Of Names and Neighbors

I am deeply saddened by the lives lost to recent terrorist attacks in Ankara, Sinai, Beirut, Baghdad, and Paris. There are truly no words to encompass the horror of the tragedies that continue to unfold - with or without media attention - in the wake of terrorist organizations like Daesh. My deepest condolences go out to the families and loved ones whose lives are forever bereft of that smile, that laugh, that hug that no one else can give.

This was originally intended to be a post on my Facebook wall. However, I had to pause after writing the first paragraph, because in the age of social media it is far too easy to skate over grief and suffering in the rush to make a statement. After taking 48 hours to sit with the suffering of fellow human beings, I find myself writing a very different post than I originally intended. It turns out that grief is not meant to be a doormat on which I step perfunctorily before launching through the doorway of impassioned political diatribe. Rather, grief is the home into which I am invited to enter as a guest, to break bread at the table of suffering. 

During the Passover Seder, the youngest person at the table asks, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" The beauty of the ritual that follows is the way in which it narrates the transition from a story of suffering to a story of hope. The shadow side of that story, however, is that most other nights at the table of suffering are no different at all. The bitter herbs we eat are not a symbol of hardships past, but rather the seasoning baked into humanity's daily bread of difficulty and loss.

Having taken a little time to enter that home and share that meal, here are some thoughts:

1. The greatest tool of exploitation is division. Organizations that hold power undermine resistance by keeping potential allies at odds with one another through fear, isolation, and misinformation. This is true of oppressive regimes that use propaganda and systematic violence to consolidate power against the nefarious Other. This is also true, though less obvious, of seemingly democratic institutions that trumpet liberty and justice for all. And more to the point regarding the recent terrorist attacks, this is true of media conglomerates who profit off of fear-mongering and sensational misinformation.

When we are tempted to criticize others on Facebook for failing to post about the bombing in Beirut or the series of bombings in Maiduguri, let us remember toward whom our critique should be leveled.  The fact is that those events got little play in any of the major news outlets in the United States, and that is a systemic bias that must be challenged. Such systems are not challenged by haranguing users of social media who are showing compassion for others, but instead by directing our money and media usage in ways that subvert the monopoly held by media corporations that employ the same tactics as oppressive regimes.

2. Symbols are powerful. The symbols woven throughout the Passover Seder have connected Jewish celebrants across millennia. The French flag superimposed on Facebook profile pictures is meant to elicit compassion and solidarity, while the black flag used by Daesh is meant to inspire both allegiance and fear. These types of symbols appear in every culture and every society. 

The most widely used symbol, however, might be language. Words embedded in languages are symbols that carry culturally and societally specific meanings. Naturally, there are different words in different languages that are meant to denote the same object or concept. However, the same word in the same language can have different meanings based on different contexts. Language is often at the heart of contested power gradients between the powers that be and resistance movements. 

That is why I used the name Daesh above to refer to the group that occupies territory in parts of Iraq and Syria, and is suspected behind several of the terrorist attacks listed at the beginning of this post. I learned the term from a friend who had recently returned from several months in Lebanon and Jordan, where it was used with a derogatory connotation by all of her Arab friends. There is an interesting explanation of the Arabic meaning of Daesh as both acronym and subversive pun here (along with a somewhat rambling critique of Orientalism in the anglophone media), that I do not have the linguistic aptitude to confirm or deny. However, I find the blogger's most compelling argument for the use of the term Daesh in her quotation of Syrian activist Khaled al-Haj Saleh: "The people who suffer most at the hands of Daesh should decide what they are called." 

In our counseling classes, we talk frequently about the need to respect how people want to be identified. This is necessary because self-identification of people in marginalized communities is often articulated in resistance to dominant narratives that are used to oppress and subjugate. Will me using Daesh instead of other acronyms bring a stop to the atrocities being carried out by that organization and their allies throughout the Middle East? Of course not. But, changing the words I use to describe them does in fact invoke a transfer of agency - no matter how small - from the oppressors to the oppressed who are resisting them. There is power in even such small acts of solidarity.

3. Asking how to put a stop to groups like Daesh also requires us to ask what are the conditions by which people who identify with Daesh have been shaped to become capable of such atrocities. It is far too easy to brand people as monsters and dismiss their actions as inhuman. The reality is that such people are undeniably human, and that should scare us. Why is it so much easier to discuss how the influence of white supremacy shaped Dylann Roof into a mass murderer than it is to understand how jihadist indoctrination causes children to hate their own family? How can we link the influence of patriarchal notions of masculinity to Elliot Rodger's killing spree, but ignore how the legacy of colonialism that contributed to riots in the suburbs of Paris in 2005 might position Paris high on the list of targets for jihadist terrorists?

To be clear, I am not blaming the victims of the Paris attacks by pointing to colonialism. Nor am I saying that the oppressive influences of toxic ideologies excuse acts of murder and terrorism, which are ultimately the result of choices made by perpetrators of violence. However, I am saying that no solutions will be found if we do not examine these events at their roots. 

We must come to understand how our very own institutions and social constructs are feeding global cycles of violence by continually assaulting the psyches of marginalized people. We must acknowledge that the Islamophobic atmosphere in the United States after 9/11 has not only fostered conditions under which a cynical, xenophobic billionaire can be a leading presidential candidate, but also cultivated an environment where Ahmed Mohamed's father hopes that moving to Qatar for his son's studies will mean Ahmed can be "accepted by that country". 

