One
By Paul Catafago
I The Gaping Wound:
Almost three years have passed since September 11, 2001. The date has become a
trademark, either in numbers (9-11) or in already hackneyed phrases (After September
11…). Like everything else, the moment means something different to everybody.
For me, the writer of these words, and you, dear reader, this is where our story begins.
In my family, growing up in Queens to a Palestinian father and Lebanese mother, I heard
stories about how my middle brother - he is seven years my senior- declared when he
was six years old that he wanted to be a lawyer- just like our grandfather was in Syria
many years ago. That would happen- he became a lawyer- using language that way-
negotiating the world as an attorney with his own practice in the Empire State Building.
I did not want to be a lawyer. I am a poet, I have always been a poet and when I declared
this perhaps at about the same age that my brother was celebrated for his declaration, I
was shooed away with whispers of “Oh my God, our son is mad.”
I bring this up now because on that mid-September day three years ago, I remember
thanking God that my brother was not in his office. He was away from the city with his wife
celebrating their anniversary.
I was here, though, in Queens. And these are the things that have stuck with me:
The smell that floated from across the river,
The smell of charred bodies melted with burnt steel,
The smell of death.
Periodically I remember that smell and it still sickens me:
The image of several Arab men talking outside an Egyptian grocery store on Broadway in
Jackson Heights on the afternoon of the eleventh. I have lived in many places, seen too
many things. But I have never seen men look more scared than what those men, that day
looked like. It was as if they were afraid they would be taken away any moment, blamed
for something that not only they had nothing to do with, but something that
disgusted them as human beings. The fact is that in the following days, weeks and
months many innocent men that looked like these fellows, and like me, were indeed
taken away under the guise of national security.
That’s the truth. That happened.
At night on the eleventh, I drove to Crown Heights in Brooklyn to pick up my college friend
who was a pharmacist at Kingsbrook Jewish Hospital. The Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway had been shut down for usage only by emergency vehicles. I had to take
side streets from Queens to Brooklyn. At about 11pm, I swear I only saw ten cars on the
road. And the streets usually teeming with humanity were empty.
The city of my birth, the busiest and most vibrant city in the world, was transformed into a
ghost town.
That’s the truth. That happened.
In May of 2002, at a Memorial Day Service at St. Charles Roman Catholic Cemetary
where my father is buried, I learned that many of the firemen who died on September 11,
2001 were buried there as well. My father who had come so far from these men, come
from the biblical town of Jaffa in Palestine now was sharing the same ground as them.
He had been a man without a country living and working in Egypt and then Lebanon, and
only was accepted by America as a citizen. But while my father was successful here
working as an insurance broker, while he enjoyed the fruits of America and appreciated
them with his family, he never felt comfortable enough to tell his associates that he
indeed was born in Palestine. He was afraid that telling people that, telling people he
was Palestinian could have gotten him fired because of people’s preconceived racist
notion of Palestine and Arabs.
Imagine what he would think now?
When I talk about that day,
That day:
September 11, 2001
I can not separate it from what has happened
in the world
since then,
think about this wound,
this universal wound,
this gaping wound.
If we tell the truth,
If we say that more people died in Afghanistan
The first week of the war there begun in October, 2001,
Then died in the attacks on the World Trade Center
And Pentagon,
Does that denigrate any one’s life?
Do we not have a right to question
the American government’s actions that
followed September 11, 2001?
To honor the dead,
all the dead,
the American dead
the Afghani dead
and
the Iraqi dead,
the dead that began dying on that day,
and continue dying still
today in places like Baghdad,
to honor those dead then,
we must be truthful with ourselves.
In a time when the human condition is suffering a gaping wound, when violence has
become an accepted part of everyday life, one of the things that will save us, at least in a
small part, one of the things that will heal this wound is a language that is free of rhetoric
and political doublespeak, free from Madison Avenue’s shilling. And poetry is part of that
language.
In her book, “The Life of Poetry”, Muriel Ruckeyser writes, under the heading “Poetry and
Peace”:
“As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources
of peace. Peace that is not the lack of war, but fierce and positive.
We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionary: Dare we win?
All the poems of our lives are not yet made.
