Boys
Left alone on a page — the word, Love – looks promising. A secret code; unhinged from meaning — without being empty exactly, but hollow nonetheless.
My boys call me and tell me when they beat their wives.
Remorseful, Emphatic. They tell me why it happened. How. They accept blame. It doesn’t happen all the time, I am told (only when they are drunk). They are not defensive, they sound tired and matter-of-fact. Defeated.
I protest. My outrage feels performed, used. They know my knives are blunt. They understand that I have left this battlefield and that I won’t trouble them with my uncomfortable, inconvenient rage. All I have left is an exhausting sadness.
My heart is in pieces, I tell them. They know.
Like this:
Redefining Marriage Equality
The institution of marriage describes a personal and emotional choice between two individuals. One not everyone chooses nor should choose. In as much that we grant social, legal, political and institutional benefits to married people lies the fundamental inequality in marriage.
In other words, the very nature of how marriage is practiced needs to be disrupted. Not the solidifying of marriage privilege by recruiting more members to its continued, unchallenged authority.
[Previous post on marriage here.]
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Slip of the Tongue by Adriel Luis [Poetry in Film]
An awesome piece of poetry in motion…
By Adriel Luis
My glares burn through her.
And I’m sure that such actions aren’t foreign to her
because the essence of her beauty is, well, the essence of beauty.
And in the presence of this higher being,
the weakness of my masculinity kicks in,
causing me to personify my wannabe big-baller, shot-caller,
God’s gift to the female species with shiny suit wrapping rapping like,
“Yo, what’s crackin shorty how you livin’ what’s your sign what’s your size I dig your style, yo.”
Now, this girl was no fool.
She gives me a dirty look with the quickness like,
“Boy, you must be stupid.”
so I’m looking at myself,
“Boy, you must be stupid.”
But looking upon her I am kinda feelin’ her style.
So I try again.
But, instead of addressing her properly,
I blurt out one of my fake-ass playalistic lines like,
“Gurl, you must be a traffic ticket cuz you got fine written all over you.”
Now, she’s trying to leave and I’m trying to keep her here.
So at a final attempt, I utter,
“Gurl, what is your ethnic makeup?”
At this point, her glare was scorching through me,
and somehow she manages to make her brown eyes
resemble some kinda brown fire or something,
but there’s no snap or head moement,
no palm to face, click of tongue, middle finger,
roll of eyes, twist of lips, or girl power chant.
She just glares through me with these burning eyes
and her gaze grabs you by the throat.
She says, “Ethnic makeup?”
She says, “First of all, makeup’s just an anglicized, colonized, commodified utility
that my sisters have been programmed to consume,
forcing them to cover up their natural state
in order to imitate what another sister looks like in her natural state
because people keep telling her
that the other sister’s natural state is more beautiful
than the first sister’s natural state.
At the same time,
the other sister isn’t even in her natural state,
because she’s trying to imitate yet another sister,
so in actuality, the natural state that the first sister’s trying to imitate
wasn’t even natural in the first place.”
Now I’m thinking, “Damn, this girl’s kicking knowledge!”
But, meanwhile, she keeps spitting on it like
“Fine. I’ll tell you bout my ‘ethnic makeup.’
I wear foundation,
not that powdery shit,
I wear the foundation laid by my indigenous people.
It’s that foundation that makes it so that past being globalized,
I can still vocalize with confidence that i know where my roots are.
I wear this foundation not upon my face, but within my soul,
and I take this from my ancestors
because I’ll be damned if I’d ever let an American or European corporation
tell me what my foundation
should look like.”
I wear lipstick,
for my lips stick to the ears of men,
so they can experience in surround sound my screams of agony
with each lash of rulers, measuring tape, and scales,
as if my waistline and weight are inversely propotional to my value as a human being.
See my lips, they stick, but not together.
Rather, they flail open with flames to burn down this culture that once kept them shut.
Now, I mess with eye shadow,
but my eyes shadow over this time where you’ve gone at ends to keep me blind.
But you can’t cover my eyes, look into them.
My eyes foreshadow change.
My eyes foreshadow light.
and I’m not into hair dyeing.
but I’m here, dying, because this oppression won’t get out of my hair.
I have these highlights.
They are highlights of my past atrocities,
they form this oppression I can’t wash off.
It tangles around my mind and twists and braids me in layers,
this oppression manifests,
it’s stressing me so that even though I don’t color my hair,
in a couple of years it’ll look like I dyed it gray.
So what’s my ethnic makeup ?
I don’t have any.
Because your ethnicity isn’t something you can just make up.
And as for that crap my sisters paint on their faces, that’s not makeup, it’s make-believe.”
I can’t seem to look up at her.
and I’m sure that such actions aren’t foreign to her
because the expression on her face
shows that she knows that my mind is in a trance.
