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إعداد : غابة الدندنة |
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يرجى
ذكر المصدر عند الاقتباس |
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القرآن
الكريم لا
يعذر الإرهاب :
Date:
Mon, 17 Sep 2001 15:33:42 -0700 (PDT)
Ginny |
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إذا
أردنا أن نفهم
الوجه
الحقيقي
للإرهاب نحن
يجب أن ننظر في
المرآة
: From:
Chris Brandt SOME THOUGHTS IN THE
AFTERMATH |
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الفيتو
الأمريكي ضد
الفلسطينيين
وعدم التحرك
ولو بالإدانة
اللفظية ولد
إحباطاً : Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001
12:41:26 -0700 (PDT) Dear Chris, I am British, but have lived
and worked in Egypt and I, like many others,have been deeply saddened by the
recent events. I also fear the reprisals and what that will mean long term. I
thought your message was one of great clarity, and with what you have recently
experienced, a very rational and fair appraisal of the situation. I only hope
that others, especially those who are in power, will share your outlook and look
for a peaceful outcome to this situation. There is so much injustice in
this world and I don't believe we will ever know what really lay behind the
horrendous attack on the American people, but I do know of the frustration felt
by the people of the Middle East concerning American policy in regard to this
area and the arbitary use of the veto in the UN which has so often robbed the
Palestinians of even a verbal condemnation on the attacks and occupation of
their territories. Please do not feel this is an attempt to justify what
happened on September 11th, nothing can ever
justify that action. I feel manipulated by the
media and politicians and don't know what is 'right' or 'wrong' anymore. In my
little sphere I have wonderful friends who do their utmost for one another and
try to extend a helping hand to support each other. I can only hope there are
enough people out there who share their caring nature so this talk of another
World War will stop. Let's hope there can be a new understanding of 'different'
cultures and beliefs and that they need not be a threat to each other so that
something positive can come from this act of carnage against those innocent
victims in New York. Thank you and God bless your
kindness and understanding Margaret |
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يتكلمون
عن العدالة
ويفكرون
بالقنابل : Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001
20:21:49 -0700 (PDT) Chris, Susanna Lang
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رؤية
عسكرية
: أسامة بن
لادن ليس
سهلاً ..
وأعداؤنا في
عشرين دولة
يرغبون في
الموت حتى
الرجل الأخير. [
إنه يقصدنا
وافرحتاه ..
صدق المثل
العربي
الشاذ : تسمع
بالمعيدي
خير من تراه ،
والشاهد هنا
هو جواز حذف
أن ونصب
الفعل بعدها ] Subject: Military view
Dear friends and fellow
Americans
14 September, 2001 These men hate the United
States with all of their being, and we must not underestimate the power of
their moral commitment. Napoleon, perhaps the world's greatest combination
of soldier and statesman, stated "the moral is to the physical as three
is to one." Patton thought the Frenchman underestimated its importance
and said moral conviction was five times more
important in battle than physical strength. Our enemies are willing
- better said anxious -- to give their
lives for their cause. How committed are we, America?
And for how long? In addition to demonstrating
great moral conviction, the recent attack demonstrated a mastery of some of
the basic fundamentals of warfare taught to most military officers
worldwide, namely simplicity, security and surprise. When I first heard
rumors that some of these men may have been trained at our own Air War
College, it made perfect sense to me. This was not a random act of violence,
and we can expect the same sort of military competence
to be displayed in the battle to come. This war will escalate,
with a good portion of it happening right here in the good ol' U.S.
of A. These men will not go easily
into the night. They do not fear us. We must not fear
them. In spite of our overwhelming
conventional strength as the world's only
"superpower" (a truly silly term), we are the underdog in
this fight. As you listen to the carefully scripted rhetoric designed to
prepare us for the march for war, please realize that America is not
equipped or seriously trained for the battle ahead. To be certain, our
soldiers are much better than the enemy, and we have
some excellent "counter terrorist" organizations,
but they are mostly trained for hostage rescues, airfield seizures, or the
occasional "body snatch," (which may come in handy). We will be
fighting a war of annihilation, because if their early efforts
are any indication, our enemy is ready and willing to die to the last
man. Eradicating the enemy will be
costly and time consuming. They have already deployed their forces in as
many as 20 countries, and are likely living the lives of everyday citizens.
