#184: Who do you want to be?
Dear reader,
I write with a heavy heart to wrap up this precarious month of ups and downs. We are in dangerously perilous times.
I’m worried for young Muslim girls in this country who are not being allowed to go to school in their hijabs, and being forced to choose between getting an education and their faith.
I’m scared for Ukraine, and hope that peace prevails. I’ve been glued to Twitter, where the news updates are terrifying yet somehow, humanity seems to be coming together. It feels like the whole world is coming together to fight for justice and democracy. I don’t know much about Ukraine’s geopolitics but I also don’t have to to know that Putin is a war criminal and that war is NOT the answer.
Resonating with Roxane Gay here:
Everyday heroes are emerging in wartime, from the civilians of Ukraine (particularly women) taking to active combat to global hacker collective Anonymous declaring cyber war against the Russian government to the courageous Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy defending his country by his troops, reminding Russia that “by attacking us, you are going to see our faces--not backs--our faces” in this historic speech that every human being must see.
*
In the final line of the poem Transplant, Andrew McMillan writes:
I couldn’t live with what I was becoming
The line took me back to Hannah Gadsby's graduation address at the University of Tasmania last year, where she asks the young students:
“For me, the question 'who do you want to be' is one that helps me step back in a moment and think about who do I want to be under the circumstances I am in... what actions will best reflect who I want to be? So who do you want to be? Do you want to be someone's whose ends justify their means? Do you want to be a people pleaser? A little of column A, a little of column B?
We write our personal narratives everyday. Which side of history do you want to find yourself standing on? Who do you want to be?
Poetry Corner
It’s been a distressing week. But poetry has held space for a wide spectrum of emotions at a universal level. Instead of war poems, a few poems on Becoming:
1. Becoming by Jim Harrison
Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.
2. Speak by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Speak, for your lips are yet free;
Speak, for your tongue is still your own;
Your lissom body yours alone;
Speak, your life is still your own.
3. Now I become myself by May Sarton
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
4. The World by Jennifer Chang
One winter I lived north, alone
and effortless, dreaming myself
into the past. Perhaps, I thought,
words could replenish privacy.
Outside, a red bicycle froze
into form, made the world falser
in its white austerity. So much
happens after harvest: the moon
performing novelty: slaughter,
snow. One hour the same
as the next, I held my hands
or held the snow. I was like sculpture,
forgetting or, perhaps, remembering
everything. Red wings in the snow,
red thoughts ablaze in the war
I was having with myself again.
Everything I hate about the world
I hate about myself, even now
writing as if this were a law
of nature. Say there were deer
fleet in the snow, walking out
the cold, and more gingkoes
bare in the beggar’s grove. Say
I was not the only one who saw
or heard the trees, their diffidence
greater than my noise. Perhaps
the future is a tiny flame
I’ll nick from a candle. First, I’m burning.
Then, numb. Why must every winter
grow colder, and more sure?
5. A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been by George Orwell
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago,
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girls’ bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
(Thanks for this Orwell poem, Sahana)
Tweets of the Week
I haven’t had the energy to read much outside of tweets this past week.
No Recommended Listening / Links of the Week this time. Only tweets:
Stay safe, and keep your loved ones close.
Hoping for peace,
Rohini