What Is

Amir Sulaiman performed this piece yesterday at Harvard backed up by the Kominas. It’s pretty hard to come up with something to say about this since, other than walking around going, “Alhamdulillah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,” since yesterday afternoon, I’ve been struck kind of speechless.

Ok, that was a lie, but it would be easier if it wasn’t, because sometimes I have so much to say it weighs me down more than silence and I fear I’ll never be able to express it correctly. I haven’t been speechless, I’ve been inspired. Words burst out of me and I have to pause under street lamps walking home at night to write down verses that won’t give me peace until they are on a page, the ink mixing with small drops of rain I couldn’t fend off. Sitting in the audience listening to him, though, I was struck dumb, unable to utter anything but breaths of affirmation and confirmation. Amir made me feel like the ecstatic in a hadrah overcome who shouts “Allah!” above other voices, not to call attention to himself but because he might explode and expire if he doesn’t, because the visions presented to him override his senses, because he has to give up his soul knowing it will be returned to him enriched and enriching.

Amir’s poetry penetrates the heart because it comes from his heart, is inspired by his truth, and is expressed through his reality. And he can string a sentence together pretty nicely too. I had an opportunity to read  Amir one of my poems and get some feedback and advice. It was a special moment for me having just heard him recite and having a glimpse of the fullness of what he has to offer. The basic message he gave me was to try to not just say what I can say or what I should say, but to say what is, and instead of telling me what to do, he told me what he does: reach inside of himself and put it all on the table in a form of self examination that I can only understand as being part of a spiritual practice. Amir Sulaiman is not just a man who speaks the truth, he is an artist who shows us how to realize the truth of what lies within ourselves, look it in the eye, and say, “This is mine,” not with pride, not with arrogance, but with an honesty that allows us to right what is wrong, increase what is good, praise God for what is blessed, and share what uplifts.

The Sound Of A Reed

I recently started reading Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage. Her writing transports me to a time before Cairo became the place that I called home for so many years, and her experiences resonate with me as distant reflections of some of my own. While I identify with much in her narrative, it is also interesting to see the things that strike me as false, the things that my memory and experience belie.

Towards the beginning of the book, Ahmed spends some time talking about the sounds of Cairo, and she mentions the man who walks the streets in the morning playing a reed flute:

His pipe sounded private, like someone singing to himself. A simple, lovely sound, almost like speech, like a human voice. He would say ‘good morning’ with his pipe and one knew it to be ‘good morning.’ When he passed it would feel as if something of infinite sweetness had momentarily graced one’s life and then faded irretrievably away.

Years later I’d discover that in Sufi poetry this music of the reed is the quintessential music of loss and I’d feel, learning this, that I’d always known it to be so. In the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, the classic master-poet of Sufism, the song of the reed is the metaphor for our human condition, haunted as we so often are by a vague sense of longing and nostalgia, but nostalgia for we know not quite what. Cut from its bed and fashioned into a pipe, the reed forever laments the living earth that it once knew, crying out, whenever life is breathed into it, its ache and its yearning and loss. We too live our lives haunted by loss, we too, says Rumi, remember a condition of completeness that we once knew but have forgotten that we ever knew. The song of the reed and the music that haunts our lives is the music of loss, of loss and of remembrance.

This is a beautiful passage, and it expertly borrows Rumi’s metaphor of the reed and retells it in a way that is both moving and compelling. While the feelings that she expresses may be universal, I think they may be even more present, more poignant, for the memoirist. If all of our lives are haunted by a music of loss and remembrance, a music that is played softly in the background and which we only notice at certain hours of the day when the sun’s fading light has that quality of melancholy, or when something confronts us that pulls us in and wraps us in the feelings of what may as well be another life, the memoirist brings all of this to the fore in a conscious effort to recall and record what their memories can still grasp of the past.

But for me, this is not the reed of Cairo’s streets; that song is uplifting and joyful. In the days of Leila Ahmed’s childhood I imagine this would have reflected Cairo’s idyllic clime, but in the years that I lived in Cairo, hearing the pipe seller walk the streets calling out with his joyful greeting, it served as a counterpoint to the pain and the difficulty which we, the city’s residents, often experienced. Much like the humor of a cab driver engulfed in smog and poverty, this song served not as a distraction from the hardship, but as an act of rebellion, a lashing out with whatever is at hand to try to conquer the oppression and the darkness. Rumi’s reed is far more mournful, far more beautiful, far less defiant.