Simply put, our soldiers will be tasked with a search and destroy mission on
multiple foreign landscapes, and the public must be patient and supportive
until the strategy and tactics can be worked out. For the most part, our
military is still in the process of redefining itself and presided over by
men and women who grew up with - and were promoted
because they excelled in - Cold War doctrine, strategy and tactics. This will not be linear
warfare, there will be no clear "centers of gravity"
to strike with high technology weapons. Our vast technological edge
will certainly be helpful, but it will not be decisive. Perhaps the perfect
metaphor for the coming battle was introduced by the terrorists themselves
aboard the hijacked aircraft -- this will be a knife fight, and
it will be won or lost by the ingenuity and will of citizens and
soldier, not
by software or smart bombs. We must also be patient with our military
leaders. Unlike Americans who are
eager to put this messy time behind us, our adversaries have time on their
side, and they will use it. They plan to fight a battle of attrition, hoping
to drag the battle out until the American public loses its will to fight.
This might be difficult to believe in this euphoric time of flag waving and
patriotism, but it is generally acknowledged that America lacks the stomach
for a long fight. We need only look as far back as Vietnam, when North
Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap (also a military history teacher) defeated
the United States of America without ever winning a major tactical battle.
American soldiers who marched to war cheered on by flag waving Americans in
1965 were reviled and spat upon less than three years later when they
returned. Although we hope that Osama Bin Laden is no Giap, he is certain to
understand and employ the concept. We can expect not only large doses of
pain like the recent attacks, but also less audacious "sand in the
gears" tactics, ranging from livestock infestations to attacks at water
supplies and power distribution facilities. These attacks are designed to hit us in our "comfort
zone" forcing the average American
to "pay more and play less" and eventually eroding our
resolve. But it can only work if we let it. It is clear to me that the
will of the American citizenry - you and I - is
the center of gravity the enemy has targeted. It will be the fulcrum
upon which victory or defeat will turn. He believes us to be soft,
impatient, and self-centered. He
may be right, but if so, we must change. The Prussian general Carl von
Clausewitz, (the most often quoted and least read military theorist in
history), says that there is a "remarkable trinity of war" that is
composed of the (1) will of the people, (2) the political leadership of the
government, and (3) the chance and probability that plays out on the field
of battle, in that order. Every American citizen was in the crosshairs of
last Tuesday's attack, not just those that were unfortunate enough to be in
the World Trade Center or Pentagon. The will of the American people will
decide this war. If we are to win, it will be because we have what it
takes to persevere through a few more hits, learn from our mistakes,
improvise, and adapt. If we can do that, we will eventually prevail. Everyone I've talked to In
the past few days has shared a common frustration, saying in one form or
another "I just wish I could do something!" You are already doing
it. Just keep faith in America, and continue to support your President and
military, and the outcome is certain. If we fail to
do so, the outcome is equally certain. |
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على
المدى
سيستعيدون ما
أخذنا منهم : Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001
17:22:32 -0400 I can assure you that
'hawkishness' and patriotism lead
to only one place -- the grave!
I urge all of us to stop waving around our rhetoric before some one loses
an eye -- for which you can be assured it will not be Mr Bush's, Mr Blair's or
Canada's Mr Chretien's eye, but your's or my son's!
Not once during the media circus now
ongoing, have I heard any mention off the US Navy's inexcusable cock up of
blasting an Iranian airliner from the sky a few years ago.
In fact I believe the ship's Capitain was exonerated of any wrong doing,
and was promoted to a position in the Pentagon ironically enough. It is all a matter of
perspective isn't it.
Basically all of us in the privledged west
have to face the fact that those who are not lucky enough to be in our traffic
jams balancing the steering wheel, a cell phone and a double latte with only two
hands -- are rather pissed off at us.
Because in the long run what we have we took from them. Thank you for the discourse, Graham Bye |
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الخطوط
العريضة ..
