128. THE DISAPPEARED

From the Archives

(July 2005) Continuing my earlier riff about the disappeared and those shiny happy people who present themselves as so freakin’ wholesome while doing so much harm.

Carolyn Forché identifies herself as a poet of witness. She says “I have been told that a poet should be of his or her own time. It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness. This is not accomplished without certain difficulties. If I did not wish to make poetry of what I had seen, what is it I thought poetry was?”

Gathering The Tribes (1976), her first collection, won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The Country between Us (1982), a volume that focused on the civil war in El Salvador during the 1970s, won the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. This prize, which Minnie Bruce Pratt also won for Crimes against Nature, recognizes the best second book of poetry published in the US. Forché’s other books include the prescient landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which she edited, and The Angel of History (1994).

She read this poem years ago at my writing program and I can still hear her voice as she described the travesty of a grocery bag full of human ears that a general poured onto a table in front of her.

RETURN
by Carolyn Forché

from The Country between Us

—for Josephine Crum

Upon my return to America, Josephine
the iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean
toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving
like lean women. I was afraid more than
I had been, even of motels so much so
that for nine months every tire blow-out
was final, every strange car near the house
kept watch and I strained even to remember
things impossible to forget. You took
my stories apart for hours, sitting
on your sofa with your legs under you
and fifty years in your face.
So you know
now, you said, what kind of money
is involved and that campesinos knife
one another and you know you should
not trust anyone and so you find a few
people you will trust. You know the mix
of machetes with whiskey, the slip of the tongue
that costs hundreds of deaths.
You’ve seen the pits where men and women
are kept the few days it takes without
food and water. You’ve heard the cocktail
conversation on which their release depends.
So you’ve come to understand why
men and women of good will read
torture reports with fascination.
Such things as water pumps
and co-op farms are of little importance
and take years.
It is not Ché Guevara, this struggle.
Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara
was rounded up with the others, and José
Martí is a landing strip for planes
from Miami to Cuba. Go try on
Americans your long, dull story
of corruption, but better to give
them what they want: Li’l Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to shit in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
Dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all
Who fucked her, how many times and when.
Tell them about retaliation: José lying
on the flat bed truck, waving his stumps
in your face, his hands cut off by his
captors and thrown to the many acres
of cotton, lost, still, and holding
the last few lumps of leeched earth.
Tell them of José in his last few hours
and later how, many months earlier,
a labor leader was cut to pieced and buried.
Tell them how his friends found
the soldiers and made them dig him up
and ask forgiveness of the corpse, once
it was assembled again on the ground
like a man. As for the cars, of course
they watch you and for this don’t flatter
yourself. We are all watched. We are
all assembled.

Josephine, I tell you
I have not rested, not since I drove
those streets with a gun in my lap,
not since all manner of speaking has
failed and the remnant of my life
continues onward. I go mad, for example,
in the Safeway, at the many heads
of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples
and coffee, especially the coffee.
And when I speak with American men,
there is some absence of recognition:
their constant Scotch and fine white
hands, many hours of business, penises
hardened by motor inns and a faint
resemblance to their wives. I cannot
keep going. I remember the American
attaché in that country: his tanks
of fish, his clicking pen, his rapt
devotion to reports. His wife wrote
his reports. She said as much as she
gathered him each day from the embassy
compound, that she was tired of covering
up, sick of drinking and the loss
of his last promotion. She was a woman
who flew her own plane, stalling out
after four martinis to taxi on an empty
field in the campo and to those men
and women announce she was there to help.
She flew where she pleased in that country
With her drunken kindness, while Marines
In white gloves were assigned to protect
Her husband. It was difficult work, what
With the suspicion on the rise in smaller
countries that gringos die like other men.
I cannot, Josephine, talk to them,

And so, you say, you’ve learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicians, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
Then they cup their own parts
with their bed sheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer heave the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are trying to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.

So take a moment and ask yourself what Audre Lorde admonishes US women to ask: “How am I using my power?”

104. THE LORD’S LIBERTY COUNCIL AND TERRORIST SOCIETY

From the Archives

(June 2005) Refusal wrote this in his blog today:

Everyone likes a bit of chicken breast. And vultures will stick their heads into almost anything, no matter how dirty it is. They'll even go in up through a dead horse's rectum to eat all its insides out, and that's why they're bald. I'm bald due to an excess of testosterone, but if you've got somewhere nice you'd like me to put my head, I'll surely consider it.

Ha. I like his irreverence.

I want to read this award-winning memoir—Name All the Animals by Alison Smith (Scribner)—and this award-winning biography—Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux (Norton). And am happy to see that the hilarious David Sedaris won a lammy too.

In other news, I find it damn ironic and more than a little frightening that Jerry Falwell not only has a legal wing to his so-called ministry but that he calls it the Liberty Counsel.

