Once Upon a Time: A Still Life Fairytale in Surroundsound

                Ilya une fois….

                Ilya une fois….

                I rode my bike down the dusty bone-white dirt road, clouds trailing after me as I sped to outpace the shrieking silence and the overwhelming noise from home. I sped faster and faster, fire pulsing through my legs and lungs burning as I pumped down on the pedals.

                Gotta get away. Gotta get away.

                If I just rode fast enough, if I just reached that perfect speed quick enough, I could break through the barriers of sound and silence turned up too loud that were fencing me in on all sides everywhere I went. Just a little faster. Just a little faster. Just a little more push and I could finally break away from it all; I could finally break free from it all and get away-

                The road curved too sharp and, going as fast as I was, I screeched and skidded too soon, sliding along the dirt that had a minute ago seemed so smooth but now grated rough against raw nerves as it dug into my bared legs and through the clothing on my side. I slid along the ground for a few feet, bike and all, then eventually came to a crumbling stop beneath a cloud of white clay dust and dappled patterns of shade from the sycamore trees forming palisades and flying buttresses along the quiet country lane.

                Stillness settled over me. The cloud dispersed gradually and I continued to lay motionless on the ground, staring up at the mosaic dancing patterns of light through the starry fan-like leaves shining in various shades of green. Chalky dust filled my nose and caked thick on my tongue. The click-click-click-click-clicking of my slowly spinning bike wheel harmonized in mid-air with the rising and falling droned wa-wa-waaaaa pitches of cicadas in swampy midsummer heat. Faint bird chirruppings staccatoed here and there, and as I lay silent I gradually became aware of the rush of my own blood throughout me as my body tried to shake off the adrenaline still pumping through me. There was also a faint thunder underlying it all coming from somewhere in the distance that I started to pick up on after a few minutes of quiet. Curious, I started to move to pick myself up off the ground and instantly regretted it. Laying still I hadn’t realize how hurt I was, but now that I was in motion it felt like every muscle was screaming at me to lay back down again. Worried that a car might come, I soldiered through the aches, picked up my bike, and limped on over to the side of the road. Dotted clumps of something wet and so deep red it almost appeared black against the light, dry surface of the road caught my eye. After staring at it for a second trying to figure out what it was I realized it was blood. My blood. I checked myself all over and saw the same dark wetness showing through a film of dust in damp clumps on my left calf. I sighed because it meant I would probably have to go back home sometime soon, but decided I would try my luck at one of the houses along the way, see if I could find anyone at home there who would be willing to let me wash up and put on a band-aid.

                I limped along down the road, hoping I could run across a house soon. The low-level roar I had heard before was getting louder and louder and, looking up, I saw another bend in the shady lane approaching. At the bend there was a cleared space with no trees save for one that towered in the empty patch and whose black boughs seemed to be swaying in a breeze only it could feel. The sound was coming from the tree, and the closer I got the less it sounded like thunder and the more it sounded like a cacophony of squawks and screeches and hoarse crying screams.

                As I walked up closer to the bend I saw a simple cow-proof gate that blocked off the road from the cleared area and realized with a start that the tree I had seen rising up like an ivory tower from the clearing was dead- it had been struck through the middle by lightning. Apart from the deep charred scar through its center, the rest of it had turned a deathly white, its branches like the fingers of a corpse who had died from fright, frozen by rigor mortis for eternity in a splayed claw. There were no leaves on the tree at all, and what I had thought were boughs swaying in the wind were hundreds of black turkey vultures all hawking, flapping, and jostling each other on the tree’s dead branches. The sound was coming from all of them, all crowded about on the tree and seemingly waiting, watching as they did something that was going on down on the ground beneath them.

                Fascinated by what could have caused such a parliament among these huge birds- the most I had ever seen at once was three of them gathered around a particularly large roadkill- I quietly moved closer to the gate to see what it was that had them all so rapt. As I crept up I saw that there were a few of the vultures awkwardly hopping about the ground as well, flapping their giant white-tipped wings every so often to give them better balance. One of them had its back to me and was perched on top of a strange-looking mound, its shoulders hunched up as if it was bending over. The other birds hopped and dragged around it as if they were following secret ley lines, and occasionally moved in to stretch their bumpy red necks out towards the mound as if trying to pick at something, then would croak and pull back, flapping and dancing some more as they did. Drawing closer still, I suddenly gasped as I realized that the mound they were so intent on was the rigid, bloated decomposing corpse of a pregnant goat.