We hear them crying to us, the wounds, the young and the unborn- we will define that
peace, we will live to fight its birth, to build these meanings, to sing these songs.
Until the peace makes its people, its forests, and its living cities; in that burning central
life, and wherever we live, there is a place for poetry.
And then we will create another peace.”
In this time of war, in this time of the great gaping wound,
Where children have become desensitized to savagery,
Here and there,
There is a creative responsibility for us in Queens, home of this famed
“multiculturalism” and “diversity” always talked about,
to bear witness to another peace, not the peace the politicians talk about, the peace that
results in the murder of innocent children, but rather a true and beautiful, albeit messy
peace.
II Against Mediocrity, Against Cheap Language
The poetic imperative is upon us. We have tried cheap language- tried to say “How are
you?” without meaning it. Tried talking about the weather: “It’s cold today”; “It’s so hot
today” just because we were afraid to delve deeper. We have tried to mask the depths of
our realities with superficiality, tried to shield our wound with mediocrity, with cheap
language. And it has failed us. Horribly.
We can look at the other, at that which is different than us as something scary, as
something dirty. We can even look at the other as “an evil doer”. We have done that, in
fact. And it has not worked. We have shielded our hearts, shielded ourselves from
difference so much that it has made our wound worse. Instead of healing us, this
methodology of being superficial has exacerbated our condition.
In a consumerist society, superficial language, mediocrity is welcomed because it does
not challenge us as human beings to go beyond the borders of the life the multi-national
corporations have decided we should lead. By accepting this mediocrity (in all aspects of
our lives- work, family, culture, religion) we can simply go on being cogs in the machine.
But as members of the human family, we deserve better than that. We deserve better
than cheap words, better than mediocrity. We deserve a language that challenges us to
go deeper, inspires us to be beautiful and creative and lyrical. And this is where poetry
comes in.
True poetry is an exercise against mediocrity, against superficiality and prejudice. True
poetry is the navigation, the negotiation between two worlds, between the seen and
unseen, between the celestial and the earth-bound, between the mundane and the
extraordinary. True poetry is inspired language. And at no other time in the history of
humanity have we needed to be inspired more than now.
Earlier this year, several media outlets reported on the difficulty of the committee to elect
a poet laureate in Queens to find a new laureate for the borough. In his article about the
subject, “Ah, Poetic Injustice! Seeking a Laureate, Queens Goes Blank” (New York
Times, March 17, 2004), Robert F. Worth writes, “In the last few decades, immigration
has Queens a far more cosmopolitan place. There are at least 20 poets writing in
Chinese in the borough…There are others writing verse in Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, and
many other languages.”
In the same article, Robert F. Worth writes about the committee’s criteria for the new poet
laureate, “The winner must be someone who has lived in Queens for at least five years
and has written, in English, “poetry inspired by the borough”.”
In the end, the committee chose Ishle Park, a 26-year-old Korean American writer who
lives in Whitestone. Not that Miss Park is a bad writer- far from it. But by negating any poet
who lives in Queens that does not write in English, the committee narrowed the talent
pool. In fact, such a criteria of accepting only poetry originally written in English (no
translations were allowed, as well), can be understood as prejudiced given the diverse
nature of Queens.
This narrow-sightedness, this mediocrity, is what true poetry should advocate against.
Our hearts must be big. We must not only accept our differences, we must celebrate
them. We must not be afraid to dance: To dance all dances. To sing: to sing all songs.
“The diversity of Queens” is not just a superficial expression. It is an everyday reality, an
exercise in the beautiful human mosaic. We can partake in each other’s cultures. That’s
where we live. We can participate in this adventure. And we must.
III The Beautiful Mosaic: The New Andalusia
Andalusia: In the south of Spain in a region called Andalusia before the reign of Isabella
which began the colonization and the destruction of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas in 1492, there existed a sort of utopian society that today both Hebrew and
Arabic poets and historians refer to as “the Golden Age”. What marked the era and region
was the willingness of disparate cultural and religious groups, especially the Muslim
Moors and Sephardic Jews to not only live together but also help build a society where
beauty and creativity were held as important elements for a good society.