دعونا نتكلم
بحرية : From: "A&E P." Since there is an opinion that we are not looking outside of our country, let me forward this as helping to see beyond our borders! Also, we need to be careful in our thoughts about Hollywood. This is an Art as well, and what happened was like a written plot out of a Tom Clancy's novel. Question now--are we the ones to be held responsible as writers and limit what we create? To comment on the media coverage is to recognize our own form of public censorship in what we are willing to accept or not as images, and info. No matter what, even with mistakes let us favor freedom of speech and ideas as an utmost privilege to keep! Anyway, hope some find this article in the Jordan Times as fascinating as I did. -- AP “He's
a very warm, hospitable man,” the source told AFP. “He likes his food,
he's generous to a fault and he gives the impression he would do anything
for you. “When
guests sit down to dinner he will wash their hands for them rather than
letting his servants do that.” It is an image that is at
odds with Ben Laden's reputation in the West as a coldly calculating killer
and a byword for a new breed of global terrorist.
If President George W. Bush
is to be believed, US intelligence officials appear virtually certain that
Ben Laden was behind the attacks on New York and Washington.
“If
he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he will
be sorely mistaken,” Bush vowed on Saturday. Ben Laden responded Sunday by
denying that he was behind the attacks which left more than 5,000 people
dead. “The
US is pointing the finger at me but I categorically state that I have not
done this,” he said. Bin Laden does not however
deny that he has dedicated his life to waging a holy war against the United
States that he knows could well end in a premature death.
“In
our religion there is a special place in the hereafter for those who
participate in jihad,” he told one interviewer.
The gaunt, bearded 44-year
old was not always such an ardent believer. Growing up as the pampered
son of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate, Bin Laden gave no indication
that he would one day have a five-million-dollar price on his head.
According to associates from
his days as a civil engineering student at university in Jeddah, the young
Bin Laden was anything but a devout Muslim. A regular at glitzy Beirut
nightclubs, he revelled in the role of playboy scion of a family that had
capitalised on the country's oil boom and its close connections to the Saudi
royal family to acquire a huge fortune. The family fortune, and the
royal connections, are still intact. Bin Laden Construction is now a
multi-billion dollar business. But Osama, the third son of
its founder Mohammad Bin Laden and one of 54 children, is no longer welcome
in the family home. “We
have nothing to do with him,” a family member told AFP this week.
Stripped of his Saudi
citizenship in 1994, Bin Laden now lives in Afghanistan as an honoured guest
of the Taliban militia that rules 90 per cent of the country under their own
ultra-rigid interpretation of the Islamic faith.
He is reported to have at
least three wives and more than 20 children — the last public sighting of
him was at the February wedding of one of his sons in Kandahar.
His residence there is a
large mansion close to the home of the equally-secretive Taliban leader,
Mullah Mohammad Omar, its opulence at odds with the image of an ascetic man
bin Laden likes to cultivate. But he is rarely there. The
fear that the western intelligence agencies who once courted him but now
regard him as public enemy number one will finally catch up with him means
he constantly shifts his location between numerous bases and safe houses
across central Afghanistan. The exact route of Bin
Laden's personal journey from the bars of Beirut to the unwelcoming,
mountainous terrain of Afghanistan remains unclear.
According to his own account,
his view of the world was transformed by a combination of events at the end
of the 1970s: Egypt's decision to make peace with Israel, the Islamic
revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
But what is not in doubt is
that it was in the crucible of Afghanistan's fight against Soviet occupation
that Bin Laden had his vision of true Muslims coming together in a constant
struggle against the western powers and their treacherous allies in the
Islamic world. “One
day in Afghanistan was like one thousand days of praying in an ordinary
Mosque,” he later recalled. After spending the first few
years of the Afghan war raising money for the Islamic resistance, he moved
to Afghanistan in 1984, taking command of, and financing, a brigade of up to
20,000 militant fighters recruited from across the Arab world. It was also
in Afghanistan that Bin Laden began to acquire the organisational and
communications skills that have made him such a feared adversary of the West
today. How much of this is due to
the training he received at the hands of the CIA is an uncomfortable
question for the United States as it seeks to establish the extent of Bin
Laden's hand in the New York and Washington atrocities.
Bin Laden's network — Al
Qaeda, or The Base — is believed to have been first established around
1988, a year before the Soviet Union finally pulled out of Afghanistan.
But it was not until four
years later that western intelligence officials began to link the
organisation to attacks on US forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia.
