WHO AM I TO WRITE? I AM I 

"This, I believe, is what personal narrative has the potential to do: to counter those dangerously simplistic and alienating reports by bringing people into the fold, into presence. Providing a conduit of access: 'being there' rather than 'knowing what happened'.

I am thinking, now, about some of the ways in which personal narrative can do this. And I think the main thing is for the writer to go in blind: the fewer the intentions and preconceptions, the impositions of the mind — how you wish yourself or the events you are narrating to be perceived — the slimmer, perhaps, the chances of manipulation. 

The second is to ground oneself in the details: lived, felt, sensed. The peripheral can be just as imporant as the seeming 'focus'. Revolution is this, too, it's the sweet-potato cart and the girl with the red fingernails. Simply to go in alert, blind, and sniff out the details that feel the most pressing. And not to attempt to explain them too much, trusting that the details will tell their own stories, form their own patterns and imprints. To approach it all with a quizzical and enquiring mind,  a puzzling-over. To include your questions, like spaces, like a breathing dough. 

And in all this, one must embrace one's deepest subjectivity. (Who am I to write about this? I am I.) This, I believe, is true of all writing: by moving with some measure of faith through the labyrinth of your own self, you might find that you arrive at a place shared by many - an underground of human experience."
 

—  Wiam El-Tamami, "A wish not to betray:
Some thoughts on writing and translation revolution,"
Translating Dissent  

NEW SPEECH 

"Is dissenting enough? To be in opposition is the fate of the dissenter. To be in compassion. We would not, or at least I would not, hold on to power were it taken. Yet we say we cannot ask for liberties from those enthroned, that they must be taken. It is the central paradox. But if we must speak, must dissent, then, yes, we must translate ourselves to better hear each other. We must counter the thoughtless nature of our times. We will never fully win. It will never be over. And we cannot simply go on saying No. If there is to be speech, it should be of something new, something that still has no language for the reality that it might create." 

— Omar Robert Hamilton, "Moments of Clarity," Translating Dissent

MEDITATION FOR WHITE PEOPLE FIGHTING WHITE SUPREMACY

Please close your eyes, make yourself comfortable and reflect on these words.
Forget any misgivings or preconceptions you may have about meditation.
As my friend Marybeth says, it’s not that serious.
Just make yourself comfortable.
Relax and reflect upon my words:

Honor all of your emotions in this space.

And let your thoughts flow to warmer, more supportive waters.

You are a being on the path to liberation.

As you breathe deeply,

Taking in all of the love and joy of the universe with each intake,

Releasing a little bit of the stress and pain with each exhale,

Imagine your soul as an endless stream.

Imagine the flow of your soul is a powerful torrent of emotion and knowledge.

It is flexible, malleable but head strong, cruising ever southward, home.

As you meditate, ride this well of feelings and information towards your greater, more authentic self.

Know that your emotions are not a distraction.

Your emotions are inherently valid.

Your emotions are data points.

Sorrow is natural response to world full of pain.

Anger is a natural response to world full of injustice.

Your joy is necessary and life-giving even in the face of oppression.

Your guilt is a learned behavior and though valid is not useful and can be released with each breath out.

Now, release your feelings of guilt with each breath out.

Feel the binds of guilt lessening as you release it from your body.

Breathe in all of the love of this space with each breath in.

Let this emotional stream that is your soul wash over you.

Let it carry away your hesitance and your fear.

You have permission to be your fullest, most gorgeous self in this space.

Let your shoulders relax.

Let you chair support you.

Enjoying the feeling of your body being supported.

As you breathe in all the wisdom and joy the world has to offer,

As you imagine your soul as an endless stream,

Breathe in deeply, exhale slowly and reflect on these words:

You are a being on the path to liberation.

You are resilient. You are powerful. You are bold.

You must transform any oppressive power over into transformative power with.

You must reimagine your power into a gorgeous, creative energy of love.

As you breathe in the power of this space,

Imagine what you could accomplish if you used your power with love instead of fear.

Imagine how free you will feel to live without unreachable standards.

Imagine the sounds and joy of our future beloved community.

Feel the power of creation within your liberated self.

Imagine how capable and expansive you will be when we are all free.