                Raw heads suddenly shot up and swiveled in my direction, and the cacophony of croaks and throaty hawking sounds increased to a symphony of violent screams. Terrified, I began to back away from the horde of giant vultures, running through my head any possible advice I could have been given in my life for what to do in case of a vulture attack. All I could think of was Hitchcock’s film “The Birds,” and that did nothing to calm me down in the face of all these suddenly hostile, screaming, six-foot-wing-span aviators.

                The one that had been hunched over on top of the goat carcass straightened up and turned my way. It cocked its bald head to the side, examining me with tiny, beady eyes, then flapped out its huge wings to their full reach, stretching out the long white feathers at their tips like fingers reaching to embrace. It half-flapped them a couple times, then hopped down from the dead body and did a strange little hop-shuffle my way, cocked its head at me once more, then eyed me up and down as the clamor of voices behind it quieted down some. It turned its head to the other side to get a better look at me, then sneakily ducked its head as if letting me in on a conspiracy and throatily croaked out,

                “You want some?”

                I didn’t scream. I just ran.

                Behind me I heard the storm of screams reach a crescendo, raising up and rippling out from the fortress of the great white tree as I high-tailed it out of there, running my bike alongside me. It almost felt as if they were laughing at me, and if I had listened close I would have been able to hear the hoarse, throaty laughter of that one vulture echoing above all the others. I didn’t think, though, I just ran. I was so terrified my aches and scrapes didn’t even occur to me as my feet pounded against the ground. The instant I remembered I had a bike in my hands, I hopped on and proceeded to pedal away as fast as humanly possible.  I was as intent to escape the deathly coughing calls of the turkey vultures that followed after me as I had been to escape the violent stillness and heart-rending cries that reverberated throughout the very fabric of my house.

                I pedaled and pedaled, passing a couple houses along the way but so caught up in my haste that I forgot all about my previous plan to stop and wash up. I kept biking on until the sweat pouring down my legs and my body sent stinging barbs shooting through my calves whenever they reached my cuts and turned the dirt there into muddy brown cracking cakes molded to my skinny legs. Eventually I saw a part of the road up ahead cleared of its dual hedges of guardian trees, with the brilliant midday sun in the open space burning white contrast against the demarcation of cool shade in the lane.

                A crossroad.

                I slowed down as I approached, then came to a ticking stop in the middle. All my terror vanished with the shadows of the trees, and I felt safe for once out here in the noon sun. I couldn’t tell you why; there’s something about crossroads that’s powerful juju to my mind. Memories of voodoo tales and stories of coming to the crossroads at midnight with gifts for Papa Legba wove through the still background and the oscillating wa-wa-wa-waaaaa of the cicadas all around me. I sat still on my bike, just watching and listening to the world. A chaos of blackberry brambles revolted over the gray weathered wooden fence on side of me, sparrows hopping and chirruping about it, their thick black markings countering the dull shine of the deep purple-black juicy berries. A blue jay swooped down close past my head and came to a helicoptering stop on a fence post across from me. It flipped its tail up to balance, then, turning just enough to shoot me an unconcerned snooty glance, took off in a flutter of sound and shimmery blue-banded feathers to another tree. I stayed resting in a bubble of lively stillness at the crossroad as my heart slowly stopped pounding, my lungs gradually began relaxing to fill more completely with the dusty atmosphere, and the burning, stinging, aching feel of my body started creeping over me.

                I kept waiting for something to happen.

Some sign, some vision to take over me and direct me; some power to come down to comfort and guide me like it always does in the stories for those who come to crossroads with questions in their hearts. I had come with nothing other than myself- bleeding, aching, terrified of what lay behind me but too scared to continue on. Wasn’t that enough? Didn’t that in and of itself request and deserve the divine intervention of some powerful benevolent force to come down and show me which way to go?

                I stood still, waiting. Time stretched out like a cat, extending itself slinky-like longer and longer until it seemed impossible that it could actually reach that length without breaking- but there it was, splaying out its jellybean toes and yawning wide, frozen right at the breaking point as if this moment could go on forever.