In November 1998, a US
prosecutor indicted Bin Laden for masterminding bomb attacks on the US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which left more than 200 people dead.
Behind these and other
attacks lies Bin Laden's fury over what he regards as the ultimate betrayal
of the Islamic faith — King Fahd's 1990 decision to allow US troops to be
stationed in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the Gulf War against Iraq.
For Bin Laden, the US
presence was an outrage, the effective occupation of the land that was the
birthplace of the prophet Mohammed and is home to Islam's holiest sites.
Until that occupation is
ended, there will be no lifting of the fatwa that Bin Laden issued in 1998
and which best sums up his creed: “To
kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual
duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible.” |
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الصلاة
الصعبة : From: "Laura Tracy
Baisden" I have been worried about
everyone. I continue to keep
residents of New york, Washington, etc., in
prayer--it's so hard right now to even know where to begin and how to
pray. Laura
Tracy Baisden |
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اليوم
بدأت الحرب : From:
Lyn We were able to pull in
different news sources and discuss the possible reactions by the U.S. We were
able to discuss our reactions, fears, and intolerance. Were my kids scared? yes.
So was and so I am. One student wrote on the calendar that I keep for
assignments: Today the war begins. One student came up to me and told me he was
17 and wondered if he would be drafted. We have seen so much loss to senseless
violence in our district that we were able to use those experiences to think
compassionately about the victims and the survivors. I asked them to remember
the time when one of our scholars who had a
full ride scholarship and was celebrating his senior year when he was shot in a
drive by shooting trying to protect a baby on new! ! years eve. Kids need to
know that they are a part of a bigger world than just the little piece that they
have lived in all their lives. Is it fair to protect them from this? I don't
think so. Lyn |
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عنف
مبصر .. وعنف
مضاد لكنه
أعمى From:
"Matt T Lavine" This may seem a bit over
the top, or perhaps simply too violent to get into in many schools, but I've
always been a big fan of doing current "historic" fiction- at
least one exercise or lesson in, as way for students to develop skills in
perspective, character-- and to develop their own empathy skills. I suggest the following
A.P. article might be a challenging- perhaps too harsh article to use for
that work. Students could imagine, and write, both from the perspective of
the perpetrators of violence (implicitly examining the underpinnings of
anger and vengeance in themselves and their communities) and from the
perspective of those the violence was enacted upon-- thereby experimenting
with sympathy and complexity. Abdelali -- Prosecutor:
Slaying A Hate Crime Tuesday September 18,
2001 4:40 AM Sodhi,
a 49-year-old Sikh, was killed in a drive-by shooting outside the gas
station he operated in Mesa. -----Original
Message----- Karen Lewis's idea of
youth exchanges is fascinating and compelling...how many schools in this
country enact such exchanges with Muslim-majority countries? any of
you have any experience with this? I think this list would benefit
from hearing from those people who have sent students to Muslim countries,
or hosted Muslim students. What can we as teachers do in terms of
incoporating specifically Mulim texts (Quran, etc.) into our classrooms to
show students that Islam has nothing to do with what happened on Tuesday? lots
of love and peace, --daniel
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في
مواجهة
التمييز
الأمريكي ضد
العرب : From: "Matt T Lavine" Already: Perhaps there are opportunities for students
to explore some of the complexities of generalizing, spirituality, extremism, in
all different forms. It might be nice for exercises to open up discussions, to
counter some of the "We're all united, all of America united in one
desire" rhetoric the politicians and shoddy news anchors keep feeding us.
It might be good for students to work w/ fragments of discussions- quotes from
various sources and various perspectives, and make poetry. Or to imagine what
it's like to be in another country, waiting to see what the U.S. will do--
perhaps waiting to be attacked. They could compare feelings tied into that
notion with how they feel now. Or - perhaps this would be a good time for
someone from a local mosque to come in and present some poetry. The Arab
American Institute down in D.C. seems very helpful, as does the Arab-American
Anti-Discrimination Committee. Good luck, |
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تميم
الأنصاري
يقول لماري عن
طلبان وابن
لادن : إِنَّ
هَؤُلاءِ
لَشِرْذِمَةٌ
قَلِيلُونَ
وَإِنَّهُمْ
لَنَا
لَغَائِظُونَ.