As you exhale a little bit of your hesitancy,

Breathe in more of the power of this space,

Know that you should never apologize for your existence.

You are exactly who you need to be.

You are a being on the path towards Liberation.

You are a seed that has been planted and is yearning to grow.

You need not apologize for not having finished an unending journey.

You need only thank those along the way you provide you with lessons of accountability and agitation.

As you breathe in deeply,

Remember that accountability is a gift.

As you breathe in deeply,

Know that liberation is a type of collective emergence.

We are all becoming who we were destined to be.

As you breathe in all the joy of the universe, imagine yourself liberated.

As you breathe out a little bit of the stress and pain, feel yourself getting lighter

As you breathe out a little bit of the trauma and the hesitancy, feel yourself getting stronger.

Repeat the phrases: I am a being on the path towards liberation. I am a seed that has been planting and is yearning to grow until centered.

Now allow yourself to come back into your body gently. Reflect on any and all feelings of joy that you experienced. Let all those feelings of joy to be your north star as continue your journey to Liberation.

Aaron Goggans, The Well Examined Life

TRANSLATION + HORIZONTALISM 

"I argue that if our networks of solidarity are to become more effective and reflect the values of horizontality, non-hierarchy and pluralism that inform contemporary protest movements, translation, interpreting, subtitling and other forms of mediation must be brought to the centre of the political arena and conceptualized as integral elements of the revolutionary project. Translators, likewise, must be repositioned as full participants within non-hierarchical, solidary activist communities."

— Mona Baker, "Beyond the Spectacle: Translation and Solidarity
in Contemporary Protest Movements," Translating Dissent 

WHY TRANSLATE/ POR QUÉ TRADUCIR

Why do I translate? Because the congealed mass of anglo-‘merican ugliness, greed & basic Christian fascism will continue to blow up the people & libraries & homes & museums of a hundred Baghdads unless we can make enough American citizens realize the beauty of the other, of the poetry of the other, of the speech of all the others. —Pierre Joris

¿Por qué traduzco? Porque la masa anglo-americana cuajada de fealdad, avaricia y fascismo cristiano básico seguirá haciendo estallar a la gente y las bibliotecas y las casas y los museos de cientos de Bagdades a menos de que podamos hacer que suficientes ciudadanxs norteamericanxs se den cuenta de la hermosura dxl otrx, de la poesía dxl otrx, del hablar de todxs lxs otrxs. —Pierre Joris

(Quoted in "A Manifesto for Ultratranslation" by Antena)

(Citado en "Un manifiesto para la ultratraducción" por Antena)

AMERICAN MYTHS

"This is the mythography of America, progressive, where you have this idea that everything moves upward, and people are always on this journey to improvement. So, “How did you make it?” Listen, this is very important to understand, I don’t speak the language of “make it.” Our moment, in late capital, has no problems, through its contradictions, occasionally granting someone ridiculous moments of privilege, but that’s not what matters. In other words, we can elect Obama, but what does that say about the fate of the African-American community? We have no problem in this country rewarding individuals of color momentarily as a way never to address the structural cannibalistic inequalities that are faced by the communities these people come out of.

"I don’t think we can safely say just because someone has some sort of visible markers of success that in any way they have avoided any of the dysfunctions. That is the kind of Chaucerian, weird physiognomy-as-moral-status. We don’t know anything about anybody. Yes, I have made a certain level of status as an artist and as a writer, but what I am reminded of most acutely is not of my “awesomeness,” or some sort of will to power that has led me through the jungle. What I am aware of, being here, is that I am representative of a structural exclusion.

"We accept too much at face value these ideologies of transcendence… I just knew, from everything that I saw, that there is no transcending the human experience. You’ve got to realize that most of us feel permanently displaced and savagely undone. Most of us try everything we can to manage our fears and our insecurities. Most of us are profoundly inhuman to ourselves and other people, and that makes us no less valuable, and no less worthy of attention and love. I didn’t transcend all this stuff, you just got to live with [it], man, and there’s nothing like trying to run away from all that stuff to guarantee its supremacy… The transcendence myth will just do you in, in the long run.

