Wednesday, June 29, 2011

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Arnoldo García

The segregation of bodies, the segregation of minds

When I started reading Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement, by Farzaneh Milani, there were what seemed countless explosions in my imagination and brain and body about how we as writers of color, Xicanos/Xicanas, Mexicans, Purépechas, Latinas, even Hispanics, or whatever you want to call yourself, have been segregated -- to no avail. Yet we are the mainstream: our stories, musics, and other experiences expressed are just ours and those who have ignored them and continue ignoring them will not know what hit them when their country becomes also ours in word and in colors.

Take note U.S.A., this is what América sounds like too: On page 29, Farzaneh Milani writes, "Sex segregation has had a powerful impact on Iranian literature.... has shaped the language, the themes, the plots and the systems of literary representation used by men and women over the centuries." And the good words over the bad swords take off even deeper from here on end.

There have deep structural political, social, economic and their corresponding cultural devastations worldwide. The current Arab and Middle East Spring, the massive uprisings and movements toppling old regimes is linked to us in many and varied ways. The U.S. had a "Migrant Spring" that opened its new season in 2006. Millions of undocumented migrant workers, their families, communities and supporters took to the streets demanding a change -- that has yet to come. However, the massive movement that continues growing in dissendence and dissoance, changed the political landscape of the U.S. forever. Undocumented people are everywhere, including U.S. citizens whose rights and dreams are being foreclosed, unemployed, and privatized. The future of workers and poor people, communities of color looks more and more like the undocumented, the "illegal." Words can become destiny.

War, Not Swords has given me a new and unfolding understanding of the relationship and impacts and influence over those who've marginalized my writing and stories, acting as if there is no genre or branding is available, unless they make sense to their markets, er I mean readers. If Syracruse University Press can get their readers to pick up this exciting work, then they should be able to see our work as not just for colored people who've gestated and given birth to the rainbow, when suicide was never enough to ake anyone understadn our words aching to be heard by everyone.

A whole new world of understanding of what I as a writer of color, a bilingual, truly multinational/multicultural/multiracial, writer, communities-based organizer face every time I write:

The segregation of our bodies has leavened a stinking segregation of the mind. Words Not Swords can become another salvo in our struggle for equality in body and in language, in desire and in voice. I want to struggle for peace, justice, human rights, with non-violent, non-humiliation strategies and words.

How have women writers, and just plain women, under the veil, in explicit patriarchy-dominant systems, fared? How has beauty, gender, nationality, eros, sex, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, the land, the natural world, urban globs of humanity -- how have they been shaped, kneaded really, under sex segregation -- and racial segregation? And now, increasingly so, citizen/immigrant segregation?

This tome is a must read to have a better grasp of what's at stake in Iran and how we're in the U.S. linked to Iran. From the three hikers, two of which continue languishing in a Tehran prison, to the trauma of their wars against Iraq, the deepening threats of U.S. and Israeli attacks and the endless war in the Middle East that doesn't seem to let up.

Women in Iran have been a force for social transformations at their own speed. Chicanas, Chicanos, Latinos, undocumented migrants, queers, African Americans, Mexicans, Indigenous peoples' struggle to recover their lands -- we share or create similar spaces to those being described and sur-veiled in this new and exciting word venture. Uncannily, here in the U.S. one of the main obstacles we face as writers/organizers/people of color is increasingly less or even racialized freedom of movement: in body and in words. SB-1070 in Arizona, the anti-immigrant, racial profiling law, has made our bodies, our Mexican-Indian-Black-Brown-queer-non-white bodies, the target. Biopolitics at its worst; whenever countries have resorted to bio-politics, they have resorted to war: war on ideas, war on difference, and eventually war on those whose ideas, bodies and differences are the carriers.

The last 160 years worldwide have been the same: upheavals and reorganization, re-combinations of nation-states, who is the People, the chosen race, the master race. This war or struggle over land, resources, labor power, ideas, culture, industrialization leading to atomization and nuclearization, least since 1848, has been a disaster for the world. And the natural world is in upheaval too: the ice cap over the north pole has an opening; one of the largest "wildfires" is raging across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas -- growing by 20,000 acres over night. Restoring humanity to her place in the natural world has been at the center of this major, global shift. Women really will be the determining human force that will shift this battle in our favor, where possibly men with guns (one of the main problems!) will be a thing of the past -- although it will take several generations for this to happen.