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 21:49:25 -0400
I do not know the person that wrote this, but think it provides interesting
food for thought. Toivo
Kallas Department of Biology & Microbiology
I
speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in
my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
I
fervently wish to see those monsters punished. But the Taliban and Ben
Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The
Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and
have been holding the country in bondage ever
since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master plan. When
you think Taliban, think Nazis. When
you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of
Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people Had nothing to do with this atrocity.
They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would love
for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of
international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it. Some
say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the
Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged, and
incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are
500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. Millions
of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men killed during the
war with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women for being
women and have buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. The soil
of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have been
destroyed . The Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban. They
haven't been able to. We
come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone age. Trouble
with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took care of it .
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.Eradicate their hospitals?
Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? There is no infrastructure. Cut them off
from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all
that. New
bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban
eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.
(They have already, I hear.) Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled
orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But
flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the
criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would be making common
cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been
raping all this time. So what else can be done, then? Let
me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden
is to go in there with ground troops. I think that when people speak of
"having the belly to do what needs to be done" many of them are
thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. They are
thinking about overcoming moral qualms about killing innocent people. But it's
the belly to die not kill that's actually on the table. Americans will die in
a land war to get Bin Laden. And not just because some Americans would
die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's
much bigger than that, folks. To get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to
go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The
conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just
stand by? You see where I'm going. The invasion approach is a flirtation with
global war between Islam and the West. And that is Bin Laden's program. That's
exactly what he wants and why he did this thing. Read his speeches and
statements. It's all right there. AT
the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are
Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam.
Bin
Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this entity
and he'd be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It
might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into
Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a
holocaust in Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose,
even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about winning,
in the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that would
mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would
die, not just theirs but ours. Who
has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone else? I
don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are
the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us
into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We
can't let him do that. That's
my humble opinion. Tamim
Ansary |
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أفغانستان
ليست حلاً : From:
"Lucy Schneck" |
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إلى تميم : From: "Perseverance
Ranch" To
: Tamim. |
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العملة
ووجها الآخر : From: "A&E P. kaye Best wishes all..... AP |
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الامتزاج
الاجتماعي
مع الآخر : From: Sar Canz I
think idea is excellent. Teachers
who want to do it don't have to start with schools abroad, though. I know that in suburban Washington there is an Islamic
school, and I'm sure there are others elsewhere in the country.
How about organizing some pen pal or web
exchanges between American schools with large Muslim populations and
American schools with no/few Muslim students?
(This would help with language problems too). |
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تفعيل
التبادل
الشبابي
وتآخي المدن : Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 22:16:43 -0700 (PDT) Thanks for starting the dialogue of
alternatives. my brain stuck in neutral today, all I could think of was
"Make Bread not Bombs" the button that graces my kitchen for these
past 15 years... |
| ضـــــــريح الشعـــــــر |
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· إنهم
لن يسرقوا
القمر Date:
Thu, 27 Sep 2001 13:16:57 -0400 (EDT) Dear All, ... "The
moon at the window / At least the thief could not take that."
The sense is someone's
come home and their house has been robbed but the
thief could not take the moon in the window.
So terrorists can take some
things, but there are other
things they can't take. Poetry is a shrine in a way
for many of the things that they cannot take. There's a two-line poem by Czeslaw Milosz ...
"Transparent tree, full of migrating
birds on a blue morning. Cold, because there is still snow in
the mountains." A
poem like that ... is like a little pill that you take to settle
yourself down. It is a way of providing a simple focus: tree,
snow, sensation of
coldness. Little poems like that seem very simple and inconsequential
perhaps, but they're really prayers of gratitude to the mystery
of existence and the mystery of being fitted so beautifully to
a natural world.
Something like "America under
attack" (if that is the slogan) shakes us out
of our position in the world almost. It creates this disjuncture and
discontinuity and I think that even the tiniest poem about some
mushrooms or someone's skin - whatever the little subject may be -
has a way of bringing us back
and reconnecting us to what really is vital. Someone described the state we're in now as
the condition that occurs
after you cut yourself, maybe washing a glass
in the sink. You know you can see you've cut
yourself, but you don't know how much it's going to hurt
yet. It's that moment extended, you know, from
last Tuesday to I don't know how long.
