POEMS OF THE POLITICAL REFUGEE: PALESTINE, & SYRIA:
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RASHID HUSSEIN
Tent #50 (Song Of A Refugees)

Tent #50, on the left, is my new world,
Shared with me by my memories:
Memories as verdant as the eyes of spring.
Memories like the eyes of a woman weeping,
And memories the color of milk and love!

Two doors has my tent, two doors like two wounds
One leads to the other tents, wrinkle-browed
Like clouds no longer able to weep;
And the second ― a rent in the ceiling, leading
To the skies,
Revealing the stars
Like refugees scattered,
And like them, naked.

Also the moon is trudging there
Downcast and weary as the UNRWA,
Yellow as if it were the UNRWA
Under a load of yellow cheese for the refugees.

Tent #50, on the left, that is my present.
But it is too cramped to contain a future!
And ― “Forget!” they say, but how can I?

Teach the night to forget to bring
Dreams showing me my village
And teach the wind to forget to carry to me
The aroma of apricots in my fields!
And teach the sky, too, to forget to rain.

Only then, I may forget my country.

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TPB's notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Hussein

NAJAT ABDUL SAMAD
When I am Overcome By Weakness

When I am overcome with weakness, I bandage my heart with a woman’s patience in adversity. I bandage it with the upright posture of a Syrian woman who is not bent by bereavement, poverty, or displacement as she rises from the banquets of death and carries on shepherding life’s rituals. She prepares for a creeping, ravenous winter and gathers the heavy firewood branches, stick by stick from the frigid wilderness. She does not cut a tree, does not steal, does not surrender her soul to weariness, does not ask anyone’s charity, does not fold with the load, and does not yield midway.

I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood. Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration.

I bandage it with the steadiness of a child’s steps in the snow of a refugee camp, a child wearing a small black shoe on one foot and a large blue sandal on the other, wandering off and singing to butterflies flying in the sunny skies, butterflies and skies seen only by his eyes.

I bandage it with December’s frozen tree roots, trees that have sworn to blossom in March or April.
I bandage it with the voice of reason that was not affected by a proximate desolation.
I bandage it with veins whose warm blood has not yet been spilled on the surface of our sacred soil.
I bandage it with what was entrusted by our martyrs, with the conscience of the living, and with the image of a beautiful homeland envisioned by the eyes of the poor.
I bandage it with the outcry: “Death and not humiliation.”"

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

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TPB's notes: "Najat Abdul Samad, an OB-GYN physician, lives and works in Sweida, in the south of Syria. Sweida has been spared much of the violence, and has served as a haven for refugees. Still, Samad’s poetry is haunted by their images." - Ghada Alatrash

JAMES BALDWIN

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Below is an excerpt from a documentary about James Baldwin. In 1963, Baldwin went to San Francisco and began a study tour of the city. He wanted to know about the state of race relations in a so called progressive city. Baldwin's San Francisco is an echo of Baltimore today: the city destroyed, the city 'recovered' through mass evictions and demolitions and the use of fire breaks to separate people along racial lines.

Take This Hammer, a study tour of San Francisco, 1963:
Link: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518
Directed by Richard O. Moore


Boy: They trying to tear down our homes, brother.... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me tell you. Now they talking about better jobs, jobs right here. You want me tell you what kind of jobs they gonna give us? They're gonna let us tear down on own homes. That's the job we're getting. And you know what they gonna pay us? Let me tell you want they're going to pay. They're going to pay you $2 an hour... I mean, what does that end up gaining you? That's not gaining you a thing. You won't get anything. They'll help you tear down your own home. It's a job, temporarily. And then what you going to do? Where you going to live? You're not going to live anywhere. They not even in the process of trying to tell you where you're going to live. All they're talking about is tearing down your house.

TV Reporter: How long have you been in San Francisco?

Boy: Well I've been in San Francisco about 18 years. Ever since I was a year or two old.

Baldwin: And you live around here, too.

Girl: Yeah.

TV Reporter: In temporary housing?

Girl: No, city projects. Ain't no temporary housing no more, they're tearing 'em down. Ain't no more. Ain't going to be no place when they get through. We're going to be living out on the streets.

TV Reporter: Does that make you feel bad?

Girl: Yeah, make you feel bad. Won't be no place to go. We'll be living out here on streets in tents.

TV Reporter: And where would you like to go if you could?

Girl: I'd like to stay up here on top of the hill.

TV Reporter: You would? How long you've been living on top of here?

Girl: Ever since I been born.

*

Man: And then this is part of a redevelopment also.

Baldwin: What do you mean? You say redevelopment meaning what?

Man: Removal of Negroes.

Baldwin: Uh-huh. Yes. That's what I thought you meant.

