The Decisive Act: On Orwell, Arizona, and 50 For Freedom

They didn't show up, and I shouldn't be surprised.  A press release was generated, an email address and phone number was distributed, the messages went to the right people, and my phone didn't ring, and no messages hit my inbox.  None of them showed up, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because there are always more important things to be discussed, like Mitt Romney's ignorance about the physics of airplane cabin pressure, or striking football referees, or the technical specs behind the iPhone 5. 

There will be no articles written, no reporting, no witness from the press (except for what we do on our own, clearly).  They've got to report on the Presidential election, and the issues surrounding our economy, and health care, and illegal immigration.  No time for a bunch of rabble rousers talking about banned books, books you can still buy on Amazon.  Because if you can still buy things on Amazon, then all is well.

Did you know that Amazon once banned George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm?  Of all the books to ban.  Supposedly it was a dispute over rights, but it led to a massive outcry—similar, it could be said, to the outcry over Tucson's book ban.  But it's okay, Amazon said at the time, because it offered refunds to the buyers.  Point being, the technology to control what you read exists.  Point being, if Arizona had known this sooner, perhaps they wouldn't have to physically remove any books from the classroom.

Let's be clear.  The issues in Arizona are only peripherally about books.  Though it should be said, the first thing you do—if your aim to disappear a nation—is to throw their literature in the trash.  Burn it, ban it, box it, just don't read it.  And so they did just that, Arizona: they banned the books, and they boxed the books, and they made the Mexican-American Studies program in Tucson disappear, along with their teachers, along with any mention of it in the schools.  Ah, but they told us, they reassured us, that the books are not banned.  They just can't be used to teach Mexican-Americans about being Mexican-American.  And they told the rest of their teachers, that any attempt to teach any of the banned literature, all 80 titles on the list (it should scare you, to death, that there's a banned books list, and that it used to be a curriculum), could result in their termination, should any complaint about their rabble-rousing content be raised by a concerned parent.  Or, anyone, really.

This is where the story ended, even after Tony Diaz and the group Librotraficante had the audacity to quote the law in public, show its unconstitutional application toward one group of people, report to us the students' discontent, and organize a series of panels and lectures around the years-long battle between Arizona and the teachers, which is still ongoing in the courts.  They told us about the school district suing the former teachers for damages.  They told us about the threats to other people's jobs, to keep them in line, to silence them.  And they (meaning Luis Urrea) told us about the Orwellian implications of banning books, unbanning Shakespeare, and rewriting history, and covering themselves in doublethink and Newspeak.

We gathered, though the press did not, last Friday at the 50 For Freedom of Speech reading, because this is not simply about banning books.  Banned author Martín Espada knows that; which is why, when I asked him to do the reading, he brought himself from Amherst, Masschusetts, on his own dime, to be with us, the very night before another reading in Boston.  And banned author Luis Urrea knows that; that's why he drove straight to La Casa Azul from the airport when Tony Diaz made the call.  (And Tony flew up from Houston himself.)  It's about freedom, the fundamental right to know that down is down, and up is up, and that 2 + 2 = 4. 

What do you think it means when a government entity does not want you to read a book called 500 Years of Chicano History?  Do you honestly believe it has anything to do with the ideology of the authors?  Has anyone in the state of Arizona actually met these authors on the banned list?  They are not concerned with how well the students do in school.  They've admitted that much: despite the success of the program in sending children to college, the program was cancelled anyway.  The state of Arizona is concerned with what, and how, children learn in school.  But it is not the facts they're concerned about, specifically.  It's the narrative they're worried about.  The story.  They are concerned, as Big Brother was concerned, with controlling the past; as Orwell points out to us, whoever controls the past controls the future. 

The United States has a past that it would like to forget.  The United States has, in its past, summarily executed brown people, Hispanics and Latinos from every walk of life.  The trouble for Arizona, and everywhere else, is that there are history scholars, activists, students, thinking people, some with U.S. college educations, who had the audacity to write textbooks, and to think to themselves the following: Hispanics and Latinos did not drop from the clear blue sky, or from some mystical war-drawn border.  In Arizona, we're actually learning the same story again, about whitewashed history, and changed facts, and misleading narrative.  We're learning about context, the same kind of context that created activists like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita Lebron, and James Baldwin, who was also banned in Arizona.  Today, it's Mexican-Americans.  Take you pick as to who's next.  Who's due, as it were.  Where the fire will be next time.