As her footsteps fade, my ego is left in crutches.
And rejection never sounded so sweet.
Like this:
Cellar Door Open Thread
What’s up? What did you write about?
Mix-Tape Fridays – Enrique Iglesias – I Like It
Like this:
Cyn McCurry’s “Out of the Storm Against the Tide”
For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further Analysis
by Anne SextonNot that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
[...]
Read the rest of the poem here.
Anne Sexton was tagged a “confessional poet” in her day and criticized for being “too personal” in her poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967.
In 1974 at the age of 46, she committed suicide.
Below is a clip of Anne Sexton talking about death and reading from her poem, Wanting to Die.
Like this:
At best, misgendering a person is disrespectful; but when done deliberately, knowingly — it is always an act of violence.
Mistakes are made; which is not the same as asking trans communities to tolerate them. The truth that many do, with grace and tact, does not dim the cis privileged ignorance on display. Check yourself. Check your ignorance. Also if you have ever used to the word, cisphobia — you are just a straight-up idiot.
Go read this wonderful post by Trananarchism.
If you want to be a good ally, you need to start taking cissexism and transphobia seriously right now. That means getting our goddamn pronouns right and not expecting a cookie for it. That means learning our names. That means not asking invasive questions or telling us how well we “pass.” (Passing generally means “looking cis.” Not all of us want to look like you, thank you very much.) That means deleting the words “tranny” and “shemale” from your vocabulary. That means understanding the immense privilege you have in your legally recognized, socially approved, medically assigned gender.
Seriously, stop everything — Go read the full post now.
Like this:
Get Your Transphobia Out of my Feminism
Girl. Woman. Female. However much you re-inscribe meanings to old words to your semantic delight, there will always be meanings left out, meanings that ask for new words, new languages, new mediums of actualization. Less with the demarcating points of origin, searching for predetermined lexical precursors for future selves. In the midst of often discontinuous histories, GIRL is best a complicated destination to which some never arrive and others arrive more than once. — Anyazelie Mi’raj Zephyaire
The entire post is worth reading.
At some level, the relationship between transphobia and misogyny has long been acknowledged by feminists. There is an understanding of the ways in which these separate hatreds rely on policing gender expression through violence — physical, emotional and structural.
But this fairly opportunistic acknowledgement (by feminists) is not enough. As we know, a group of people need not be beaten down in order to be silenced — they can simply be rendered invisible.
In the larger feminist movement, in too many feminist discourses — transgender stories, lives and identities are deemed irrelevant or beyond the scope of the current discussion. This second assertion is perhaps the more often, appropriately politically correct thing to say when asked about the transgender community. It’s time we demand more. If transgender experiences are “beyond the scope of the discussion” — change the scope. Fuck the scope.
Both the reclamation of femininity and anti-femininity often gets weighed with anti-transgender subtexts. Transgender communities are pathologized as products of patriarchy or criticized from the position of cis gendered privilege. Discussions around gender roles continue to hold a gaping hole where transgender experiences need to be.
When feminists say, “But this is about women!” — they are not making space for marginalized voices as much as they are using their cis gendered privilege to further invisiblize an entire community (who have historically, socially, politically, legally already been rendered disregard-able). It’s not a reason for applause, it’s an explanation for a failure. These are all problematic and endemic to how feminists choose to dialogue about gender.
The question isn’t about “making room” for transgender voices within feminist politics. The image of those with power seated at an exclusive table deciding whether they have time/space to dole out equality to everyone is colonial, archaic and fundamentally flawed.
Language has so much more potentiality for inclusivity than it’s allowed, and the tendency of cis feminists to engage in this ironical process of trying to deconstruct / de-essentialize gender from a position of assumed, sometimes affirmed, “bio-female” essentiality is really frustrating. Stop trying to reglaze an old porcelain vase; break the damn pot already.
— Anyazelie Mi’raj Zephyaire
(Also get your racism, classism, casteism, communalism, colonialism, islamophobia, ableism, anti-immigrant, anti-femininity, anti-sex work out of my feminism. Await my rants.)
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“You (upper castes) take the best of the cow – its labour, its milk, its offspring, and sell it after you have no use for it. When we find ways to use this resource, you attack us and even kill us (referring to the killing of 5 Dalits in Jhajjar, Haryana, in 2008, who were skinning the carcass of a cow after purchasing it). You are taking our livelihoods from us, even though we make it out of the waste you discard. Is this justice?” — James, a young Dalit activist (in an article dated Jan. 11, 2012)
Stephen does an excellent work of summarizing the laws and the economic implications of meat that inform the food and caste political debate raging in India. It’s worth reading in order to begin to understand the context in which Dalit students at Osmania University in Hyderabad held their Beef-fest last month. There has been an attempt (mostly by the right-wing Hindutva and Hindutva-sympathizers) to steer the caste narrative towards a conveniently reactionary explanation of “young people instigating” a “leftist war”. Conspicuously absent from these opinions are the well-established and violent history of domination from the Hindu Brahmanical sect that closely relates culinary practices to caste purity.
