SuperWeed

“Don’t need no hateration, holleration / in this dancerie”

I don’t know about you, but there was quite a bit of speculation, imitation, derivation in my kitcherie when Mary J. Blige came out with “Family Affair” back in 2001. I definitely remember telling incoming roosters that we didn’t allow hateraters at this sanctuary, and I’m pretty sure I drove Miriam halfway around the bend by adding “-ation” to random verbs and “-ery” to terminal nouns in the midst of otherwise unremarkable conversations.

All credit to Mary J. Blige, I argued, for audacity. Considering the spectrum of wordplay from bebop to hip hop, those coinages didn’t seem especially clever at first listen. But, the heavy-handed forced rhyme and alliteration of “hateration” and “holleration”–hit hard right on the beat–did capture the ugliness of the hating and hollering Mary J. was deriding. And then the flippancy of “dancerie” (as I imagined it was spelled) did seem the perfect antidote to mean-minded stomping in the first line of the couplet.

So, you know, it was poetry.

So, imagine my delight last week when, midway through a 1974 anthology of Caribbean literature, I happened upon this poem, written by Louise Bennett to mark the 1961 withdrawal of Jamaica from the Federation of the West Indies (which led to the collapse of that federation):

Dear Departed Federation

Dear Departed Federation
Referendum muderation
Bounce you eena outa space
Hope you fine a restin place.
Is a heavy blow we gi yuh
An we know de fault noh fe yuh
For we see you operate
Over continent an state.
But de heap a boderation
In a fe we lickle nation
From de start a yuh duration
Meck we frighten an frustrate.
A no tief meck yuh departed
A no lie meck yuh departed
But a Fearful meck we Careful
How we let yuh tru we gate.
Fearful bout de big confusion
Bout de final constitution
An Jamaica contribution
All we spirit aggrivate.
An we memba self-protection
All we ears of preparation!
Referendum Mutilation
Quashie start to contemplate!
Beg yuh pardon Federation
Fe de sudden separation
If we sufferin’ survive
We acquaintance might revive.
Dear Departed Federation
Beg you beg dem tarra nation
Who done quarrel and unite
Pray fe po West Indies plight.

Yes! Murderation. Botheration. Both clear antecedents of “hateration” and “holleration.”  Of course, I don’t know whether Mary J. Blige ever heard or read that particular poem, but she did grow up in New York City, where plenty of West Indians live, so she may well have spent time in verbal environments where the playful creation of such coinages was common.

And notice: However playful the wording, that poem is serious. As is the call for a dancefloor free of hateration. As the subject of my previous blog post also knew, existing words aren’t always adequate to the task of saying what needs to be said. Indeed, divisive violence may be built into the words we use to slice-and-dice the world into bite-sized bits. If Audre Lorde was right and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” then we need to feel free to create the tools we need, whether these be new words or new non-verbal strategies. Like peaceful danceries.

April 14th, 2012 | Tags: poetry | Category: Language | Comments (1)

Lesbian-feminist poet, essayist, and activist Adrienne Rich died this week at 82.

Adrienne Rich in 1987 (Photo by Neal Boenzi, New York Times)

Here’s a quote from her poem, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children“:

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

Since I’ve been writing too many RIPs these days, that seems to be all I have to say.

I could tell you about the time I heard the line quoted in the title of this post, read out (as it happens) at a memorial service for Simone deBeauvior and was so moved that I tracked down the person who had read it, in order to learn that the poem she had read was Rich’s 1963 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” Or, I could tell you about how heartening it was for me when Adrienne Rich, whilst signing books after a speech she’d given in Ann Arbor, told me to “keep up the good work.” Or, I could dig deeper, dredging up memories of long nights—many long nights, at many different times of my life—when the words of this woman either echoed my own anguish or helped me, so many years younger than she, imagine making my own way to the place of integrity she seemed to reach in her later works.

“But I just don’t have the heart for that right now,” I was going to say. But flipping through online lists of her books (all of mine, alas, are boxed in cardboard at the moment so I cannot flip through the books themselves), I came upon the first line of one of my favorite of her poems, which she wrote at 49 (I am now 50):

A wild patience has taken me this far

And, you know what? That’s true. And useful to remember. So, let me close by thanking Adrienne Rich for reminding me of that, and for all of the poems and essays that remain (despite her death):

delivered
palpable
ours.