If Chicanos have a context, and a history, before the advent of white supremacy, before the advent of European conquest or Pax Americana, there might be a reason for them to walk a little straighter, to understand their histories in context, to see themselves in a continuum from Aztlan, to zoot suits, to The House on Mango Street.  500 years ago, Chicanos existed.  Africa existed.  Latinos existed.  They had just different names.  When will we learn these names?

And when will the media learn to write long pieces about the systemic dismantling of civil rights?  When will they show up to poetry readings by authors on the banned list, in community spaces like La Casa Azul bookstore, in other states besides Arizona and Texas?  When will they tell you about Latinos uniting against their own genocide?  When will they tell you about the counterspells being cast by poets and writers, the ones who still believe in language, and history, and meaning, and roots? 

Maybe when they find themselves being downsized, or commanded what to say, by their bosses, by their governments, by financial concerns.  Maybe that day is already here. 

What's left for us, poets, Latinos, is to wake up and understand what is happening, to understand it in the context of lightning-fast information being passed and passed over.  We have to speak, and we have to speak often, in new ways and old ways, to keep these fights fresh.  And we must always be ready to tell the world our history, never tiring of the truth, never weary when people tell you they don't get it.  Never scared when the media doesn't show up. 

And we have to remember love:  that's what was present in massive amounts last Friday at the Casa Azul, and in many places around the country, reading banned literature out loud, casting counterspells into the universe to reverse the trends, defy conventional wisdom, and survive the way we always have.  We have to remember love because our children thrive on it, because we thrive on it, because we will not become automatons unless we allow ourselves to be.  We have to remember love, because love banishes indifference, and because love will keep us rooted, our histories intact, our people whole.

Remember love, now and until the day you die, by reading every book that the state of Arizona tells you not to.  Read them, and quote from them, and steep your children in them.  Love every day, and do not give in to indifference. 

While you're at it, write some of these things down. 

"To mark the paper was the decisive act."

–George Orwell, 1984

Counterspell: 50 For Freedom of Speech/NYC, in protest of the banning of books in Arizona

If you're not familiar with the story in Arizona, then take a few minutes to get educated:

From Barbara Norell, on January 17th, 2012:  http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/01/custer-huppenthals-last-big-lie-seized.html

From The Progressive, January 2012:  http://www.progressive.org/banned_in_tucson.html

Here's the Salon article cited by the Progressive:  http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/

And here are a few videos to drive home the point.  

Tony Diaz, founder of Librotraficante, explaining the practical impact of the Arizona law, the end of Mexican-American studies, and the banning of books, at a panel organized by students and scholars at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City:

And here are Sergio Troncoso and myself at the same event, on Latino literature and censorship:

The actions of a few politicians in Arizona, riled up by the hate in the hearts of those without empathy or human understanding, constitute a spell against intellect, against immigrants, against education, and against dignity.  And make no mistake, it is spreading from state to state.

I believe in counterspells.   

This is why Acentos is joining up with Librotraficante, and a coalition of like-minded Latino creatives in NYC (Latino Rebels, Sangre Viva, Capicu Cultural Showcase, and La Casa Azul Bookstore) to participate in a national day of action...a zafa, if you will...against the de facto banning of Latino literature in Tucson, Arizona, and wherever else it's being considered.

The New York City gathering will feature the banned Puerto Rican author and award-winning poet Martín Espada (Zapata’s Disciple), as well as Tejano author Sergio Troncoso (The Last Tortilla and Other Stories), as well as the public readings of other banned book texts by some of New York City’s top Latino academic, literary and spoken word talent.

Also reading are Bonafide Rojas, Miguel Ángel Ángeles and John Murillo; Peggy Robles-Alvarado, María Rodríguez, and Nancy Arroyo-Ruffin will be reading from Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street; Juan “Papo Swiggity” Santiago, Mark Anthony Vigo, and José Vilson will be reading from Luis Rodriguez' Always Running; and John Rodríguez, Grisel Acosta, Isabel Martínez, Elizabeth Calixto, and Vincent Toro will be reading from Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America.

The reading will be taking place on September 21st, from 6pm-8pm at La Casa Azul books: 143 East 103rd Street, NYC (6 train to 103rd St.)  

  

I posted the following on Facebook a few days ago.  It bears repeating, and sharing...

What we need to understand is that the banning of books in Arizona, the end of Mexican-American studies in Arizona, did not happen yesterday. It happened in January. And the debate is even older than that.

We waited until the administrators of the Tucson school district marched into classrooms, boxed up books, and physically removed them. And when we found our outrage, the national media turned away from the story and stood by, again, when teachers and administrators were fired.

