Ru Freeman

I’ve just recently returned from visiting The Enlightened Land, i.e. Canada, specifically, Quebec City, and perhaps that has colored my American view; a view long-accustomed to isolating a few injustices to rant about rather than looking at the vast canvas of injustice against which we fling our careless paint. In Canada, unlike in the United States, it seems that the default setting is an interest in the welfare of an entire community. It is an interest that leads to strong and continuous investment in the public good, including well-maintained parks, recreational walk-ways that take in - rather than block - the view, beautification of public buildings and a sweet pride in a collective history that gives equal place to those Native people that were disenfranchised. While the city is predominantly white - as are most of her tourists - there is very little attempt made to white wash the past.

Sure, not everybody is able to pay $416 and up to stay at the Chateau Frontenac, but the rentable flat around the corner from the Frontenac affords an equally splendid view. And the music that floats from the mouths of street musicians assaults or delights every ear in equal measure no matter the thread count on the sheets upon which he or she may lay at night. The Cirque du Soleil performs free of charge for people of every stripe and the acts, spread as they are around the outdoor viewing area, ensures that the view remains the same for everybody.

Which brings me to America and, specifically, to The Hamptons where I was on holiday with good friends. The Hamptons was a place I had heard referred to in architecture magazines lying around the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I knew that it was a place that the New York City rich “fled” to during the summer months. But being a foreigner who still calls Maine home simply because Box 523 Bates College, Lewiston, ME 04901 was listed as my permanent mailing address for over a decade, and whose Maine experiences as an adult involve long stretches of coast line undamaged by human vanity, The Hamptons in the flesh served to displease. Apparently, there is a way to “do the Hamptons right” and it involves being a publishing heiress, a three-home owning Polo star (Argentina, Palm Beach and the Hamptons), a cook with her own TV show etc. etc. Those grains of sand, those drops of water, those blades of grass? They don’t feel quite the same to the rest of us.

As a way of assuaging a little of the outrage I feel, and taking a leaf from what appears to be a Hamptons tradition, I have come up with a list of what’s hot and what’s not here in the Hamptons.

Hot: Homes that can be maintained by the home-owner.
Not Hot: Homes manicured by armies of underpaid migrant workers who bend their heads and step off into the hedges when people walk by.

Hot: Not caring what Hamptonians think is hot when mixing and matching swimwear for the beach
Not Hot: Following anybody else’s idea of fashion other than your own (and, just for the record, I think all these supposedly “hot” bachelors look like asinine clones!)

Hot: Greeting everybody when using running paths and biking trails.
Not Hot: Glaring at customers and assessing their net worth before deciding not to serve them.

Hot: Eschewing identical and towering hedges and tree hydrengeas in favor of gardening with original flair that happens to include vegetables.
Not Hot: Sprinkler systems that have no rain-sensors

Hot: Disguising pool fences with greenery.
Not Hot: Two tennis courts per mansion for every mansion in a ten-mansion block.

Hot: Letting a vacation house accumulate its furnishings through generations of occupancy.
Not Hot: Designing multi-million dollar four season homes which remain empty seven months of the year.

Hot: Lying on the beach when exhausted by being pummeled by the surf.
Not Hot: Lying on the beach to acquire a tan while reading trashy paperbacks.

Hot: Teenaged guards in white polo shirts who look away and do not ask for “beach access ID tags.” Also, deer who don’t give a doe’s behind for signs put up by human beings.
Not Hot: Narrow access-ways to the beach blocked by Private/No Trespassing/Keep Out signs.

Hot: Journal editors who, finding themselves in enclaves of exclusivity, treat it as an anthropological exercise with the potential for comic relief.
Not Hot: Magazines that celebrate exclusivity as though it were a serious virtue.

Okay, so that’s the heart of it, really, that exclusivity. It grates. And I believe the reason for its existence is a staggering lack of shame on the part of many Americans. To live comfortably in a country ruled by laws that champion the individual at the cost of the community must, surely, necessitate an absence of conscience. It is what makes it possible for a town in the Hamptons to put up an access-way, post sentries at cost, and charge those who do not own a home here, $7 per person to frolic in the waves. The waves themselves remain unowned, and the beach below the high water mark is ostensibly public. But if you prevent people from reaching that no-man’s land, then what is in effect is a violation of the right of access to public land.

As I sat on the beach - the only brown person for miles around - a little boy drew a line in the sand around me and muttered something to the effect that I could stay there and that’s it. I am here in the Hamptons with parents whose kids would never consider quarantining strangers in their own pre-marked zone of exclusion. They would find that both puzzling and shame-worthy. I wonder when the balance is going to shift toward that second model of parenting. I doubt the movement is going to start here in the Hamptons.

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I became a citizen of the United States on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Sitting in a room at the University of Maine, I listened to a speech made by a senior administrator at the university that spoke not of the benefits of citizenship but of its responsibilities: to participate in civic engagement, to vote, to speak up against injustice. There was a note of despair to the address, in that way things sound when we speak of what we hope will happen while fully conscious of the horror of what is actually going to come to pass.

Why do you want to become a citizen?, I was asked, by a reporter from a local TV station as I strode over in my sari to cut a large chocolate cake decorated with an American flag - not because I had been appointed to do so but because everybody else seemed too terrified to disrupt the red white and blue! I want to demonstrate what it means to be a citizen, I replied, I want to give my daughters a model of citizenship where pride in ones country does not absolve one of working to mend its ills. I didn’t tell him that the biggest push to take this step came from my mother-in-law who was anxious about my political writings, an anxiety justified by the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act and the specter of Guantanamo, but, perhaps, a little too exalted a possibility for a small-time journalist such as myself; despite the fact that the Iranian newspaper delivered to my door came pre-shredded at the USPS, something I laughed about in a somewhat juvenile fashion, using it to torment my mother, alongside my “jokes” about the CIA and how my father resembled Saddam Hussein.