I don't know how long that's going to take before we realize how
much we actually hurt
... |
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ليونور
غوردن .. عبر
النهر : From: Leonore Seeking Solace (a poem in process) . the firefighters who pushed upwards past
fleeing refugees of a burning tower, to climb And for this, |
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في
. إس . نيبول : They
went to the bathroom and got their teeth. They went down to the sitting room
and ate large pieces of cake. --V.S.
Naipaul |
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قصيدة
لآدم
زقاويشكي : Try to praise the mutilated world.
--Adam Zagajewski |
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سهير
حمادي
: From: "Jessica Klonsky" September 25, 2001 Ali Abunimah ********** 1- there have been no words. i have not written one word. no poetry in the ashes south of canal street. no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving
debris and dna. not one word. today is a week, and seven is of heavens,
gods, science. evident out my kitchen window is an abstract
reality. sky where once was steel. smoke where once was flesh. fire in the city air and i feared for my
sister's life in a way never before. and then, and ! ! now, i fear for the
rest of us. first, please god, let it be a mistake, the
pilot's heart failed, the plane's engine died. then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake
me now. please god, after the second plane, please,
don't let it be anyone who looks like my brothers. i do not know how bad a life has to break in
order to kill. i have never been so hungry that i willed
hunger i have never been so angry as to want to
control a gun over a pen. not really. even as a woman, as a palestinian, as a
broken human being. never this broken. more than ever, i believe there is no
difference. the most privileged nation, most americans do
not know the difference between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims,
sikhs, hindus. more than ever, there is no difference. 2 - thank you korea for kimchi and bibim bob,
and corn tea and the genteel smiles of the wait staff at wonjo the smiles
never revealing the heat of the food or how ! ! tired they must be working
long midtown shifts. thank you korea, for the belly craving that brought me
into the city late the night before and diverted my daily train ride into
the world trade center. there are plenty of thank yous in ny right
now. thank you for my lazy procrastinating late ass. thank you to the germs
that had me call in sick. thank you, my attitude, you had me fired the week
before. thank you for the train that never came, the rude nyer who stole my
cab going downtown. thank you for the sense my mama gave me to run. thank
you for my legs, my eyes, my life. 3 - the dead are called lost and their
families hold up shaky printouts in front of us through screens smoked up. we are looking for iris, mother of three.
please call with any information. we are searching for priti, last seen on
the 103rd floor. she was talking to her husband on the phone and the line
went. please help us find george, also known as a! ! del. his family is
waiting for him with his favorite meal. i am looking for my son, who was
delivering coffee. i am looking for my sister girl, she started her job on
monday. i am looking for peace. i am looking for
mercy. i am looking for evidence of compassion. any evidence of life. i am
looking for life. 4 - ricardo on the radio said in his accent
thick as yuca, "i will feel so much better when the first bombs drop
over there. and my friends feel the same way." on my block, a woman was crying in a car
parked and stranded in hurt. i offered comfort, extended a hand she did
not see before she said, "we"re gonna burn them so bad, i swear,
so bad." my hand went to my head and my head went to the numbers within
it of the dead iraqi children, the dead in nicaragua. the dead in rwanda who
had to vie with fake sport wrestling for america's attention. yet when people sent emails saying, this was
bound to happen, lets ! ! not forget u.s. transgressions, for half a second
i felt resentful. hold up with that, cause i live here, these
are my friends and fam, and it could have been me in those buildings, and
we"re not bad people, do not support america's bullying. can i just
have a half second to feel bad? if i can find through this exhaust people who
were left behind to mourn and to resist mass murder, i might be alright. thank you to the woman who saw me brinking my
cool and blinking back tears. she opened her arms before she asked "do
you want a hug?" a big white woman, and her embrace was the kind only
people with the warmth of flesh can offer. i wasn't about to say no to any
comfort. "my
brother's in the navy," i said. "and we"re arabs".