What resulted from this “collaboration” between different peoples was the building of so
many beautiful institutions such as the Alhambra Palace in Cordoba. Also, the poetry
written in that time in Andalusia was some of the greatest poetry ever written.
This famous “multi-culturalism” was not just lip service or an excuse to promote products
and consumerism to different communities (Mcdonalds having different commercials for
different communities, such as African-Americans, is not a celebration of diversity but
obviously a way to get more people to buy big macs). Rather, Andalusia, or Al-Andalus,
was the living proof that different peoples could not only live together without killing each
other, they could not only work together. Al-Andalus was living historical testimony that
human beings, if they are willing to work, could build a beautiful and just society together.
Is Queens the new Andalusia? The criteria for such a society is two-fold: 1)Diversity of
cultures, religions, experiences, languages, talents, etc. 2) The desire to not only live in
the same place together despite differences, but also to use those differences to build a
beautiful society.
Again, the diversity of Queens is well-documented. When I was growing up in Elmhurst
(where I left only to return again), there was a story in the NY Daily News that said that
Elmhurst was the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of New York. Therefore, if
New York was the most ethnically diverse city in the world, then it stood to reason that
where I was born and live today, Elmhurst, was the most diverse place in the world.
And regarding diversity, it’s not just Elmhurst. It is also Queens. We all live here: every
race, every religion, every ethnicity is represented here. People who in their places of
origin didn’t get along with one another, find themselves in Queens living side by side.
So therefore the first criteria to establish a new Andalusia, a utopic multi-reality place is
obviously present in Queens: diversity is not a problem here. Then the second question
must be asked: do we, the people that live in Queens, have the desire to work creatively
together as the people of Andalusia did?
On any given morning, you can take the 7 train and see the world present in the
passengers’ faces. It is not without the realm of possibility to experience this on the
famed 7 train on any given day: You can sit across an Afghani- American man, and next to
a man of Iraqi origins. Maybe on the same car will be a mother whose son is in the
military in Baghdad. And there is always the possibility of riding the train with someone
who lost a loved one in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
I do not mean to make light of any of those things. The point is that we all live here. We
are all here. There is no place in the world like Queens, and because of that we find
ourselves as sort of ambassadors to the world, as sort of testimony that we can live
together.
In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, the character played by Tim Robbins, a new
inmate in a New England prison in the 1940’s, tells his friend, an older inmate played by
Morgan Freeman, that in their situation, it is important to keep hope. That Robbins’
character is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit makes his resolve even more
poignant.
Robbins’ character tells the Freeman character that in their predicament, incarcerated in
a prison with a brutal and corrupt administration, there really are only two choices: “Get
busy living,” he says, “or get busy dying.”
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Indeed.
Originally, the Freeman character is offended by the Robbins’ character’s steadfast belief
in hope. He has been in prison over thirty years for a crime he committed when he was a
boy. Because of racism, however, every time he’s up for parole, he’s rejected. So to hear
anyone talk about hope is insulting to him.
Eventually, however (especially after he learns that the Robbins character still believes in
hope despite being wrongfully imprisoned), he starts believing himself.
There is no place in the world like Queens. In many ways, we are the New Andalusia, but
only if we get busy living: if we not only share in our differences but if we are willing to
partake and celebrate in them. Then, we will be ready to show the world, and possibly
our own government, that there is another way to live.
IV Warning: The Person You’re Sitting Next To On The Bus Could Be Great Poet
The task of the poet is to speak truth beautifully and lyrically. It is not only to participate in
this beautiful mosaic, this New Andalusia, it is to sing about it and thus help to create it.
Because of the nature of Queens, because it is home of New York City’s only two
airports, it stands to reason that many great poets from different backgrounds live here.
By definition, Queens is both a point of arrival and a point of departure, both literally and
metaphorically.
It would not be absurd to say that on any given morning you could find yourself sharing a
bus ride with one of the greatest living poets writing in Chinese, or Urdu, or Korean. Then
the question becomes should you care? (the answer here of course is YES).
Some of the world’s greatest poets either live in Queens or have been involved with
Queens at one time (the Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky taught at Queens
College before his death in 1996- He, too would not have qualified for poet laureate of
Queens because he wrote in his native Russian!).