•

Found this out in the The Washington Blade , but this rag rarely reaches the mainstream. For example, raise your hand if you know about the diversity training video put together by the San Francisco 49ers' PR director.

This little jewel features off-color humor and a topless lesbo wedding taped in a strip club with the PR director (impersonating San Francisco mayor Newsom) officiating, and racial jokes and nudity are sprinkled throughout.

Meanwhile, out in the really world, these "harmless" little jokes encourage real brutality. And let’s don’t forget that our taboo "life style" that so fascinates the straight guys results in real women being placed under house arrest in Allahabad just a few miles away from the lesbian couple that attempted suicide after their parents forced them to marry men.

So many of us here have so many more options than we even realize, yet we paint ourselves in corners and believe ourselves helpless/out of options. Or we let others limit our freedom with alarming regularity.

What’s that Ferron line: Before you get to plea for freedom, you’ve agreed to being ruled.

99. A POINT IS THAT WHICH HAS NO PART

From the Archives (May 2005)

Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home—Audre Lorde, Zami

I had to rent a vehicle today after my water pump blew and wound up with a big-ass Dodge king-cab truck. Sent an email to my pal Tuscaloosa describing my ride and she wrote back “I would pay good money to see you driving that truck, Ms. thang.”

Funny.

I blasted Lucinda on the way to class because, well, it just didn't feel right to play Mozart in a big-ass truck. Was also thinking about the fact that anyone who really knows me already knows that I am just a redneck dressed up in prof clothes at heart.

Example: If you make me froggy enough, then I am always gonna jump, damn the consequences.

And I’m always thinking “Huh, wonder what would happen if I attach a hook to that doohickey and a cable to this doohickey and jump on it” or “Bet I could jump off that thing and land on my feet” or “Wonder what would happen if I attach this steering wheel to that motor and stick a couple of wheels on the thing, then strap myself in, wind 'er up, and go?”

And finally, I swear on a stack of girl scout cookies that I once successfully outraced a cop on a rural red clay road while driving my extremely fast and highly modified 350-small-block, big Holley four-barreled, posi-track rear-ended Camaro way, way back in the day of my extremely mis-spent and thoroughly lived youth.

Plus, apropos to nothing at all except the fact that I just thought of it, my ex Tree can vouch for the fact that, for the first several years after we bought a two-story house, I climbed out a bedroom window onto the top of our one-story garage, did a chin-up onto the second-story roof, then flipped up onto the roof backwards to clean the gutters.

(This worked fine till the first time I slipped on pine straw; then we bought a decent ladder.)

•

Okay. What I meant to write before I went off on that tangent is that I am a member of a hilarious secret lesbian sex society called Delta Phelta Thigh and would like to report that, during our founding initiation, we made a list of all the women with whom we’ve slept (or at least as many as we could remember).

Since many of the initiates have lived in the same place since grad school, our list wound up resembling the interlocking sex chart on The L Word. And, since several couples were initiated together, I can report that I know of at least two affairs were not documented at all.

I’ve been in two long-term relationships for most of my adulthood but had a few wild bar-hopping years before that, so my list is relatively shortl. It’s quality, not quantity that counts though, right? : D

Meanwhile, the first line of Euclid's Elements is "A point is that which has no part" and I'm sure that I must have a point here somewhere!

BEST BUMPERSTICKER: Greed Pollutes.

2. SITUATIONAL ETHICS

From the Archives

(March 2005) My friend Petra got mugged leaving work Wednesday night. A man rushed her as she walked to her car, grabbed her purse, and began punching her in the head.

Petra is a small woman with scant upper-body strength. She’s also an actor who knows how to project, and so she screamed ... and tried to run away ... and pushed him off of her ... and pounded on her office door ... and screamed some more ... and finally managed to break free and run.

She eventually made it back inside her office, but her jaw is broken, one eye is swollen shut, her forehead has goose-eggs all over it, and a shoulder is scraped and badly bruised.

Her husband Lee, a lawyer, said he can hardly bear the thought of one of his colleagues defending his wife’s attacker. He wants to ask that the man’s lawyer be appointed from another district.

If they find her attacker, that is.

Petra counsels addicts and is fairly certain that her attacker is a client in her building.

On Thursday, a bunch of us creative types met Lee and Petra at a pub where theater types hang out. We shared some vino, celebrated her escape, and offered support as best we could to someone who is trying to adjust to living in a different world.

Petra said she went into counseling because she wanted to make a difference in the world but, these days, she just feels jaded. Most of her clients never escape their addictions and their children grow up just as damaged as they are, to mostly repeat their parents’ lives.

She works grueling hours on a state employee’s salary and cares enough to stay late—which, frankly, she said, just leaves her vulnerable to attack.

She has resigned herself to the fact that she will probably not make a difference in most of her clients’ lives.