"wow, you got double trouble." word. 5 - one more person ask me if i knew the
hijackers. one more motherfucker ask me what navy my
brother is in. one more person assume no arabs or muslims
were killed. one more person assume they know me, or that
i represent a people. or that a people represent an evil.
or that evil is as simple as a flag and words
on a page. we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh
bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his family's
addresses or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson. and when the networks air footage of
palestinians dancing in the street, there is no apology that hungry children
are bribed with sweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit
images. that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccurate
journalism. and when we talk about holy books and hooded
men and death, why do we never mention the kkk? if there are any people on earth who
understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and
the gaza strip. 6 - today it is ten days. last night bush
waged war on a man once openly funded by the cia. i ! ! do not know who is
responsible. read too many books, know too many people to believe what i am
told. i don't give a fuck about bin laden. his vision of the world does not
include me or those i love. and petittions have been going around for years
trying to get the u.s. sponsored taliban out of power. shit is complicated,
and i don't know what to think. but i know for sure who will pay. in the world, it will be women, mostly
colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves
through grief. "either you are with us, or with the terrorists" -
meaning keep your people under control and your resistance censored. meaning
we got the loot and the nukes. in america, it will be those amongst us who
refuse blanket attacks on the shivering. those of us who work toward social
justice, in support of civil liberties, in opposition to hateful foreign
policies. i have never felt less american and more new
yo! ! rker, particularly brooklyn, than these past days. the stars and
stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent the dead as
citizens first, not family members, not lovers. i feel like my skin is real thin, and that my
eyes are only going to get darker. the future holds little light. my baby brother is a man now, and on alert,
and praying five times a day that the orders he will take in a few days time
are righteous and will not weigh his soul down from the afterlife he
deserves. both my brothers - my heart stops when i try
to pray - not a beat to disturb my fear. one a rock god, the other a
sergeant, and both palestinian, practicing muslim, gentle men. both born in
brooklyn and their faces are of the archetypal arab man, all eyelashes and
nose and beautiful color and stubborn hair. what will their lives be like now? over there is over here. 7 - all day, across the river, the smell of
burning rubb! ! er and limbs floats through. the sirens have stopped now.
the advertisers are back on the air. the rescue workers are traumatized. the
skyline is brought back to human size. no longer taunting the gods with its
height. i have not cried at all while writing this. i
cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart.
i have never owned pain that needs to spread like that. and i cry daily that
my brothers return to our mother safe and whole. there is no poetry in this. there are causes
and effects. there are symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and
information we will never know. there is death here, and there are promises
of more. there is life here. anyone reading this is
breathing, maybe hurting, but breathing for sure. and if there is any light
to come, it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice
after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.!
! suheir hammad Jessica Klonsky
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فصائد
للأسى
والفجيعة : From: ChriBrndt Dear folks, one of the things I did for my
classes, knowing there wasn't going to be any other possible topic, was put
together a suite of poems about grief, to try to make the point that at
times of great loss, literature can help us to shape and understand our
feelings in ways nothing else can. So, for what they're worth to you, here they are, in some
sort of order. POEMS FOR THE AFTERMATH OF THE WTC BOMBING
...beware the easy
griefs, that fool and fuel nothing.
—Gwendolyn Brooks After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that
bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then
the letting go— — Emily Dickinson, c. 1862
DIRGE They are the dead who died of thirst
With water near, who never found
The cool, unfathomable well
Or the deep pool they thirsted for.
Who listening never caught the sound
Made by contented water flowing
Over green contented ground.
They died despairing and unknowing—
The unnecessary dead who fell
Almost beside the reservoir.
But there was no one there to tell
Of water to those men in thirst.
And now it is too late to tell.
— Robert Francis, 1936
MEMENTO MORI She made a picture of herself
before her illness had a name
- a face stripped of all but line and soul,
a listening face, before the words
came in like birds through an open window
and perched silent on sill and lintel
- leukemia, bone marrow cancer, acute
carcinoma, malignancy - her face in the picture the face
of the one bird that does not
belong here, panicked for open sky, exhausting itself
against the glass of every window
but the one it flew so easily in.
— Chris Brandt, 1996 A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF A
CHILD IN LONDON Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour Is come from the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
Wit any further Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's
daughter, Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her
mother, Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other.