The fact that some of these great poets who live amongst us prefer to write in other
languages besides English, doesn’t make them less brilliant or accomplished poets.
Rather, the diversity of styles (some of the greatest living ghazal (a Persian style of poetry
now practiced by Pakistani poets) writers live in Queens) and languages simply makes
this play, the play of our lives, all the more musical.
Here I will discuss three poets who have not only contributed to the life of poetry in
Queens, they have made the beautiful mosaic even richer.
Huang Xiang
Before coming to America as asylum seekers (they settled in Flushing) in 1997 with his
wife, the writer Quiuxiao Yulan, the poet Huang Xiang was incarcerated in his native
China six times, twelve years in all, for his part in the Democracy Wall Movement . Xiang
and other poets would take their poems advocating freedom of expression and paste
them on a wall in Tiannamen Square. This was several years before the Democracy
Movement, the student protests in Tianammen Square in the late 80’s (Xiang, now 63,
was imprisoned at the time in June, 1989, but many demonstration leaders credit him as
an inspiration).
In a totalitarian environment, where “security” was used as a ruse to limit people’s
personal liberties, Huang Xiang, a poet who doesn’t consider himself “political” was
seen as a threat and punished that way.
As a poet, Huang Xiang is a giant. He has had 15 books of his poetry published in his
native Chinese, one in Japanese, and earlier this year, his first collection of translated
into English poetry was published (“A Bilingual Edition out of Communist China”, Edwin
Mellen Press, 2004).
Because of his experience and visionary talent, Huang Xiang has much to teach us. Any
great artist begins in the local, in the personal, then expands and touches the universal,
the commonality. Since coming to America, Huang Xiang has continued to write, dealing
with subjects that are touching and pertinent to all of us (moved by the events of
September 11, 2001, he wrote a poem about that subject, “Death of a New Century”).
Again, the fact that Huang Xiang practices the craft of poetry not in English but in his
native Chinese, doesn’t make him less of a poet. Anybody who thinks so would be
considered a racist.
In “Refusing Exile”, Huang Xiang writes about the pain felt by most immigrants (my
parents included) when leaving their native lands for America. Xiang’s ambivelence is
made worse by the fact that his exile was a forced one by the Chinese government. He
wrote the poem in 1997 when he and his wife came to New York. The words are not a
denigration of America (in fact he has come to love his new country), but rather a lament
of the world that creates exile. Seven years after he wrote it, the poem still resonates.
Refusing Exile
By Huang Xiang
Translation by Andrew Emerson
Everything there inspires my
Passionate love
The bone-jarring rocks in the high country. The ravines,
The metallic luster
On the sides of the high peaks and crags
The sun blows a torrid clarinet
Gliding cloud shadows foretell rain.
By a cave dwelling, hands shield eyes from the sun
Gazing into the sky
Poverty and violence...This moment
Is a wealth
I am like a dog guarding an old house
Guarding my long hated
And detested
Memory of expulsion memory of persecution memory of the
Overbearing attention given me by
Suffering and death
I freely reject freedom
I have no choice but refuse
Exile
The world is a crevasse
Crushing me like a vise
The world is an underground passage
With many exits yet without an exit
All its' entrances are sealed off exits
A man died inside there a long time ago
And no one knew
Going from one continent to another
From one city to another
I am not a migrant nor a
Visitor nor a supplicant
Yet in spite of myself I have rushed off to a strange
And enduring isolation
America’s vast sky vastly
oppresses me
Buildings with their fresh theme towering
Above this ant’s head
Spread their wings high in the sky
The language of riches and foreignness
Shoots rapid-fire bursts of light
Time’s eyes are blinded in the racket
Solo I stagger along the street Chewing alone on the
Noise The rhythm and speed
Sinking into the unseen
Loudly roaring
Eddies
There is only one stream that flows as before
My blood
Full of savor of my native land and village
There is only one tree that extends my four limbs
In swirling yellow dust and oxcart tracks
There is only one horse small as a donkey bearing
the burden of all the loneliness of the Gobi Desert as he wobbles
Towards me
High walls and wire mesh reappear
Prison attracts me like a paradise
Jail guards and dogs smile at me
With liquid honey in their eyes
