starting the revolution anew?

What’s left but to kill the crime?

****

The revolution is born in two eyes without a nation

The revolution is born a peasant without land.

Now only the police have land

and on it they imprison us all.

The revolution is born when the illiterate

and the writer

and the blind know the truth.

After the revolution writing will be free

and truth will be free.  

****

So my friends

I’m tired of being drugged by the speeches of Arab Kings.

I’m tired of a god who lives in the Seven Heavens.

A god who only cares about

prohibiting pork and permitting gold.

****

I’m tired of this god

who sells heavens and virgins.

So condemn me to hell

and you’re condemned to collect the wood

to keep it burning.

****

So you Arabs

patience has become exhausting.  

I’m angry now

I’m angry

I’m still angry.  

The revolution desires anger.

****

Then what?

In front of all the priests,

a child gave birth.

They dragged her to the market were she remains

nothing but the butt of insults.  

So when I write a poem

I’m torn apart

and blood from my mother’s womb pours from my face

and my poetry goes mad

searching for the faces of traitors.

****

So I remain a peasant

and a poet.

Wherever I walk

you will see a revolutionary.

Translated into English by Esmat Elhalaby from the Arabic original in: Rashid Hussein, Ana al-Ard la tahrimni al-Matar (Beirut: Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyyah, 1976). Originally published in al-Adab v. 20 n. 3 (1972).