                The stories never told of benevolent forces at the crossroads, I slowly remembered. I sighed and looked down at the sweat streaming in rivulets down my dirty legs, mixing with the dried smears of blood from my scrapes there. They told of blood and sacrifice, of cunning and conniving to outwit self-serving manipulative forces so you can achieve the power you want.

Nothing is ever free; nothing is ever given; nothing is ever based solely on altruism.

                Nothing would ever come of its own accord.

Nothing was here to save me, to direct me, to guide me away from everything I was running away from. I knew it, but still I wanted to stay. Being out here in this wide open space surrounded by both silence and sound was better than what it would take for me to turn around and face everything that I had been trying to leave behind. There was no motion here, no emotion or its antithesis of apathy. There was just quiet.

Not the forced quiet of home, either, where laying in plain sight underneath everything that wasn’t said were groans of pain and despair so loud they screamed as violently as that congregation of vultures had. Perhaps as terribly as that pregnant goat in her death-throes had. I couldn’t take that silence, but neither could I stand the treble of the noise when the sound barriers finally broke and everything that had been kept unsaid finally starting washing out in voluminous waves.

                Yet, I had to go back.

                There was nothing to keep me going further on but the fear of what I was leaving behind. And what was in front of me anyway? Whether I kept pushing on forward or turned left or turned right, I had no idea where the road was going to take me. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be running down it with that destination in mind. Wherever I went from here, it would just be to get away from what was behind me; home would forever be in my mind, driving me forward in circles around it.

                Gotta get away.

                Gotta get away.

                But the forced forgetfulness of its silence and the oppressive volume of its noise would always be there, right there inside me.

                A hollowness settled itself deep in my belly and slid quietly creeping through my torso, settling in the bottoms of my arms and along my legs. I took another long look at the crossroad I was sitting in the middle of. I would always be coming back home no matter where I went, no matter how far away I traveled. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

                The emptiness spread throughout me and I shouldered it like my booksack, carrying it like a profound life lesson I would keep returning to for grounding throughout the years. Wherever I went, if all I was doing was running away, whatever road I took would inevitably end up becoming a treadmill with me running full force in place; whatever choices I made would always be dictated by a history of unspoken violence that lay underneath the moments of extreme noise. I slowly turned my bike around and began heading back towards the vulture tree and towards the confining walls of home, never stopping once to look behind me at the crossroads after I left. 

Letter to the Academy

            Look.

            I don't know what kind of response it is that's expected of me. I'm told to write my impressions of what I'm reading, and then I'm told I wrote them wrong. I'm exposed to articles critiquing hegemony and the dominant culture and then enforced to restrict my thinking to this culture's writing standards so I end up seeing through the very lens I am told to move away from.

            Sometimes I don't even know what academia is here for, save to perpetuate knowledge created and sanitized by the dominant culture as enlightening, but not so enlightening as to inspire revolutionary insights. Professors and teachers en masse are indoctrinated into their roles as perpetuators of hegemony through the very institutions they end up working for. If a student is "lucky" enough to get in to a university or college, it is because they have either learned to accept the dominant culture's standards or learned to balance its expectations with their own culture's. From this extended anxiety of acceptance they are ushered into the ritual hazing typical of undergraduate experience. Professors and other students often downplay the experience of homesickness, culture shock, sexism, classism, or racism many students face, or the role that life experiences play in a student's ability to participate in school; like in the larger society off-campus, they are expected to "suck it up", separate their realities from academia, and acquiesce to the expectation of being an upper-class heterosexual male Euro-American model student.

  

            From their first classes to maneuvering the institution's bureaucracy, students are indoctrinated into the cult of the "professional"- meaning a five-foot personal bubble advanced by Anglo-Saxon upper-class Protestant American culture that places them at a sanitized distance from the people they're supposed to be relating to and learning valuable life skills from. Professors often refuse students' unconventional responses or reactions within their classes, punishing the student for their deviation from the "norm" with poor grades which further penalize them by putting them on academic probation or limiting scholarships and financial aid available to them. Those that don't- or haven't learned how to- accept the dominant culture's standards of analyzing, reproducing, and reading are filtered out of the system. Those that walk have either learned how to work the system to their advantage, are fully immersed within the dominant culture's expectations, or were broken by the system to accept it as the only "proper" way of doing things. But, at least, they got that college degree, right? That college degree which theoretically is what gives you a step up in the world and better access to jobs, and which is totally not proof that you acknowledge the primacy of upper-class male Euro-American cultural standards.