As a future mental health professional, I am asking why young men from Minneapolis and young women from London and Colorado left to join Daesh. How are their actions connected to the fact that they are all people of color? How are teenagers in particular vulnerable to Daesh's recruiting techniques? If we are not asking these questions, then we are turning a blind eye toward the pain and alienation that helped shape neighbors and classmates, cousins and sisters, into jihadists and mass murderers.

Insomnia

There are a lot of things close to home lately that have been difficult to work through, but I also find myself acutely aware of several places in the world, the thought of which leave me restlessly chasing sleep. I wish I could write about these places with elegance and expertise, but the geography is too vast and the struggles too complex for one person to hold them all together. Nonetheless, they have a hold on me.

I long for justice to roll down like a river in these places, for righteousness and peace to meet with a kiss. Until then, all I have to offer are my lamentations, small and insignificant though they be. I grieve for my neighbors in:

Manama, Bahrain
The Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan, Sudan
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
Gaza, Palestine
Aleppo, Syria
Somalia
D.R. Congo
Jos, Nigeria
Northern Mali
Qinghai, Ngaba, and Lhasa
The Arakan region of western Myanmar
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
The Saharwi refugee camps
Dagestan

 Oh, that you would recognize on this day the things that make for peace!

Selah

For Syria

Common Ground

The weapons of warfare are suicidal.
Bent toward destruction
of other
they cripple self,
maiming soul and spirit
until we are left
desolate,
bereft of humanity.
We are at war with God,
striking at his image in our neighbor,
in ourselves.


What is the knowledge
of good and evil
but awareness
of unsightly otherness?
To be naked and ashamed
is nothing less
than forgetting the way
we laid side by side
in unformed clay,
silently
waiting.


Speak to us friends.
Remind us with bleeding voices--
there are no borders
beyond the curtain,
where enemy and ally
rest in the common ground
that eluded them
in the broken brotherhood
of flesh.

-- E. Ramón Chaparro, 2008

The most serious thing you ever felt

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was
a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun
so they were, in part at least, golden. I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us
as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,
but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.
The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

-- Mary Oliver

(Thank you to Kenneth Pruitt for sharing a blog post on the contemplative stance that contained this poem).

Final Revisions

"The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it." 

--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

 ********

                Charley Bob Brewer was 30 years old when they found him in his house on the night of October 14th, a fatal gunshot wound peeking out from his chest. It's hard to believe I had just seen him, and even harder to admit what I was thinking about him the day he died. I feel bad because I was thinking that though he appeared to be a nice guy, I couldn't find it in myself to like him very much.

                See, Charley was hired to fix my mother's ailing computer, and it became clear early on that he didn't really know what he was doing and my mother's bill was growing in direct proportion to his ignorance. He came to my mother's house three times and each time he suggested she replace another component. After the first time, I told her that I didn't think he knew what he was doing. She seemed to agree, but she felt it would be counterproductive to go to someone else after he had already done so much work on the computer. So the process dragged on unnecessarily for weeks. Classic inertia.

                As much as I'm inclined to dislike people who try to take advantage of my mother, I think what troubled me the most was the two times he brought his family along when he came to do repairs. The first time, I was at the house alone and he was supposed to install a piece of hardware and be on his way. Several hiccups and nearly an hour later things were not working, and he decided to take the computer home to work on it. It wasn't until I walked him to the door that I saw his wife and kids sitting in the car, parked in the driveway beneath the baking sun. I asked him why he didn't tell me they were there, as they were more than welcome to come inside. He just laughed, said they didn't mind, got in the car and drove off.

                It took an inordinately long time, but he finally returned my mother's computer. This time both of my parents were home, so I let them field his never-ending flow of affable chatter. On an impulse I looked out the window to see if the car was occupied, but I didn't have a clear view. Twenty minutes later, I heard a car door open and I looked out again. There were his wife and two kids, opening the car doors to get some fresh air. He might have been unclear on the etiquette of bringing his family on house calls the first time, but after an explicit invitation the second time seemed intentional. Charley was still happily chatting away and didn't look to be in any rush, so I discreetly motioned my father over and explained the situation. He and my mother gently sidestepped Charley's objections and invited them inside to relax on the couch and enjoy some refreshments.

                It was an odd experience. I mostly stayed in my room, but there was definitely some unease in the air. The kids were young, 3 and 6, and they quickly warmed up to the new environment and the strangers who inhabited it. Indeed, the 6 year old appeared to have inherited his daddy's gift of gab. Charley's wife, Cheryl, began to smile shyly as she saw her kids having fun, but there was an electric thread of tension between her and Charley. He was still laughing and smiling, but it felt a bit forced, and she wouldn't meet his eyes. Chalking it up to some people just being awkward around strangers, I mostly stayed to myself until Charley finished working on the computer and we all said goodbye. That was October 13th.

********

                The police are reporting that Cheryl called 911 to say she had shot her husband. Further details have not been made public as of yet, but it is my understanding that no charges have been filed. At the very least I can say that as of October 27th she was not incarcerated. That was the day she came to my parents' house for the last time.

                At the time it only seemed moderately strange. My mother answered the doorbell and found Cheryl on the stoop with a package for her. My mother did not recognize her until Cheryl said that the package contained my mother's old internet adapter. I thought it was strange that she brought the adapter alone, but I didn't give it much thought since every interaction with them had been strange.

                But tonight we found out that Charley was shot, and my mother reflected that she'd also found the interaction to be strange. Not because Cheryl was alone, but because she had gently held onto my mother's hand for a moment when she handed her the package. My mother told her to tell the boys hello, but Cheryl didn't respond. It's eerie to learn now that she brought the forgotten internet adapter without her husband because he was already dead, perhaps by her hand. When Cheryl left that last time, we had assumed that we would never hear about Charley and Cheryl Brewer again. 