While the memory of cool fresh spring water
Dispels the heavy heat and lassitude of exile
From the greensward before the gate before a small white cottage gate, the sun
Descends
Revolving like a red apple under the feet of a
Squirrel
I am set in a picture frame yet far from that frame
In an instant I discover between them the whole breath and
Distance reaching from Eastern Hemisphere to the Western
Before, the sun rose in the East, wounding
My everyday
Myriad lightrays of spurting blood flames
And hatred
Now the sun shines in the West a pleasant
Dwelling in a foreign world- and like a red lantern
Slips through my tears and
Two arms’ embrace
No familiar scenery here,
The only scenery is my lonliness
There are no wolf-like crowds surrounding howling and
Pursuing
Indifference is what hides in the crowd
Culing its lips and baring its teeth at me like a
Wolf
My lonliness leans back to face
The past
Two creaking wooden door panels with carven flowers
Unhinged swing open towards me
I drown myself in the dark sylvan peace of
Bygone days
While struggling free of the suffering
I warmly recall the suffering
I am now obtaining freedom
And yet reject the freedom
I have been on a tortured path all my life, in flight all my life
But- refusing- to seek- exile
Without waiting for my wished-for, my
Called-for, my long-awaited
“Godot”
Racing here with face all flushed,
I forced the door and got out
Abandoned my home and left
To revolt against destiny yet accept destiny
Is my destiny
To my homeless drifting soul
This latest homeland is
No- homeland- at-all.
July 27, 1997 Middle of night, woke with a start
Suffocating, could not sleep
July 27,1997 Poem generated towards dawn
emitted in New York
Sang Hee Kwak
Sang Hee Kwak came to Flushing from Korea in 1963. She has published 5 volumes of
poetry, and her work has been featured in several anthologies, including The Source:
International Women Poets. In 1994, she was awarded the Olympoetry Award in Spain.
Since 1984, she has led the English and Korean Writing Clinic (KALA), based in Flushing.
Sang Hee Kwak is a true poet. Her work deftly floats and penetrates both in English and
Korean. She writes about everything but her work sharply employs nature as a departure
point for something deeper.
Recently, she talked about living in Queens for over forty years. “I feel this is my home. As
human beings, we are all different from each other here. We all left our native countries
and settled here. So in that way, we are the same.”
She said that poets in Queens can be examples of how to live together in peace, despite
coming from different backgrounds. She recounts a flight of poetic fancy when one day
while she was sitting inside a café on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, she noticed a man
who looked very different than her. She imagined herself floating inside the man’s heart,
embodying his being, his soul. In this way, in that moment, their differences had
disappeared.
In her poem, “Botanical Garden”, Sang Hee Kwak uses the subject of the Queens
Botanical Garden as a metaphorical opportunity for hope and renewal.
Botanical Garden
By Sang Hee Kwak
The morning smells like fresh & flowery mint
-Resurrection of butterflies
over the dead body of winter.
Scented clouds of mint hover over
Yesterday’s frozen earth
&A small Indian girl holds out one green spring.
But still the sounds
Of distant wintry bells are heard
Beneath the frozen rumblings of earth.
-&Yet, a flower keenly mint-like, blossoms to insist:
“We are really on a highway
Moving towards prosperity and happiness
Just as winters move toward spring.”
Oh, who can believe it?
Yet, let’s go with it! &With Freedom, Freedom, our drum!
Flower begins moving icy feet- yes!
Morning fragrance, finally arises like fresh, flowery mint.
It’s a resurrection of clouds of butterflies- yes!
Over this dead body of winter-&beyond.
N.M. Danish
Last year, thanks to N.M. Danish, I witnessed something that perhaps as much as
anything I have ever experienced, stands testimony to the power of the word. An assistant
professor at Federal Government Urdu University in Karachi, Danish, now living in
Queens and considered one of the most accomplished poets in the world writing in
Urdu, was a participant at a mushaira at a restaurant in Woodside.
For those who don’t know, a mushaira is a traditional gathering of poets originated in
Persian times, and now still carried on by Urdu language poets all over the world. What
strikes one is the relationship between the poet and the audience at a mushaira. In other
words, it is not a boring poetry reading. For anyone who loves poetry, attending a
mushaira is inspirational in that it is a vibrant celebration of the word.