It has taken the efforts of tireless educators, activists, and groups like Librotraficante to keep our attention focused, and to keep the heat on Arizona, a state which has already shown the nation that they are willing to throw civil liberties and young people under the bus. And still, I get email and notes from otherwise thoughtful people who are only now hearing about the banning of books, who are surprised this could happen in the United States.

How long do we wait to stand up to genocide? Understand, the first step in erasing people is erasing their literature. How long do we wait? Until the authorities find it in their interests, or in the interests of "the citizens," or in the interests of national security, to round up whole groups of people by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands? Do you think it impossible? Or confined to Arizona?

You will be erased if you don't wake up. Your history will be invalidated. And the authors of your destruction will hide behind the law to do it. Don't let them.

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

-James Baldwin, THE FIRE NEXT TIME
Banned in the Tucson Unified School District

The Poem Comes Back...

Not even twelve hours later, the poem came back to me, courtesy of T. Rasul Murray.

My recollection was a little off, but not the sentiment.  

It was the reflection, indeed, that she saw in his heart, not an image, or a picture, or an otherwise artificial representation.  She saw herself in him, unaltered and true.  How love should be, what it should inspire.

I want to be the kind of man that inspires this kind of love.

The Photo of Love
for James E. Miller III

Almost everyday

I see my reflection in your heart

No longer a superimposed image

Hidden in shadows of metaphors

No imaginary house playing

where children dream

where teenagers grope

The picture has become clear in scope

Has become a smile up from my toes

You have presented me with a gift

Framed in gold

Fragrances of jasmine and Spanish Moss

And you've given me an open heart that

Calls to the woman in me

I answer you in song

Primal celebrations

Life finely focused

--Brenda Connor-Bey

Damn Near

My job is to make her laugh at the most inappropriate times possible.  That's how we  always understand it, whether it is at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, or at the Port Chester poetry festival, or at a reading, or milling about in a parking lot.  I tell the joke, it is utterly wrong, and Brenda assumes the face: one that says, "I know full well that joke was funny, but it would not be proper to laugh out loud here."

Brenda Connor-Bey is always the most elegant woman in the room.  Of course she'll put you at ease, or coax conversation from you, or make you smile.  If you are in the room, you are her guest, even when the event is not hers to run.  It's a certain orientation toward the world, one that radiates pure love, that is anchored in the mode of openness and kindness.  For if you are in the room with Brenda, more than likely you are there to celebrate poetry.  And poetry, Brenda knows, unites people, and erases differences.  It makes you a little more human.  And if you know poetry like Brenda knows poetry, it amplifies your spirit, and your spine—and yes, it brings you grace and elegance.

So it is always my pleasure to watch her face break when she takes joy in my humor, even when it's not appropriate.  And it was her, I know, that tapped me on the shoulder after the third lovely tribute in her honor, at her funeral.  "Hold it together, Rich," she said, finally getting a measure of comeuppance. "You don't wanna die at a funeral home."  It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. 

Not that we didn't laugh from the things that were said. 

I think Jim Miller knows he's a quiet man, not necessarily because he was born that way, but because he's been told this by everyone who knows his wife.  If you know Jim, and you know Brenda, you know the drill: Brenda walks in and spins gold out of thin air with sheer charm.  Jim shakes hands, and is polite, and possesses an air of wisdom that doesn't require him to express it.  And then he'll become quite unobtrusive, either in his own seat, or standing up, and he'll observe the room.  You'll watch him and know that he is observing everything, and he is sizing up everyone.  And you'll know without having to be told that he is in love with his wife.  Sometimes he'll jostle her, or she him, and sometimes they'll exchange looks.  But you know that behind those looks is something pure and beautiful. 

At the podium, Jim spoke more words than anyone in the room had probably ever heard from him.  His voice was strong and sure, and through tears he was able to deliver one of the most heartfelt tributes I've ever heard anyone deliver, from a man who has clearly studied his wife, not as one in nature, but as someone in love, who respected her, and was invested in her.  "I'm someone new in her life," he joked at one point. "I've only known her 30 years."  They have always been newlyweds.

He asked us all to look around and talk to the person next to us, rightfully pointing out how mixed and various the individuals in the chapel were.  Here were gathered teenagers, adults from every spectrum, every race, every ethnicity, every economic circumstance, every location and background.  This was Brenda's gift: bringing people together through empathetic gestures, through spirit, and through poetry.  He reminded us also that she was a gift to American literature, not just to the people in the room.  And he reminded us of the true power of poems, the power that Brenda wielded every time she stepped into a classroom, or behind a microphone—the power to create life, to sustain life, and to cause us to live a life of contemplation, never one of powerlessness or inertia.