********

                It's amazing how the mind molds our memories. I read somewhere that the memories we hold onto most, the ones we most often rehearse, are just that – rehearsed. They shift subtly with each retelling, fitting more closely to the larger framework we are using to make sense of the world and our lives. We add embellishments and change time frames, all toward the end of shaping a memory that does not hinder the flow of how we narrate ourselves. It took me years to realize that my memory of seeing the Space Shuttle Challenger explode at liftoff in 1986 was erroneously staged in the house which we didn’t move into until 1988. A counselor friend of mine told me this might be a subconscious way of staging a traumatic event in a safer environment, which makes me wonder how many other memories have received such treatment. It seems that the things I can consistently remember are often shockingly inconsistent with reality.

                Who can say if my mother really noticed those details when Cheryl came to our door? But after her recollection a pensive silence fell around the dinner table. I was thinking about my various interactions with them, wondering if there was some way I could have known, could have prevented what would happen. Would one extra smile at Cheryl and the kids have made the difference? Was the electric thread of tension between them exacerbated by my interfering with their house call arrangement? Did it pull and pull and pull until everything unraveled in a flash of gunpowder and blood? 

                Speculation abounds, not just in my head but on the streets. Small communities are genetically predisposed to parse through the gossip and take sides, and right now there are several factions. One says that Charley was a saint, but Cheryl struggled to kick a drug habit. She is therefore obviously guilty of murder and ought to be locked up. Another muses that Charley was abusive behind closed doors and Cheryl shot him in self-defense. Why else wouldn't she be in custody? Yet another posits that it might have been an accident, being hunting season and all. Finally, some folks whisper that Charley had recently experienced some significant educational and occupational setbacks, and the pressure might have been too much for him to handle. All of these sides only show that speculation often conforms itself to our preferred narratives, according it a tenuous tie to reality similar in nature to that of memory.

                However much we scour our memories for hints, however many theories run through the gossip mill, the reality is that Charley is dead. His grandparents have outlived him. His young sons are partial orphans, his wife a widow. Reality as they knew it has changed irreversibly, and it is heartbreaking. Denied the power to change reality, we can only speculate and tinker with our memories until we tell a story that lulls us to sleep, dreaming that we've made sense of things at last.

Born Into Becoming

The seeds of this post were planted more than 15 years ago, when I prayed and admitted to God, "I have no idea what I'm getting myself into, but I will follow Jesus for the rest of my life." It has been a long journey from seeds to roots, and these hidden roots are difficult to articulate, though they are slowly digging deeper and spreading farther than ever before. For years the first shoots have struggled to break the surface and emerge into the light. In the open air, these initial offerings have been somewhat fragile and uncertain, unsure of what maturity looks like as they endured the hard work of being born into becoming fruitful.

Now is the time for pruning, for intentional moves toward that fruitfulness. That is where you come in, fellow thinkers and readers. I need your minds, your hearts, and your convictions to help me shape this life that is emerging into the light. Pruning shears are sharp by nature, so please do not dull the sharpness of your disagreement or critique in the name of friendship. Also, do not hold back because you feel like you have nothing to say. The act of speaking to a plant gives it nourishment to continue the difficult journey of upward growth, and every voice is beautifully life-giving and necessary.

So, this is my invitation, no matter your religious, political, or cultural affiliation -- please join me in breathing life into this blog, guiding it toward maturity and action.

The Moment in the Corner

Three months ago I attended a workshop on writing and performing our stories. Thank you to Paula Morell and April Gentry-Sutterfield for sharing their gifts to stir new levels of creativity in our writing. The Jorge Luis Borges quote below was the prompt for our writing exercise.  

"Any life, no matter how long or complicated it may be, is made up of one moment - the moment a man finds out once and for all who he is."

   There are many moments that try to form alliances and narrate the story of one's life. They push and jostle like children at the ice cream truck, screaming to be heard. Then there are other moments that stand quietly in the back of the room, watching with a gravity that reveals their movement beyond such childish reckonings. Their very presence shifts the taste in the air, laces it with a tang of permanence and regret.

   These memories will not go back inside when the carnival music disappears over the hill. They stay seated on the front porch, watching, knowing. These moments see the story we cannot, reveal themselves because of their "oughtness", their truth. In the times when I can step back from the throng and look over my shoulder, they gaze back at me knowingly. They do not beckon or call to me. They simply know me. It is always a trial for me to acknowledge them.

   The moment who sits in the seat of honor has been around for nearly 15 years. He is partially covered in shadow but his darkness illuminates my blackness. In the winter of my senior year of high school I ask a girl to a dance. I am not romantically interested, but we've been friends for a long time. All goes according to plan - I ask her, she agrees, we both look forward to it. But there is one small problem in her parents' eyes - she is white and I am black.

   The moment is baffling in its truth. The girl is sitting in front of me, crying slow motion tears, and the words coming out of her mouth are all wrong. "Because you're black", "It's against God's will", "I can't believe my parents are so ignorant", "I'm so sorry, so embarrassed". None of it makes sense. Who thinks these things at the end of the 20th century? Sure, I attend a private school that is nearly alabaster in its whiteness, but I've adapted, right? I've shed the rough Jersey attitude and Yankee vowels and even joined the youth group next door. I am well liked, some might even say popular. Other than the odd redneck bigot, nobody is so blatantly racist as these things her parents said about a boy who goes to their church would suggest.