So here read this new set of words, Words, Not Swords to sharpen our tongues and our steps for a different world tomorrow. Women of the world, unite! You only have men-chains to lose!

*

This is a preface to a book review to be done later after finishing reading Words, Not Swords; with the caveat and certainty that I will change my thinking and my body in the process.

Monday, June 06, 2011

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Chunks | Trozos


I went to the border where
women assemble the world
I saw my cousins laugh
through the poison, bring
home suiches, Magda said.
I make suiches all day. She
brought home the poison
in her veins and passed on
to her husband, his semen
was poisoned too, her womb
poisoned the fetus assembled
at the maquila, born deformed
flowing into the Río Bravo twisting
dumped into her waters
drowning herself. Madga places
her newborn in a barrel cut in
half and sets it afloat on the Rio Bravo disappearing
into the Gulf of Mexico: will this
deformed distorted baby return as
the new Moses

*

The sea
does not
tire
of being
the sea
yet I am tired
of being
me

She dances with
the moon
I dance with her
the moon objects
sends an earthquake
to tap me on the shoulder
cuts in on us
separates us with
a little tsunami.

*

There are tiny apparitions
on my tongue:
Guadalupe | Coatlicue,
soles,
whirlwinds of dust,
tongue-twisting huracanitos,
tempest
shells,
my body
its molecules
dispersed
in equal portions
for every nation
now
and in the future,
my semen,
swimming toward
the impatient sun,
maíz, bultos of
human rights movements,
orchards, her ruby
veins,
the explosion of volcanoes and earthquakes
the DNA of her thoughts and
curvatures,
the hum of bones,
the vibrato of desire

*

We are dilemma:
no one
is
without
ancestors.
You may have lost them
because you lost their way.
When you don't know
where you're from
who your ancestors are
where your bones are buried
where your seed explodes
what season
what time
what color
your past is
it is because you
are both descendant
and ancestor
an elder before your time
you pluck yourself from your ribs
you engender new dust
your bones are sperm for the future.

*
Palabras descalzas
lengua pelada
ojos pelones
corazón zurco abierto
la naturaleza se viste de humana.

*
cada
palabra
es
un acto
una acción
un pensar
un pensa-
miento
con piernas
con sangre
con vida
en movi-
miento
práctica
y practicable:
Ah palabras
benditas
que no son bombas
ni guerras
Abren senderos
en las venas
de tu sonrisa
el horizonte
los zurcos
semilla maciza
viento suave
lluvia madre
agua dulce
sobre la tierra
de mi lengua
lanzadora de reinos

*
Quién me despierta?
Quién me hace soñar?
Tu ternura
tu cuerpo
tus sonidos
(que no hacen ruido)
tus palabras
que derrocan reinos
y lenguajes duros.

*
Ella
estudia
enfermería
medicina
Yo escribo
curandería
hierbas, hojas, semillas
Ella cuida enfermos
Yo infecto imaginaciones

*
Castilla
nos
envió
tres
galetas
llenas de
avaricios
sus velas
esclavizando al viento
para llegar
a nuestro mundo
Yo envío
tres
palabras
a
Europa:
revolución
humana
naturaleza

*
I will make
love
to you
in Baghdad
when the U.S. flees
stops the bombing
ends the occupation
Baghdad will once again
be the cradle of a new
world civilization
with no WMDs
with no occupation
with no torture prisons
with no enemies and no
combatants
The Euphrates will flow free, clean
we will drink form her waters
baptize our love
From Ho CHi Minh City
to New York City
no more America holocaust
will threaten Indians or
immigrants
Tortillas de maíz will be globalized
everyone will aspire to be a
land worker, a tiller of fields
a keeper of seeds
with dirt underneath the fingernails
a mark of humanity
Aztlán will finally accept the sun's sperm
and gestate
the sixth grandfather
the seventh grandmother
when we can become a people again
with a place in the cosmos
in your arms or in mine
all the space we'll ever need.

*
I don't want to leave
any space open to
interpretation
I want
overlapping
mixtures
shared
memories
intersections
conflated
words
collapsing
into
each other
exhaustion
renders
dreams
freedom
we unleash
what
we do not
want to keep to ourselves...