All these years later, though, in a climate where fear has released its hold on the citizenry, I find that my answer to the reporter still stands. I have a deep allegiance to the country in which I was born, and the call and response of this country in which I now live comes to me as a responsibility. I want my daughters to feel the depth of loyalty to ones country, they to theirs, I to mine, but in order to make that possible, I have to let this country seep into my veins. In the face of overwhelming evidence of my love for Sri Lanka, something they see in all that I say and do, I must demonstrate my love for America in ever more meaningful ways.

And so I have discovered that love is a responsibility that has little to do with rights. I have listened, time and again, to Americans who can quote the most popular of the constitutional amendments - the 1st, the 2nd, the 4th, the 5th. Rarely, if ever, have I heard my fellow citizens speak up on behalf of the other amendments. The 14th, for instance, which calls for working toward the betterment of community through public, volunteer work that may improve the lives of all citizens. No, that’s not very popular. What is popular is the chest-thumping demand for freedom to conduct private lives unrelated to our public existence as human beings. The right to free speech, for instance, without consideration for the responsibility of civility, morality or sensitivity to the humaneness of others. Or the right to bear arms without the responsibility to consider that the resale of small arms first purchased in the United States is responsible for a large number of the 300,000 people, mostly civilians, killed worldwide every year.

That interpretation of rights as unrelated to responsibility does not speak to me of love for ones country or of patriotism. Unless we are the sole inhabitants of a country, we live among others in a social agreement where the rights we codify in laws are but a guide to the responsibility we have toward and for each other. They are, always, the last word on our interactions, our behaviors. They are there to be summoned when all conversation is spent, when all negotiation is done, in other words, when we are broken. They are not to be held aloft like a banner in a time of war, as an indication of threat and defiance in the face of advancing enemy troops. That is not their purpose.

I read the title story by Bala Cynwyd author Robin Black, in her new collection, If I Loved You I would Tell You This, (Random House, 2010), which describes perfectly the essential difference between right and responsibility. In the story, a woman (possibly) dying of cancer with a child (possibly) in a facility for the mentally disabled, reflects on the motives of her neighbor who cuts down a line of 16 year old trees between their houses in order to erect a six foot fence on the - newly surveyed - property line. A host of inconveniences occur for a family already under duress. Did he have the right? Absolutely. Did he have a responsibility? Yes. But the right trumped consideration. In such an exchange there are no winners.

Love for a country must surely carry with it love for its many parts. To claim love for this country and yet care not a whit for the public education of other people’s children, or the speed at which one drives down a residential road, or the weariness of the check-out clerk who bags your groceries, or the forced enlistment of young people too poor to have any other choice but to risk their lives at war, or the abandonment of people whose homes sink under rising waters, or the impatience with the elderly lady trying to drive her car at rush hour, or the daily work of the thousands of teachers and coaches who show up at our children’s schools and sporting events, is to exist in a vacuum where you possess but a surface clarity about the meaning of those two words: country, love.

On a recent Sunday, during a query about integrity at the Haverford Friends Meeting, a lady stood up to quote a few lines from Donne. It was taken from his essay, ‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,’ and although we are all familiar with it, it bears quoting again:

“…No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…”

I grew up, as a Sri Lankan, understanding that what is given freely must still be earned. A free education must be earned by upholding respect for education and rigorous intellectual pursuits. Free healthcare must still be earned by the purchase and consumption and, if possible, the cultivation, of native vegetables, fruits and herbs. The freely given affections of parents and grandparents and extended family, must be earned by a willingness to tend to the elderly, consideration of the dying, with a transmitting of the same values to a younger generation.

The freedoms that Americans are so quick to mention are no different. They, too, ought to be earned. We ought to deserve them, somehow. That “somehow,” to me, does not come on the wings of a recitation of the pledge of allegiance but on the heels of attentiveness to the work that must be done, in any neighborhood, in any community, in any state, in any given moment. As I teach my daughters the American anthems that my mother strung on my vocal chords long before this American life came to pass, I favor less the desperate hope of the ‘Star Spangled Banner;’ it is that other anthem, the anthem of a beautiful country that I sing most often. And, perhaps, because words are the foundation of my life, they can hear in my voice the note of care that accompanies the celebration of a bountiful nation, to mend our flaws, to confirm our souls in self control, to refine our goals, to ennoble our successes, to ensure that selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free. But, perhaps, most of all, I hope that they hear in those words the reminder that we are asking, not demanding, the grace that might bring us the brotherhood we still lack, and that I commit, as I expect them to commit, to doing the work that makes beauty possible.

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I’m over at The Rumpus today in a “mini” conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Lorraine Adams. You can read the full text - it is short, by definition - here. Even more brief excerpt below:

Adams: No one ever asked me this. But you’ve hit on why I don’t write short stories. I think in novel length.

Freeman: Ha! Knowing what you do about your subjects – Algeria’s internal politics, the lives of Arab Muslims without papers in the US, the politics directed at Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, American military intelligence, “black ops,” and, of course, news coverage of all those things – do you ever feel “done” when you finish? Or is there always more of a conversation you wish to have?

Adams: I’ve been obsessed with these issues for ten years now as a novelist and critic. My next novel is set in present day Lahore Pakistan. It’s about a wedding. Yet it’s a wedding in the middle of danger. So I think the conversation about political violence and the American understanding or misunderstanding of the rest of the world’s conflicts is my subject.

I’ve blogged about Lorraine’s work before while talking about media and truth. If you have money to spend on one book right now, buy Harbor (Knopf, 2004), because I know that as soon as you finish it you will want to read everything else she has ever written. Including her blog. And her essays, like ‘Terror Fiction,’ in The New Republic.