   Even as I recognize what they were saying is false, I also realize the truth of the matter. The moment sits down next to me in the principal's sterile office, watching impassively while the girl sobs her disbelief. I can feel him turn toward me, waiting for my acknowledgment. He follows me around for three days before I can look at him, and when I do he just stares back. No words, no tears, no reassuring smile. Just truth, silent and cold and persistent.

   I knew then what I'd been trying to hide from. I am an AfroNuyorican man, and I don't fit anywhere. Not with bilingual boricuas in New York, not with black folks in Little Rock whose speech cadences eluded me for years, and certainly not in a nearly all-white private school where I adapted so effectively that months would go by without anyone mentioning our difference. Our ethnicity. Our race. Our respective statuses in society.

   My blackness, my boricua-ness is omnipresent. I'm not ashamed of it and never have been. I have tried to hide it at times, or at least forget, but that was mostly to survive. It is always with me, like the moment when the girl's weeping opened my eyes to my true self -- my otherness. Always. Everywhere. Sometimes it's too much to take in, so I keep pushing my way up to the ice cream truck, keep drowning my senses in the clamor of the raucous crowd. But still he waits on the porch, watching and knowing.

It's Hard Down Here (a poem for Advent)

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty!
Now might be a good time to say
we miss you in the worst kind of way,
'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
All the saints adore thee,
throwing down Crown Royal every night
in crystal glasses filled with ice.
We drink 'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
Though the darkness hide thee,
we come bowed down with grief,
barnyard shepherds in need of relief.
See, 'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
Merciful and mighty,
have mercy on us who thirst for this--
peace and justice joined with a kiss.
It's just so hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty!
Oh! How we await thee,
'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

A Common History

I just finished a powerful collection of poetry by Natasha Trethewey called Native Guard. Her poems are haunting, filled with the paradoxical beauty and brutality of the South as experienced both historically and personally. In addition to her content, I love that many of her poems have more formal structure than the free verse that I'm used to reading.

Her collection is also dear to me because it adds one more elegant voice to the relatively few who tell the story of what it means to be biracial in America, particularly in the South. Though she was born in a much different, much harder time than me, there is nevertheless overlap in our stories. One of my favorites from the collection is below:

Southern History

Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master's care.

I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

It was late; we still had Reconstruction
to cover before the test, and -- luckily --

three hours of watching Gone with the Wind.
History, the teacher said, of the old South --

a true account of how things were back then.
On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth,

bucked eyes, our textbook's grinning proof -- a lie
my teacher guarded. Silent, so did I.

Pillow Frame

I am driving, cutting
through fields of sorghum
and soybean, but
all I can see is the dying
day fire, glowing behind
clouds pink and blue,
a familiar hue,
like pillow shadows
framing your face flushed
and drunk after
making love.

On Hip-Hop Salvation

I think part of what is interesting about [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] is that it just takes the idiom of hip-hop as a given. And a lot of times in hip-hop literature, they make a big fuckin’ deal out of it. The thing is, once you single it out as an element or as an aesthetic, I think there’s a problem. For me, as someone who grew up in this world just listening to it, we had this understanding that it was just normal. It wasn’t something you became fanatical about, it was just a part of everyday life. Hip-hop for us wasn’t like “hip-hop is life,” it was just normative, man. I thought that that was what was really important in Oscar Wao. I wanted to make the hip-hopness of the book normative, and not something that was sensational. Which I think is very important, because one of the things that happens with this economic shift in hip-hop from a local market to an international brand is that they were really trying to push people into becoming this sensational lifestyle, this almost pseudo-religious practice. And when we were coming up in the Eighties, it wasn’t like that, man. You loved hip-hop, that was that. But you didn’t think of hip-hop as this salvation. Now there’s a lot of corporate money in getting young people to embrace hip-hop in ways that would seem very strange to a lot of people from my era. If you took kids from 1986, 1987 and time-traveled them to right now, I think they would find some of the ways that people are like “hip-hop is religion” or “hip-hop explains the universe” really weird. It was meant to be an organic part of people’s lives, it wasn’t meant to replace people’s lives.

-- Junot Diaz

The rest of his interview with Stop Smiling can be found here. Thanks to John Pattison for passing this on a couple years back.

The Lesser Jihad

Do you remember when your friends and family could walk with you all the way to the gate at the airport and give you a hug just seconds before you boarded your flight?

Do you remember when you didn't have to take off your shoes or submit to naked X-ray pictures going through the security line?

If you have darker complexion and a beard like me, do you remember when you could read the Qur'an on a flight without worrying about whether the other folks in your row thought?

Do you remember when the government did not have permission to tap our phones by reason of the Patriot Act?

Do you remember when we at least pretended McCarthyite witchhunts were a bad thing? (Please follow the link and take time to read some of the comments)

Do you remember when the the most infamous Cuban body of water in American history was not Guantánamo, but the Bay of Pigs?

Do you remember when we didn't care much about our president's middle name or want to see copies of his birth certificate?

Do you remember?

I still maintain that fighting and defeating political and/or religious enemies is the lesser jihad. As has always been, the greater jihad is defeating the enemy within ourselves.

Our own prejudices and predilection for injustice do not hide in locked down bunkers in northeastern Pakistan, but instead flaunt themselves in sensational newspaper headlines and viral email forwards about the danger of shari'ah law overturning the constitution. These are the poisonous fruit of a flourishing tree of fear-mongering and hate that has deep roots in the psyche of our country, and ultimately in each one of our hearts.

I pray that we will have the courage to fight the greater jihad. As-salamu `alayna.

