Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Riot dog, Chile.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

SHOPPING SPREE | ANNE WALDMAN

Whose whose property property is whose whose in the origin origin of marriage marriage. In in the the not not always always but sometimes sometimes gloom & doom gloom & doom of marriage marriage. Would would a person person buy buy another another. Could could a person person buy buy another another arrange arrange another another & be another’s another’s sometime sometime body body captor captor. When Diego held the paintbrushes? A rapture maybe. Mister Mister. A rupture. And make it a bond for arrangement of the other’s mind & body parts. Hearts. Mrs. Mrs. and soul. And black market organs organs. And sexual psyche. Might be. Could another buy another in such a way as to own a sexual soul psyche. You who are a buying kind tell me. Joint accounts are a trusting way to go some think others are burned in the shopping spree of broad daylight. And if if separation separation set sets in in beware beware the turning turning tide tide. Start labeling. This this is mine mine no no this this is mine mine. The child is mine. This this is surely surely mine mine. I don’t think so it used to be mine mine before you were mine mine. You were never a goldmine you might add although you were mine. Things things mount up up to chastise you in their frenzy frenzy. Custody custody is brutal brutal. (one voice) Custody is brutal.

from MARRIAGE: A SENTENCE

[American Dream]

SHAME ON!

CHRYSTOS

fake shamen give me some money
I’ll make you a catholic priest in a week
couple thousand I’ll name you pope
of our crystal breakfast cereal circle of healers
Give me some money you’ll be free
Give me some money you’ll be whole
Give me some money you’ll be right
with past lives zooming by your door
Steal from anybody to make a paste-up tacked-on
holy cat box of nothing
I tell you I’m sincere & that excuses everything
I’m a sincere thief a sincere rapist a sincere killer
My heart is pure my head is fuzzy give me some money
& you’ll be clear
Your pockets will be anyhow
Give me a dime I’ll erase your crime
Give me a dollar give me ten give me a thousand
fastest growing business in america
is shame men shame women
You could have a sweat same as you took manhattan
you could initiate people same as into the elks
with a bit of light around your head
& some “Indian” jewelry from hong kong, why you’re all set
Come on now take something more that doesn’t belong to you
Come on & take that’s what you know best
Whites take Red turns away
Listen I’ve got a whole bunch of holey underpants
you could use in a ceremony you can make up yourself
Be a born again Indian it’s easy
You want to buy spiritual enlightenment we got plenty
& if you act today we’ll throw in four free 100-watt lightbulbs
so you can have your own private halo
What did you say? You met lynn andrews in person?
That woman ought to be in a bitter herb stew
I’ll sell you lies half-price better than hers
america is starving to death for spiritual meaning
It’s the price you pay for taking everything
It’s the price you pay for buying everything
It’s the price you pay for loving your stuff more than life
Everything goes on without you
You can’t hear the grass breathe
because you’re too busy talking
about being a holy Indian woman two hundred years ago
You sure must stink if you didn’t let go
The wind doesn’t want to talk to you
because you’re always right
even when you don’t know what you’re talking about
We’ve been polite for five hundred years
& you still don’t get it
Take nothing you cannot return
Give to others give more
Walk quietly Do what needs to be done
Give thanks for your life
Respect all beings
simple
& it doesn’t cost a penny

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

PLAINTAIN | ERIKA JEFFERS


Early in de morning she fry him plantain
to eat wit he long bread, guava jelly, an tea.

She bring it to he as he sit tall on de chair
in front de telly. Den she wake de kids

and ready dem for school. Comb dey
hair, pack dey bag, an fix dey breakfast plate

before de bus come tek dem away.
Husband vex ‘cause de bread too tough

an tea grow cold; nat sweet anyway.
He gather he self for work an rush

out de door. While de house empty
she clean de floors, wash de clothes,

den tek de good book out to praise de Lord.
She tank Him for de new day, de house,

her beautiful children dat bore
from de wrong man. She close

de book an return to de work,
all de while singing ‘amazin grace.’


http://worlddatadesign.com/kwelijournal ... bPageID=85

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

WHAT’S GENOCIDE? | CARLOS ANDRÉS GÓMEZ

their high school principal
told me I couldn’t teach
poetry with profanity
so I asked my students,
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas
then straightened out like an SS infantry
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
blank stares mixed with curious ignorance
a quivering hand out of the crowd
half-way raised, like a lone survivor
struggling to stand up in Kigali
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”

“Carlos—what’s genocide?”

they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.

I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”

“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”

“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”

…what’s genocide?

they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them

…what’s genocide?

Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him

…what’s genocide?

Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade

…what’s genocide?

she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal

…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Luz, this…
this right here…

is genocide.”

