Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge no monument’s in sight but fog prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog no icon lifts a lamp here history’s breath blotting the air over Gold Mountain.
In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even in our own lives.
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark – freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
The moment the feeling enters the body is political.
The movement to demedicalize childbirth – to treat it as an event in a woman’s life, not as an illness – became a national one, with an increase in home births, alternative birthing practices, and the establishment of “birth centers” and “birthing rooms” in hospitals. Professional midwives were initially at the forefront of this movement, along with women who wanted to experience birth among family and friends with the greatest possible autonomy and choice in the conduct of their labor.
There is nothing North Americans seem to fear so much as manipulation, probably because at some level we know that we belong to a deeply manipulative system.
Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.
Perhaps many white North Americans fear an overtly political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are “rationally” against; it might get us on a level we have lost touch with; undermine the safety we have built for oneselves, remind us of what is better left forgotten.
Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location.
I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.
The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done or hiding from power in her love like a man I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence.
The retreat into sameness – assimilation for those who can manage it – is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.
I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.
A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It’s not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument for embodied experience.
Some ideas are not really new but keep having to be affirmed from the ground up, over and over. One of these is the apparently simple idea that women are as intrinsically human as men, that neither women nor men are merely the enlargement of a contact sheet of genetic encoding, biological givens. Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather, our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around us.
The living, politicized woman claims to be a person whether she is attached to a family or not, whether she is attached to a man or not, whether she is a mother or not.
The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else.
I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt.
You are every woman I ever loved and disavowed.
This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.