— Junot Díaz, Upstairs at the Strand 

LET'S STAY HERE AWHILE/QUEDÁMONOS AQUÍ

"We live and work in the clutter of untranslatability. The discomfortable snag where we no longer know what to say, how to say, or even quite what saying is—but we continue in our saying. The language-snag is the sign that there is more thinking to be done. We can’t get free from the grip of non-knowing, nor would we wish to detach ourselves even if we could. Rather, let’s stay in this space. The instigatory space of difficulty and not understanding. Untranslate this space. Retranslate from this space."

— Antena Language Justice Collaborative, "A Manifesto for Ultratranslation"

"Vivimos y trabajamos en la batahola de la intraducibilidad. El gancho discómodo donde ya no sabemos qué decir, cómo decir, ni siquiera de qué, exactamente, consiste el decir—pero seguimos en nuestro decir. La lengua-gancho es la señal que hay que pensar más. No podemos liberarnos del agarrón del no-saber, ni desearíamos desprendernos aún que pudiéramos. Más bien, quedémonos en este espacio. El espacio instigatorio de la dificultad y el no entender. Destraducir este espacio. Retraducir desde este espacio."

— Antena Language Justice Collaborative, "Un manifiesto para la ultratraducción"

"A story is not a story until it is told; it is not told until it is heard; once it is heard, it changes—and becomes more open to the beauties or frailties of more change; or: a story is not a story until it changes. Indeed, until it changes or it changes someone else, until it becomes part of the vital histories of change it recounts."

— Della Pollock on the Marian Cheek Center for Making and Saving History

OUT OF BREATH

"If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms—say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family—in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one's life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the "pace of life," the psychological feeling of always being out of breath—which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change...For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed." 

— "Too Fast, Too Furious," N+1 Winter 2015

SISTER STORIES

"Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories. This is the admonition "Learn your sisters' stories" by Black feminist sociologist Jaqui Alexander. This is a dialectical process that requires us to constantly retell our stories, to revise them and retell them and relaunch them. We can thus not pretend that we do not know about the conjunctures of race and class and ethnicity and nationality and sexuality and ability. "

— Angela Davis, "Transnational Solidarities" 

ALEGRE REBELDíA 

"Esto no es utopia es alegre rebeldia" 

— Ana Tijoux, "Somos del Sur"

HOW 

"Let me be clear: I believe it is my political and ethical responsibility to counter white supremacy explicitly and purposefully, in my creative work and in my teaching and in my cross-language practice and in my everyday conversations and movements through the world—and I don’t actually make much distinction among those realms, in practice or in poetics. I believe, further, that white supremacy is inextricably and intersectionally bound up with heteropatriarchy and voracious capitalism and the kind of anthropocentric consumer mentality that allows humans with privilege to believe that they are somehow immune from the ecological interconnectedness of all living beings (human, fauna, and flora). These are my beliefs, and I work to enact them in multiple ways in multiple contexts, and I often fail, and I continue through failure, and I don’t seek success but rather I seek accountability, porosity, to encounter what is beyond me, to accompany and be accompanied. These are my beliefs, and yet in the moment, as everyone present was being subjected to Marjorie Perloff’s hate speech—or maybe it was less intentional than hate speech? fear speech, perhaps?—I didn’t speak. I heard something and I didn’t say anything. All too often I don’t quite know how to speak. There’s no how-to for making a work or a life that counters white supremacy, nor is such resistance always as clear-cut as responding directly to racism publicly and blatantly expressed. Poetic practice is rarely clear-cut, direct and blatant; this is, in my view, part of its power: to take the everyday often instrumentalized tool that is language and to defamiliarize it in order to make other imaginings, other instigations, and other structures radically and concretely and imaginatively possible."

— Jen Hofer, "If You Hear Something Say Something,
or if You're Not on the Table, You're on the Menu" 

BE VAST

All she wanted was to find a place to stretch her bones.

A place to lengthen her smiles

and spread her hair

a place where her legs could walk without cutting and bruising

a place unchained.

She was born out of ocean breath.

I reminded her;  ‘Stop pouring so much of yourself into hearts that have no room for themselves

do not thin yourself, be vast.

You do not bring the ocean to a river.’

— Tapiwa Mugabe, "You are Oceanic"

ON LIVING THE QUESTIONS 

"Ultimately what drives us to resolve tension as quickly as we can is the fear that if we hold it too long, it will break our hearts.