Man: In other words, a lot of the Negroes who came because the Japanese were pushed out, now are now being pushed out.

Baldwin: In effect, San Francisco is reclaiming this property to build it up, which means Negroes have to go.

Man: That's right.

Baldwin: Where are they going to go?

Man: Well, they're going out to Hunter's Point, and to the Haight-Ashbury area, and also into Ocean View, wherever they can find reasonable rents. South of Market, and all those other places. Wherever they can find cheap rent. In other words, going from one ghetto to the other.

Baldwin: Yes, yes. So, this is the Negro housing project in effect.

Man: Yes.

Baldwin: Uh-huh. I know a lot about housing projects in New York. But I am sure this isn't different at all.

Man: No, houses there have some of the same problems although the buildings, the exterior looks--

Baldwin: Oh, the exterior looks marvelous, that's the whole point. But I know what goes on inside. Correct me if I'm wrong... Better housing in the ghetto is simply not possible. You can build a few better plans but you cannot do anything about the moral and psychological effects of being in the ghetto. This is the point. Everybody living in those housing projects is just as endangered as ever before by all of the things that the ghetto means. By raising a kid in one of those housing projects I would still have, at the front door, or probably right next door in the housing project, all the things I was trying to escape. I mean, even such things as dealing with insurance companies if I want fire insurance, you know, to the fact that, in the playground, my boy or my girl will be exposed to the man who sells narcotics, for example, to a million forces which are inevitably set in motion when a people are despised. You can't pretend that you're not despised if you are. We were saying yesterday that children can't be fooled. But I could be fooled, and be glad about having a whatever it is, a terrace, a garage. But, my kid won't be. It's my kids that are being destroyed by this fantastic democracy.

It isn't only what it's doing to Negro children which is, God knows, bad enough. It's what it does to white children who grow up believing that it is more important to make a profit than it is to be a man. And that's the way that society really operates. I don't care what society says, this is how it operates and these are the goals it sets. And these goals aren't worthy of a man.

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TPB's notes: TAKE THIS HAMMER a study tour of San Francisco, 1963 was directed by Richard O. Moore, Link: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518

"To send your email vote in support of Take this Hammer's nomination to the National Film Registry, please visit this web page at the Library of Congress's web site: http://www.loc.gov/film/vote.html.

Please note: copyright to Take this Hammer (the Director's Cut) is held by WNET. All rights reserved. WNET is the premier public media provider of the New York metropolitan area and parent of public television stations THIRTEEN and WLIW21. Take this Hammer (the Director's Cut) was originally produced by KQED for National Educational Television (NET) - the predecessor of WNET - and was never televised. After 15 minutes of footage was cut from the original version, a 44 minute edit first aired on February 4th 1964 at 7:30pm, on KQED Ch.9 in the Bay Area. This shorter broadcast edit was remastered by Monaco Digital Labs in 2009 and may also be viewed in DIVA.
KQED's mobile film unit follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. There is no moral distance ... between President Kennedy and Bull Connor because the same machine put them both in power. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview Hunters Point and Western Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a Negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the merits of this film and for his determination that it be preserved and remastered for posterity.
Director Richard O. Moore was interviewed in 2012 by the TV Archive, and discussed the film production of Take this Hammer and working with Baldwin in The Making of Take this Hammer. As Moore notes, 15 minutes were cut from his original version by order of KQED's Board of Directors, some of whom felt the film cast San Francisco's race relations in an overly negative way. One board member stated that: "I believe we would all agree that it is not the function of KQED to produce inflammatory, distorted, sacrilegious, extremist programming under the name of educational television. I believe this program is all of these." The 59 minute Director's Cut was found in August 2013, as a result of information which came to light during the Moore interview and is preserved at San Francisco State University. Movette Film Transfer of San Francisco remastered this 16mm positive film print in August 2013 in 2K resolution (2048x1556 pixels), using a Kinetta film scanner. A low-res video screener was made publicly available for the first time ever from San Francisco State's Digital Information Virtual Archive (DIVA), in August 2013.
In March and April of 2014, the TV Archive worked with BAFTA Award winning sound editor John Nutt on a digital restoration of Take this Hammer's optical soundtrack, to improve sound quality. A screener featuring this audio restoration, synchronized with the 2K picture was uploaded to DIVA in April 2014. Sound editor John Nutt's explanation of this audio reiteration - together with a sample comparison between audio quality of the original optical soundtrack and the digitally restored soundtrack - are also available in DIVA."