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I’m over at the Huffington Post today, blogging about the recent spate of “20 under 40″ lists which include The New Yorker, the UK Telegraph and Dzanc Books. You can read the full post here. For now, an excerpt:

Is it really true that the trend is changing for female American novelists? In an article titled ‘How Old Can A Young Writer Be?,’(NYT Books, June 9, 2010), Sam Tanenhaus hammers home the so-called “essential truth about fiction writers… they often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young.” The giants Tanenhaus mentions include Ishiguro, Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Proust, Fitzgerals, Kafka, Melville, Faulkner, Mailer, Updike, Pynchon and, of course, Hemingway. There is one woman in this list: Joyce Carol Oates. Those writers who matured into even greater novelists, according to Tanenhaus, include Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Don DeLillo and Virginia Wolf. I wonder if it occurred to Tanenhaus that the entire notion of producing not simply works of fiction — for, in truth, it is simpler — but entire cohesive family units and, hopefully, spiritually and physically nourished children within amply supported communities and schools, all of which has fallen predominantly upon the shoulders of women rather than men, might get in the way of women writers? His list alone ought to have given him a clue as to why most women produce their best work in later years. It has been said that raising children is like being pecked to death by chickens. I wonder how many of these male writers could truly produce great works of literature while undergoing death by chickens. I’m just saying.

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Poor. Poverty. Impoverishment. I’ve heard these words bandied about a lot recently. That last one in particular is a funny word. It sounds as though the state of being poor is a fact, that “impoverishment” is endemic to the place that is suffering from the condition. And yet, what impoverish actually means is “to take away” or “to make poor.”

It’s a word that is used often to describe countries from the old global “South,” countries like Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka. It’s the kind of classification I disagreed with even as an undergraduate, producing a 384 page honors thesis titled ‘The Dominant Ideology in International Development,’ where I argued against the idea that there were “rich” countries and “poor” ones, rather than what was the case, a trans-national capitalist class that is alive and well in every country, as were the so-called poor. There were certainly imbalances, but they were internal to each country, between the rich and the poor of that country, and they were transnational between the rich in wealthier countries and the rich in poorer nations. I refused to use those old terms, “developed,” “developing,” and “underdeveloped,” choosing instead to define the terms to more appropriately reflect our biases, as “industrially advanced” for instance.

I was reminded of that thesis recently when, during a local gathering, I met a woman who described herself as someone who worked “in poor countries.” I struggled to respond. The first thing that came to mind was whether it was really necessary to turn a friendly almost-summer afternoon into a bull fight. Can I change this person’s mind?, I asked myself. Is it worth it? Wouldn’t it be better to just shut up? (I often find myself in these situations, just for the record). But then I remembered Sara Stowell. Sara and I became friends during my first class on international politics at Bates College, a class taught by Professor Jim Richter. Sara was die-hard leftist from Vermont who had worked in El Salvador, was majoring in Rhetoric, spoke Spanish fluently and, also, helped me stage a fund-raising luncheon so I could raise enough money to go home at the end of graduation. We don’t see each other very much, in fact we recently got together after nearly seven years, at her parents’ farm in Ludlow, but Sara is often on my mind. What would Sara do/say, I often ask myself. I asked myself that question as I stood before this recent stranger that afternoon, paper plate and the ubiquitous potato salad in one hand, ear half tuned to so many babbling conversations. Well, Sara always chooses the words or action that would help change the world, however remote the possibility of that happening. I sometimes emulate her.

I turned to the lady and I said, “what countries?”
“Indonesia, Malawi,” she replied.
“Oh,” I said, giving her something of a chance, “You mean you work with poor communities in those countries?”
“Oh no, these are poor countries. Just poor countries,” she said.
Without the possibility of grace anymore, I said, “Well, that would depend on what your definition of poor might be, right? People call Sri Lanka a poor country, but when I think about its wealth of history, culture, social programs, civic life, education, healthcare, natural beauty, I am hard pressed to call it poor.”

(In case you’ve never seen Sri Lanka before, here’s a sweet video on youtube. )

Needless to say, we didn’t talk much after that. It depressed me, somewhat, that such a person, one who falls fairly into the category of a liberal democrat in the United States, who travels overseas and works with local populations, could still harbor such skewed perceptions of the world. There are days on which I believe I live in a country full of deprivation, the sort of lack which I associate with poverty. The poverty of the mind, for instance, which finds American students, at the end of high school, averaging at the bottom of the ranking among their peers worldwide, as indicated by this report by Dr. Forgione, U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics, which is only comparing the US to other industrialized countries in the West, Europe and Asia, but not the so-called Third World, where the results would be even worse for the US.

In short, the tests showed U.S. fourth-graders performing poorly, middle school students worse. and high school students are unable to compete. By the same criteria used to say we were “average” in elementary school, “we appear to be “near the bottom” at the high school level. People have a tendency to think this picture is bleak but it doesn’t apply to their own school. Chances are, even if your school compares well in SAT scores, it will still be a lightweight on an international scale.

If we set the test scores aside and concentrate on the simple matter of education, we are clearly languishing in a state of poverty. We live in a society that values a quick buck via a reality show over a commitment to learning, where most people, given the choice, would spend their money on a new gizmo over buying a book. We live in a country where in the neighborhoods on this side of City Line Avenue, we can have nationally ranked schools of excellence, where the trophies gleam behind glass bookcases, and on the other side of City Line Avenue are neighborhoods where sending ones children to those schools comes from necessity not choice, and the only glass to be found is often on the streets outside.

I am struck by the spiritual poverty of a country where people choose to protect their own individual interest over the chance to protect a community. Where attention to physical wellbeing is reserved for the rich while the poor must simply make do or die, something I’ve written about before.

I am struck by the poverty of a country where an elderly person must languish in a home away from family and what is familiar, where visits are few and irritations many. How poverty-stricken it is to be abandoned in such a manner, where the first consideration is neither care nor gratitude but convenience?

What poverty there is in a country where the citizenry barely understands the platforms of parties for which they vote, if they vote at all. What a hideous lack there is in people who have such little interest or understanding of the globe of which our country is but one very small part. What poverty exists in classrooms where even the history of this country is taught with such a lack of complexity and depth, where the memorization of a date and a name is sufficient. How poor is a child who is graded with an A for mediocre work and rides off into the sunset to become completely disillusioned and depressed when he or she comes face to face with a world of peers who have been held to higher standards?