Dennis, who works with Petra, once opposed the death penalty in all cases. But then he met a boy who pounded a claw hammer into an eighty-year-old woman’s skull just so he could show off her Cadillac to his pals.

He's met too many people just like that boy—children with pop someone for a joyride or fifty cents—and so has come to doubt some people’s humanity (although he does recognize that their world may not provide the possibility of their humanity).

Now, if the evidence is overwhelming and the murderer is found guilty by a true jury of his or her peers, then Dennis believes that we ought to just go ahead and give the foreperson a gun and get it over with—save us and the criminal from himself.

(Wonder what he’ll do with the fact that, yesterday, the US Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors?)

•

I realized some time ago that I am the only one among my immediate circle of friends who cannot say with absolute conviction that I am always opposed to the death penalty.

I struggle with this issue. Sure, I understand that our justice system is blatantly racist, that innocent people sit on death row and that some of them will be executed not because they’re guilty but because they were born poor and could not afford decent representation.

I know that guilty people who can afford good representation can get away with murder because the hoards of people working on their cases are able to devote the energy required to find the inevitable technicality that spells freedom.

And I know that plenty of people are in jail because they grew up angry at a world they have every right to be angry at and then, not surprisingly, became the embodiment of that Audre Lorde poem about the disaffected teenager who becomes the ticking time bomb that will come due.

I know that, in the twenty-first century, there is money to be made from privatizing prisons and locking up whole segments of the population, and that this despicable form of social control is allowed to happen because, as a society, we have decided that some among us are expendable.

I know that plenty of businesspeople are happy to perpetuate this system because it allows them to rake in those privatization dollars. And everyone knows our rehab programs are a joke.

But here’s my problem with being 100 percent opposed to the death penalty: I have listened to cassette tapes of women being tortured to death and have stared into the eyes of the man who tortured them—a man who was, incidentally, wearing a Mork and Mindy T-shirt; someone who, in another circumstance, might be the guy behind you or me at the isolated all-night gas station. I also observed one of his victims' autopsies.

This man had already served a seven-year sentence for cutting a woman’s nipples off with a butcher knife when he kidnapped the woman whose autopsy I observed.

He raped and tortured and abused this woman over the course of several hours, then left her body in a field for wild dogs to eat.

This animal was fascinated with pain—which I suppose explains why he chose to tape-record her pleas and screams and sobs and gasps as he cut off her digits one knuckle at a time before skinning her alive. That was apparently not enough pain for him though, so he proceeded to pour salt onto her newly exposed skin and recorded her response as she lay there gasping and howling and bleeding to death in the dirt.

Later, he replayed those tapes, remembering.

I recognized his eyes the moment they caught my own. They’re the same eyes I saw when I visited my mother in the violent wards of mental hospitals. Goat eyes. One-dimensional eyes. Gone flat.

Those eyes scare the living shit out of me—especially when I see them on people walking freely down the street.

Some people on the violent wards are obsessed with their excrement—hurl it against the walls or fingerpaint with it. They bang their heads into the iron bars until they’re put into straitjackets, then bark and howl and reach through the bars for you as you walk by.

And, sadly, in some cases, whatever it is that makes most of us compassionate empathetic human beings is just permanently gone.

Maybe their violence is an outward projection of their own self-hatred or the hate their parents or the world projected onto them. Maybe they inherited the worst of both parents. Maybe they saw too much violence. Or maybe people were just too mean to them. Or maybe (to paraphrase a country song) they were just born bad.

And maybe medicine is never going to help.

Whatever the cause, some of us will always lack connection and will, instead, embody an unquenchable will to violence. And, if someone is unfortunate enough to encounter this person at an inopportune time, then she or he will become this person’s next victim.

•

The first thing colonists did when they settled a new place was build a church and a jail. They recognized how fragile communities are, the necessity of creating institutions that sustain and protect our fragile human connections. They recognized that some actions are so threatening to our connections that the people who commit these acts must be separated from others in order to protect the whole.

I read seventeenth-century English literature because I believe that we are at a similar cultural juncture. And I'm a poet who is prone to think in symbols and microcosms.

I imagine our country as a microcosm, a single colony of disparate but interconnected individuals existing in a fragile and destructible world where the violent results of unquenchable rage can damage and eventually un-tune the whole friggin’ spheres.

That's the Holocaust. That's Revelations.

My objection to the total elimination of the death penalty has nothing to do with revenge or the cost-to-profit ratio of the appeals process versus permanent incarceration, or the quest to understand what brain or hormonal or emotional abnormality destroys the human component of the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world.

Instead, I worry about the potential Machiavelli or Hitler in the rest of us. I worry that the risk a torturer’s potential escape poses to our society, the potential havoc he can wreak on our fragile connections, on our faith, is too great a threat for us to allow for that possibility.