אלי אלי למה עזבתני

Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is not a rhetorical question, the answer to which is already known.

This is not an interrogative question, the answer to which can be stated clearly.

This is a cry of deep pain and despair, for which there are simply no words.

When our care for loved ones stirs a desire in us to say something--anything--to try and ease the fire of unfathomable pain, we would do well to remember God's initial response was silence.

In that silence, resurrection power had time to speak louder than words.

Let us consider carefully our response to other people's suffering. Very rarely are the answers that fit into words sufficient.

Ghosts

Ghosts
are watching me
on bustling campus walkways pulled
toward rooms of drab florescent bulbs,
inducing convalescent lull.
As I lay me down to sleep
and rise again to coffee need,
they're watching me bemusedly.

Ghosts
are calling me
with wedding bells aloft and ringing,
from window sills where doves are winging
through heavens rent apart with singing.
Laughing in the yard, they are
a choir of love for all the parts
I've hidden in the closet's dark.

Ghosts
are urging me
to look their way and witness how
they walk the line but don't allow
their consciences to weigh them down.
Floating on the midnight sea,
they have not ceased condemning me,
nor will they heed my guilty plea.

Ghosts
are keeping me
from resting in peace.

Change

Editor's Note:I am aware that all of the links below are from one news source. I must plead laziness and my inability to gauge my small readership's reactions to using news sources like Al-Jazeera. Nonetheless, the links are good topical starting points from which you can search for coverage in other media.

I am in no way advocating violence, rioting, or looting. However, if you have not been able to keep up with the news lately, big things are afoot in several parts of the world right now. Of course, the events garnering the most media coverage are the mass protests in Tunisia (which resulted in the abdication of a president and subsequent governmental collapse/reshuffling) and Egypt (the results of which are still to be determined).

Before those events, things were already heating up in Lebanon with the collapse of the unity government and angry protests in the street after Hezbollah legally forced the ouster of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of assassinated former premier Rafik Hariri. In addition to Egypt, the Tunisia protests have also had a milder ripple effect in Yemen and Jordan.

As I said, big things are afoot. Again making a disclaimer that I do not support violent protests, I want to publicly confess that the recent events stir a certain amount of enthusiasm in me. Why?

Because change can happen.

Change is happening.

While I am immensely grateful for the freedom of speech that allows me to keep this blog and express any opinion that I want, I at the same time get tired of how much us Americans confine ourselves to whining in the ethereal world of the internet. We use our Facebook status updates to complain about what we see as faulty legislation. Many of these people are using Facebook to compel thousands of people to hit the streets in protest.

There seems to be a wide gap in our usage between the words "social" and "media". We don't mind the media part, giving our own views a venue or letting our media personalities carry the "conversation" (ha!) forward. But what about the social part? The actual mobilization of people to come together to do something in society? Why are Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart organizing our political rallies?

Again, I do not overlook the fact that Americans have the right to exercise their freedom of speech. Where I currently live, it is impossible to access this blog without using certain software, and none of my friends here have heard the faintest inkling about what is going on in Tunisia and Egypt. I am very grateful for our right to assemble and exercise free speech.

In fact, that's my point. Let's use those rights! Do you know how much we could accomplish if we spent half as much time getting to know our neighbors and brainstorming ways to make grassroots changes as we did listening to political commentators or watching "Jersey Shore"?

And in case you are hesitant to embrace such activist enthusiasm because of the tinge of violence in most of the above reports, please take note that the media has given much less coverage to what appears to be the largely peaceful dawning of a new age for the people of Sudan.

Hope is founded on the potential for change. It's time that we tapped that potential.

A Short Commentary on Selective Memory in the Pursuit of Empire

For background on the following, join in the conversation on my friend's blog about the new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which replaces the epithet "nigger" with "slave". Please note that when I critique empire, I am not critiquing a singular party or movement, but rather the entire American project that rests on the lingering idea of Manifest Destiny. The following is a slightly elongated revision of the comment I left in response to the above post:

Empires thrive on the rewriting of history, and in its short history the United States has shown itself to be adept at this exercise. The problem with the word nigger is not that it’s an ugly spot in our history we don’t want to look at. The problem is that it is a reminder that a previous injustice was in large measure remedied (and that only a generation ago), and thus there is power in the populace to continue effecting change within the structures of empire. Such reminders are dangerous in the extreme and to be avoided at all cost.

From the days that slavery was abolished, the word nigger was used to keep ideological chains on so many black Americans who either transitioned to the semi-slavery of sharecropping or migrated to the cities of the North. Physical violence was paired with these verbal chains in order to communicate one message: “You may have been freed from slavery, but don’t think that EVERYTHING is going to change. White people are still in charge.”

The battle over vocabulary is a battle over imagination. If a country where the word nigger could not be used with impunity was imagined and then realized, why not imagine a country where Latino students can critically examine history from a minority perspective without being accused of sedition?

Such imagination cannot be given room to grow, so the solution is to get rid of words and stories that serve as touchstones of communal memory, which in turn is the foundation for communal transformation. There are two main options to be rid of such words and stories. The first option is to co-opt them. Think of how Martin Luther King Day fixes in time the nation's victory over its own weakness of racism, rather than propagating Dr. King's radical critique of the military-industrial complex and economic inequality.

The second option is simply to delete such troublesome words and stories. Czech author Milan Kundera illustrates this well in a passage from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

It is this latter option which the well-intentioned professor and editor of the newest censored version of Twain's novel unwittingly chooses with his attempts to make the work more accessible to young readers.

