Iz ow sum peepl cyaan si wat clock a straik?
Choosing at random: the bee colonies are breaking down and (so?) the food supplies are dwindling; the polar ice is melting; the permafrost is damaged beyond mending; the weather has turned wild and unpredictable, so we have impossibly powerful hurricanes and tornadoes creating unprecedented devastation; the jet streams from aircraft and sundry other carbon exhalations have over-heated the atmosphere; and, to top it all, the world economy has been plunged into ruin by a very small group of enormously greedy people, so that individuals have lost their spouses, families, homes, jobs, businesses, savings, indeed, their lives, in some cases. Meanwhile, the folks at AIG are proceeding as if it’s business as usual, paying out, and accepting, large bonuses, and that from public monies?
To repeat: how is it that some people can’t see [or hear] what [hour the] clock is striking, can’t wake up and smell the excrement, can’t grasp that we are inter Scylla Charibdysque, or, in English, between the Devil and the deep blue sea? (We are way, way out of rock and hard place territory, here! The high frights of myth and the base horrors of slavery can probably, however, serve our purposes.)
There have been some pictures, recently circulating on the internet, of God’s Eye. Go here: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_eye_of_god.htm
According to Urban Legends, the photo, or composite of photos, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, actually depicts the so-called Helix Nebula. Astronomers describe the Nebula as "a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases." At its center is a dying star that has ejected masses of dust and gas to form tentacle-like filaments stretching toward an outer rim composed of the same material. Our own sun may look like this in several billion years. (It matters not to me that it’s a blue eye. The colour may well change in due course. It’s just a pretty amazing image floating out there.)
Also, interestingly enough, in a book called The World’s Eye (University of Kentucky Press, 1982), Albert Potts informs us that the Huichol Indians in a remote spot in the southern Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico have for centuries been making sikuli or eyes, ritual objects made of thread. It was believed that the eyes of the gods looked out through the middle of the woven ‘cross’ of an eye. You make sikuli by winding a web of ever expanding threads around two crossed sticks. The objects express a prayer that the eye of god or the gods would rest, benignly, one supposes, upon the supplicant. Anthropologist Carl Lumholz encountered these artifacts on a visit between 1895 and 1898. In time, the sikuli, as ojo de dios, spread throughout Latin America and into North America and the Caribbean. The Aymara in Bolivia and the Hopi and Dineh (Navajo) in North America, among others, now share the tradition. Craftspeople create elaborate ojos de dios. Kids make them in art class. I can remember making ojos de dios myself, ages ago.
Potts tells us, though, that the sikuli phenomenon is not limited to Latin America; rather, it is a worldwide one. Anthropologists elsewhere know the eye as a thread cross or Fadenkreuz. There are also variations known as Fadenstern or thread stars. And they have been around for a long time. There is evidence that they existed in Latin America before A.D. 500; eyes of a similar rhomboid shape appear on pottery in Troy and the Middle East thousands of years before Christ.
So what do the ojo de dios, the Fadenkreuz and the God’s Eye image as depicted in the Hubble polyglot photo have to do with big bonuses being paid out by AIG to already super rich people? Probably nothing at all. Or maybe, just maybe, in the spirit of re-associating sensibilities, or, as Lauryn Hill put it, because “everything is everything,” if primitive peoples have known for millennia that the Eye of God is watching them, wouldn’t you think that these super-technocrats who rule in the cyberage ought to have got the message?
As everybody and him granny have a way to say, “God is not bedridden and him not asleep.” (Note: ojos de dios do not depict closed eyes.)
Iz jus dat fe Im taim langa dan roup.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Pam Mordecai reads in Calgary on March 4 and March 6
On Wednesday, March 4 at 7:00 p.m. at Pages Bookstore, 1135 Kensington Road NW, I read at an event sponsored by the Canada Council and the Creative Writing Research Group at the University of Calgary. The reading is free and open to the public.