[American Dream]

MOVING TOWARDS HOME BY JUNE JORDAN

“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.”
“Who will bring me my loved one?”
New York Times, 9/20/82
(after the 1982 Phalangist/Israeli Massacre of Palestinian Refugees in Sabra and Shatila)
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and
the stench
that will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors and
the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the dead
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare”to purify” a people
those who dare”to exterminate” a people
those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare”to mop up”
“to tighten the noose”
“to step up the military pressure”
“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representatives
of the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning
because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten into
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home



I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?



It is time to make our way home.

[American Dream]

EJIDO, FERNANDO MARTÍ


Todos somos Marcos, todos somos Ramona,
todos somos ilegales, in somebody else’s eyes…

Tex the Indian gets up
from his blanket on the sidewalk,
wipes his stubbled chin with
the edge of his hand.
He hasn’t sold a thing today,
but above us business is good
at the 16th Street Hotel,
“chiva, chiva,” “mota, mota,” and “hey baby,”
we listen to the sounds of my street.

Tex points to a square of dirt carved
out of the concrete, where a tree used to be.
“That’s my ejido,” he says, “that’s
where I’ll plant my corn this year.”
We laugh, because the dirt is hard as rock,
and the only thing it’s good for
is growing candy wrappers and needles.
But Tex says, “I’ve been planting corn
in the desert all my life…” and
turns to a new customer.

Funny how borders have a way of
passing over us, funny how white people
like to surround the land they’ve taken with
concrete walls and shiny barbed-wire fences.
Funny how we find ourselves perdidos,
buscando asilo en el corazón de imperio,
donde nadie existe sin su precio,
y todo está de venta…
“And this one,” Tex says, “this little Zapatista doll,
she’s Ramona, y’know, the comandante:
You can have her for 50 cents…”

Todos somos Marcos, todos somos Ramona,
todos somos ilegales, in somebody else’s eyes.

[American Dream]

VIOLENCE is to work 40 years for peanuts and wondering if you will ever retire.

VIOLENCE is state bonds, stolen pension funds, the stock market scam.

VIOLENCE is to be forced to take out a home loan which you end up paying back like it was gold.

VIOLENCE is the right of an employer to fire you any time he or she likes.

VIOLENCE is unemployment, insecurity, 700 euros salary with or without social security.

VIOLENCE is workplace “accidents” because bosses reduce their costs at the expense of their employees’ safety.

VIOLENCE is taking psychotropic drugs and vitamins to cope with exhausting hours.

VIOLENCE is to be an immigrant, to live in fear that you are likely to be deported any time and experiencing constant insecurity.

VIOLENCE is to be an employee, housewife, and mother at the same time.

VIOLENCE is to be groped at work and told: “Smile, we are not asking you for much, are we?”.

—Leaflet by the liberated town hall of Agios Dimitros, Greece, December 2008

[American Dream]

Wings

Cuba y Puerto Rico son Cuba and Puerto Rico
de un pájaro las dos alas. are the two wings of one bird,
Reciben flores y balas receiving flowers and bullets
en el mismo corazon. into the same heart.
Lola Rodriguez de Tió

Two wings of one bird, said the exiled poet
whose words burned too many holes of truth
through the colonial air of a different iron-toothed occupation.
Nothing divides the suffering of the conquered.
Two wings, she said, of a single bird, with one heart between them,
taking bullets and roses, soldiers and prison bars and poetry,
into one pulse of protest. One bird she insisted
as the ship pulled away from San Juan headed for Havana, 1879.


A century later we are still the wounded wing,
fluttering, dragged through the waves, another empire
plucking feathers from living flesh. White egret among the foam,
cried the poet, returning after long years in the dry solitude of Spain:
garza, garza blanca. Those ruffled reefs are infested now
with unexploded bombs. Pastures where white birds
still grace the backs of cattle, are dusted with the toxic waste
of rehearsal for invasion, that seeps into the blood of children,
so that cancer is a required course in the highschools of Vieques,
giving a whole new meaning to the term "drop out".
I was born into an occupied country. I am that wing.

What kind of Jew are you, receiving bullets and roses
as if in a Palestinian heart?
I am the Jewish great-great-grandaughter of Puerto Rican slaveholders.
I am the Puerto Rican great-great-grandaughter of Ukrainian socialists.
I am the surviving branch of a family tree split at the turn of the last
century
holding the photograph of nameless cousins
who missed the last train to Siberia
and fell into the trenches of summer
as Nazi armies rolled across the farmlands of Kherson.
I am the educated grandaughter of a Puerto Rican seamstress
who never went past the eighth grade,
whose fingers bled into the spandex of sweatshop assembly line girdles,
a long subway ride from the barrios where she lived,
the grandaughter of an electrician
wiring battleships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, of a communist
studying law at night and serving deli by day, and of a social worker
trying to plug the holes in immigrant lifeboats.
I am a daughter of occupation and conquest, of deportation and escape.
I am a daughter of people who were outgunned and refused to die.
I am a colonial subject with a stone in my hand when I listen to the news.
I am a fierce Latina Jew holding out a rose to Palestine.