Goodbye, “nigger” – you and all the power (good or bad) in your utterance belong to the past, not the future.

New

Yesterday afternoon on my way home delicate snow crystals gently dusted the sidewalk. Due to the dry climate, it rarely snows here in the lower altitudes (7000 feet), so I didn't think much of it. A few hours later I emerged from the front door to find that it was still snowing, a tiny layer had accumulated on the surface of the roads, sidewalks, trees, and bricks.

I know the last part of that list is kind of odd, but bricks are really quite a phenomenon here. Because there is never-ending construction in Chinese cities, and particularly in our slightly rundown Eastside part of town, there are often building materials piled all over the place. Our part of town additionally features many piles of rubble of the hundreds of houses and tiny storefronts that are being demolished to make way for "development". I noticed as I was walking last night that the thin layer of snow blanketing the piles of brick rubble gave them the eerie feeling of ruins.

Apart from those ruins of the recent past, everything else looked new. Even as I was walking, I knew it was temporary. Soon the tread of boots, the trace of dogs, and the dim neon of drunken urination would sully the shallow purity glowing around me. Nonetheless, it was a fitting sight for the start of another year.

As I was walking around 7 p.m. on the first day of the year in China, the denizens of American Samoa were ringing in 2011 in whatever style Samoans celebrate. Except for two tiny Pacific islands on the very edge of the international date line, practically the entire world was artificially united by our clumsy demarcations of time. For all the disharmony in this world of ours, those few moments still descend upon us in which we feel that, somehow, there is a chance for a new start. It is in these moments where we are faced with a difficult question - do we dare to hope?

I am looking forward to and hoping for some things in this new year:

*Scoring respectably on my first national Chinese proficiency exam
*Securing a longish term residence here in Western China
*Taking concrete steps toward the completion of a significant writing project
*Attending the weddings of two of my favorite people (Natalie Ray and Alexis Harmon)
*Learning how to cook at least five Chinese dishes
*Losing enough weight to wear red leather pants
*Thinking better of wearing red leather pants
*Ending my five year absence from New York City
*Attending a Food for Thought reunion of some sort
*Talking to kids who were just babies when I left the States
*Writing and recording at least three songs

There are of course many more things that could be on this list, but I wanted to leave room to tell you that if you are reading this I am most likely more grateful for your friendship than you realize. As I'm cresting 30, sleeping in a bunk bed and still in school without letters behind my name, I have become certain that I will never have much in the way of money. But there is this - I am well loved and feel rich beyond measure. I pray that you may all be rich in love in 2011!

The Fight for Peace

I live in a region that epitomizes the ethnic strife and attitudes toward violence of a nation that comprises approximately 20% of the world's population. There is so much about the particularities of this region's situation that I want to write about on this blog, but in my current living arrangement it is unwise to do so. Nonetheless, I am prompted to write something that might bring the "unspeakable" into focus. So it is that I find myself again drawn to the subject of nonviolence.

While it is easy to point at governments, the media, video games, and other "impersonal" structures as the main perpetrators of violence, I am finding again and again that the finger ultimately points back at us--ordinary people. Almost daily I am confronted with often uncomfortably frank conversations about ethnic prejudices which can lead to conflict. On the more benign level, I am asked several times a week if I like to play basketball or "street dance", two activities that are most closely tied to local conceptions of my identity as a black American. Those with whom I have cultivated more of a relationship talk about depictions of black men in American movies as being ultra-violent and dangerous. "But, you're not like that," a few friends have said, one of whom admitted that he was nervous when he first met me because of his preconceived conception of black men.

The reality is that very few black people make their way through this part of the world, and the few prejudices in place have more to do with the ignorance of absence than anything else. However, the more concerning prejudices are rooted in deeply communal, deeply personal ways of interacting with cultural differences. My province is home to a wide array of ethnic minorities (a complex concept in Chinese society which has filled volumes of scholarly works and can hardly be introduced in blog post) with various linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities that sometimes come into conflict. These conflicts can arise in a multitude of situations.

For example, in regards to food consumption, Hui Muslims will only eat at restaurants and homes that are Qing Zhen, literally "pure and true", implying the complete absence of pork. That means that any restaurant or home where pork has ever been cooked or served is out of the question; even cups touched by lips that have eaten pork can be considered unclean. This can lead to awkward situations where a Hui person is invited to a Han Chinese person's home and will not eat or drink anything offered to them to guard against contamination. This awkwardness can expand into offense in socially specialized environments like weddings, banquets, and business dinners.

In many ways, local people are accustomed to this arrangement, with public places like school cafeterias and grocery stores making concessions for Qing Zhen dietary restrictions. However, the imbalance of power in hospitality (ie, Hui can host Han, but not vice versa), such an important part of this society, often leads to what is in practice a habitual lack of contact with members of the "other" group. This mutual absence creates space for ethnic cultural "straw men" which have little in common with the real people who they represent, and these "straw men" are passed on through various mediums to later generations.

The problem with straw men is that they have no brains. They are not rational beings capable of thoughtful adaptation to the complexities of their environment. As such, they can be looked down upon those who live according to subhuman instincts and impulses, or even worse, seen as objects. This characterization in turn provides justification for prejudiced actors to employ violence to resolve conflicts of interest. After all, you can't reason with something that is subhuman, can you?