This bedrock layer of fear is the one that interests me, for at least two reasons. It evokes more sympathy in me, for myself and others, than the ego's fear of looking bad or losing out, which seems whiny and pathetic. And the heart's fear of being broken is not fanciful: holding powerful tensions over time can be, and often is, a heartbreaking experience. 

But there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about—a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid. The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity—a process that is not without pain but one that many of us would welcome. As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world's suffering and joy, despair and hope." 

— Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

BEING EMPTY

"I have traveled this country extensively and have met many people. Rarely have I met people with the overweening sense of self the moralists say we have, people who put themselves first as if they possessed the divine right of kings. 

Instead, I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be—an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others. We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves as superior but because we have no sense of self at all. Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were. 

The moralists seem to believe that we are in a vicious circle where rising individualism and the self-centeredness inherent in it cause the decline of community—and the decline of community, in turn, gives rise to more individualism and self-centeredness. The reality is quite different, I think: as community is torn apart by various political and economic forces, more and more people suffer from the empty self syndrome. 

A strong community helps people develop a sense of true self, for only in community can the self exercise and fulfill its nature: giving and taking, listening and speaking, being, and doing. But when the community unravels and we lose touch with one another, the self atrophies and we lose touch with ourselves as well. Lacking opportunities to be ourselves in a web of relationships, our sense of self disappears, leading to behaviors that further fragment our relationships and spread the epidemic of inner emptiness. 

As I view our society through the lens of my journey with depression—an extreme form of the empty self syndrome, an experience of self-annihilation just short of death—I am convinced that the moralists have got it wrong: it is never "selfish" to name, claim, and nurture true self. 

There are selfish acts, to be sure. But those acts arise from an empty self, as we try to fill our emptiness in ways that harm us and bring grief to those who care about us. When we are rooted in true self, we can act in ways that are life-giving for us and all whose lives we touch. Whatever we do to care for the true self is, in the long run, a gift to the world. 

— Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

BROKEN TONGUES

I have always been conscious of my battling tongues,
of being too assimilated
to speak my mother’s language,
the rejection of English because of my brown skin.
Sometimes, I want to refuse
to speak,
refuse my mouth movement;
conscious, it might be too ugly for either side to hear.

I remember something Celia Cruz once said,
in all her colorful outfits,
with sweet courage of AZCUCAR!
“My English is not very good lookiiiing
but I am very glad to say that.”

She has
an unapologetic accent.
Point blank—
Her English is not very good looking.
In one brave line,
her less than classic beauty
has no pity
but has
the ganas to be a good looking pure badass mami.

                                                                       Esa muxer tiene tumbao!

And for all the Spanglish—
can’t find the correct words in Spanish/English
pochx mamis,
Celia speaks to us.

                                                                       Porque si tenemos tumbao!

Fuck the:
“Wow, you speak English really good!”
Or
“Do you know why Spanish is so important?”
Or
“Shame on your mother for not teaching you Spanish.”

—No te jodas con eso—

Check them with:
Yes, I speak English well, not good,
to answer your grammatically incorrect statement;
I’m not trying to be anyone’s token.
Yes, I know Spanish is important,
my skin is a constant reminder
that language is always trying to e r  a  s   e            m      e
and my mother was trying to preserve me,
don’t shun her for showing me how to survive.

Our broken tongues do not need to fall apart
because of pinche pendejxs.

Our language lives in-between
constantly being misunderstood
and lost in translation.

No, I will not apologize for my incorrect Spanish,
—pinche pendejxs—
I am reclaiming what was taken
and wounds take time to heal.

No, I am not trying to be white,
—pinche pendejxs—
English was my first language,
so don’t call me a coconut
like it will crack me open,
find me hollow.

See me like Celia—
Colorful outfits,
sweet AZUCAR!
rolling off my tongue.
Mixing sugar and salt to recreate flavors
from recipes
trial and error.

Celia, I want my tongue to be good looking like yours
—porque mi español no te mires bien tambien.

Pero muxeres,
there will always be people
not wanting to hear
how good looking we are.

— "Good Looking,"  Raquel “Raqui” Torres 

DREAMING IN GUJARATI

The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati
turn their trusting faces to the sun
say to me
care for us nurture us
in my dreams I shudder and I run.
I am six
in a playground of white children
Darkie, sing us an Indian song!