            After this acceptance ritual comes the test of graduate school. How dedicated to "US" are you really? Are you willing to spend hundreds- sometimes thousands- of dollars on GRE's, MCAT's, LSAT's, and so on? Pay for trips to every institution you're interested in on top of the application fees? Drown in debt for two to four years' of further cultural assimilation to prove your loyalty to Academia? If so, then you're the stooge for US- a cultural vanguard ready to spread these values on to others across the nation and, ideally, the world. By the time you get your doctorate all hope of being relevant to anyone outside of academia (or anyone acculturated to its language) is pretty much dead.

            Look.

            These are wide sweeping generalizations, I know.

            Yet the Academy tells me that wide sweeping generalizations are valid ways of representing specific groups. That it's okay to use Luana Ross's and Stormy Ogden's very personal testimonies of specific populations of Native women as indicative of the plight of all Native women, and that in no way will this affect perceptions of Native women in the minds of students who have never had contact with anyone who claims Native heritage. It tells me the use of national data is as valid as regional data for understanding most complex sociological institutions. It tells me that my experiences within a halfway house are applicable in a general way to the experiences of incarcerated individuals, and so I can conceptualize and partly (never fully- that would be un-"professional") empathize with their plight.  It even tells me that I can freely draw connections between the school system and the carceral system, as long as I use MLA or APA format. All without ever having had to experience anything that I'm reading about. I can critique and preach and teach all I want; the only requirement is that I know how to speak the language of the system. Ego sum intus carcerō. Within, I perpetuate the system and insist on its efficacy for those outside by helping codify its gang signs and rituals into acceptance by the larger society.

            Look.

            I don't need APA or MLA format to show that I have read the required articles and books. It shows in my writing, it shows in my thinking, it shows in my behaviors. I understand that not all students read the works or even pay attention in class, but being able to cite an author's ideas or words in a paper using the tools and structures of the systems many of the authors are critiquing is not a sign that the student understood what was written. It shows they know how to regurgitate a formula.

            So let's talk about prison.

            To a degree, Academia is right to say that generalizations can help bring understanding. I can look at my experiences in the halfway house and draw relations between what went on there and what I'm learning goes on in prisons for women. Where the understanding stops is where it stops relating to my personal experience. After that, even natural empathy can be used to perpetuate the perceptions of incarcerated populations and communities of color to keep them from being fully seen.

            Now, when I say seen, I mean seen. There is a very big difference between looking at someone perceived as Native or Nicaraguan or Black or poor White who has been incarcerated and seeing someone you know who has been incarcerated who also claims their identity as Native or Nicaraguan or Black or poor White. The former will be looked at and the viewer will draw from all the stereotypes and lessons properly learned in school and at home in the act of looking at them. In the latter case the person is seen, their personality and personal story understood. Even if stereotypes are still drawn on they are ameliorated by the personal, and the knowledge of others' stories and their similarities illuminates the revolution of society's wheels.

            With broad sweeping generalizations that take away the personal and the lack of impetus within institutions of education to approach knowledge as personal, the system of Academia helps perpetuate its own brand of racism (sometimes labeled "colorblind racism") and supports institutionalized racism that contributes to the prison-industrial complex through the mass production of individuals forced to internalize the lens of hegemony. Those without the system of Academia are taught to be seen as falling off the track, or as somehow deserving of pity. Worst is the benevolent paternalism implicit within many sympathetic views of impoverished communities, communities of color, and incarcerated/formerly incarcerated individuals fostered by their excommunicated presentation within the system of education. Nōs sumus intus carcerīs.

            See.

            I read the articles and essays. I understand what these scholars are discussing. I have internalized it and carried it with me to Compton for work. I have let it affect how I see my neighborhood on the outskirts of UCLA's campus and the surrounding areas of Bel Air and Westwood. I have used it to better make sense of trends and social inconsistencies I noticed in the different places I've lived. And I am using it as a lens through which to magnify the trends and inconsistencies I have noticed throughout all the various types of schools I have attended within the grosse US. So go ahead. Give me that F for not following the right style and language of writing, or bringing in enough about certain authors and expounding on my ideas in the correct academic format. Give me that F and I'll put it on my wall as a badge of honor to carry with me throughout the rest of my college career. Because I know. I understand what these readings are saying, and what's implied within them about the larger systemic support of hegemony. I understand how dominant hierarchical structures like the Academy reinforce and reproduce mindsets that can justify the creation and growth of dehumanizing institutions while bolstering a person's beliefs in their moral conscience and benevolence. 