This may seem like harsh overstatement, and perhaps it is, but the consequences of violence that I see around me require harsh analysis. In many ways, violence is often controlled in the public spaces of the United States. Sure, you can watch UFC matches on television and play Grand Theft Auto video games, but uncontrolled displays of violence are generally socially unacceptable. It is often in the shadows of back streets where people get jumped or mugged, inside houses where husbands abuse wives. Here, these acts of violence are profoundly public. Men can hit women while they are walking down the sidewalk, and groups of young men can shower a rain of blows on a lone victim, all without expecting much interference from passersby unless it is a police officer, a monk, or a pesky foreigner. Violence is in some ways the norm.

When it comes to intercultural strife, small incidents sometimes escalate in more widespread vandalism and acts of violence. Just yesterday in a small town a few hours from my city, I heard the story behind a spurt of violence three years ago. A Hui vendor and a Tibetan boy had a disagreement about a purchase, and the Hui vendor reportedly struck the boy. Whether or not this event actually happened as it was told, the result is that the Hui vendor was beaten badly. That beating fed deeper feelings of offense and enmity which led to the chanting of slogans advocating violence against all Muslims (including those who were not Hui), and a mob formed which began to vandalize Muslim restaurants and beat unsuspecting Muslims out on the street. Soon, the slogans began to include other ethnic groups, and it can be safely said that at some point people participating in the mob did not even know what event sparked the entire thing. It didn't matter. All that mattered was the opportunity to unleash internal rage on nameless, faceless "others" who were clearly the enemy.

Do you see how easy it is for the "straw men" to become objects of violence? While this might be an extreme example, I think it is particularly pertinent for Americans today. On the global level, there is the ongoing American warfare against "enemies of democracy" which extends from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to today's War on Terror. In each instance, the enemy has to be depersonalized and essentialized as vessels of opposition to our own goals. According to the conventions of nation-state governance, this is the approach required in order to be a head of state. The dissonance which this creates in the thoughtful actor is captured beautifully in a recent article about Obama's visit to India.

On a more personal level, I remember when my former roommate (who is also African American) joined the military shortly after 9/11. Several months later we were chatting online and he used the term "ragheads" in regards to Arabs. I was taken aback by his use of this racial epithet, and chastised him for aiming prejudice at Arabs when black people had been the targets of that exact kind of racism for years.
As he began to defend himself by referencing the 9/11 tragedy, I began to wonder what kind of training he was receiving in the military. Don't get me wrong, I am not accusing the military of training soldiers to be racist. However, I am asking if there might be a connection between the depersonalization that fuels prejudice and the depersonalization that my ex-Marine buddy said was necessary to eliminate the hesitation that most people experience before pulling the trigger with a human being on the other end of the barrel.

I don't want to pick on the military alone. The military is simply the embodiment of a human tendency to depersonalize those we consider "other", and especially those whose goals come into conflict with our own. We can point at the statistic that robberies are less likely to become violent if the victim mentions her family or tells the perpetrator her name. Personalization of the victim makes it harder for the victim to be objectified. I wish I remembered where to find this article, but there was a report several years ago about the reduction of violence and negative perceptions between Palestinian and Israeli youth who played sports together (does anyone else remember this?). The list goes on, but the salient point seems to be that if we are forced to personalize the "other", we are less likely to commit violence against them.

I think this highlights a famous but often unheeded teaching of Jesus--to love one's enemy. Most of us stumble over the seeming impossibility of such an idea before we consider the power that it might have in its accomplishment. Missionary to India and friend of Gandhi, E. Stanley Jones, writes in The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person in response to the common objection that "love your enemies" is an impractical command:

Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and go the second mile when compelled to go one. Impossible idealism -- you would be everybody's doormat, everyone would walk on you. Would they? The aim of a quarrel is to get rid of your enemy. Suppose you strike back and give blow for blow. Do you get rid of your enemy? You fix the enmity by very blow you give. By turning the other cheek you disarm your enemy. He hits you on the cheek and you, by your moral audacity, hit him on the heart by turning the other cheek. His enmity is dissolved. Your enemy is gone. You get rid of your enemy by getting rid of your enmity.

If prejudice and violence are rooted in our own view of the "other", is it truly possible to get rid of our enemy by getting rid of the enmity in our heart? By viewing those who oppose us not as depersonalized opposition to what we want, but as persons who can change in response to their environment? What if our enemies are confronted with nonviolence rooted in the affirmation of their own personhood and ability to change? Can they remain our enemies?

Assuredly, some people can. However, I think that the early Jesus movement, the Indian independence movement, the American Civil Rights movement all illustrate that many people cannot remain enemies in the face of such nonviolence rooted in belief in the possibility of redemption for actors of violence. These movements also illustrate that those committed to nonviolent resistance are also committing to self-discipline and personal suffering which most of us do not have the courage to take on willingly. Yet, if we willingly choose that discipline and suffering, there is tremendous power for justice and redemption.

Looking back over this post, I see that I have mostly been rambling incoherently. Typical. If I would only write smaller posts on a more regular basis, that might be avoided. Nonetheless, scrambled though it may all be, I'd be interested in hearing your responses. Until then, peace be with you.

Temples and Holy Places

My previous post has served its purpose - enough of you have asked when I'm going to post again that I feel sheepish if I sit in front of the computer and don't write. So, since there is a slight element of "forcing it", don't expect too much :o)

I was walking around today and put my finger on something that had been ruminating under the surface for awhile. One of the main roads in my town runs from east to west, and on this road are two of the religious landmarks near the center of town - a large mosque and a Christian church.

