Poetics of Mass Construction
This is an attempt at words when it has felt hard to locate them in a language third removed from my inherited tongues.
Nobody prepares you for your turn on the world stage. What to do with the 15 minutes of grief alotted my family of compatriots?
A programmed news cycle commences, a hashtag arises, a movement coalesces and like a stampede hurls the collective over tripwires of ancestral trauma. Is it our turn to feel momentarily validated and then abandoned after the hype wears off?
The spotlight dims and the feed starves the attention out of me and into the next headline—I can only be grateful that these hidden parts of myself are coming to the surface. Maybe its best I am jolted into this assemblage of displaced fragments at this moment.
In the year surrounding 9/11, I rallied to get my Spanish teacher fired for consistently making lewd and sexual comments toward students in the class, I shared a house with another family, I learned how to steal yogurt cups from the nurses station while my father got chemo, I watched my mother become a widow while my sister and I had secret spiritual awakenings, we shared a house with another family (again) and I became a terrorist in the eyes of my peers. Before that day, those kids didn’t believe Afghanistan was a real place.
I erased myself until I became legible as a patriot. I dropped part of my last name so I couldn’t be traced to family in Afghanistan’s new regime. I changed my first name at my new high school…for 4 years I was “Emma Arsala” at roll call. I dropped my Islam from public view, too. I dropped it so hard, it shattered into a million disparate belief systems.
I’ve recently realized that my multi-hyphenature is a trauma response. Trying to be remarkable at everything possible so I can be indispensible—to be wanted alive is a blessing. I am privileged to have had a “marginalized” experience in America, and that’s something I’ve held quietly to myself for a long time. On the other hand, it cost a sense of belonging, culture and land…things I’ve held quietly to myself because so many didn’t have that option.
There are many mountains of stories in between the sentences of those last few paragraphs, but that is for another time.
The biggest thing I’ve been feeling lately is this intense squeeze on a deep soul level. I observe deuling dualities, interjecting thought forms of policing, nagging habits of control and identity crises barking through my system. Where does my marginalization end and my privilege begin? Am I an ally or a traitor? Am I guilty or am I scared? So many of these questions and ruminations have played on loop as I organize with my peers and hold space for sorrowful elders as they feverishly absorb what’s happening to Afghanistan. I realize I don’t need an answer to any of these questions, because I am searching for an answer where there isn’t one. I just need to watch my tendencies and listen to my nature until my body finds peace…that is the closest to an answer I have right now.
I acknowledge that there are several people and points of view that will be sharing air time today. My intention here in this stream is to simply soften the buttresses of my armored heart, to let go of these stories in as gentle and kind a way as possible. I don’t intend for any of my personal reflections to invalidate anyone else’s experience. This is just me sharing what’s coming up, and hopefully I can offer some poetics of mass construction.
~
As we flail in this portal that Arundhati Roy geolocated us in at the start of the pandemic, we are reaching a threshold of trends in American culture, geopolitics, economics and intellectualism that self-fulfill by harnessing the intelligence of our collective behavioral shifts. How we act and behave -in public- right now feels very important.1
I’m not talking about our performance, but our verity. For me, the latter emerges in a practice of improvisation, less so curation. I’m trying to write and live from that place more, because it allows me to observe all those things I have expertly hidden and practice letting them go. A corporate owned democracy does the same thing…expertly hides entire systems of violence through a performance of best-selling truths. An ego does the same thing. And so does a media conglomerate larping a reality tv competition about “activism.” There’s 90% of an iceberg under that tip, and tragedy isn’t just inevitable, it becomes a nostalgic re-run. Maybe through improvisation we can meet more manageable challenges and disasters within our means through a shared sense of trial and error, care and accountability?
And this is where, in the midst of the pain, the ancestral wisdom arises. If there is anything about portals, these divine meeting places between worlds, it is that they must be closed. We need to integrate all the messages that have come in during this opening.
In what feels like a battle between the past and the future, I want to help us remember that time can be a distraction. We’ve been here before as a civilization and we will be here again…until we don’t care to circuit this circus anymore!
If there is a wish I could cast into the collective as we get closer to this threshold, it is to concentrate and intend to close the door on the paradigms, not of the past, but of those that don’t serve our complete collective liberation. There is much wisdom in the past to hold close in the present—ancient technology, indigenous knowledge systems and roles, existing governance structures that are begging for femme leadership and a little renovation. There are also futures that have already been conjured by forces that don’t serve our societal and cultural well being thanks to jobs like the one I left two months ago.
I’ll segway from subtweeting myself into these poignant words from Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan:
On Sept. 14, 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives considered House Joint Resolution 64, “To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.” The wounds of 9/11 were raw, and the lust for vengeance seemed universal. The House vote was remarkable, relative to the extreme partisanship now in evidence in Congress, since 420 House members voted in favor of the resolution. More remarkable, though, was the one lone vote in opposition, cast by Barbara Lee of San Francisco.
…
(Representative) Barbara Lee presciently compared the invasion of Afghanistan to Vietnam in her speech back in 2001 and closed by quoting the Rev. Nathan Baxter, dean of the National Cathedral: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore. [Democracy Now]
Media Studies:
I stayed up until 5am the other night to collate as many tracks from albums that dropped in 2001 into this playlist. It was cathartic, entertaining, nostalgic and fascinating to see how many themes in the lyrics are relevant today. I will note that I made exceptions for albums t.A.t.u. and Interpol dropped in 2002 because teenage hawa demanded it.
Citation Stream: some links I’ve been chewing on
The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy
Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.
Saving the Saudis, Vanity Fair
Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden Over, The Guardian
New Offer on Bin Laden, The Guardian
On Cultural Illiteracy in Afghanistan, The Washington Post
Grounding Ourselves in the Past 20 Years and Resistance - Justice for Muslims Collective
Why Religions Facilitate War and How Religions Facilitate Peace - J. William Frost
Tuesday, and After - New Yorker writers
60 words, 20 years, Radiolab
Kindness is a practice, and in the gaps where I lapse I just want to insert: fuck this guy and all the opportunist war and “reconstruction” profiteers
Will Humanity Survive? - a video lecture by the legend, john a. powell
Wisdom of Small Joys - Ross Gay and adrienne maree brown
This one deserves a note: around 42 minutes in adrienne speaks to how disconnecting from the harmony of ecosystem can “cause harm that has nothing to do with our survival” and the ultimate disconnection in “getting pleasure from harm” which is what our society must be detangled from. Ouff.
May the exploration of what poetics of mass construction could look, feel, be like continue.
In full faith and gratitude,
~hawa ruhafza amin-arsala
in my humble opinion