He closed his tribute with the last section of the poem "Thanatopsis," by William Cullen Bryant, a section which by some coincidence, it seems, contains that same character he's only known for 30 years.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan which moves

To that mysterious realm where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

I've loved incompletely.  My thoughts these last few weeks drift back and forth between worries about career, craft, and the empathy I need to show to my loved ones.  I'm not always good at that, but it's not because I don't know how.  I was raised with care, and with faith, and with the knowledge that God is always watching and willing to guide us into our own strength.  I don't pray in desperation anymore, and I don't pray vainly for things I desire.  For better or worse, God made me a poet, and that means, as the pastor said, that my brain is teeming with ideas that need to be put on paper.  It also means I am capable of loving the way I saw at that funeral home: actively, as a verb.  And empathy, I realize, is not an object to be taken like money, but an orientation that leads into faith.  So, when it comes time to pray, the prayer is a humble recognition that what I seek is already found, is already within me; that the dream I had last night is as real as Brenda's voice in my head, as the voices I miss some days, as the people I love with my entire heart. 

Of the words I heard at this service, there were several phrases that stood out especially, because the truths contained within them seem to follow me wherever I go, in the heart and the mouth of my beloved.

I Corinthians 15:51:

"Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed..."

[People are energy.  They don't die.  They transform.]

Psalm 23:

"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over."

[Worry is always wasted energy.]

I Corinthians 15:58:

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.

[Doubt is self-destructive.  Your only limitations are self-imposed.  Nothing is more important than love and truth.  Pray with faith, knowing that the victory is yours.]

The last phrases I remember were written on the back of the program, and I don't have the program anymore, and I don't have the poem memorized.  It was a love poem from Brenda to Jim, one of the most beautiful ones I've ever read, and it describes how a woman sees herself in the heart of a man, as a reflection, not as an image.  I may be projecting, but I think it has to do with how two people bring out the best in each other.  I know I will get this poem back.  I have faith.

I know because on my way out of the funeral home, I was crossing in front of a car full of people I hadn't met, who were there for Brenda.  The man at the wheel asked to see the picture on the front of the program.  I handed him the program, and he handed it to another woman in the car, and she showed it to a woman standing beside.

"Are you family?" I asked.

"Damn near," the man replied.

I let them keep the program.  "He's clearly one of Brenda's friends," said the standing woman. 

That I am.  Present tense.

The poem will come back to me, and when it does, I will show it to you, too.

I Want To Write Poems.

Look. 

I wanted to write a complete, full-blown thesis on factionalism within American literature.  But then I got to thinking, that's not really what's bothering me right now.  That, and I'm actually helping with the preparations on a day of action organized by Librotraficante, to address precisely that problem, so maybe an essay is not what is called for.  Not right now, anyway. 

As is my m.o. (sometimes), I've been trying to make a small pet peeve into a bigger, more universal issue.  Mountains, molehills, and the like.  But the peeve and the cultural issue are not precisely related.  Well, maybe they are. 

Can I just say this?  Stop me if this makes sense.  Poetry is not professional wrestling.  Nor is it a series of battles against roving gangs of zombies, wizards, wolfpacks and vampire clans, medieval nobility, mafia families, or vatos locos.  Of all the things I hate in my professional and artistic life, nothing bothers me more than the feeling that "Poetry" has become a playground for people without any real combat skills to pretend that they belong to a gang.  Jets.  Sharks. Iowa.

I can barely open my email without hearing about some kind of disagreement over

something bothering them about the community of writers they belong in, and almost none of those issues have to do with the actual craft of writing. 

I can trace my involvement with the literary world back to 2002, when I first stumbled into the back of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe.  I'd heard about these things called slams, the Nuyorican poets, and Def Poetry, and I wanted to see it up close and figure out what was so sexy about it.  And it was sexy, of course.  You'd walk into a confined space and see these people you'd seen on HBO, or in the Piñero movie, or in a book you'd read, and you'd desire to be a part of it, because frankly, the last poet on stage was not that impressive.  By 2003, I was hopping into my car, or an airplane, or a train, to travel the country and participate in what I'd seen. 

I don't regret that part of it for a second.  My involvement in poetry has brought me, either directly or indirectly, to the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico, to the greatest hamburger I've ever eaten (Bobcat Bite, outside Santa Fe), Harvard Yard, City Lights Books, the St. Louis Arch, rural Indiana, the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, and to Wicker Park in Chicago.  When I return to Cuba, I can go visit Nancy Morejón.  There are no words for the privileges I have, thanks to literature, thanks to my writing life.