On Friday, March 6 at 7:30 pm at St Stephen’s Anglican Church, 1121 14 Avenue SW, Calgary, Calgary resident, Howard Gallimore will join me in a reading of my Good Friday performance poem, de Man. Howard reads the part of Samuel and I read Naomi. Naomi (maid to Pilate’s wife) and Samuel meet on the road to Calgary for the first time in a long time and report on the crucifixion event as it takes place. The reading is free and open to the public. Books on sale, part proceeds in aid of the Church.
On Friday, March 6 at 7:30 pm at St Stephen’s Anglican Church, 1121 14 Avenue SW, Calgary, Calgary resident, Howard Gallimore will join me in a reading of my Good Friday performance poem, de Man. Howard reads the part of Samuel and I read Naomi. Naomi (maid to Pilate’s wife) and Samuel meet on the road to Calgary for the first time in a long time and report on the crucifixion event as it takes place. The reading is free and open to the public. Books on sale, part proceeds in aid of the Church.
Elizabeth Alexander's Inauguration Poem
Well, not a big response to our poll on the inauguration poem — perhaps because so many websites have been carrying people’s responses. Just one person voted who said the poem was good, rather than middling or great.
Occasional poems aren’t easy to write. Add to that the formal demands of a praise song, and compound the matter further with the expectations of a vast and varied audience on an unprecedented occasion… Clearly Elizabeth Alexander had her work cut out for her.
Setting aside for now how good or bad the poem was, a great many people commented that Professor Alexander’s reading didn’t transmit the poem’s music, didn’t make the best use of its natural rhythms. And the audience did have a right to expect music, for the poem had named itself that way — it was, after all, a praise song. Perhaps the poet read slowly because she wanted people to understand; perhaps she was awed by the occasion. Whatever it was, the truth is, even if not all poets are performers, this poet on this occasion needed to be one, needed to steep herself in the imagined moment, so that when she opened her mouth before the great congregation, the poem would emerge powerfully, as Rev Lowery’s prayer did. (In fact, some people have compared the poem, unfavourably, to Rev Lowery’s benediction.)
Quraysh Ali Lansana, director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and associate professor of English and creative writing at Chicago State University had this to say: “Elizabeth is a poet who renders her work very much in the way that many poets have been schooled or trained, certainly many academics, which is to read the poem and sort of let the words live on their own, without the emotional emphasis placed in certain areas… It is a school of thought for many poets and academics, and I am an academic, but I don’t ascribe to this approach to reading work.”
Might there be, lurking under his comment about the manner of ‘reading work,’ a similar observation about writing it?
Why did so many people not like the poem? Is it perhaps because their poetic expectations derive from the diet of rhyme (straight or slant), rhythm, and ‘deep emotion,’ that still characterize many popular songs? Such expectations might account for a comment like, “This is poetry? Gosh, if I'd turned in this kind of crap in elementary school, I'd have failed on the spot… Dr Suess (sic) did a better job!” or one like, “The dull and somewhat monotonous reading style improved very little the bland and repetitious verses of a confusing poem…”
Wordsworth, in that famous long-time definition, saw a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” as being at the root of the poetry-making activity, and rhyme and rhythm are ancient, worthy tools of poetic craft. Indeed, rhyme or no rhyme — there’s no issue about rhythm, for if it’s words, they will have rhythm — an occasional poem needs to rise to the occasion, and if the event is as big as this one was, then there needs must be a mighty rising.
So what did I think of the poem? I think the poet did a good, work-woman-like job, but not a great one, which I suppose amounts to saying that she didn’t quite manage to meet the demands of the moment. Some people say she was trying to fit in with Obama’s low-key, practical, we-have-lots-of-work-to-set-about-doing speech. I don’t agree. I think she saw her job right. It was to sing a praise song, and, as David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times observed, in the stanza in which she recalled the stories of the many whose struggles made the day possible, her poem did make music.