Not sure which poems those last two quotes are from? Go searching. Find the words.

March 29th, 2012 | Tags: poetry | Category: writing | Comments (1)

Big news, folks. Dunno why it’s taken me so long to announce this, but I am moving back to the sanctuary, where I’ll be living in a 1973 Airstream trailer, sharing my front yard with cows and chickens in the part of the mountainous sanctuary property we call “up the hill.”

My new home

As regular SuperWeed readers know, I co-founded VINE Sanctuary (originally Eastern Shore Sanctuary) with Miriam Jones in rural Maryland back in 2000. We both lived on site for the first several years. Then I managed operations on site while Miriam lived elsewhere (visiting frequently) for a couple of years. That experience—solo sanctuary work in rural isolation—really wore me out, so I’ve taken a break from direct animal care for a couple of years while Miriam has more-than-ably not only managed but significantly expanded the sanctuary following its relocation to rural Vermont. (She’ll still be running the show. I’ll just be pitching in with sanctuary chores while getting back to the steady schedule of writing and speaking that I used to maintain.)

Speaking of writing, I’m just now finishing what ought to be the penultimate round of revisions on the book about the sanctuary’s first decade (and so much more—it’s about birds and people, race and place, and the ecology of violence). I started keeping notes for that book shortly after we took in the first chicken, becuase it was already clear to me that other people both wanted and needed to hear the stories I was living and observing out in the chicken yards. I had a go at writing the book in 2005, but that draft was a disaster, partly because I was still in the midst of of its narrative and partly because I didn’t yet have the skills I needed to tell the tale adequately. So, I wrote Aftershock and then set about developing my creative non-fiction skills while continuing to live the story. The next big push to write the book started in 2009, as the sanctuary’s decade on the Delmarva came to a close, providing a natural endpoint for the narrative. Three years and heaven-knows-how-many rebuilds, rewrites, and remixes later, it’s really ready. Next step: Pitching to publishers, so wish me luck on that.

I’m excited about that and about the move, but I also have mixed feelings. While it will be very good for me to get back to the sanctuary and to pick up some of the work set aside whilst making my living by teaching, I’m going to miss teaching at MCTC and Metrostate here in the Twin Cities more than I can say. And there are people (and places) I’ll miss too. So, don’t be surprised to see some “what I’ll miss about Minneapolis” posts in the next couple of months. But do feel free to cheer me on as I prepare to segue to the next stage in my life.

March 18th, 2012 | Tags: sanctuary | Category: sanctuary, writing | Comments (9)

Cyclepedia: A Century of Iconic Bicycle Design by Michael Embacher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The trajectory of my responses to this book: (1) Excitement, (2) mild disappointment, (3) growing admiration with every page turn which (4) canceled out any disappointment, all adding up to (5) five enthusiastic stars.

(1) Excitement upon discovering the book: Wow! I can’t wait to look at pretty pictures of well-designed bicycles.

(2) Mild disappointment upon initial browsing: Whoa! Many of these bikes are not much to look at and an awful lot of them are folding bikes, which aren’t particularly interesting to me.

(3) Admiration as I begin to read, growing with every page turn: The perfect blend of sharp pictures and clear text illuminates why each bike was chosen. Many bikes that seem bland at first glance prove, upon closer inspection by a now better-informed eye, to be subtly elegant paragons of good design. Meanwhile, as the pages pile up, the reader is learning–in easy, bite-sized steps–more than she knew before about the thousand-and-one questions involved in bike engineering and manufacturing.

(4) All disappointment vanishes as this leads to renewed appreciation for every bicycle, and numerous near-crashes as the reader turns her head (while riding her own bicycle) to look more closely at bikes passing by. Back at home on the couch, the pages of her notebook fill with scribbles and doodles inspired by the facts and images in this extraordinary book.

(5) Five stars: The book itself is well-designed, with just the right blend of text and photos for a book of this kind. Apart from the sheer physical joy of looking at (and imagining riding) these bikes, the close reader will be rewarded with information and inspiration.