In any case, at this specific mushaira, Danish was upset by the way the event was
organized. So when it was his turn to recite his poetry, Danish took the stage and
proceeded to eloquently blast the evening’s organizers for their ineptitude. The main
organizer, a stern looking fellow with gray hair and a fine beard stood up and tried to get
Danish off the stage. Danish composed himself and said he was finished with his
critique and all he wanted was the opportunity to recite his poetry.
By the time Danish was finished with his two poems, there was a standing ovation, led
by the fellow with the fine beard, the one who wanted Danish to get off the stage. Danish’
s words encompassed only a few minutes but in that short time, he had managed to
change hearts.
Like Huang Xiang, N.M Danish, 45, felt great ambivelence leaving his native land-
Pakistan- for America (He now lives with his wife and two children in Kew Gardens). In
fact, before coming to the U.S. in 2000, he put off immigration for two years. This is not to
say that Danish does not like being here or living in Queens. He recently said, “Of all of
New York, I chose to live in Queens because of its multi-cultural nature. It makes you feel
comfortable living here. Because of the diversity, you don’t feel like a stranger.”
Danish added that living in Queens has allowed him to do something he loved doing in
Pakistan- study other people’s cultures. He counts Langston Hughes, known as an
internationalist, as one of his favorite poets and would love to translate his work into Urdu.
In his poem, The Death of a Poem, Danish writes about the nuclear tug of war that
Pakistan and India engaged in four years ago. Like all great poetry, it is about a specific
thing but it can mean anything to any reader. The fact that it is beautiful as a translated
work speaks not only about Danish’s talent or the translator’s (it was translated by Tahira
Naqvi) but of the importance of translation.
The Death of A Poem
By N.M. Danish
Translation by Tahira Naqvi
With small things,
I’ve created a poem,
With small things,
That contain deep hurts,
An empty cigarette box
In which all the pain of the smokers
Is filled,
A piece of paper on which
Voices, words, letters
And the blood spilled in history is congealed,
The empty hands of a child
Holding only the burden of metaphysical life,
A toy
Whose neck
And arm
Are severed,
A fly that
Has become a part of
The web,
The matchstick with which
At least a house
and many dreams
Can be ignited,
A part of the day
Which bears the weight of dreams.
In the lap of the night lies
on its face,
A part of midnight which
Cowering in the silence and fear
Screams,
A mountain
And a desert
Whose colors have altered,
And a poem
Which bears the sorrow
Of allthings,
Holding within it grief and regret
Hatred and anger,
When this poem comes to people
To make them aware,
Then people do not feel
Grief, regret or anger,
They hear this poem.
They are happy,
They praise it,
They applaud it,
And put it to death.
V Do You Know What I’m Saying? : The Importance of Translation
The very concept of translating a poem is always dualistic. Poetry itself is a form of
translation. The poet translates their inner most feelings in whatever language he
desires. But there is always a certain lacking in that translation because words can never
really exactly convey our total feelings. They are at best an elegant attempt at doing the
impossible. A thousand times I have heard that the best poetry is the one that doesn’t
use words.
Silence.
In a world that has become increasingly violent, the art and science of translating poetry
is essential because it allows the world to understand the inner language of other
people. Last year, a couple of months before British and American bombs starting
raining over Baghdad, Iraqi Poetry Today (2003, King’s College, London), was published.
An ambitious collection of English translations of the work of Iraqi poets who have written
in such varied languages as Hebrew, Kurdish and Arabic, the book is an important
testimony to the power of translation. It is also evidence (other then the fact that the
Tigres and Euphrates is considered the Cradle of Civilization) that the Iraqi people had
culture long before the American occupation.
In his introduction, the book’s editor, Saadi A. Simawe writes, “The globalization of capital
threatens to extinguish the spirit of each culture, but one positive change has come with
this movement. It has shed light on the importance of translation. Translation can, of
course, be seen as a tool that facilitates the globalization of capital and thus contributes
to the overall deadening of cultures, but when poetry is translated, it works against these
effects. The particularities of one culture, expressed through poetry, can be appreciated
by readers of another because of translation.”