There is another passage in Ahmed’s book that explains the discrepancy between her memory and mine even better than the separation of fifty years. Recalling funeral processions that would pass by her home, Ahmed incorrectly quotes the Arabic phrase the pallbearers would exclaim. Concerning this she says,

That was how I heard the phrase, which, as I now know, is different in its “correct” form – but of course memories are the stories of our consciousness rather than just “objective” facts.

We are each allowed our own memory of the reed, and our different interpretations do not cause the music to be any less pervasive, the song any less profound, or the echo in our hearts any less real.

Welcome to “The Jungle”

I’ve been wanting to post something about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for a while now, but I’m finding it a bit difficult, the book is so heart wrenching at times, and the passages that I would like to quote are precisely the one’s that make me turn away from the page when I read them the same way people do when they see something horrible in a movie or on T.V. The difference is, when you look back at the screen, the offending image is gone, but the words on the page remain, waiting for you to return so they can shock you with their blunt brutality.

The Jungle has been on my list of books to read since I got interested in food, factory farming, and the treatment of animals a couple of years ago. D gave me his copy of The Jungle when I saw him in New York a few weeks ago, so I started reading it on the bus ride home. D has this wonderful policy of giving away all of his books after he reads them, except cook books that is. I have benefited from this practice on more than one occasion, and while I would like to say that I pass them on to others when I am finished, the truth is that I horde them on my bookshelves and keep them stacked on the floor of my bedroom in small towers that teeter and threaten collapse when I pass them on my way from my desk to the dresser or closet.

The following is part of the description of the wedding party with which Sinclair begins The Jungle:

Now the fat policeman wakens definitely, and feels of his club to see that it is ready for business. He has to be prompt – for these two-o’clock-in-the-morning fights, if they once get out of hand, are like a forest fire, and may mean the whole reserves at the station. The thing to do is to crack every fighting head that you see, before there are so many fighting heads that you cannot crack any of them. There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice on their friends, and even on their families, between times. This makes it a cause for congratulation that by modern methods a very few men can do the painfully necessary work of head-cracking for the whole of the cultured world.

Although the emphasis is slightly different, this passage reminded me of Joel Salatin’s statement in Food Inc:

A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.

The real difference between these two quotes is that Sinclair seems to indicate that the brutality of slaughter house practices in the early 20th century only affected the individuals who directly took part in it. Salatin, on the other hand, makes an argument that extends these negative effects to the entire culture of which it is a part. I do not mean that this point was lost on Sinclair, not at all, that last sentence is far too tongue in cheek for anyone to think that he exonerates the rest of the country from the horrors of packing town: the cultured world indeed. The real victims of The Jungle are the poor immigrant workers, and while they treat animals with brutality, it is not a brutality of their choosing, rather it is one that is foisted upon them by their bosses and their bosses’ bosses, one which horrifies them as much as it does us, when and if they ever have a moment to consider it, moments that are not easy to come by amidst the struggle to survive. The real brutality of the book is that which is inflicted upon the people working in packing town, it is the brutality of poverty and need, the brutality of being constantly taken advantage of and robbed of whatever pittance one might have, of whatever hope one may have harbored, the brutality of not having even a moment’s respite from suffering.

The Jungle had a huge impact on the meat packing industry in the U.S., and it is one of the reasons we have certain laws regulating the quality of food and the conditions of workers in this country. Although we have taken great strides forward since Sinclair’s time, the way we produce our food remains exploitative in many ways and on many levels; we have still to leave the jungle.

Yes We Might Have Been Able To!

I  just wanted to say that.

The Grapes of Wrath via Raj Patel

I recently saw Raj Patel speak in New York on a panel with Naomi Klein and Amy Goodman. I was impressed by what he had to say, so I bought his books after the talk. Stuffed and Starved is actually something that I have been planning on reading for some time now and seeing the author in person was the impetus I needed to finally pick up a copy. When I mentioned it to M his response was, “Raj Patel is the highest example that I have of badassness and professional success!” I couldn’t agree more, particularly since M made this comment in Arabic, a language in which it makes more sense and has a smoothness that is untranslatable: “Raj Patel howwa masali el a3la fil siya3a wel nagaa7 el professional.”

The following are two passages from The Grapes of Wrath which Patel quotes in his chapter on farmers committing suicide, some out of desperation, some in defiant acts of protest, but in all cases, in rates that are far too high to be neglected.

A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.

Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.

But – you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on the money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.

‘It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look – suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung, there’ll be another guy on the tractor, and he’ll bump the house down. you’re not killing the right guy.’

‘That’s so,’ the tenant said. ‘Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill.’