In sum: This book is right on time. As the planet warms, we need more people to be inspired not only to ride but also to tweak and redesign bikes of all kinds.

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March 16th, 2012 | Tags: bicycles, book review | Category: Books | Leave a comment

Hamid Karzai is demanding an explanation for the  “assasination” of numerous Afghan civilians, including several little girls, by a rampaging US soldier who evidently just went door to door, shooting whoever he happened upon. What could Obama possibly say? “Nothing personal, that’s just how we roll in the USA”? Just in the past week or so, we’ve seen a school shooting in Ohio, a college clinic shooting in Pennsylvania, and a courthouse shooting in Washington state. (We’re also “number one” in serial killers, for what it’s worth.)

I’m serious here: Afghan officials are (reasonably, in their in their minds) requesting an explanation for something that, for most Americans, requires no explanation. It seems normal to us that, relatively regularly, an armed male will go on an indiscriminate shooting rampage. Each of these episodes is seen as an ultimately unexplainable anomaly even as they are collectively accepted as a kind of normal (albeit horrific) periodic natural disaster.

It doesn’t look that way from the outside. Which provokes me to wonder: What would it take for Americans to see themselves as others do or even to look more critically at themselves, regardless of what others think? Short of something like losing World War II, what does it take for members of a violent culture to inquire deeply into the sources of the violence that seems so natural to them?

Because, of course, there are all sorts of things we could do, individually and collectively, to undermine the sources of violence in our everyday lives. But for those kinds of actions to add up to substantial cultural change, they’ve got to be undertaken by a sufficient number of the people who co-create the culture through their collective choices every day. And for that to happen, maybe, there needs to be an awareness of both the bad news that something’s gone wrong and the good news that the way things are right now isn’t how they always have to be. Both require the knowledge that what happens to be normal here and now isn’t the only possibility.

How might artists and activists make that manifest? Any ideas?

(Let’s count this as part 2 in the “to be real” series.)

March 11th, 2012 | Tags: psychology, violence | Category: Facing Facts, violence | Comments (6)

What would you do for a piece of toast? Unless the answer includes spurting plumes of sulfur dioxide into the air and literally killing rivers by making them too acidic for any life other than extremophile microbes to grow, then you need to read this book. Luckily for you, it’s fun to read! Here’s the review I just posted on Goodreads:

The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The premise of this book is simple–build a toaster from scratch–and Twaites’ writing style is similarly straightforward. But what Thwaites is up to here is deep, nothing less than undermining (at one point, literally) the foundations of the throw-away culture upon which both late consumer capitalism and the ongoing rush to wreck the planet depend.

Thwaites tells the story in a matter-of-fact, at times deadpan, voice, punctuating the tale with fun facts, amusing email, and quick character sketches of people met along the way. It’s a fun, fast read with a powerful message made palatable by the breezy style.

Don’t undercut your own enjoyment by reading too many reviews that might reveal key events or conclusions too soon. Just jump in and enjoy the ride.

View all my reviews

February 22nd, 2012 | Tags: book review | Category: Books, climate, economics | Leave a comment

Down in South Carolina, baby-faced Newt Gingrich bemoans the inexplicable failure of the masses to see him as the savior-of-civilization he believes himself to be. Meanwhile in North Korea, chubby-cheeked Kim Jong-Un steps forward as the new “supreme leader” of the Democratic People’s Republic, ready to protect the people from all who menace them.

As North Koreans acclaim their new leader and U.S. voters assess the ideological purity of the Republican candidates for President, now might be a good time to look at the similarities between North Korea and the United States. While self-consciously poised as antipodes—one triumphantly capitalist and the other ostensibly communist, each at times condemning the other as the embodiment of evil—these two “democracies” share more features than either would care to acknowledge. Chief among these is what B.R. Myers, writing about North Korea, calls “paranoid nationalism.”