But I think we must at least consider the possibility that some persons have hijacked poetry and run off with it to a distant hill, where they have been cooking and reheating the poetic corpse so that it’s now a weary, wary, prosy poetry. That might explain the poet letting out the string so that the kite of her poem (in the verse Ulin refers to) lifts with, “Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices…” only to fetch it up in some prosy brambles by proceeding to describe the edifices as ones “they would then keep clean and work inside of…” Oh dear!
All of which brings me back to the question in my previous post about whether there are many different poetries…
Occasional poems aren’t easy to write. Add to that the formal demands of a praise song, and compound the matter further with the expectations of a vast and varied audience on an unprecedented occasion… Clearly Elizabeth Alexander had her work cut out for her.
Setting aside for now how good or bad the poem was, a great many people commented that Professor Alexander’s reading didn’t transmit the poem’s music, didn’t make the best use of its natural rhythms. And the audience did have a right to expect music, for the poem had named itself that way — it was, after all, a praise song. Perhaps the poet read slowly because she wanted people to understand; perhaps she was awed by the occasion. Whatever it was, the truth is, even if not all poets are performers, this poet on this occasion needed to be one, needed to steep herself in the imagined moment, so that when she opened her mouth before the great congregation, the poem would emerge powerfully, as Rev Lowery’s prayer did. (In fact, some people have compared the poem, unfavourably, to Rev Lowery’s benediction.)
Quraysh Ali Lansana, director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and associate professor of English and creative writing at Chicago State University had this to say: “Elizabeth is a poet who renders her work very much in the way that many poets have been schooled or trained, certainly many academics, which is to read the poem and sort of let the words live on their own, without the emotional emphasis placed in certain areas… It is a school of thought for many poets and academics, and I am an academic, but I don’t ascribe to this approach to reading work.”
Might there be, lurking under his comment about the manner of ‘reading work,’ a similar observation about writing it?
Why did so many people not like the poem? Is it perhaps because their poetic expectations derive from the diet of rhyme (straight or slant), rhythm, and ‘deep emotion,’ that still characterize many popular songs? Such expectations might account for a comment like, “This is poetry? Gosh, if I'd turned in this kind of crap in elementary school, I'd have failed on the spot… Dr Suess (sic) did a better job!” or one like, “The dull and somewhat monotonous reading style improved very little the bland and repetitious verses of a confusing poem…”
Wordsworth, in that famous long-time definition, saw a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” as being at the root of the poetry-making activity, and rhyme and rhythm are ancient, worthy tools of poetic craft. Indeed, rhyme or no rhyme — there’s no issue about rhythm, for if it’s words, they will have rhythm — an occasional poem needs to rise to the occasion, and if the event is as big as this one was, then there needs must be a mighty rising.
So what did I think of the poem? I think the poet did a good, work-woman-like job, but not a great one, which I suppose amounts to saying that she didn’t quite manage to meet the demands of the moment. Some people say she was trying to fit in with Obama’s low-key, practical, we-have-lots-of-work-to-set-about-doing speech. I don’t agree. I think she saw her job right. It was to sing a praise song, and, as David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times observed, in the stanza in which she recalled the stories of the many whose struggles made the day possible, her poem did make music.
But I think we must at least consider the possibility that some persons have hijacked poetry and run off with it to a distant hill, where they have been cooking and reheating the poetic corpse so that it’s now a weary, wary, prosy poetry. That might explain the poet letting out the string so that the kite of her poem (in the verse Ulin refers to) lifts with, “Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices…” only to fetch it up in some prosy brambles by proceeding to describe the edifices as ones “they would then keep clean and work inside of…” Oh dear!
All of which brings me back to the question in my previous post about whether there are many different poetries…
Sunday, February 8, 2009
What Makes a Good Poem?
A lot of talk about Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem, “Praisesong for the Day.” Some people liked it, some didn’t. If you pass by over the next few days, do participate in our poll! I’ll save my comments until the results are available. I’ve been thinking about poetry, though, and my ruminations benefited yesterday from a conversation with Dan Varrette, one of the editors at Insomniac Press (thanks, Dan), as well as some eavesdropping online today.