The Dongguan Grand Mosque is on the east side of the city center, and was featured in absentia in a post last fall marking Eid al-Fitr. It is one of the largest mosques in China, and is rumored to annually host the largest gathering of Muslims outside of Saudi Arabia celebrating the end of Ramadan (I'm still looking for concrete statistics to support this). Dongguan is a cultural landmark for the many Muslims in our city, and the area surrounding it is full of small shops and markets selling Islamic merchandise - head coverings and hats, prayer rugs, halal food, religious books (in Chinese, Arabic, and Persian), gold-plated plaques featuring intricate Arabic inscriptions of the shahada, etc. It is a lively, bustling area, and one of my favorite parts of China for its unique Chinese Islamic flavor.

But, after four years of being away, I noticed a few months ago that something had changed at the mosque. When the sun went down and the street lights fired up, lights also fired up on the mosque. This beautiful mosque, which features a blend of Tibetan, European, Turkish, and Arabic architecture, is now covered in very large, very tacky strings of lights. It's like a little piece of Vegas tucked in a corner of Mecca. It would be completely shocking if not for the fact that this is how most parts of Chinese cities look. If you keep heading west on the road, you get to the more economically developed part of the city, chock full of shops splattered with neon, blasting Chinese and Korean pop music. It is the mosque and the neighborhood surrounding it that are the true anomalies.

Further down the road, at the intersection that marks the city center, there is another out of place structure - a church steeple. There many reasons this steeple is out of place, but perhaps the most prominent is that it is the only church building I recall seeing in this part of China. When I visited Shanghai in the spring, I was surprised by how many church buildings and steeples dotted the skyline. There were even DENOMINATIONS! It was quite surreal, and highlighted the oddity of this church steeple in my largely Muslim, Buddhist, and agnostic city, proclaiming in bold white letters: "Church of Christ" (not the denomination).

The other prominent aspect contributing to this building's oddity is the fact that it is just off the city center intersection. Everything around it is stores, malls, shopping centers, and restaurants. There are perhaps more lights per square meter than in any other part of the city. There is a huge video screen projecting various advertisements above one of the few Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in our 落后 (backward/underdeveloped) little city. Everything around this steeple screams of hustle and commerce, hardly a place for religious reflection.

The stretch of road between the mosque and church is nothing but stores and markets. Walking through that strip today, I was struck by how many people were walking alongside me, raptly drinking in the blaring music and signs announcing 30% off sales. The people were incredibly diverse - Muslim women wearing glittery headscarves and 4-inch heels, Tibetan monks wearing scarlet robes and leather jackets, Chinese college students sporting the newest and coolest tight jeans and spiky hairdos, and elderly people walking slowly with hands that survived the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution clasped behind backs. It is these last who have witnessed the rise of a new religion to come alongside the Buddhism and Islam which have had roots in the area for centuries.

I am not the first to write about the religious aspects of consumerism, nor will I be the last. I am not particularly in the mood to present an academic case for it either. However, I will say that today, the temple of consumerism had more pilgrims than the mosque and the church. The lights that have crept up the front of the Dongguan Grand Mosque and the barrage of blinking signs obscuring the view of the Church of Christ steeple seem to suggest that this is not temporary. The coffee shops and merchandise booths inside some American mega-churches hint at possible milestones farther down the road for these religious landmarks in my "developing" city. I suppose everyone has different ideas of the benefits or detractors of this trajectory, but very few seem able to imagine anything different for the future. Consumerism seems to have won the religious franchise wars.

I'm rambling now. I guess I'm stirred because the other day on Facebook an acquaintance asked if people thought their faith had impacted their behavior. It's actually a multi-layered question that was apparently sparked by a conversation about the correlation between adherence to a faith system and what is considered "bad" behavior. Maybe I'll post my response on here sometime, but if that question is aimed at the religion of consumerism, the answers that arise are a bit disturbing.

I'm reading a novel by Margaret Atwood called Oryx and Crake, which through graphic depictions of the gradual excesses of consumeristic, self-centered behavior leading to societal apocalypse has regularly sent chills down my spine. Self-centered behavior encouraged by rampant consumerism leads to a valuation of comfort and security above all else. As Kahlil Gibran asserts in The Prophet, this lust for comfort is risky business:

And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors? Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host and then a master?

Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires. Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron. It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh. It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels. Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral. (You can read "On Houses" in its entirety here)

Perhaps the religion of consumerism serves the god of comfort. Perhaps that is why many times religion can end up looking very similar to consumerism and the political/economic orders that uphold it as a unifying (and pacifying) strategy. When the lust for comfort has not only become masters of our houses, but of our churches, mosques, and temples, what then becomes of the passion of the soul?

There has to be more to religion than whispers of comfort, or else religion becomes a murderer. But I'll leave that for another post :o)

Rebirth?

It would be generous to say that this blog has been lethargic this past year, especially considering it has been completely devoid of activity for more than three months. Coming soon, new life will be breathed into this stale little corner of the interwebs. Significant personal experiences have transpired in the interim, and I have no idea how to breathe enough life into my overambitious prose to convey even a fraction of the changes that have taken root in my mind and spirit, but I will try.

It makes me wonder about Lazarus...after Jesus raised him from the dead, how different was he? Was he like a cancer survivor who learns to drink life down to the last drop? Or was he like someone who has a near death experience and grows increasingly strange, like Jeff Bridges in Fearless? It seems like dying might really influence your personality, maybe to the same extent as becoming addicted to cocaine or Lost.

I'm wondering whether my writing voice will change in proportion to my internal changes, or whether writing again will reignite hidden parts of myself that have spent the last year in deep slumber. Whatever happens, I am excited to discover once more the mystery that writing somehow has a life of its own. I hope you'll join me.