— Dylan Thomas (Welsh), 1941
WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY CAR*
here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i — Dan Pagis (Austrian Jewish), c. 1945
*The sealed railway
car refers to the closed and locked trains the Nazis used to transport Jews
to the concentration camps. WHAT A SHITTY TRIP Ernesto Cardenal (1985) That unexpected telephone call from Managua
to the last Antilles island—
"Ernesto, Laureano's dead." On the flight —Trinidad-Barbados-Jamaica-Havana-Managua
—
looking at sea and more sea, I could think of nothing else.
Since we're born to die the best way is for the Revolution
like you did. Of course it would have been better if you'd
never died
so long as your wife and your kids and your friends and
everyone in the world never died. When I baptized him, 20 years old, in
Solentiname because he wanted to leave his insular
protestantism for our revolutionary christianity
he didn't want a godfather or a godmother —
the entire campesino youth club were his
godfather and godmother.
Above all his obsession with the Revolution. Fascinated by marxism but never wanted to
read Marx. Very intelligent but never wanted to form an
intellect. The most foul-mouthed person I ever knew,
but the one who said "bad words"
most purely. One time, commenting on the Gospel at mass:
"Those wise men sure fucked it up, going to Herod's first."
Or, on the Holy Trinity (summing it all up):
"Those three assholes are just one asshole!"
The night he confessed to me facing the calm
waters of the lake,
"I don't believe in God or any of that shit —
Well I do believe in God only for me God is people."
But he always wanted to be my altar boy.
No one could take that office away from him. His most frequent statement: kiss my ass.
Laureano my son and my brother
son sweet and headstrong like every son with his father —
and what's more since I was not your real
father you were more my brother than anything,
my brother much younger in years,
but above all my compaأ±ero —
you like that word better, don't you?
— the one you loved most after Revoluciأłn.
Compaأ±ero
sub-comandante Laureano,
Chief of the Frontier Guards, I say it with you: death can kiss our ass.
I did not want to write this poem. But you would say to me in the poetic
language you spoke in those masses,
— translated later into so many languages, even Japanese
)that must have
cost them!) — "Poet bastard,
tell those fucked-over compaأ±eros of mine
in Solentiname the counterrevolutionary sons of great
bitches killed me but death can kiss my ass."
Like that "tell your mother to surrender" of Leonel's.
You were always telling me you couldn't wait
to be a guerilla. And I: "With your lack of discipline, up
there they'll execute you." Until your dream came true in the assault on
San Carlos.
"Now we're gonna fuck those motherfuckers."
The bullets the Guardias shot at you. And you
telling it later: "Thwat! Thwat!
Thwat! — that time, I thought I was dead!"
Brawler. Party-lover. Womanizer.
Bursting with life but never fearing death.
Not long before he died he told me quietly in
Managua, "Up there it's
crazy. I could be killed any day in an ambush." You have not stopped being:
You have always been and ever shall be
)not only in this
but in all universes.) But sure you only lived
thought loved once. And now you're dead. Shall we say existence is like earth, or like
stone, which is the same, "stone endures
because it feels nothing." But no, nothing stone endures,
if you're alive to feeling there
beyond the speed of light
beyond the space which is time completely conscious,
within the most vital consciousness of all existence.
LAUREANO MAIRENA, PRESENTE! Fucking airplane, delayed at every stop.
Deepest night already, over the ocean. I
could not stop thinking... I would like to die like you, brother
Laureano. And send word from what we call heaven,
"Fucked-over
brothers of mine in Solentiname, death can kiss my ass."
(Translated by Chris Brandt)
THREE DARKS COME DOWN TOGETHER
Three darks come down together,
Three darks close in around me:
Day dark, year dark, dark weather.
They whisper and conspire,
They search me and they sound me
Hugging my private fire. Day done, year done, storm blowing,
Three darknesses impound me
With dark of white snow blowing.
Three darks gang up to end me,
To browbeat and dumbfound me.
Three future lights defend me.
— Robert Francis, 1960
WHEN DEATH COMES When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright
coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of
curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of
darkness? And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another
possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as
common as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the
mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and
something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into
my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something
particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and
frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited
this world. — Mary Oliver, 1991
from THE CURE AT TROY Human beings suffer. That means someone is hearing
— Seamus Heany (Irish), 1990 |
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علاء
الدين رمضان علاء
الدين رمضان :
09
09 2002 |
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مع
تحيات |
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