ISHMAEL REED & ROBERTO BOLANO

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ROBERTO BOLANO
Horde

Poets from Spain and Latin America, literature's most
Infamous, surged like rats from the depths of my dream
And strung their squeaks together in a chorus of minim voices:
Don't worry, Roberto, they said, we'll make sure
You disappear, neither your immaculate bones
Nor your writings which we spit out and ably plagiarize
Will surface from the shipwreck. Neither your eyes, nor your
balls,
Will be saved from this dress rehearsal of sinking. And I saw
Their satisfied little faces, solemn cultural attachés and rosy
Editors-in-chief, manuscript readers and poor
Copy editors, poets of the Spanish language, who go by the
name of
Horde, the best, the pestilent rats, well versed
In the cold art of surviving in exchange for excrement,
Of public terror maneuvers, mass market Neruda
And Octavio Paz, cold swine, an apse
Or scratch on the Great Building of Power.
Horde holding title to the adolescent's dream and to writing.
My God! Under this fat greasy sun that kills
And belittles us.

translated by Laura Healy

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TPB's notes: from the book, THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSITY -full collection of RB's stuff, see below.

ISHMAEL REED
I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra

‘The devil must be forced to reveal any such physical evil
(potions, charms, fetishes, etc.) still outside the body
and these must be burned.' (Rituale Romanum, published
1947, endorsed by the coat-of-arms and introductory
letter from Francis cardinal Spellman)


I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,
sidewinders in the saloons of fools
bit my forehead   like   O
the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists
who do not know their trips. Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town.

School marms with halitosis cannot see
the Nefertiti fake chipped on the run by slick
germans, the hawk behind Sonny Rollins’ head or
the ritual beard of his axe; a longhorn winding
its bells thru the Field of Reeds.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. I bedded
down with Isis, Lady of the Boogaloo, dove
deep down in her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago
in daring midday getaway. ‘Start grabbing the
blue,' I said from top of my double crown.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Ezzard Charles
of the Chisholm Trail. Took up the bass but they
blew off my thumb. Alchemist in ringmanship but a
sucker for the right cross.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Vamoosed from
the temple i bide my time. The price on the wanted
poster was a-going down, outlaw alias copped my stance
and moody greenhorns were making me dance;
   while my mouth’s
shooting iron got its chambers jammed.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Boning-up in
the ol’ West i bide my time. You should see
me pick off these tin cans whippersnappers. I
write the motown long plays for the comeback of
Osiris. Make them up when stars stare at sleeping
steer out here near the campfire. Women arrive
on the backs of goats and throw themselves on
my Bowie.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Lord of the lash,
the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and
Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do
the dirty boogie with scorpions. I make the bulls
keep still and was the first swinger to grape the taste.

I am a cowboy in his boat. Pope Joan of the
Ptah Ra. C/mere a minute willya doll?
Be a good girl and
bring me my Buffalo horn of black powder
bring me my headdress of black feathers
bring me my bones of Ju-Ju snake
go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow

I’m going into town after Set

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra

look out Set   here i come Set
to get Set     to sunset Set
to unseat Set  to Set down Set

               usurper of the Royal couch
               imposter RAdio of Moses’ bush
               party pooper O hater of dance
               vampire outlaw of the milky way

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TPB's note: from New and Collected Poems by Ishmael Reed, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1989 by Ishmael Reed. Reprinted by permission of Ishmael Reed. All rights reserved.

ORAL POETRY FROM THE SUDAN: Gentlemen grind their grain in the land of the Congo
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A POEM OF THE POLITICAL REFUGEE

"Gentlemen grind their grain in the land of the Congo" is a Dinka song from South Sudan and a poem of the political refugees who found themselves persecuted by the Sudanese Khartoum government. The poem describes the plight of refugees fleeing into Zaire in the 1960s from the war between the Khartoum government and the Anyanya nationalist movement in the south.

ORAL POETRY FROM THE SUDAN
Gentlemen grind their grain in the land of the Congo

Gentlemen grind their grain in the land of the Congo;
The Dongolawi, the Arab, has remained at home:
He has remained in our land.
We left our herds tethered in the cattle-camps,
And followed Deng Nhial.
Gentlemen beg in the land of the Congo;
The Dongolawi, the Arab, has remained at home.
We left our herds tethered in the cattle-camps,
And followed Deng Nhial.
When we reached the land of the Congo,
The Congo said, ‘Dinkas are matata!’
I turned and asked Ngar Maker,
‘What does matata mean?’
Ngor Maker answered,
‘He says we are bad.’
My heart became spoiled
In the land of the Congo, my heart was spoiled;
And I thought of Anger, the daughter of Wol Ayalbyor,
I wished I could find her to see her.

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TPB's notes: Compiled by Jack Mapanje and Landeg White, Oral Poetry from Africa (1984). Published by Longman.

Dongolawi: A people of Sudan whose name the Dinka use to refer to all Arabs.
Deng Nhial: One of the Dinka leaders.
Ngar Maker: The singer’s friend.
Anger: The singer’s betrothed.