           As long as a knowledge of what is considered "Other" is framed by those who have created that conception, and as long as personal, interactive experience is divorced from what is considered knowledge, there will remain the systems that validate the current dominant culture and its power structures. Give me my low marks for this paper and I'll wear them as a badge, as proof, that even though I may not be willing to always speak in the language of hegemony, I sure as hell know what it's saying. 

Hide your kids, Hide your family, Hide your mother

            Rikki Lake.

            Jerry Springer.

            Judge Judy gone horribly wrong.

            In his lectures from 1974-1975 on how Europeans came to determine which things would be considered "abnormal," Michel Foucault says, "expert psychiatric opinion allows the offense, as defined by the law, to be doubled with a whole series of other things that are not the offense itself but a series of forms of conduct, of ways of being that are. . .presented in the discourse of the psychiatric expert as the cause, origin, motivation, and starting point of the offense." In other words, as soon as one is accused of a crime, the first instinct is to root out evidence of the assumed psychological deviance that led to the crime. To give some concrete examples of this from popular American culture, think Rikki Lake, Jerry Springer, and Judge Judy.

            No- think media portrayals of the Boston bombing suspects.

            No, rather, think media portrayals of the Boston bombing suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev.

            From the minute a suspect was named and photos released, the U.S. media turned into one huge amalgam of Rikki Lake, Jerry Springer, and Judge Judy (with a sprinkling of Cops!) gone horribly wrong. From the start, the suspects' parents both declared their belief in the innocence of their sons in stark juxtaposition to media vilification of them- and let it be made clear, until there is a hearing and a legal verdict announced they remain suspects and only suspects- at a time when the nation was greedily following every update as one young man was shot dead, his younger brother hunted, and their entire family history splashed across the screen. However, it has been the mother's impassioned defense of her sons that has come to take center stage in the mainstream media's own push to prove their culpability. In a move that would have made the theorist in Foucault sigh, in just days Zubeidat's own interviews and testimonies became prima facie proof (and of course, according to the nature of the discourse, assumptions of deviance can never be proved false) of her sons' degeneracy by putting on display how she herself is a "bad" mother.

            Take, for example, this article. Published just one day after the suspects' names were released and her oldest son killed, this article sums up succinctly what so many others throughout that Saturday were leading up to: this woman must be crazy for not agreeing with the federal agents' and media's indictment of her sons. Nevermind that many of Zubeidat's testimonies concerning her sons actually correspond to issues these same news sources previously published articles on- namely, the use of FBI plants in mosques to provoke (and then convict) gullible young men into terrorist plots, the CIA's collusion with the NYPD in using "mosque crawlers" to spy on Muslim communities, and CAIR's assertion of a link between anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamophobia in their report "Islamophobia and Its Impact on the United States." Nevermind the (in my personal opinion, absolutely terrifying) speed with which the feds were able to finger in a matter of days two young men out of the millions of people in Boston at any given time, and in around 24 hours display every detail of their life as if this information had already been readily available.

            No.

            The “real” issue is, where did all of this violence really come from? Not even a day after the misogynist MSNBC article cited above  fell back on painting Zubeidat as irrationally emotional and overly biased, news sources began popping up with the smoking gun evidence of her unreliability and, of course, the definitive marker of her sons’ deviance: a mug shot. Here is a terrible mother. Not only does she repeatedly deny the media's claims against her sons, vacillate in her accounts and react in a very human manner that refuses a single defining narrative- on top of all of this, she is "Russian," "Muslim," and now a shoplifter. Her "crime" is not the bombing but the outside circumstances of her life that allow a vilifying narrative to take place- and thus, through her vilification, the degeneracy of her sons becomes much more understandable and easy to believe.

Echoes of Cold War media scares and paternalism reverberate throughout interviews with her as columnists and anchors alike take turns in informing the public of her life as if they are the authority on the matter and assuring them of her Russian identity. Stronger echoes of Freudian psychology and post-9/11 media scares of Islamic terrorism present themselves in how she is blamed alternately for being too supportive of her son's religious quest and not being attentive enough to the "obvious signs" of her sons' "radicalization"- despite being attuned to fears of covert federal operatives’ meddling. As a not-so-subtle coup de grace, the appearance of the mugshots of her keyed the nation into a collective breath of "Aw hayl no!" and, following in the fashion of European psychology, cued subconscious chants of "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" since it could be clearly seen now that the root of pathology lay squarely with the mother. Sigmund Freud would be proud.

            If this all seems like too much of a stretch, take a gander at this article published Monday, April 22, just three days after the suspects were named and information about them began livestreaming to media outlets. The article initially uses the word "parents," but it is Zubeidat who becomes cited again and again as de facto "proof" of terrible parenting. What makes her a terrible parent? Well, from the start she is described as "blinded by adoration and excuses," "deluded," refusing to correct Tamerlan's "conspiracy theories," and, of course, she is a shoplifter. Spare the rod, spoil the child? Once a bad egg, always a bad egg? Of course, bad eggs are made by bad parents, and most especially bad eggs are made by bad mothers. Men like Uncle Ruslan who willingly defame the Tsarnaev brothers are given as the voice of reason while Zubeidat is continually blamed for being irrational, simple-minded, and stubbornly ignorant. She is damned for being too loving, but also for not being overprotective enough. Somewhere the ghost of Foucault sighs again at the affirmation of yet another of his theories when, in a religiously fanatic vindication of the panopticon, the columnist concludes with:

 

"You can’t expect witnesses to report every fanatical outburst to the FBI. But when family members are repeatedly exposed to signs that a loved one is drifting into the vortex of violent extremism, they have a duty to intervene, or at least to alert someone. If they don’t, and the fanatic becomes a killer, they bear an awful responsibility. If they deny that responsibility by accusing the police and the government of anti-Islamic conspiracies, they forfeit our sympathy, our respect, and our trust. Police your family. Police your congregation. Police your community. If you don’t, the rest of us will do it for you." 

            Be afraid. Be very afraid. Of yourself, of your mother, of your children, of your community. During the Cold War, too, a Communist could be (and frequently was) any American, and from the Gulf War to 9/11 to now a Muslim American could be (and, in fact, is) any American. Beware: the root of pathology, of deviance, of degeneracy lies in the nuclear family, and the core policing agent of that family- the one who determines whether it is a "good" or "bad" family- is the mother.

            Perhaps the reason for such violent attacks as this on the image of Zubeidat lies in the fact that the Tsarnaevs could be (and, quite literally, are) any "white" American family, that shibboleth of "Americanness."  The family dynamics being so sensationalized in the media right now could describe any family in America. There is no abnormality here, so instead it must be found through "a whole series of other things that are not the offense itself but a series of forms of conduct, of ways of being that are, of course, presented. . .as the cause, origin, motivation, and starting point of the offense"- starting, of course, with the mother.

---

 

Musings On Whiteness And Other Illnesses

If Scott Kayla Morrison's aunts were right when, in her short story An Apokni By Any Other Name Is Still a Kakoo, they say
\
"White men put flesh on dinosaur bones to reconstruct the entire animal, to show they are smarter than the animal they construct out of their own egos. They do the same thing with us by rewriting our history. They do not have to be right, they only have to do the act itself.
". . .White men will clothe our bones in whatever fashion they desire. They have no history so they must manipulate ours to make them feel superior.. . .We cannot teach them because they do not have the memory of their own race's birth. They have not seen the entire animal so they do not know how to reconstruct it out of its bones." (Reinventing The Enemy's Language, pp 95, 96, emphasis mine)

then perhaps the way to save our humanity is to acknowledge what the animal is.
Perhaps the reason for the colonial settler's "jealousy" (per Powhattan's evaluation in his address to John Smith, from A People's History of the United States), their two-hearted behavior (per Tattooed Serpent in his address to Antoine Simone Le Page Du Pratz in The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735), and their extreme violence over resources (descriptions of which can be found in Benjamin Madley's paper, Patterns of frontier genocide 1803-1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia) has much more to do with a loss of connection to place and identity. Much has been written (and rightly so) about the trauma of African slaves' loss of home and Black Americans' bewilderment of place, with W.E.B. Du Bois' "double-consciousness" whereby "one ever feels his twoness" (from The Souls of Black Folk) and Saidiya Hartman's "burdened individuality" (from Scenes of Subjectivity: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America) being among the most succinct analyses I've seen so far. However, outside of the powerful social commentary on Whiteness by thinkers from the Civil Rights Movement like James Baldwin or South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement like Steve Biko, I've yet to see similarly on-point analyses of the psychology of those who came to think of themselves as "white."
Here were groups of people from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and India (at the very least) who were first documented according to the nationalities of the companies or troops of the colonial power they were with and who, upon settling in the Americas (forcibly or voluntarily), experienced an isolation from their roots that was felt more acutely by their progeny. Considering the overwhelming majority of European settlers were prisoners, debtors, destitutes, and vagrants rounded up by the government to bolster the colonials' presence in these foreign territories (and thus had little resources to go back home) and that the vast majority of colonial offspring were first brought about through slave concubinage and wartime rape, this calls into question the psychological development of "whiteness," and what impact this environment actually had on those who claimed an affiliation with the European political powers. Disassociated from the culture of their (or their parents') homeland and increasingly raised within the cultural influence of different indigenous nations and tribes in addition to the cultural influences of people from a wide range of areas in Africa, yet often pressured by their communities to "pick a side" or even denied the chance to by either community, what effect did this then have on a person's psyche? Where did these people stand, and where, still, do they stand? Upon what can they stand? Even those claimed as "European" (whatever that really means in such a colonial setting) most likely had little affinity to European culture, having been raised in a completely different cultural environment. This certainly isn't meant to justify the continued violence, genocide, and blatant disregard for the legally codified rights of people throughout history that has been routinely enacted by or instigated by colonial settlers and condoned by their governments. But it is to begin questioning the nature of "whiteness" and its psychological dimensions in an attempt to cure it, as Franz Fanon would say. Given the above social and historical circumstances, what, then, did this group of people so dependant upon indigenous nations and imported labor for existence really have?
Nothing.
Nothing, that is, without an admission of their great debt to these others and a respectful diplomacy for co-existence like that employed by so many other tribes displaced by European-provoked conflict who found larger nations that were willing to shelter them. But officially, that was never done. Politically, instead, a doctrine of supremacy sprang up in the metropoles and was heartily adopted by those in positions of power in the satellite colonies.
Why?
The offspring of these initial politically motivated proponents of European Supremacy (and later, White Supremacy) to this day greedily clutch at these constructed myths of purity, wholesale belittling or denying the diverse complexity of their heritages that doesn't spring primarily (or solely) from Europe. Which means denying their very identity, their very grounding, their very history, leaving them with nothing. The modern Americas have a very horrible history but also a very unique one in that it is a history first and foremost of the indigenous civilizations that existed here prior to European settlement (and who are still very much alive) and secondarily a history inextricably linked to that of the rest of the world in a manner that exceeds even that of the Abbasid, Ottoman, Incan, Srivijaya, Songhai, or Han empires. As one friend of mine who is an African Studies major said in justification of her studies, "African history is American history." So, too, is the history of countless other nations, tribes, and empires across the world also American history. This is the animal, but when we are taught to see only a molar and re-construct the entire beast from that, we have nothing. To also deny, while attempting this, the bones lying right in front of one's face along with so many stories describing what the animal actually looks like is indicative of a deep psychological sickness. It is an abnormality that revels in its aberration, in its history-lessness, its groundlessness, its culturelessness, its emptiness, its neediness.
Why?
"Nahola* is to be pitied. Remember that." (Reinventing., p 96)






*"Nahola means white in Choctaw." (Reinventing, p 91)

Purpose

I can no longer dream
of what my body wants.

No longer spend those hours in the dark
No longer spend those hours alone
imagining,
hoping,
breathing inspiration from flickering longing-
wreathing smiles
and low, low whispers
amongst images of:
a head on my breast
a breath against my neck
soft hands stroking short hair
security blankets wrapping up
warmth being together between the two
-maybe one day three?-
of us.

I can no longer dream
of what my body wants.

I can only work;
keep my head down to toil,
smile in passing-
a vague pleasantry here and there-
as my sight dims around me
and all I see in front
is the dream my soul longs for
that mind tells body
it must subsume itself under
in order to work wonders.