Already I have made the point of the stupidity for a committee assigned to choose a
representative poet for Queens to exclude translations. But such a limitation is not only
bigoted, promoting the idea of “English first” and a sense that people of different cultures
are welcome, but only if they assimilate, it is also damaging to the overall health of our
community. Translation or the attempt to understand the other is important because it is
a bridge that seeks to connect us, all of us, as members of the human family.
VI Conclusion: The Frayed Line, The Attempts at Healing The Wound
In December of 2001, I took a friend to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. As
always, the tree was majestic, beautifully decorated and lighted. If you looked around, you
almost forgot what had happened on September 11 of that year. Like always, families
were there, young people were ice skating. The air was clear and crisp.
If you allowed yourself, you almost forgot that America was in the midst of a war in
Afghanistan, and contemplating another in Iraq.
Everything looked the same. But then you noticed something different. Ever since I was a
kid, I remember that when we went to see the tree, all around there were flags of every
country imaginable. Of course, there was never a Palestinian flag but then again, in
fairness, the country of my father’s birth has never been accepted as a sovereign nation
state.
In any case, that day when you looked around, you saw no flags from different countries.
No Bangladeshi flag. No Indian flag. No Japanese flag. No Chinese flag. No Korean flag.
No Pakistani flag. No Afghani flag. No Iraqi flag.
Oh, there were flags of course. Many flags. But the only country you saw represented in
those flags was the United States of America.
America had been hit. And now besides hitting back, bombing the poorest country in the
world, Afghanistan, into submission, it was retreating into itself. In refusing to put up
different people’s flags, the message was clear: we are alone and the rest of you can be
damned. Instead of reaching out to the world and attempting to understand the root
causes of such violence, America struck back. Hard.
And then the wound got worse.
And then Iraq was invaded.
And no weapons of mass destruction were found.
And American serviceman tortured Iraqi prisoners.
That’s the truth. That happened.
And the wound, the wound that I have talked about here, the wound that is universal and
that has frayed our family, frayed this line that connects all of us, has gotten worse. But
we must believe that this line that connects us is only frayed, and can somehow be
repaired (but not through war or violence).
In her poem “Fundamental Difference”, Alice Walker writes about this line that connects
us. The line that sustains us.
Fundamental Difference
By Alice Walker
To acknowledge our ancestors means
We are aware that we did not make
Ourselves, that the line stretches
All the way back, perhaps, to God;
Or to Gods. We remember them because
It is an easy thing to forget:
That we are not the first to suffer,
Rebel, fight, love and die.
The grace with which we embrace life,
In spite of the pain, the sorrows,
Is always a measure of what has gone
Before.
So what can heal our wound? What can fix this frayed line?- make us remember that we
are connected to each other: Afghanis, Jews, Muslims, Iraqis, Palestinians, Israelis,
Americans, Christians, Hindus, etc. etc. etc.?
To suggest that the many poets of Queens will be the vanguard of healing this wound is
absurd. This is not what this article was about. Rather, in being faithful to ourselves, and
to our differences, and the opportunity to live and work and create together, we can be an
example to other people in different places such as Washington, D.C.
Last year, at the First Queens International Poetry Festival held at the Flushing Library
auditorium, over twenty poets from many different cultural backgrounds gathered to
celebrate our craft. Included in those were the three poets I have featured in this article.
But there were many other talented poets who participated. The commonality was that all
the poets lived in the New York City area, many of them in Queens. Afterwards, the
consensus opinion was that such a gathering was necessary for our community.
Later, on the news that night, on September 13, 2003, there were reports of more
violence in the world. No, the gathering at the festival hadn’t changed the world, hadn’t
stopped the bleeding. It hadn’t healed the wound. But the gathering, by both the poets
and audience, was important because it helped show that we can indeed create
something beautiful when we desire to do so.
Only when we choose to live together, then, fiercely and beautifully, will our wound, our
gaping wound, be healed.
____________________________________
Paul Catafago is executive director of Movement One: Creative Coalition. This article
originally appeared in the fall 2004 issue of "Urban Folk Magazine", published by The
Queens Council of the Arts.
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