How utterly lacking is a nation where the people want their President to express rage and fury rather than reason, integrity and resolve. How intellectually impoverished this country is when those who are most highly educated - like this individual was - lacks the intelligence to understand that my presence at that gathering did not suddenly make me someone who thinks just like her, but rather, an individual with a personal history that might influence how I look at our common world.

I posted a link on Facebook a few days ago, about the discovery, by the United States, of rich deposits of minerals in Afghanistan. The sarcasm of the accompanying comment had to do with how wonderful it was that the U.S. military, which was ostensibly fighting a war in Afghanistan, had the time, inclination and resources to discover “huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium.” Did they find them while they were, you know, digging a hole to hunker down in for the night? Did they come across these mines while looking for water? Did a local tribal elder show them the way in exchange for a bag of MREs?

The response to the post came from two sources. One, the immigrant voice, which articulated with a trace of bitterness that perhaps the search for minerals preceded the war, and the other, the American liberal, which celebrated the fact that instead of growing cocaine the impoverished country of Afghanistan could finally make an honest living. So there was that word again, impoverish.

Odd how in this case the word was correct. Afghanistan is a country that has been impoverished by a variety of groups, some their own, but others residing in White Houses (in America) and Parliament Buildings (in Moscow). America’s link to the cultivation of poppy in Afghanistan and its export out of the country have been widely documented. Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:

“It was alleged by the Soviets on multiple occasions that American CIA agents were helping smuggle opium out of Afghanistan, either into the West, in order to raise money for the Afghan resistance or into the Soviet Union in order to weaken it through drug addiction. According to Alfred McCoy, the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and others such as Haji Ayub Afridi. In 2010, Russia accused United States of supporting the opium production in Afghanistan. Presently with resurgence of high out put production of opium and heroin in post-Taliban Afghanistan, there is an ongoing heroin addiction epidemic in Russia which is claiming 30,000 lives each year, mostly among young people. There were two and half million heroin addicts in Russia by 2009.”

It seemed so bizarre to me that anybody could imagine that any country in the world, however impoverished - in the past and now on an ongoing basis - by countries such as America, would be glad that the American military had invaded its territory, killed so many thousands of civilians - there appears to be a particular fondness for attacking wedding parties - and then announced that they had found an exploitable natural resource.

Somehow I doubt that the United States intends to leave those mines alone or that they intend an equal exchange of technological expertise for the sharing of wealth that belongs solely to Afghanistan. Somehow I feel that there is further impoverishment on the cards for Afghanistan. And, while that happens, the United States will continue on its own downward spiral of poverty. We are, after all, safely addicted to our own vices and myopia.

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Earlier this year I gave a couple of speeches, one at the State Department and another to an assorted collection of expatriates and Sri Lankans courtesy of the American embassy in Sri Lanka. The speech was on immigration, emigration and writing. Part of what I spoke about involved a sort of meditation on what it required of a writer who wishes to write of or about a foreign country. It involved a reference to the sort of ‘parachute journalism’ practiced by many reporters these days - supported, avidly, by their readers back home - and which describes the practice of “dropping in” on a “situation” in another country, sometimes for a couple of days sometimes for a week or two, firm in the conviction that one has the competence to understand everything that it is necessary to understand before one presumes to write about conflicts or, indeed, disasters or other catastrophes, that affect a culture not ones own. I have written about all that before, here (All the News Fit to Print) and here (Foreign Media).

As it so happened, however, that week’s New Yorker(January 25th, 2010), which I took on the flight with me, carried several excellent articles that spoke to the birth and nourishment of this phenomenon in America. The first of those was Ken Auletta’s column, Annals of Communication (‘Non-Stop News’), which uses the Obama administration as a way of discussing the matter or, to be more specific, the President’s ongoing effort to educate and retrain the press corps. The issue, laid bare by the President in an interview on CBS’ Meet the Press, is exemplified by his comments to two journalists:

To Bob Schieffer: “I do think part of what is different today is that the twenty-four hour news cycle and cable television and blogs and all this, they focus on the most extreme elements on both sides. They can’t get enough of conflict. It’s catnip to the media right now.

And, to David Gregory: “What gets you on the news is controversy.”

Separately, the President is said to have used the occasion to chastise a press corps that has rushed to judgment, with “instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter (Cronkite) disdained. . . . ‘What happened today?’ is replaced with ‘Who won today?’ The public debate cheapens.” It is certainly laudable when the President sits through a two and a half hour long service, so he could deliver a sermon of sorts to the journalists who had gathered there to honor their fallen comrade, Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, the president argued, had earned his title as a trusted news person, through decades of “painstaking effort, a commitment to fundamental values; his belief that the American people were hungry for the truth, unvarnished and unaccompanied by theatre or spectacle.”

Listening to the President’s press conference today, I was struck by the relentless search for a soundbite that seemed to be the driving force behind many of the questions from seasoned personnel from the NYT on down. Indeed, minutes after the conference ended, we have this live-blogging take from Kate Phillips from the NYT, “…it remains an open question whether the measured tone that has become the soundtrack of Mr. Obama’s presidency – a detached, calm, observational pitch – served to drive the point home that he is sufficiently enraged by the fury in the Gulf Coast.”

As far as I know, being sufficiently enraged is reserved for us foot-soldiers, for activists at the front of a multitude of battles that need to be fought and won on the ground. Detached calm and observational pitch and, indeed, clarity of thought and perfection of diction - which continue to be refreshing in the post-Bush era - is what I expect from a President. But not for journalists, oh no. For them, for the newspapers they wish to sell, for the innumerable byte and pen-and-ink venues in which they wish to spew “the latest,” the “right here right now, don’t go away” version of what is important, rage and fury are what matter.