Former DPRK Kim Jong-Il’s death and his son Kim Jong-Un’s accession have drawn a new round of attention to Meyers’ colorful 2010 treatise, The Cleanest Race, which purports to clarify the North Korean “cult of personality” for befuddled foreigners who might be tempted to write off that nation’s aggrandizing rhetoric as insane or insincere. According to Myers, North Koreans mean it when they revere their leaders, whom they see as embodiments of the essence of their own inherent superiority. In other words, when North Koreans sing the praises of leaders such as Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il they are actually praising themselves. Like true-red-white-and-blue Americans, North Koreans see themselves not only as uniquely virtuous but also everlastingly endangered. Hence the need for a strong-armed leader with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

American candidates for office routinely state that the United States is “the greatest country in the world,” sometimes going so far as to retroactively include all of human history in the comparative assessment. To hear FoxNews tell it, we are persistently besieged by terrorists who hate our freedom and by immigrants who will pollute our culture unless kept in check by English-only laws and a militarized border. Meanwhile, the mediocre thinkers who pass for our intellectual class debate with straight faces the concept of “American exceptionalism” as if this notion were anything other than manifestly fantastical.

How different is this, really, from North Korean claims of inherently exceptional (and always endangered) purity?

Let me put that another way: If any other country were to rank 37th in the world health care, 17th  in the world in educational achievement, and 36th (tied with Cuba) in life expectancy while insisting that all candidates for the highest office in the land make counter-factual statements concerning the country’s overall superiority, what would you call that?

If the citizens of any country other than the United States assumed that it was their natural right to lead the world on every issue—not sometimes lead, sometimes follow, and most of the time cooperate, but actually take charge on every matter of international concern—what would you call that?

I call it delusional hubris. And so I am curious to understand the roots of such self-aggrandizement elsewhere, in case it might shed light on the psychological forces that lead our country and its leaders to behave so dangerously. (Yes, I mean you Barack Obama—don’t think you’re off the hook just because the Republicans are so flagrantly deranged. The current chaos in Pakistan comes courtesy of your arrogant insistence on death by drone when the true allies of democracy in the region could have told you what to do instead.)

I found The Cleanest Race to be illuminating albeit imperfect. The basic premise of the book is sound: What looks like nonsense from the outside often proves to be both internally consistent and psychologically meaningful. (That’s true, by the way, not only for popular political delusions but also for personal psychoses.)  Myers marshals masses of illustrations of the key themes he sees in recent and current North Korean propaganda and pop culture, all of which spring from and flow into what he sees as the fundamental motif: “The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.”

Myers stresses the maternal characteristics attributed to the male leader of North Korea

So far so good. But Myers’ own biases betray him when he sets about explaining themes such as mistrust of foreigners or the maternal characteristics attributed to and expected from the male leader. Myers treats Korean history as if it were blank before the era of Japanese colonization, mistaking the absence of a self-consciously national or ethnic identity among the inhabitants of the peninsula for the lack of a distinct culture. This leads him to neglect indigenous traditions when reckoning the sources of the collective psychology he aims to analyze. Of course, all human groups create cultures—that’s the nature of social animals. Like island cultures, peninsular cultures tend to be idiosyncratic. I don’t know enough about indigenous Korean culture to know what Myers missed, but it cannot possibly be the case that no vestiges of pre-colonial Korean culture persist in the psyches of the people today.

Myers simultaneously overstates and minimizes the impact of the 40-year Japanese occupation of Korea, denying the traumatic effect of colonization while at the same time attributing virtually all of the characteristics of post-colonial Korea to ideas and practices borrowed from Japan. Similarly, Myers acknowledges but denies any impact of American activities on the peninsula, which have included occupation of South Korea and indiscriminate bombing of North Korea. Myers concedes that the United States committed war crimes in Korea yet does not take the ensuing trauma and legitimate fear of further aggression into account when assessing North Korean attitudes towards Americans.

“War crimes in North Korea?” I can hear mystified Americans asking. Myers notes the North Korean unwillingness to judge themselves as guilty of any wrongdoing, but there’s one country that carries the presumption of innocence to truly psychotic proportions. Educated Americans—left, right, and in between—debate “immigration” as if the very borders of the nation were not established through an explicitly genocidal process of displacement of the original inhabitants of the land (including the ancestors of many so-called “illegals.”) American soldiers march into other people’s homelands expecting to be greeted as liberators and then feel sincerely aggrieved—innocently outraged—at any resistance they encounter. American consumers gobble up far more than their fair share of the world’s resources and then accuse environmentalists of evil intentions.