‘You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, “Clear those people out or it’s your job.”‘

‘Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.’

The driver said, ‘Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, “Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.”‘

‘But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.’

These quotes bring home to me the inhumanity of banks and large corporations, and the hopelessness that people who come up against them experience. It is this inhumanity that makes it possible for them to exploit the poor. Empathy is an essential human trait that I think we share with a number of animals as well. The banks and corporations, however, seem to be devoid of a capacity for empathy and true feeling, and are therefore immune to our protestations, and impossible to kill. This is all the more poignant in light of yesterday’s supreme court decision allowing for unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns under the guise of protecting free speech; a decision that places us all in the position of a man standing between a bulldozer and his home, impotent because the real agents of his oppression are not even people to whom he can raise his voice, or his arms.

Deschooling Society – Intro

I used to make fun of M for the speeches that he would make against universal compulsory education. It’s the kind of idea that most of us are probably inclined to reject out of hand without much consideration. But one of the most constant laws of the universe, I have found, is that things we have ridiculed come back to haunt us. I have often found that the faults I have scoffed at in others were soon manifested in myself, and ideas that I have been unwilling to entertain have often become my intellectual bread and butter. It is a lesson in humility, but also an endorsement of empathy: maybe one way to stave off trials and pains is to feel them when another person is suffering. The following is the first paragraph of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

I had recently asked M about Freire’s work and he recommended I look at Illich along with Pedagogy of the Oppressed. When I got Deschooling Society from the library I immediately shot off an e-mail to M with the above quote and a simple: F#@$ing A! Upon reading this passage I felt a deep sense that this was something that I had always known, something so true that it was built into my intellectual DNA. I remember when I was in high school our science teacher Dr. D asked the class to imagine a hypothetical situation wherein they could either do no work the entire semester and learn nothing, but get an A for the class, or do the work, learn everything that he had to teach them, but get an F. I was alone in raising my hand to take the knowledge and the F. Now, it must be admitted, I was failing the class anyway, but that’s actually part of the point: I constantly performed poorly in Dr. D’s classes (I took three classes with him and never scored above a C, once actually getting an F for the year) but he was one of the teachers from whom I learned and gained the most. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have learned if I had done the work and gotten an A, I would probably have learned more, but grades never meant much to me, partly because I couldn’t buy into the system. I yearned for knowledge, and when school didn’t give it to me, I sought it elsewhere. Should I have done my science homework? Probably. But if I had I might not have been reading Dostoevsky until four in the morning on school nights, and then where would I be?

Beyond Vietnam – MLK

Today they aired two speeches by Martin Luther King on Democracy Now! The following is an excerpt from his speech “Beyond Vietnam” delivered April 4th 1967, one year before he was killed. It is a truly wonderful and powerful speech about justice and values. It is difficult to just post a quote, so this one is a bit lengthy and my comments are minimal:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Words as true today as when they were spoken.

A Clean Glass – Malcolm X

One of the casualties of living an international lifestyle in which you have homes in multiple cities on multiple continents is that you often end up buying books that you already own just to have them with you. So although I know I have a well read copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X somewhere in the world, that didn’t prevent me from picking up another one from a stack of them I saw on one of the display tables at The Strand in New York the other night. Whenever I buy a new book, even if it is a book that I have read before and am convinced that I want to buy, I have to read a passage or two standing in the bookstore aisle. This process can take a few seconds, or if the book grabs me, I can end up sitting on the floor engrossed in what I am reading forcing other shoppers and store clerks to jostle their way around me. I carelessly flipped open The Autobiography of Malcolm X and my eyes fell on this passage:

One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammad put a clean glass of water beside it. “You want to know how to spread my teachings?” he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. “Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,” he said, “just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.”

Of all the things that Mr. Muhammad ever was to teach me, I don’t know why, that still stands out in my mind, although I haven’t always practiced it. I love too much to battle. I’m inclined to tell somebody if his glass of water is dirty.

Now, for all of the problems that I have with Elijah Muhammad, for all of the many things concerning which I disagree with him, this struck me as the teaching of a wise man, and it spoke volumes to how he was able to impact so many people in such a powerful way. Like Malcolm, I too find that I have not always practiced this teaching, that I love too much to battle as well, that I am also inclined to point out to somebody that their glass of water is dirty, and in so doing, I have often found that my own glass was at least equally as soiled as theirs. Although it has rarely been my practice, I have always acknowledged that the best teaching is done by example: that is how I have learned from the teachers that I admire, and it is how I would educate others if my example were one that was more worthy of being  followed.