In that same article I mention above, Peter Baker is quoted as describing the difference between beat reporters from ten years ago and today thus:

“(He had) the luxury of writing for the next day’s newspaper. He had at least a few hours to call people, to access information, to provide context. Today, as much as you want to do that, by the time your deadline comes around you’ve already filed for the Web”—often more than once. In between times, you’ve filed for radio, and appeared on TV, and maybe done a podcast or a blog. “When do you have time to call experts? When do you have time to sort through data and information and do your own research? Even with a well-staffed news organization, we are hostages to the non-stop, never-ending file-it-now, get-on-the-Web, get-on-the-radio, get-on-TV media environment.”

Which is why I was particularly heartened by this interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Lorraine Adams (Harbor and The Room & The Chair), who states the importance of fiction in adding the nuance missing from the news, something I’ve written about before here (Global Civilians). It’s a short interview, and includes both Lorraine and Nick Davies (Flat Earth News), another journalist/author who has been critical of the press, and well worth a listen.

I have just finished reading Harbor, and am deep into Lorraine’s second book. As an immigrant who has experienced the underside of what it means to work illegally in the United States (I won’t say how or why), who has felt both cold and poverty in environments where wealth and privilege seem de rigueur and the lack thereof indicative of a deeper lack in oneself, who has known that the stories from “back home” were never the stories that would be told, who has understood, above all, that the news that is presented to Americans about left-behind countries are never, ever, comprehensive or truthful, Adams’ book, about a group of Algerian stowaways in Boston, was uplifting. Not because the themes contained therein were, but because in her fiction, Adams portrays the origins of perception and the vastness of the distances between us, as immigrants, as survivors, as Americans, as well as the acute intimacy of our inner lives, both proximate and divergent, with an empathy that unfolds what is true in a way that no amount of news coverage ever could.

If I want a soundbite, there are dozens of news blogs and news-aggregating websites and personal rants that I can access. But if I want to understand the human beings behind the story, if I want to truly understand a history, I go to fiction. Harbor was one of those books. Chimamande Ngozi Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun was another. Long may writers of fiction, particularly those with the skill to uncover both fact as well as moment, gift us with the truth that really matters and could, perhaps, change the world.

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Today my best friend celebrates his birthday in a state, New York, which denies him and many of his friends basic rights and benefits that the rest of us take for granted.

As I think about that, I am reminded of a Fall morning many years ago, when I sat in a class on Black Women in the Americas, at Bates, and was told that we were going to watch the romantic saga that brought Vivienne Leigh to independent theaters worldwide. “Gone With The Wind? I love that movie!” I exclaimed. My friend, an African-American woman, stared at me, aghast: “But it’s so racist!” Thanks to our subsequent discussions, Mammy and Pork took up a full screen in my mental map of the movie, revealing a subtext that I, a foreigner, had missed in my awe over Scarlett’s waist and the beautiful green velvet drapes.

Recently, I revisited that moment in light of the debate over same-sex marriages in New York, and the attacks that have been made on those who have tried to bring equal rights to everybody in this country as well as those initiatives that seek to export our basest impulses overseas. In an article for the NYT early this year, Jeffrey Gettleman talks about three American evangelical Christians, who went to Uganda to give a series of talks about “curing” homosexuals:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

The end result was a law, introduced by a little known politician with ties to the U.S., called the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which will impose a death sentence on people exhibiting homosexual behavior. The role of individual Americans, (usually those with an agenda of proselytizing thrown in), in instigating and supporting bigotry in other nations, particularly in the recent past in African nations against gay individuals, is bad enough, but we have troubles closer to home.

Here’s the current status of human rights with regard to gays in the US: five states, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, New Hampshire and Vermont and the District of Washington DC, allow legal marriage between same-sex couples, along with the Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon. Previously, the state of California granted the same legal right to marriage for same-sex couples, and then rescinded that right although it continues to grant the right to the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples, although only those who were married before November 5, 2008, are allowed the designation, “marriage.” In NY, Rhode Island and Maryland, same-sex marriages are recognized but not performed.

So back to that movie. I first saw the driveway to Tara projected on a screen at a private screening in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Apart from the movie, I watched a young man, Michael, who was wearing blue shadow on his eyes and had his arm around the shoulder of his boyfriend. My parents – an educator and a senior member of the Ceylon Civil Service - were deeply involved in the arts community, and Michael, new to the fold, became a good friend.

I went from 7 to 17, with a dawning realization that our home was a haven for my parents’ non-heterosexual friends. Neither my brothers or I or any of our friends ever questioned their presence under our roof. Uncle Eustace, trained in England and a Brigadier from the Royal Army, a fine actor who played Alfred Doolittle with aplomb, cheered us up when my father lost his job, and commandeered an army ambulance to get him to intensive care when he had his first heart attack. I called Uncle Tony when I needed a ride somewhere. There he would reliably be, a very large gentleman in a very small red Morris Minor, on time and ready to shuttle us where we needed to go. Uncle Damian, Director of the Dept. of Motor Vehicles, cleared both my American husband and me for our International Drivers Licenses. These men and women joined the many others who created the social backdrop to my childhood, coloring it with their generous spirits and purposeful lives.

It has been bewildering to me therefore, to watch each wave of fearful and vitriolic reactions to bills ensuring that the rights extended to all citizens and legal residents are not withheld from those who choose to consummate their romantic relationships differently than others. Much of the debate has been centered on God. As a practicing Buddhist who attended a Roman Catholic convent and then a Christian missionary school, reads both the Bible and the Qu’ran, worked for the Quakers, and conducted research on the Jewish and Druze faiths, I have come to see that there really is no God who is not present in every person. Among the words of wisdom that have guided me in how I raise my own three daughters, are the words of Jesus who said, “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto Me.” (Mt. 25:40)

It is difficult for me to understand how some of God’s followers have taken it upon themselves to decide that they must judge other human beings. Not for the massacre of innocents or the pursuit of material gain at the cost of destroying all creation, but for how two consenting adults choose to conduct their private lives.