And don’t get me started on whiteness. Suffice it to say that it’s no surprise to me that Ron Paul’s right-wing racist newsletters haven’t kept even self-proclaimed progressives from supporting him.

I’ve not yet seen the book that adequately plumbs the “brain trouble” that historian Oscar Ameringer identified as a key determinant of American history. Since we’re the more dangerous rogue nuclear state, that’s a glaring gap. (“Brain Trouble” was the title of my original dissertation. Maybe I’ll have to pick that project back up.)

Despite its shortcomings, The Cleanest Race has helped me to make better sense of the stories and pictures coming out of North Korea in the wake of the death of Kim Jong-Il. I can see in the ways that Kim Jong-Un is conducting himself and being presented a replication of the persona previously occupied by his grandfather and father. And many of his subjects do seem to be sincerely hailing him as the latest incarnation of the the heroic and protective genius of the nation.

That’s gotta be killing Newt.

January 15th, 2012 | Tags: book review, politics, psychology | Category: Books, politics, Psychology | Comments (1)

January 10th, 2012 | Tags: politics | Category: gender, politics, race | Comments (1)

I teach a community college course called “Women Respond to Violence” in which we examine varieties of violence and the multiplicity of ways that women (and their male allies) have struggled to understand and intervene in its causes and consequences. (Here’s the syllabus for the upcoming semester.)

Most of the students are survivors of some form of violence, such as sexual assault, domestic battery or war. Most are women; many are refugees.  Most are poor or working class; some are or have been homeless. Many live in violent neighborhoods; all, along with you and me, live in a dangerously deranged biosphere in which babies are born with (literally) hundreds of industrial chemicals (many of them neurotoxins) already floating in their blood.

In other words, most students come into the class with substantial real-world experience of violence. And yet, about halfway through each semester, the class collectively pronounces itself stunned (and overwhelmed) by the extent and variety of abuses human beings have and continue to inflict on each other (this is before we get to violence against animals and ecosystems, which tends to prompt another round of horrified surprise).

No, I don’t leave them in that lurch. The point of the course is empowerment, not demoralization. But true empowerment can only come within a real assessment of the situation. Otherwise, it’s all pep talks and smiley faces—superficial succor instead of substantial skill-building. So we face the facts squarely, knowing that doing so is a requirement for figuring out what we can do that might actually have a chance of making a difference (rather than just making us feel better).

As a new year begins, I find myself wanting to make a similar but broader assessment of inconvenient facts. I want to pile them all up together and then see where the chinks in the wall might be. This might be what Joanna Macy recommended as a spark to anti-nuke activism: Directly confronting, rather than shiftily avoiding, the sources of despair.

I think that I’ll start by recapping some of the distressing facts that I and my students wrestle with every semester. (I’m about to launch into a new 15-week cycle of that class, so various topics will be especially fresh in my mind as the exercise unfolds.) Then, I’ll tally up other troubling realities that I often wonder whether social change activists in various movements are adequately accounting for. Probably, I’ll need to go offline and non-linear at some point, but I can scan and post any scribbles or sketches.

The hope is that looking at the aggregation of inconvenient facts—and looking especially at the connections among them, at the ecology of violence—might help in crafting more realistic social change strategies. Whether consciously or not, all social change strategies are rooted in assumptions about what people are like and how the world works. If these unspoken assumptions are inaccurate, the strategies may be inherently unlikely to achieve their aims. Real-world change can only come through an accurate assessment of the facts on the ground.

I invite you along with me on this exercise. What facts, when they come to mind, tend to punch your morale in the stomach? What thoughts lead you into the temptation to throw up your hands and quit trying? Share them with me in the comments, and I’ll be sure to include them in the process.

(This is the first of what will be I-dont-know-how-many parts  in the “To Be Real” series. I’ve created a new category—Facing Facts—for the series, and I’ll go back and add relevant past posts to that category for our mutual reference.)

January 7th, 2012 | Tags: social change, strategy, teaching, violence | Category: Facing Facts, Teaching, violence | Comments (4)