I’ve often found myself remarking, in discussions about poetry, that soldiers in WWI took books of poetry with them into the trenches. Poetry was that important. So, like, maybe that would be a good criterion to apply to a poem? Would you take this poem with you into a war? Would you have wanted to take Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, or a piece of that poem, with you into a war? That’s kind of a tough test but, since some poems at a previous time have passed it, maybe it’s not an unfair measure. How high? That high!
(Worth noting that a lasting body of work emerged from the pens of soldiers in both World Wars…)
There are actually poems that I remember, and am glad to recollect, some from when I was at school, and other poems or bits of poems encountered since. So maybe that could be another criterion. Is this poem, or a part of a poem, something I want to remember? We do remember songs, after all, the truth being that some songs are fine poems: think Bob Marley, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen.
What I’m wondering is whether it’s inevitable that people’s taste in poetry, their expectations of a poem and their ideas about the good-and-bad-of-it, be determined by where they are from, their history, their language(s) and their culture. For some people, poetry is a way of finding out who they are (Césaire’s "Qui et quel nous sommes?"), and thinking through their history. There’s the famous Walcott quote from “A Far Cry from Africa” that puts the matter up front and personal:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa, and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Brother Bob’s “Redemption song” reports that never mind our history of being stolen and forcibly relocated…
Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.
…because of the strong, uplifting hand of the Almighty, triumph is ours and so “We forward in this generation.”
Should all poets address concerns like these? Or is it only people whose history includes oppression and the horrors of slavery, deracination and forced relocation across oceans and continents — and if not those precise subjects, versions thereof?
Is England’s Philip Larkin looking, albeit with a much tighter lens, and from a somewhat different angle, at who we are and how our history informs us in his bad-behave poem, “This Be the Verse”?
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
These and similar questions beg to be asked. Does white people’s poetry have to be different from the poetry of black people? Does the poetry of black and white people have to be different from the poetry of native people? What about gay people? Women? Men? Do they all write separate poetries?
Are some poets preoccupied with ‘new and different’ because for them poems need no longer bear any serious burdens? If, after all, poems struggle with issues of justice, of unequal relations within and between nations, of racism, classism, gender relations, it would seem that they hardly need to set out to be different. Must they not get there under the terrible strain? And if they don’t, what does it matter? Isn’t the issue whether the words make your hair stand on end, or fail to?
It’s interesting to compare the excerpts from these three poets. Derek Walcott sounds almost histrionic, set against Bob Marley’s laconic recounting of rapine and Larkin’s mischievous — and deadly — counsel to us to abandon the reproductive enterprise. But the anguish that wrenches Walcott’s questions from his gut emanates from a history of capture, abduction, and plantation slavery that more than supports it. The shrieks are warranted. If Bob’s tempo is different, he’s singing the same tune. And Larkin’s little nursery rhyme delivers the most terrifying verdict of all: misery is our inheritance, and so we should just stop. Period.
Interestingly enough, all three use rhyme (Bob’s rhyme of ‘Almighty’ and ‘triumphantly’ is missing here), and three better practitioners of the Muses’ art it would be hard to pick. More on poetry soon.
I’ve often found myself remarking, in discussions about poetry, that soldiers in WWI took books of poetry with them into the trenches. Poetry was that important. So, like, maybe that would be a good criterion to apply to a poem? Would you take this poem with you into a war? Would you have wanted to take Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, or a piece of that poem, with you into a war? That’s kind of a tough test but, since some poems at a previous time have passed it, maybe it’s not an unfair measure. How high? That high!
(Worth noting that a lasting body of work emerged from the pens of soldiers in both World Wars…)
There are actually poems that I remember, and am glad to recollect, some from when I was at school, and other poems or bits of poems encountered since. So maybe that could be another criterion. Is this poem, or a part of a poem, something I want to remember? We do remember songs, after all, the truth being that some songs are fine poems: think Bob Marley, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen.