And yet, most days I feel like writers, some I have called friends, spend their days wringing their hands; walking on eggshells with some University administrator with a tenure-track position to hand out; getting depressed because they have submitted with no luck to dozens of book publishers or prizes; politicking on who picks who to read poems at a bar or a bookstore, lamenting over not being chosen to do so.  They fret when a space closes down, when a workshop stops running, or when a reading series switches venues.  They spend their waking hours on Facebook arguing about spoken word versus page poems, slam versus academia, MFA versus no MFA, instead of writing the things, living the lives, that inspire them to walk the lines, or erase them.

I am not the pot calling the kettle black, though.  I've been all too familiar and invested in these arguments myself.  And to be clear, I'm not speaking of arguments on access: I believe that the fight for equal time in the publishing world, the right of marginalized voices to be heard, is a civil rights issue, an issue about the proper framing of history, and the telling of every American story. 

Simply put, I'm no longer interested in engaging the egos of writers and poets who view their participation in American literature as a game.  I am uninterested in poets who view poetry as a way to gain entry into a clique, to look down on the ones who aren't in it.  I am tired of professional performers who are not interested in poetry beyond finding the next gig.  I am tired of the phenomenon of the poet thug, the streetwise wordsmith who just wants folks to wake up to injustice, while living a life that does not reflect those ethics.  I'm tired of poets who compete with one another for attention and mic time, and who throw you under the bus when they don't get it.  And I am beyond fed up with idiots, frankly, who claim some level of imaginary leadership status within the poetry "scene."  You know the ones.  They use bluster and bravado as a way to justify their own existence as a writer, or mask their own deficiencies as poets, as human beings.  If you think about it for three honest seconds, they'll come to you.

I know them, because I used to be around them.  Wanted to be them.  And I just can't listen to all that noise anymore.  I want to write poems, and I want poets to be heard.  At my core, that's my mission.  Everything else is bullshit.

There's only one way to be a poet:  write poems, read poems, live honestly and openly, and listen.  That's a lesson I learn day in and day out, and something I need to be more mindful of.  I'm trying.  I'm succeeding more, and I'm trying.

I am uninterested in politics.  Or identity politics.  I'm more interested in deconstructing identity, especially in a world where my identity is easily tracked, manipulated, erased, or reinvented, without my consent.  Talk to me about people, not systems.  Talk to me about people, not Republicans and Democrats.  I'm about to be 35 years old, and my time on this planet is not guaranteed.  I want to write poems.  I want to see things for what they are.  I want to be able to frighten you when I show you what I see, and how I see. 

Mostly though, I want to support the real organizers of poetry and literature and cultural change, the ones you don't hear from because they're too busy writing, and getting your writing seen and heard, to concern themselves with the game.  Miss me with the bullshit, folks.  I want to write poems.

Mantra:

"I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful, Antonio. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you."

 -Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima

In Which Rich Tugs at his Ear on a Monday

-Somebody wrote a really long poem today.

-One of the more popular features on my former Facebook page was a little segment known as "Fun With the Parentals."  It was the easiest feature to write, because all I have to do is prick up my ears and copy down what they say. 

My father is Cuban, and 78.  My mother is Puerto Rican, and...not 78.  They've been together since 1974, which means they lived through disco, Fania all-stars, new wave, freestyle, the Sugar Hill Gang, Family Ties, Family Matters, the Spice Girls, both President Bushes, and Justin Bieber.  Tie all that together with Don Francisco, Iris Chacon, and nonstop work for people they don't like, add five children (including a poet) and you get comedy gold like this:

POP (to me, in the living room):  ¿Se levantó la vieja?

MOM (from the bedroom): ¡Viejo seras tú!

(To my non-Spanglish speaking readers: Don't worry, we'll keep you hip somehow.)

I am keeping my ears up, and out, and tuned.  No, they have no idea I do this.  Eventually they'll catch on.

-NYC BOROUGH OF THE WEEK:  Queens, y'all.  They got quenepas and pinchos and two airports.  Do you need anything else in life? 

If I was Carol Burnett, this is the part where I tug on my ear.

-I am still figuring what this blog is supposed to look like.  I have poems and essays I'd like to share, but sometimes it's easier just to tell you what I'm thinking.  It's also easier to write funny crap, because most of the time I'm funny.  Let's see what happens.

-Day 7 of my Facebookless existence.  Did I mention that I have poems and essays to share?  That's because I found the time that I was throwing down the rabbit hole.  Go figure.