Meena Kandaswamy, a Dalit woman and a poet activist, attended the the Beef-fest to show her solidarity. (The event was marred by violent attacks by the ABVP — the right-wing student group.) In response to her show of support, her twitter feeds were inundated with violent threats including gang rape and acid attacks.
Despite all exits of Osmania University being sealed to not let in the outsiders, the situation turned so violent that Meena and her friends had to be escorted out of the campus in a van with paramilitary personnel. “Meanwhile the situation in the campus had become violent. A televsion channel’s OB van was set on fire and there was continuous stone pelting.”
After having returned to her friend’s place in Hyderabad, Meena logged on to twitter and tweeted about the festival. She evoked several angry responses. A series of strongly worded tweets that indicated a serious threat followed.
“A lot of name calling happened and then I was worried as they started threatening to assault my modesty, attack me with acid and one of them even wanted to put a price put on my head,” Meena said.
The Network of Women in Media issued a strong statement in support of Meena and wrote about the oppressive mandate of these individuals who threaten the fundamental freedom of expression.
The fundamentally violent nature of caste was further revealed when Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal activists conducted a puja to “purify” the campus.
From Food Fascism: The Vegetarian Hypocrisy In India
The construction of today’s India as a vegetarian-loving and cow-praying country is an outright lie and a false cultural-propaganda by right-wing upper caste forces to oppress Dalits, lower-castes and Muslims.
This vegetarian image is also now part of India Inc. and exported to the world. The brand-transformation of India’s colonial image from a country full of snake-charmers to IT savvy Brahmans who are mostly vegetarians, is a false-representation of millions of people’s every day politics and food practices.
Jairam Ramesh, an Iyengar Brahmin and former Minister for Environment, came up with a Brahmanical solution to world’s climate change problem: stop eating beef. He added, “(T)he best thing for us, India, is we are not a beef-eating nation.” He has conveniently forgotten that Indians annually consume 1.14 million tonnes of buffalo meat.
This year India will also overtake the United States as the world’s third largest beef exporter. The vegetarian hypocrisy in India has no limits: the beef-hating project is carefully engineered to advance Brahmanical Hinduism.
Also worth reading: Is it India’s Rosa Parks moment? by Ajaz Ashraf
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Louis C.K. on Evolution
Cellar Door Open
What’s on your mind?
Mirman Baheer Poetry
You won’t allow me to go to school.
I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this:
One day you will be sick.— Lima, a 11 yr old Afghan girl
This poem was recorded in a New York Times magazine article about female underground poetry groups in Afghanistan. The group — Mirman Baheer — holds poetry sessions as well as records women narrating poetry secretly on the phone. The women express their resistance to male oppression, their feelings about love (considered blasphemous), and their doubts about religion.
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The Kitchen Didn’t Have a Wall
Momma never knew.
She never knew that inside the pantry, next to the kitchen, Mariam pushed her against the wall and slipped her tongue — like a snake — into her lips, teasing them apart.
Momma called out for the flour and Ceydon rushed out, hands shaking and handed over the bag of Golden Temple atta. “Why are you sweating so much? Go wash your face.” She did, she ran.
Momma never knew that Mariam came to their house everyday after school a full hour before she did, and waited for Ceydon at the gate. They came in together, hands locked, and ate pakoras with tamarind or drank coconut milk with almond cookies. Momma never knew that Mariam would press her fingers inside her skirt under the dinner table when she nodded her head at Momma.
“Yes, Aunty” — “No, Aunty” — “We are gonna go up and study in Ceydon’s room until dinner, Aunty.“
Momma never knew.
Years later, Ceydon owned a place with one vast room and a kitchen crouched in the corner like a thief. The kitchen didn’t have a wall.
It had a curtain. Thick, blue jute that separated the hall from the gas stove. It caught on fire once and Ceydon banged it out with a dishtowel. Ever since there has been a black singe curl ugly-ing up the edges.
The curtain had to be pulled back every time Ceydon cooked in order to avoid burning down the apartment.
No one knows why she put up a wall in the first place.
More Love, Please
Like this:
Coffee, Cake and Curry
Woke up to a morning brimming with troubles. My morning coffee was my shore.
With coffee. I had cake.
I stabbed a fork into the cake that was sitting serenely in the fridge. But I couldn’t be bothered to slice a piece like a proper person. It bled cold raspberry cream filling.
At lunch, the pungency of the curry leaves buried inside my aloo-mutter-rice-curd-pickle ball was too much. I drooled and slurped. I sucked the leaves at the end of my meal — cleaning the gravy, making the leaves green again.