In trying to understand the motivation behind these assaults, I go back to that class I took as a young adult. Ignorance is usually at the root of our most repugnant and non-inclusive political positions, but it is also at the root of our blindness to what life might be like for someone other than ourselves. I learned, by seeing that movie through my friend’s eyes, that it both left things unsaid and stated other things loud and clear. It did not diminish my enjoyment of the chemistry between Scarlett and Rhett. It did not make me stop grabbing the unyielding soil of my garden from time to time and declaring that “as god is my witness I’ll never go hungry again!” It did make me understand her experience, it did enlighten me about American history. It broadened my mind, it made me a better human being and it made us real friends, the kind whose friendship is based not only on shared activities and interests but deep empathy.

Surely our lives should be defined by the people we stand up for, not by those we seek to destroy? One of the early Quakers, William Penn, once said that “Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it,” which is not unlike the verse in Colossians, Chapter 2:13-19: “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience…and over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

May my friend wake up someday soon to a home that recognizes that which is holy in every living being. Happy birthday, Charles.

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I am over at the Main Line Times today, but if you want to avoid the usual suspects, all anonymous, unloading over there, just read the op ed below in its extended version.

Respice finem means, literally, “look to the end; consider the outcome.” I was reminded of those words as I listened to some of the grandstanding that was done by various members of the community and, sadly, at least one high school student headed for the newspaper business, at the special meeting of the school board last night at Harriton High School. The most bewildering question, as far as I was concerned, came from Professor Burton Caine, a legal scholar of considerable prominence who asked why the legal firm Ballard Spahr “had not interviewed the former Police Commissioner, Joe Daley, who was quoted in the newspaper as saying that’s as illegal as hell.” Isn’t the answer obvious? If we relied not on the evidence before our eyes, but rather, the whimsy of newspaper reporters and statements made by sundry individuals to the press, we would be fighting this lawsuit for years. Perhaps decades. (The full report from Ballard Sparh is available here.)

Professor Caine also referenced the fact that many in the audience questioned the motives of the Robbins family in filing the lawsuit at all. What struck me about his statement, which elaborated, with great flourish, the worth of lawsuits, is that an academic interest in the merit of lawsuits is quite different from the real-world impact of lawsuits on communities. Has the professor forgotten that the courts exist to intervene when all other methods of arriving at compromise and obtaining justice have broken down? We do not file lawsuits for purposes of entertainment or intellectual stimulation. We file them when no other means exist to obtain what we seek, which, in the words of the Robbinses’ lawyer himself, Mr. Haltzman, was, apparently, information, not compensation.

The fact is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t opt out of civil discussion and rush to filing a class action lawsuit - a lawsuit whose legal credibility as a “class action” is now in question given that the TheftTrack feature’s three separate functions (i.e. recording the IP address, taking a webcam photo and taking a screen shot), were only activated on Blake Robbins’ computer and no other. Even if we set aside the fact that a team of parents, as well as one separate family, have filed for consideration as an intervening class, the fact of the matter is, the circumstances surrounding Blake Robbins are not representative of those surrounding any other student. Here is the paragraph within the report that deals with that issue:

On March 18, 2010, a group of six parents of LMSD high school students filed a motion to intervene in the Robbins case to pursue claims arising from the District’s remote activation of webcams on student laptops.5 Their proposed complaint seeks only equitable relief, including an order prohibiting LMSD from remotely activating webcams on student laptops, prohibiting LMSD from using laptop tracking technology that can compromise students’ and families’ privacy, and requiring LMSD to create and implement policies and practices for the District’s administration of student laptops. (Motion of Colleen and Kenneth Wortley, Frances and David McComb, and Christopher and Lorena Chambers for Intervention, filed March 18, 2010 in Robbins, et al. v. Lower Merion School District, et al., No. 10-665 (E.D. Pa.) (“Wortley Intervention Motion”), App. Tab 205.)

On April 5, 2010, an HHS student and his parents filed a motion to intervene in the Robbins case to pursue claims arising from the District’s remote activation of webcams on student laptops. Their proposed complaint seeks only equitable relief – namely, an injunction permanently prohibiting the District from remotely accessing laptops “in a manner that constitutes an unreasonable search of students and their families,” and a declaration restricting the dissemination of images captured by TheftTrack. (Emergency Motion of the Neill Family to Intervene and for a Protective Order, filed April 5, 2010 in Robbins, et al. v. Lower Merion School District, et al., No. 10-665 (E.D. Pa.) (“Neill Intervention Motion”), App. Tab 06.)

The second of the two young men from the staff of The Merionite had several questions most of which revolved around why the Superintendent was allowed sole access to the data, a question, that Dr. McGinley fielded with an indulgent reference to his technological ineptitude. The main thrust of the student’s comments, as well as those of some others in the audience, was why the board would authorize such an expense without understanding completely what the separate features might be. Well, here’s the answer: trust. The principal of a school routinely authorizes creative modifications to curricula based on trust in the expertise of teachers. If a principal were to have to understand every single subject before she made such authorizations, we would still be etching on stone tablets. When a president wishes to make policy on the environment, he (and, someday, she) asks for the recommendations of subordinates. In this case, the recommendations was supported by material that indicated to the persons making the recommendation, Ms. Cafiero and Mr. Perbix, that another school in Pennsylvania had used the TheftTrack effectively. The paragraph relating to that is below.

In addition, Pole Position touted TheftTrack in its promotional materials, including a “case study” of the use of TheftTrack by the Bensalem (PA) Township School District to recover two MacBooks, one of which had been stolen from a student and the other of which was stolen from a teacher.25 Noting that the Bensalem district had chosen LANrev in part for its ability to manage both Mac and Windows computers, Pole Position stated that the stolen laptops had returned 500 webcam photographs and other tracking data that the Bensalem and Camden, New Jersey police Departments used to obtain search warrants. The article quotes a Bensalem district network technician as saying: “The police were amazed at the detailed tracking info provided by LANrev. Thanks to TheftTrack, our stolen MacBooks were recovered, the culprits apprehended, and we got the last laugh.”