I am the Jewish grand-niece of a Puerto Rican WWII soldier
cracking up in the bloody Pacific in the service of an army
that always sent the brown men in first. I am the Puerto Rican cousin
of Jewish evacuees trying to flee eastward, shot in the back
by Ukrainian collaborators who lived just down the road.
I am the daughter of red pacifists married in the year of Korea,
a two-winged child conceived as the Rosenbergs died,
born as Lolita was shackled
into her quarter century of punishment for shooting into the air.
I was born Jewish in an occupied Caribbean land, speaking Spanish
with the accent of escaped slaves and hungry coffee laborers,
because my great-grandfather would not fight Japan for the Tsar,
because he evaded yet another imperial draft,
and washed up in New York City
where barrio meets shtetl, girl meets boy and solidarity was my lullabye.

What kind of independentista are you, to weep for Israeli soldiers
drafted into accepting atrocity as a fact of life,
beating out the ritmo of kaddish for colonialists
wrongfully killed in rightful revolution
on the conga of your caribe heart?
I am the proud cousin of a banned Boricua writer
climbing out of his deathbed to raise the flag of Puerto Rico
on the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion, just two weeks before he
died
of tb contracted in the bitter prison cells of Valladolid.
I am a distant relative of the first woman of Puerto Rico
burned by the Inquisition in the name of Christ, for being a secret Jew.
I am the descendant of hacendados
who worked their own slave children to the bone in tobacco fields
ripening over the traces of uprooted plantings of casabe
and of the pale brown daughters of dark women,
taken into the marriage beds of landholding men,
criada servants deemed good enough for younger sons,
setting their wide cheeks and mouths into their children's bones.
I am the descendant of invaders and invaded,
now riding high on history's wheel, now crushed below,
of those evicted and their village burned,
of those who rode the horses and set the flames.

What kind of song is this? Whose side are you on?
Two wings, I say with the exiled poets of my country
to my disposessed and disposessing cousins
in the land it seems that everyone was promised.
Two wings with a single heart between them:
intifada and partisaner, refusnik and cimarron.
Nothing divides the suffering. One bird full of bullets and roses,
one bird with its wounded pinions,
one heart that if it breaks is broken. I know there are two bloody
wings,
but it is one bird trying to lift itself into the air,
one bird turning in circles on the ground, because
two wings rising and falling together,
is the forgotten principle of flight. Two wings
torn by tempestuous weather.
One bird struggling into the light.


Aurora Levins Morales

[American Dream]

Domestic workers really do a good job of modeling for the social justice movement. One of the things that I find so consistently inspiring and powerful about the leadership of domestic workers in our alliance is that as mostly working class or poor women, women of color, and immigrants they live inside of that experience, that class experience. Then they go to work, and they oftentimes work for employers that are much more wealthy and almost on the other end of the wealth spectrum from where they are, so they understand that different class experience and that reality, because they live inside of that in terms of their employers. So they have this incredibly sharp understanding of inequality. AND yet, they also have this incredible depth of humanity, because they actually love and care for the families that they work for; they couldn’t do the work every day if they didn’t.

So they have cultivated a deep, deep capacity for compassion and humanity inside of a really sharp understanding of inequality. And I think that is the place from which we can build a really powerful movement for change. It’s really that sharpness and that clarity of all that’s wrong, of all that’s out of balance in the universe that really needs fundamental transformation. And we need to be able to do it from a place of deep compassion, love and a place of connection to humanity, to the sense of universal humanity. I think that domestic workers, in a lot of ways, have that piece down, and there’s a lot that we as social justice activists can really learn from them in that way.

— Ai-Jen Poo | Domestic Workers & Finding Balance Through the Lens of Love

http://transform.transformativechange.o ... s-of-love/

[American Dream]

“There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.”

Selma James– Sex, Race, & Class

[American Dream]

“Racism abounds in the writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries. Past feminist refusal to draw attention to and attack racial hierarchies suppressed the link between race and class. Yet this class structure in American society has been shaped by the racial politic of white supremacy; it is only by analyzing racism and its function in capitalist society that a thorough understanding of class relationships can emerge.”

— bell hooks Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center