Love Home: Coming Back Again

I touch down,
dive dedans
technocratic beaurocratic
N'Synchronized rat racers
to extend a single forefinger out

and touch

the putrid bubbling swamp
brushing fingertips scooping up
the stinking layers of lives and
eons of decadence, decay, development
of rich cultural strata blossoming with
the lost and long-forgotten
hubbledybubbledy up of swamp gas memories
to show us the way to real treasure
in the mud and fertile stink of this place-

it sticks between my fingers,
this place,
gets underneath my nails and stays
puts me back where I belong
within myself
and then I'm gone
to face the new day
with smell of swamp
cypress trees' knees
leveed waterways
crawfish totems
whipcrack slaves
Centroamerican hot chiles
spicing Vietminh shrimping
gumbo file dark roux cooking
jasmine incense gathering
coffee and chicory transporting
cloying magnolias crowding in
sparse whiteness desperate to outshine
the dark jungle blackness from which it came
no matter that they always turn brown anyway.

It sticks to me
brings me back
it puts me back where I belong
this love has taken its hold of me
and taken off parts of me
taken apart of me
this love has eaten me from the inside
with violence and hatred and tit-for-tat kinship ties
has held me together with families' closeness
outside the call of kin
and relationship support woven so close
it's burden and boon both

this love
it sticks to me from the inside
and dictates where I go and whom with
it changes me the longer I'm around it
a metamorphosis complete-

and man, Ovid ain't got nuthin' on me-

It's what you see caterpillars writhing in
death throe twitching
mandibles working
screaming to be heard
beating head in full-body thrashing an'
the chrysalis deathly slow settlin' in.

It's re-arranging me from the inside
it's in pieces rent asunder
and put back together
hardened skin writhing underneath
with weak threading heartbeat
and hardly a recognizable fragment beneath
as it transforms
and is transformed
active and passive
actively passing me by the wayside
to see for itself.

I touch home
and it touches me
calling me back to be
calling me back to me
through Houma bayou polings
Mayan ruin holdings
Arowak pre-Hisperia homes and
Wolof Sahel drummings
Malian blues chord strummings
Saharan fireside gatherings
Iberian marran wanderings
Basque morisco travelings
French Cajun expulsions and
Sikh and Hindu trading-ins
Irish backwater mixings with
Philippino Manilla men segregations
Polish factory discriminations
tearing me apart from the inside and
re-shaping in the muggy heat and
re-shaping me into something that's
something,

Something what Phaeton feared,
Plato allegorized in his cave years,
and Zoroaster ritually endeared;
something God called Itself to be
and gave to Creation in the Genesis story.

Jumu'ah Prayer

Prayer through community; prayer through sage and copal; prayer through song; prayer through conversation; prayer through knowledge; prayer through MPC breakbeats and latenight/earlymorning rapping after the world has long gone to sleep.

Spirit runs through this life.

Doc Rob thanks the Creator for the blessing to be able to see the spirits around us while modern psychology condemns him for the triple curse of being Black, African, and "schizophrenic."

Laura cries into the abalone shell held in a deer antler, how much she needed this. Danser Azteca, the copal ignites her soul to cry out her prayers in traditional dances.

Tudi makes tea for Nicole and jokes about karaoke night singing Michael Jackson's "Beat It." Have you made your own dreamcatcher? Do you have a feather for it? Feathers are powerful medicine. As powerful as the medicine you put into the things you make when they come spiraling out of you into willow bark and twine to form a prayer to keep nightmares away. As powerful as the medicine created through a circle connected through stories and emotions, releasing fears and paranoias, anxieties and dreams through the inhalation of incense and the exhalation of worries. As powerful as the medicine of music, of hugs, of kisses, of fire, of beats and the vibrations of words, visions, and rattles fitting into its nooks and crannies.

Spirit runs through this life.

Tudi speaks of the medicine of nature and Marguerite adds the importance of place- herbs of place, medicine of place, respect of place. Know who you are, know where you're from, know where you've been and where you are. The medicine of prayer in song. No quarrel there: the Qur'an sings in the same language as Tudi and Quixi's prayers. Powerful medicine of prayer in vibration, in dance, in physicality, in song, in the politics of space and place and the lessons we learn in the nature of the things that make us up and surround us.

"Iqra'!"

And the rapping begins, flowing out in the spaces between MPC rhythms and vibrations.

Powerful medicine spirit runs through life.

Inshallah, we got this. May our prayers be accepted and answered.