"jews love books...books are bodies of stories and stories make history and we are a people who believe in the stories of people to tell history"

shared with me by my sister

Posted by Kevin Coval

peace. i invite and hope for conversation with poems i write. this about a real event that happened last month
that sounds like orwellian fiction, but is true and tragic and unacceptable. it is 2009. writers, artists, and all who believe in democracy must consider the current and historic practices of the of state of israel. i offer a reflection.

Reflection on The Israeli Army shutting down The Palestine Festival of Literature
in the month of May in 2009: Burning Books, A Bebelplatz in Jerusalem

Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
Heinrich Heine

jews love books.
we dress them up
in crowns and gold
breast plates. fine
paper, our finest
calligraphy. our books
live in an ark lit by a flame
that always burns, a metaphor
for a G-d, we don’t have
vowels for.

if we carry nothing
else into Diaspora, we carry
these stories, these scrolls
that unroll a history we revere
and parade thru aisles
on the highest of holy days.
we kiss the corner of tallis
to our lips, put cloth to text
to praise words Moses brought
off the mount, our ancestors
lugged thru the desert. stories
told and told again at a kitchen
table some where, the 5th and 15th
time we heard them bored out
our seder mind, but the 50th
and 502nd time something stuck
so we wrote them down
in our most reverent hand style
in the blackest of ink on bone
parchment. we record the trials
and rivals and lineage and heroes
of our families cuz we love books
mourn all the storied bodies
burned by the those who hate books
with messy endings. we love books
cuz books are bodies of stories
and stories make history
and we are a people who believe
in the stories of people to tell history
and mourn all the bodies and stories
burned before they are recorded
in the Eternal book, authored
by the voiceless and Voweless.

but it is 2009/5769

& this spring Israeli troops shut down The Palestine Festival of Literature
behind barrels of guns. they stormed into a theater where poets were reading poems
& demanded silence behind triggers where bullets scream & governments check point
& knessets approve military bombardments & schools bombed & burned on ground they are meant to be on fire from words & ideas, not metal.

in the name of a jewish state
Israeli educated young men aimed guns in the faces of women
reading poems. in the name of a jewish state stories silence forever.

which raises the question(s):
who are we because of empire? what democracy are we scared of?
how can we deny the right to sing, to chazzan a Palestinian song?

mad men bring books to the bond fire.
power mad men bring bodies.

our books been banned & burned & bordered, bodies into boxes
& camps cuz they demand memory, insist our presence in the story
of the world & books are memory of never forgetting & people house books
in their stories & stories should never be crushed by missiles. books record the day
& days in exile & days that should not have been recorded. the horrors & the horrible. the record of families spilt & broken & bastards forever. books are records that never forget & preserve & serve memory & history when militarized revisers deny events
as lived by the natives. the records prove otherwise, proof of existence & empires
want proof of purchase & per chance & pursue silencing stories that make them look criminal in the honest of day & moon of night.

records are stories, a people
hold dear. who knows this
more than us?
all us wandering immigrants
all us seekers of safe land
all us unfettered poets of wind
all us literate builders of pidgins
all us inventors with scraps
all us people of the book

though we don’t seem to know anything
anymore except the havoc
reaped on our bodies in exile, the learned
behavior of executioners we internalize
the bureaucracies & boots & lines of refugees
we terrorize. gather families into open air
prisons & worse. we bury bodies in graves
of steel. bodies who house forests of stories.
the sad song of our own malignancy untold.
where is the ark in the center of the congregation
the ark in the center of the city of peace filled
with bodies of stories, records stacked
unsequestered & unsilenced.

it is mad men who burn books
& bodies & hold poets at gun point

this the work of emperors & empires
furors & fascists. scared colonists
insane to control what no state could
the record of people living
despite the state’s efforts
to have them not.

timelessness of refusing capital/boycotts

in light of all of this recent talk about boycotts and divestment from Israel (here at Wesleyan, at U of Rochester, Hampshire, etc),

i had one of those moments, which seems to be happening a lot lately, of feeling like history is so small, just a pinch between two fingers, tiny enough to hold in my hand, like history was just yesterday, like human society and oppression and resistance to oppression has actually changed very little (which for me isn't always a pessimistic thought, but instead is humbling and beautiful because it is completely daunting unless i quell my disbelief and the magnitude of such a weighty realization, am compelled, by the need to maintain meaning in my life, to once again believe in the indescribably sacred HUMANNESS that is actually...eternal.)

in 1895, ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN YEARS AGO,
In The Red Record, a brilliantly constructed essay which clearly exposes the falsity and inconsistency of white justifications of racial violence (more specifically lynch mobs), Ida B. Wells suggests that to end lynch violence, her readers :

3d. Bring to the intelligent consideration of Southern
people the refusal of capital to invest where lawlessness and
mob violence hold sway.

you can tell me that a hundred and fourteen years is actually just a pinch of history, but given the so many things that have changed, i find simoultaneous sorrow (for the realities we feel the need to change) and warmth from the solidarity of a timeless humanness (see above) in the very sameness of this suggestion to today's struggles.

Slavery and the Jackson 5

In what many a deeming a very strange project one of the members of the Jackson 5 is throwing support behind developing a museum/historical site/resort dedicated to preserving the memory of those that died on the transatlantic slave trade and the memory and music of the Jackson 5. oh yeah, if it wasn't complicated enough also its in Nigeria. The bbc article paints a full picture of what this would mean and hints at the extreme disconnect between the capital gained from such a venture and the historical positionality of the commemorated people themselves as capital. This is strange but not nearly as shocking as the article suggests. The world has a long standing relationship with asking money for the knowledge of historical events (think museums, college) and all while expecting to be able to live luxuriously.




EDIT 11:18am I cant stop thinking about this. There is something that runs deeper than the comodification of the legacy of slavery for profit because that is something I have grappled with with so long. But its something about the cliche "where we've come" that for Marlon this is not only a profitable option but one that he likely truly believes will be aptly honoring people that need to be honored. How we should honor people is not as simply a question as it sometimes seems to me because so many of the ways that we currently use seem insufficient. I like the practice of saying names out loud but what if you don't know the names. What if you don't have access to the knowledge of where your history started and where your family originated? Do I then let go of the idea of honor all together or pick a group that I may or may not have "claim" to? These questions are difficult and worth delving into and I think, importantly, require different answers for everyone.