What I’m wondering is whether it’s inevitable that people’s taste in poetry, their expectations of a poem and their ideas about the good-and-bad-of-it, be determined by where they are from, their history, their language(s) and their culture. For some people, poetry is a way of finding out who they are (Césaire’s "Qui et quel nous sommes?"), and thinking through their history. There’s the famous Walcott quote from “A Far Cry from Africa” that puts the matter up front and personal:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa, and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Brother Bob’s “Redemption song” reports that never mind our history of being stolen and forcibly relocated…
Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.
…because of the strong, uplifting hand of the Almighty, triumph is ours and so “We forward in this generation.”
Should all poets address concerns like these? Or is it only people whose history includes oppression and the horrors of slavery, deracination and forced relocation across oceans and continents — and if not those precise subjects, versions thereof?
Is England’s Philip Larkin looking, albeit with a much tighter lens, and from a somewhat different angle, at who we are and how our history informs us in his bad-behave poem, “This Be the Verse”?
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
These and similar questions beg to be asked. Does white people’s poetry have to be different from the poetry of black people? Does the poetry of black and white people have to be different from the poetry of native people? What about gay people? Women? Men? Do they all write separate poetries?
Are some poets preoccupied with ‘new and different’ because for them poems need no longer bear any serious burdens? If, after all, poems struggle with issues of justice, of unequal relations within and between nations, of racism, classism, gender relations, it would seem that they hardly need to set out to be different. Must they not get there under the terrible strain? And if they don’t, what does it matter? Isn’t the issue whether the words make your hair stand on end, or fail to?
It’s interesting to compare the excerpts from these three poets. Derek Walcott sounds almost histrionic, set against Bob Marley’s laconic recounting of rapine and Larkin’s mischievous — and deadly — counsel to us to abandon the reproductive enterprise. But the anguish that wrenches Walcott’s questions from his gut emanates from a history of capture, abduction, and plantation slavery that more than supports it. The shrieks are warranted. If Bob’s tempo is different, he’s singing the same tune. And Larkin’s little nursery rhyme delivers the most terrifying verdict of all: misery is our inheritance, and so we should just stop. Period.
Interestingly enough, all three use rhyme (Bob’s rhyme of ‘Almighty’ and ‘triumphantly’ is missing here), and three better practitioners of the Muses’ art it would be hard to pick. More on poetry soon.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
EL NUMERO UNO; runnings in Toronto and Calgary
El Numero Uno or the Pig from Lopinot is a play (for children, sort of, I guess) that I’ve been working on for the last few years, during which time it’s been through several workshops at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People. LKTYP commissioned the script when Pierre Tétrault was Artistic Director, and current AD, Allen MacInnes and his crew have nurtured it since. The most recent workshop was in January when Lisa Codrington, Sham Downer, Jujube Mandiela, Billy Merasty, Karim Morgan, Karen Robinson and Rhoma Spencer gave it a workout, under the direction of ahdri zina mandiela and with dramaturg (that’s with a hard ‘g’), Stephen Colella keeping tabs, and apprentice director Joan Kivanda looking in and on. Allen MacInnis, LKTYP’s Artistic Director, visited with us from time to time. Allen has enriched the offerings at LKTYP, the current production, The Forbidden Phoenix, being a good example of the diverse fare that LKTYP now has on the boards. (See below for further info on The Forbidden Phoenix.)
So this here is a big, public thank-you to all these folks! Merçi, gracias, tanx, thank-you. I can’t say it often enough because it’s a real privilege to have something you’ve written taken through its paces in this rigorous, attentive, whole-hearted way. It’s also enormously useful. The script has evolved over time, and, what with changes from the last workshop, we may now have something with which to go forward to production. Whether we do get that far or not, I couldn’t have hoped for a better experience than I’ve had working on the play with these, as well as other actors like d’bi young and Alison Sealey-Smith. So nuff respec and big ups, all! “Irie, amen, and seen!” as Ras Onelove, one of the characters in the play, would say.
The Forbidden Phoenix
The current production at LKTYP, The Forbidden Phoenix, has its world première tonight. A musical, the play is loosely based on the experience of Chinese immigrants brought to Canada to work on the railroad in the 1800s, and explores themes of freedom, diversity, family, community and environmentalism. It fuses martial arts, acrobatics, stunning costumes, and contemporary musical theatre and cleverly weaves the comic antics of traditional Monkey King stories with the powerful tale of a father’s sacrifice to provide for his family. Check http://www.lktyp.ca/en/current/forbidden.cfm
Pamela Mordecai Reads in Calgary
I go to Calgary on 2 March at the invitation of the University of Calgary for a class visit with Aruna Srivastava’s class on 3 March and a public reading on 4 March. Details for these events forthcoming, but just wanted to give you an early heads up.
There will also be a reading of my Good Friday performance poem, de Man, at St Stephen’s Anglican Church, 1121 14th Avenue SW, Calgary. Calgary resident, Howard Gallimore will join me in the reading. Howard reads the part of Samuel and I read Naomi.
Toronto Launch of Half World by Hiromi Goto
On Friday February 13th at 7:00 p.m., Canadian author, Hiromi Goto, launches her novel, Half World, at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore at 7:00 p.m. For more n this crossover/YA novel, visit http://www.halfworld.ca/
So this here is a big, public thank-you to all these folks! Merçi, gracias, tanx, thank-you. I can’t say it often enough because it’s a real privilege to have something you’ve written taken through its paces in this rigorous, attentive, whole-hearted way. It’s also enormously useful. The script has evolved over time, and, what with changes from the last workshop, we may now have something with which to go forward to production. Whether we do get that far or not, I couldn’t have hoped for a better experience than I’ve had working on the play with these, as well as other actors like d’bi young and Alison Sealey-Smith. So nuff respec and big ups, all! “Irie, amen, and seen!” as Ras Onelove, one of the characters in the play, would say.
The Forbidden Phoenix
The current production at LKTYP, The Forbidden Phoenix, has its world première tonight. A musical, the play is loosely based on the experience of Chinese immigrants brought to Canada to work on the railroad in the 1800s, and explores themes of freedom, diversity, family, community and environmentalism. It fuses martial arts, acrobatics, stunning costumes, and contemporary musical theatre and cleverly weaves the comic antics of traditional Monkey King stories with the powerful tale of a father’s sacrifice to provide for his family. Check http://www.lktyp.ca/en/current/forbidden.cfm
Pamela Mordecai Reads in Calgary
I go to Calgary on 2 March at the invitation of the University of Calgary for a class visit with Aruna Srivastava’s class on 3 March and a public reading on 4 March. Details for these events forthcoming, but just wanted to give you an early heads up.
There will also be a reading of my Good Friday performance poem, de Man, at St Stephen’s Anglican Church, 1121 14th Avenue SW, Calgary. Calgary resident, Howard Gallimore will join me in the reading. Howard reads the part of Samuel and I read Naomi.
Toronto Launch of Half World by Hiromi Goto
On Friday February 13th at 7:00 p.m., Canadian author, Hiromi Goto, launches her novel, Half World, at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore at 7:00 p.m. For more n this crossover/YA novel, visit http://www.halfworld.ca/
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Willful blindness? Justice in the United States of America
Justitia, godess of justice, is always depicted as blind. She holds scales in one hand and a sword in the other. Somewhere along the line my knowledge of the symbolic meaning of this blindness (that justice is rendered without fair or favour) translated itself into a quite opposite interpretation (that justice, being blind, would be unable to see the true nature of things and apply the law with equity). How this happened and when it happened I don’t know, but I recently found myself telling one of my children that the blindness of Justitia meant that she could not be fair, and hence was intended as a caution about what one should expect from legal systems. It wasn’t a wry comment. It was straight — and necessitated his correcting me.
Jason Vassell’s story may help to explain how my understanding was unwittingly transformed.
Jason Vassell is a young Jamaican American man, formerly a student at UMass, Amherst. Early in the morning of 3 February 2009, that is a year and a day ago, he was attacked in his dorm by two drunk, young white men who hurled insults at him, broke his window, entered the dorm (though not through the broken window) and physically attacked him. (Unable to secure help from the campus police in time, he called a friend. When he opened the door to the dorm to let in the friend, the two white men forced their way in at the same time.) He tried to defend himself with a pocketknife. He did stab both men, but their injuries were not serious. One of the men broke Jason’s nose.
Jason Vassell has no prior criminal record. The attackers have prior records of disorderly and violent conduct, including (in the case of one in particular) racially motivated violence. Jason Vassell has a good academic record and was working full-time and performing community service when the attack took place. Numerous students, faculty and others have come forward eager to testify to his exemplary character.
Jason Vasell explains that he thought, while the attacks were in progress, that the men were going to lynch him. This would explain his use of the pocketknife. We remind that they had broken his window, and that they came, uninvited, into the place where he was living (his ‘home’ at the time) and attacked him, and he has a broken nose to prove it.
The upshot of all of this? As a result of defending himself against this unprovoked assault, Jason Vassell, the victim of the attack, has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon and now faces charges carrying a possible sentence of up to 30 years. One of his attackers faces no charge at all; the other faces a maximum of five years. Members of the UMass community (excepting the university administration) have rallied around Jason and attempted to lobby the state to drop the charges against him, so far without success.
“The Memorandum of Law in Support of the Motion to Dismiss” Jason Vassell argues that there is compelling evidence of racial discrimination both in the actions and attitudes of some members of the police department and in decisions made by prosecutors of how to proceed — or not to proceed — against all three men. There are eyewitnesses to the incident and video tape of the encounter between Vassell and the men. One of the police officers involved in the incident noted that “[both white males] smelled strongly of an alcoholic beverage and were slurring their speech when trying to give statements.”
Further information on the matter is available at http://www.justiceforjason.org/
Barack Obama may be in the White House but American jails remain full of young black males in horribly disproportionate numbers. Perhaps a story like Jason’s helps to explain why. Perhaps too, if sufficient persons in, what we hope is a new America, rally to Jason’s cause, Justitia will begin lifting a hand to peel off the blindfold. When a symbol comes to mean the opposite of itself, then perhaps we need to dispose of it.
Jason Vassell’s story may help to explain how my understanding was unwittingly transformed.
Jason Vassell is a young Jamaican American man, formerly a student at UMass, Amherst. Early in the morning of 3 February 2009, that is a year and a day ago, he was attacked in his dorm by two drunk, young white men who hurled insults at him, broke his window, entered the dorm (though not through the broken window) and physically attacked him. (Unable to secure help from the campus police in time, he called a friend. When he opened the door to the dorm to let in the friend, the two white men forced their way in at the same time.) He tried to defend himself with a pocketknife. He did stab both men, but their injuries were not serious. One of the men broke Jason’s nose.
Jason Vassell has no prior criminal record. The attackers have prior records of disorderly and violent conduct, including (in the case of one in particular) racially motivated violence. Jason Vassell has a good academic record and was working full-time and performing community service when the attack took place. Numerous students, faculty and others have come forward eager to testify to his exemplary character.
Jason Vasell explains that he thought, while the attacks were in progress, that the men were going to lynch him. This would explain his use of the pocketknife. We remind that they had broken his window, and that they came, uninvited, into the place where he was living (his ‘home’ at the time) and attacked him, and he has a broken nose to prove it.
The upshot of all of this? As a result of defending himself against this unprovoked assault, Jason Vassell, the victim of the attack, has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon and now faces charges carrying a possible sentence of up to 30 years. One of his attackers faces no charge at all; the other faces a maximum of five years. Members of the UMass community (excepting the university administration) have rallied around Jason and attempted to lobby the state to drop the charges against him, so far without success.
“The Memorandum of Law in Support of the Motion to Dismiss” Jason Vassell argues that there is compelling evidence of racial discrimination both in the actions and attitudes of some members of the police department and in decisions made by prosecutors of how to proceed — or not to proceed — against all three men. There are eyewitnesses to the incident and video tape of the encounter between Vassell and the men. One of the police officers involved in the incident noted that “[both white males] smelled strongly of an alcoholic beverage and were slurring their speech when trying to give statements.”
Further information on the matter is available at http://www.justiceforjason.org/
Barack Obama may be in the White House but American jails remain full of young black males in horribly disproportionate numbers. Perhaps a story like Jason’s helps to explain why. Perhaps too, if sufficient persons in, what we hope is a new America, rally to Jason’s cause, Justitia will begin lifting a hand to peel off the blindfold. When a symbol comes to mean the opposite of itself, then perhaps we need to dispose of it.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
A thank you, and maybe a glimpse of Big Brother?
The next visitor to the site is the 1000th, so I thought I'd mark the moment. Thanks so much folks. Appreciate the support and hope to keep going in 2009, Inshallah.
Here's how I find the blog. I type my name into google, and the urls come up, Jahworld is near the top and I click on it, and I usually see that little number there on the right hand side in the corner that tells me how many sites mention "Pamela Mordecai". (That's what it indicates, yes?) Well, it's nice — and important for an author — that the number has kept going up, but it's a useful bit of data for other reasons too. Here's a recent coincidence. All of a sudden a few days ago the number jumps from near eight thousand to twelve thousand seven hundred. That's weird, I think. Suddenly the world is very interested in me. It's also an oddly round number and I wonder why. It stays that way for a couple of days, two, maybe three, then reverts to where it was before.
I check the comments on my last post in the interim, a post that cheers Barack Obama, the new American president on, and suggests we pray for him, and wish him and the American people well, etc., etc. It's there for anyone to read. But guess what? We've had a visit at Jahworld from Afghan Citizen. (Many thanks Baktash, for visiting! Come again!)
I make no comment. Those are the facts. I know Geoffrey Philp, who has had blog adventures too, will smile.
Perhaps not a bad time to note that the press is not just reporting, but showing us that we suddenly have a clear online aerial view of the residence of Vice President Joe Biden and Mrs Biden. It was veiled in blurred pixels while the previous resident was in office... Semioticians might find a lot to talk about in that. Us ordinary folk just wonder what on earth Dick Cheney might have wished to hide.
Here's how I find the blog. I type my name into google, and the urls come up, Jahworld is near the top and I click on it, and I usually see that little number there on the right hand side in the corner that tells me how many sites mention "Pamela Mordecai". (That's what it indicates, yes?) Well, it's nice — and important for an author — that the number has kept going up, but it's a useful bit of data for other reasons too. Here's a recent coincidence. All of a sudden a few days ago the number jumps from near eight thousand to twelve thousand seven hundred. That's weird, I think. Suddenly the world is very interested in me. It's also an oddly round number and I wonder why. It stays that way for a couple of days, two, maybe three, then reverts to where it was before.
I check the comments on my last post in the interim, a post that cheers Barack Obama, the new American president on, and suggests we pray for him, and wish him and the American people well, etc., etc. It's there for anyone to read. But guess what? We've had a visit at Jahworld from Afghan Citizen. (Many thanks Baktash, for visiting! Come again!)
I make no comment. Those are the facts. I know Geoffrey Philp, who has had blog adventures too, will smile.
Perhaps not a bad time to note that the press is not just reporting, but showing us that we suddenly have a clear online aerial view of the residence of Vice President Joe Biden and Mrs Biden. It was veiled in blurred pixels while the previous resident was in office... Semioticians might find a lot to talk about in that. Us ordinary folk just wonder what on earth Dick Cheney might have wished to hide.
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