But more than these kinds of agenda-driven questions, what struck me as most disappointing was the tone used by the student in addressing people at least three decades his senior. There are questions to be asked, and they have been. There is anger to be expressed, and it has been. But there is something else that has fallen by the wayside during this circus and that is our understanding of what makes a good school system. It is not buildings, although they are certainly glorious, it is not a/c for Philadelphia summers and a greenhouse for potted plants, although those bring comfort, it is not, in short, facilities, but people. So what I would like to say to this boy and his peers are those two words: respice finem. Look to the end, consider the outcome. For the outcome and end is not the little media blip you get from being precocious and combative. The outcome is your own education. The outcome is the respect and care of your teachers and elders. The outcome is the stature of the school to which you belong.

The public and private schools my brothers, friends and I attended in Sri Lanka all had classes consisting of 40 students, a piece of chalk and a blackboard. All of us went on to graduate school, some of us to the finest universities here, including Harvard, MIT and Cornell. We didn’t learn what we needed to know to succeed in life from the facilities in which our learning took place. Our advantage was that we had teachers who cared about us and parents who did not see teachers and administrators as adversaries.

In the midst of all the new buildings and state-of-the-art equipment in Lower Merion, what I have seen, and what I focus on, is that same care and commitment to students that we had in our Spartan Sri Lankan classrooms, and the willingness on the part of parents and staff to consider education a task that is undertaken with mutual respect and cooperation. That, son, is a fragile but beautiful thing. When you look back at this time in your life, what you will remember is not free laptops, webcams or multi-million-dollar renovations. What you will remember are those people. Give them your respect, for without them nothing else matters. Respice finem.

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I am one of those writers of prose (fiction and non-fiction), who is actually a lover of poets and poetry. At the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Denver, Colorado last week, I found myself purchasing collections of poetry, among them Satellite Convulsions, Poems from Tin House (Tin House Books, 2008), The Art of Folding by Sarah Zale (Plainview Press, 2010), an intimate involvement in the disclosures concealed in daily life, and The Giving of Pears (Black Lawrence Press, 2010), by Nigerian poet, Abayomi Animashaun, winner of the Hudson Prize. I also found myself lingering in conversation not with fiction editors but rather with small presses devoted to the publication of poetry, and the poetry editors of journals that I found interesting. Perhaps it is because poetry crystallizes the matters of human life that prose writing expands. Fiction, for me, is an unraveling, while poetry gathers to. There’s a Sri Lankan song that talks about a man leaving three women who love him and in this story, one woman cries and begs him not to leave, the other tells him to travel safely, the third says nothing, simply gazes upon his face. Poetry is that third woman as I see it, the one that stays on my mind, the one that it is worth coming back to.

I was supposed to talk about a group of poets today, but instead I am going to focus on one of my beloveds, who was re-introduced to me at this year’s AWP: Mahmoud Darwish. The details of this Palestinian poet are well known, so I will be brief. He was born into a Sunni Muslim family in al-Barwe, east of Acre where, after the war of 1948, Israelis took over the land his family owned, turning them into refugees. Thanks to a census that was taken without notice (a fact I discovered at this reading), he became designated as “a present absentee” a turn of phrase as strange as the use of “resident alien” here in the United States. He lived in Lebanon, Cyprus, Tunisia, Jordan and France. He worked in Haifa as a journalist and joined the Israeli Community Party, Raka. He studied in Moscow, and settled in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1971, where he worked for the PLO in various capacities until he resigned from the PLO executive in 1994. In 2001 Darwish reveived the Prize for Cultural Freedom established by Lannan Foundation. He visited Israel in 1996 after 26 years of exile, having made his home in Ramallah in the Central West Bank and which was, subsequently reoccupied by the Israeli army in 2002. He died on August 9th 2008 while undergoing open-heart surgery.

What Darwish survived throughout his life, his series of assaults and displacements which he refers to in one of his poems thus “a life I used to measure/ In minutes / Or departures,” forms much of what we think of when we think of his work, but as the tribute showed, the poet himself was much more various than we have let him be. The poets reading Darwish’s work were Fady Joudah (Yale Series of Younger Poets Award winner for The Earth in the Attic), Yusef Komunyakaa (winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Kingley Tufts Poetry Award for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Michael Collier (former poet laureate of Maryland and author of Dark Wild Realm, The Ledge, etc), and Libyan poet, Khaled Mattawa (Questions and Their Retinue: Selected Poems of Iraqi poet Hatif Janabi), and each of these remarkable poets took a different route to their celebration of Darwish.

It was interesting for me to hear Mattawa who prefaced his reading of the poem ‘Identity Card,’ by Darwish, which begins with the lines “Write down!/ I am an Arab” with the biographical note that the poem was written for his father. The poem is full of details from their own life: 8 children, a ninth on the way, work in the quarries, their landowning history as farmers, and it was written as a response from a Palestinian against an Israeli. Yet throughout Darwish’s life, the poem was adopted as a rallying cry for Arabs who would recite it among themselves, a tradition he found, frankly, idiotic since the absence of the original context made the poem sound nonsensical. It was a perfect example of how we take the poet’s intention and bestow to it our need. It is a beautiful poem, full of rage and torment and yet, I wondered how diminished we are in reading poetry in translation. To my ear, the last line, “and my anger” fell flat and useless. The poem ought to have ended with “Beware…/ Beware…/ Of my hunger.” But who am I to say.

The difficulty of maintaining cadence in translation was also made clear in the reading by Fady Joudah, whose recitation of the first poem in the Arabic ‘On a day like today,’ was full of the long and repetitive ‘n’s and the drawn-out ‘a’s and hard ‘g’s that almost made it into his recitation of the same poem in English and yet left me with a longing for that original language rather than a feeling of satiation from having heard what the poet may have intended.

Here are some lines from Darwish’s poem, ‘Mural,’

One day I will become an idea. No sword will carry it
to the wasteland and no book…
like a rain on a mountain that has cracked
from a single sprout
so neither force
nor fugitive justice can win
One day I will become what I want.”