Eight
in a roomful of elders
all mock my broken Gujurati
English girl! 
Twelve, I tunnel into books
forge an armor of English words.

Eighteen, shaved head
combat boots - 
shamed by masis
in white saris
neon judgments
singe my western head.

Mother tongue. 
Matrubhasha
tongue of the mother
I murder in myself.

Through the years I watch Gujurati
swell the swaggering egos of men
mirror them over and over
at twice their natural size.

Through the years
I watch Gujurati dissolve
bones and teeth of women, break them
on anvils of duty and service, burn them
to skeletal ash.

Words that don’t exist in Gujurati: 
Self-expression. 
Individual. 
Lesbian.

English rises in my throat
rapier flashed at yuppie boys
who claim their people “civilized” mine. 
Thunderbolt hurled
at cab drivers yelling
Dirty black bastard! 
Force-field against teenage hoods
hissing
Fucking Paki bitch! 
Their tongue - or mine? 
Have I become the enemy?

Listen: 
my father speaks Urdu
language of dancing peacocks
rosewater fountains
even its curses are beautiful. 
He speaks Hindi
suave and melodic
earthy Punjabi
salty rich as saag paneer
coastal Kiswahili
laced with Arabic, 
he speaks Gujurati
solid ancestral pride.

Five languages
five different worlds
yet English
shrinks
him
down
before white men
who think their flat cold spiky words
make the only reality.

Words that don’t exist in English: 
Najjar
Garba
Arati.

If we cannot name it
does it exist? 
When we lose language
does culture die? What happens
to a tongue of milk-heavy
cows, earthen pots
jingling anklets, temple bells, 
when its children
grow up in Silicon Valley
to become
programmers?

Then there’s American: 
Kin’uh get some service? 
Dontcha have ice? 
Not: 
May I have please? 
Ben, mane madhath karso? 
Tafadhali nipe rafiki
Donnez-moi, s’il vous plait
Puedo tener…..

Hello, I said can I get some service?! 
Like, where’s the line for Ay-mericans
in this goddamn airport?

Words that atomized two hundred thousand Iraqis: 
Didja see how we kicked some major ass in the Gulf? 
Lit up Bagdad like the fourth a’ July! 
Whupped those sand-niggers into a parking lot!

The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati
bright as butter
succulent cherries
sounds I can paint on the air with my breath
dance through like a Sufi mystic
words I can weep and howl and devour
words I can kiss and taste and dream
this tongue
I take
back.

— Shailja Patel, Migritude

MOBILE CAPITAL + IMMOBILE RACE

"So much good has come from modernity: freedoms of the mind, and of the stomach. It is hard to look back at older ways of being with nostalgia. Things were hard in the old days. And yet, with the modern came some brutal social forms, one of which was the scientific linkage of blood to belonging. Caste and bondage has along history, a brutal past that leaks into the uncomfortable present. Those older social oppressions are now married to the technology of the modern State, whose capacity to measure, to count, to conduct surveillance and police its borders, is far more efficient than that of the pre-modern State. It is this linkage between older ideas and new technologies that  makes migration of the past so different from migration of the present. 

'Immigration,' as a concept, is born in the era of imperialism. 'Immigrants,' in this context, are not just those who cross boundaries, but those who pointedly enter the advanced industrial states from lands of dusky skin. Immigration is always already about mobile capital and immobile race. Colonial rulers went where they willed, and they even moved people from one colony to another; but the colonized were not to be fully welcome in the heartlands of the empire, in Europe, in the United States. If they came, they were allowed in for their labor, not for their lives, Those Indian traders in Africa would become foreigners, not just outsiders. Racism would overwhelm older forms of xenophobia." 

— Vijay Prashad, Foreword to Shailja Patel's Migritude

WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS

"And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts, 
the strength, the lives of women. 
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless. 
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left. "

                                                                                             — Carolyn Forché,  "The Return," The Country Between Us

DIVINE DISSATISFACTION

"I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: 'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.'

'But,' I said, 'when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.'

'No artist is pleased.'

'But then there is no satisfaction?'

'No satisfaction whatever at any time,' she cried out passionately. 'There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.'"

— Agnes de Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham