Who's There?

This week’s readings have filled me with a giant dose of imposter syndrome.  I feel like somebody took a huge hypodermic syringe and shot me full of reality pebbles, broken into shards and they’re scraping against the walls of my veins, knocking off ideas of suffering, identity.  They’re scratching new paths into my surfaces and I’m bleeding, bleeding.  Reading Solmaz Sharif made me write a poem:

Solmaz Sharif is burning me with her

   eyes

   staring at me through the searing words of her book, Look

   capturing the occupier

            the American, Hussein’s Iraq

            an eye of an American

            forcing me to look

   what I see

            how puny and privileged my

            own life is

            how cliché and irrelevant

            my pain

that’s not her point (poor myopic American)

Brutality is still

it’s just

I’ve grown so many layers over the

circumcision of my personhood

I’m a cliché – a privileged American.  I’ve never faced the power of the state and the colonial beastiality of the American war state as a foreign occupier in my yard, my house, my father’s pocket contents.

Look was such a powerful book for an American to read.  It set me back on my unexposed haunches and put me to knowing the gritty pain of what is done in my name as an American.  Maybe, like the soldiers, if I see a dog then I won’t ever see a child.  Maybe like her lover, if I see sexual expression as something done to a partner, I never have to see myself or the partner as an “exquisite” object.  Sharif started with the incredibly personal lens of herself through her lover’s calculation of their moment together.  She then expands her view to her uncle who wonders how she saw him, saw into his life, and knew his shame at wetting himself during the war.  Everything is detailed including her claim on identity:  Iranian.  And proud.  Iranian in America.  And still proud.

Natalie Diaz isn’t proud of her brother’s addiction and the toll it’s taken on their parents.  She is however, still proud to love her brother and the family and the members of the Gila Indian Reservation of which she is a part.  She’s not afraid; she’s a survivor of government commodities, and her brother’s self-destruction through meth.

The fidelity Diaz shows her brother throughout his addiction trauma shows up in jessica Care moore’s homage poem to Lupe Fiasco.  There is an inherent acceptance of Fiasco no matter how many rhymes he makes with bitches or how misogynistic (great rhyme – surely it’s be done?) his lyrics can be.  moore is able, through her depictions of rhyme and spit, as a woman in that trench, to own it.  As one who owns the mic, she knows the world Fiasco’s in when he’s in the light.  She’s one too, just the female, more challenged, more disrespected and still able to prove.  Through it all, she loves Fiasco.

We are who we claim to be.  And defend that claim.