In Joudah’s voice, that “want” was no mere expression of desire, but a well crafted statement of what is deserved, its utterance full of the modulation of a native speaker of Arabic transforming it from familiar to deep portent.

The first time I heard Yousef Komunyakaa was at Bread Loaf. I’d talked to him several times, even shared a picnic lunch with him, but I had no knowledge of his importance among American poets or, indeed, his poetic caliber. Another writer told me “listen to him read and you will fall in love,” and so I went. To listen to Komunyakaa read is, truly, to be transported to a place of understanding where words, how they roll in ones mouth, how they come together and break apart in voice, is more important than anything else that could be happening. To hear Yousef Komunyakaa read Darwish, even in translation, and speak these words, “writing wounds without drawing blood,” was sublime. Komunyakaa’s reflected thus on Darwish (I paraphrase):

“(his) clandestine war of imagery and innuendo, where we have been changed without drawing blood, without the smell of gunpowder in the air. His voice echoes from the conflicted center of the PLO writing poetry which is like martial arts, so breathless that the adversary does not know how he has been affected until he wakes in the night with an image in his head.”

I cannot place the choices made by any of these poets in an order of importance for they created a far more complete portrait of a poet I thought I knew, than any one of them probably could have managed alone. But it was particularly wonderful to hear Michael Collier read a studiously edited (his) version of several pages from Memory for Forgetfulness, where he uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the resulting bombing of Beirut which went on almost constantly from June 13th to August 12th, as a setting for a series of prose poems which refers also to one of those dates, August 6th, which is Hiroshima Day, a day during which he chooses to explore the streets of Beirut.

In the collection, he asks, “To whom shall I offer my innocent silence?” describing scenes of a ravaged place, brutalized people. But the section Michael Collier chose to read was about a meditation on the poet’s desire to make a perfect cup of coffee in between the sounds of the shelling. Having been flung into the corridor outside his room, he wonders if he has enough seconds – five is all he asks for – to get to the kitchen. In that kitchen, he will make coffee, and he describes at great length, the way in which a perfect cup of coffee, perfect for him, may be made, while meditating on the very nature of coffee with these memorable lines:

“The aroma of coffee is a return to and a bringing back of first things because it is the offspring of the primordial. It’s a journey, begun thousands of years ago, that still goes on. Coffee is a place. Coffee is pores that let the inside seep through to the outside. A separation that unites what can’t be united except through its aroma. Coffee is not for weaning. On the contrary, coffee is a breast that nourishes men deeply. A morning born of a bitter taste. The milk of manhood. Coffee is geography.”

How hideous that this mindful existence within the contemplation of coffee takes place while the poet fears for his life. How appropriate that it is only those simple rituals that order our lives and turn a general existence into a personalized life. How easy it was to forget, as this American poet read that Palestinian poet’s words that this was not only an exposition of how humanizing that desire was, the desire to do what is always done, but a moment that could end all thought and word and act, until he closed with the lines, “a second is long enough for me to burn.”

Fady Joudah, picking it up from there, related an anecdote about a friend who was crouching with his father and brothers during the more recent concentrated attack on Gaza - I believe it was the December 2008 - January 2009 bombing that was mentioned, but it could have been Qalandiya, Balata or one of dozens of other places within the occupied territories, one of thousands of other dates and other brutalities. He describes how one of the brothers tells him to go make some coffee and the boy does not move because he is too scared and says so to which his brother responds, “What’s the matter with you? haven’t you read Mahmoud Darwish?” At which point the boy gets up and defiantly goes into the kitchen and makes coffee for his family.

One of the readers, I forget now which one, said that Darwish appeared to have spent his life arguing with himself, as though he was wondering if he took the right direction and, the speaker said, it seems that, in the final analysis, when we consider his body of work, he might agree that he did. Which brings me back to this poem, translated by Joudah and read by Komunyakaa, which might just tell us what Darwish actually felt:

Don’t Write History As Poetry
Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah

Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
The historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
Chills when he names his victims and doesn’t listen
To the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
Of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
Intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
Has no compassion so that we can long for our
Beginning, and no intention so that we can know what’s ahead
And what’s behind . . . and it has no rest stops by
The railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
Toward what time has done to us over there, and what
We’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is neither logical nor intuitive that we can break
What is left of our myth about happy times,
Nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
Of judgment day. It is in us and outside us . . . and a mad
Repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us . . . Perhaps
History wasn’t born as we desired, because
The Human Being never existed?
Philosophers and artists passed through there . . .
And the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
Then passed through there . . . and the poor believed
In sayings about paradise and waited there . . .
And gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
And passed through there. And history has no
Time for contemplation, history has no mirror
And no bare face. It is unreal reality
Or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it.
Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!

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I’m over at the Huffington Post today, writing about the inaugural national event for Women in Letters and the Literary Arts (WILLA), which took place in Denver during this years Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference. Here’s the beginning:

Is it ever possible to go against the grain, particularly in an industry so thick with sexism that it is a veritable live model of exploitation where the masses who write, read and purchase books (women) support the few who judge, award and critique them (men)? Apparently, not only is it possible, but it can be a whole lot of fun. The first rock-concert styled public reading and national kick-off for WILLA (Women In Letters & Literary Arts), took place at the Denver Press Club last Friday night during this year’s conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), held in Colorado. After two days of panels and readings (approximately twenty-four during each of six time slots; do the math), plus a full slate of off-site events ranging from a reading hosted by several literary journals, Counterpath Review, Drunken Boat, Guernica, and Persea Books to one by Cave Canem/Kundiman to the Con Tinta Celebration which involved one of those rarities in the usually expensive AWP world, free food, and two popular parties on the same night, one by über literary agent, Julie Barer and the other by Granta, one would imagine that participants would feel an eyes-glazed-over effect in their entire bodies at the prospect of listening to 31 writers from 9 to midnight. Instead, through the course of the evening, nearly 400 people showed up.

The full article is available here. Check out and join , follow its founders, Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu on Twitter and, in general, whenever possible, write a review, give a shout out or pass on relevant information about the work being done by women writers.

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