“The old world is crumbling down:”Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and the Rise and Fall of the Third World

A little note of mine regarding Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, currently over at The Actuary. 

Published in 1969 Césaire’s A Tempest, can be placed not only under a Cold War context but also at the height of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements enveloping the world from Bolivia to the Congo to Vietnam or in those continents which came to form the “Third World” and the non-aligned movement of those years. (This tri-continental movement which sought to establish true political, economic and cultural independence from the West or First World but also from the Soviet Sphere or Second World thus became known as the Third World. The Third World was much more than a geographic zone on the periphery of the Empire; it was an idea perhaps best exemplified by its political leaders, the likes of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Yugoslavia’s  Josep Tito to name but a few).  A Tempest, it could be argued can be read not only as a text that deals with the lingering effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized but also as a fascinating narrative that takes us from the birth of postcolonial nations after World War II to their downfall as corrupt nationalist regimes. A closer look at the characters of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel should elucidate some of the points made here thus far.

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There’s Beauty in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

That's the title of a note I've been wanting to write for a while and which is now hosted at The Actuary.

Kamau Brathwaite's Middle Passages

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I love what Kamau Brathwaite does in Middle Passages vis a vis confronting the horror of colonialism and in particular the treatment of Africans and blacks during that era. The world which he creates is an echo of the dreams our ancestors wished for us. He reminds us that we are here today because there were people before us who refused to die, and lived to have children who lived long enough to do the same. Brathwaite chooses to see the history of slavery and the sell of human flesh not as a history of oppression but rather as one in which he views the genetic inheritance of those that out-lived their oppressors as a triumph worth celebrating or/and as a pedagogy of resiliency and resistance.

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A Review of Odas a Futbolista by Yago S. Cura and Abel Folgar

Louse dream of buying themselves a wig, fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and I, (to use a term coined by Yago S. Cura) poor “fútbol cretin” turned poet still dream of playing a World Cup alongside fútbol’s biggest names.

 In Odas a Fútbolistas, Yago S. Cura and Abel Folgar compose a cycle of humorous odes (with illustrations by Chaz Folgar and Martha Duran-Contreras) that pay tribute both to the sport’s greatest players and to the Wikipedia-age fan that recreates the dazzling virtuosity of those players through YouTube videos and yes, also, by writing celebratory odes. The writing of poetry is, after all, the closest one can get to playing true fútbol and playing fútbol is the closest one can get to writing true poetry.

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CORN(QUISTADORS) @ THE OFI PRESS

One of my poems at the OFI PRESS an international journey of poetry (an excerpt):

Little fireflies that still burn 500 years after

Cortés/ the great fornicator

Cortés turns in his blue beard/

turns in his moist and burning bush

turns beneath his wife Doña Marina’s

breasts I remember your breasts

I remember your nipples like two eagles

perched on a cactus 500 years after

your breasts are two soldiers standing at attention

saluting NAFTA the great fornicator

500 years after I remember

Surviving Progress

I saw this film Surviving Progress. It reminds me of why I write. Why I write poetry, which has no real monetary value. Which will not earn me money, will not keep me or others dry from the rain. Will not make me or others eat better. Will not save me or others from progress.

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Why do I write? Why do I fling myself against progress?

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 In high school my English teacher played a documentary for us titled Berkeley in the 60s. I remember Mario Savio:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. 

I imagined Mario Savio placing his little bones between the teeth of the gears of the great machine.

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I imagined Mario cut to pieces, those violent pieces are like walls where the graffiti of love and tenderness endures.

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I am laying down my poems in the teeth of the great machine of progress.

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Sometimes poems have to be like Mario. Mario stuck his hands in the teeth of the great machine.

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Sometimes hands get amputated, bitten off by the teeth of the great machine.

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The hands died and their finger nails still grew.

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"The arms they manufacture shall be turned against them
Their political systems shall be erased from the earth
and their political parties
shall exist no longer
The plans of their technicians shall serve for nothing
The great powers
                          are as the flowers of the field


Imperialisms
                  are as smoke

All day long they spy upon us
Already they have the sentences prepared
yet will the Lord not deliver us to their police
he will not allow us to be condemned at the Judgement
I saw the dictator's picture everywhere
                                   --it spread itself like a green
                                          bay tree--
and I turned to pass again
                                      and it was no longer
I searched for it and found it not
I searched for it and now there was not any picture
and his name could not be spoken"

Ernesto Cardenal

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Lord the gilded boars are sodomizing me. 

Undocumented Poem # 9

We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence. We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about.— Representative John Lewis, 1963

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I say again, I'm not anti-Democrat, I'm not anti-Republican, I'm not anti-anything. I'm just questioning their sincerity, and some of the strategy that they've been using on our people by promising them promises that they don't intend to keep. When you keep the Democrats in power, you're keeping the Dixiecrats in power. I doubt that my good Brother Lomax will deny that. A vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Dixiecrat. That's why, in 1964, it's time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we're supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet.—Malcolm X

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no se necesitan balas para probar un punto
es logico no se puede hablar con un difunto
el dialogo destruye cualkier situacion macabra
antes de usar balas disparo con palabras—Calle 13

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This year will mark the second time in my life that I am old enough to vote in a presidential election. The first time was 2008. I did not vote. This year, I will not vote. Not being a U.S. citizen I am not eligible to engage in this symbolic act of democracy.

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I am a poet. I am not an activist. I could never rightfully call myself an activist.

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Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez are undocumented students and DREAM activists.

Saavedra grew up in NY City after having arrived from Mexico in 1993. On July 11, risking deportation, Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez infiltrated the Broward Transitional Center in Florida—a detention and deportation center, owned and operated for ICE by GEO group; “the world’s leading provider of correctional detention” with facilities in the U.S., U.k., Australia and South Africa—in order to organize and bring awareness to those facing deportation and incarceration in such facilities. People like:

Claudio Rojas, originally from Argentina, and who was detained by Border Patrol agents after having picked up his son and accidently driving into the Ft. Lauderdale port, in Florida. He is now in a hunger strike.

or Anibal Hernandez, from Mexico, and whose children have—in the absence of his father—been reduced to live a hand to mouth existence, where what is eaten one day maybe needed the next.

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I am not a poet. I could never rightfully call myself a poet.

Marco, Viridiana, Claudio, Anibal are poets whose primary concern is life.

 Poetry, when it works—when it is real poetry—IS life.

Anything else is irrelevant.

they slash poetry from her roots

she learns to walk without having roots

even from the desert they kill her

she walks the desert still

they deported her from her tongue

she learned to speak their tongue

bendita sea la mano 

que le corta la lengua a la poesia