I'm sorry. As a Jewish American I have no words, only numbness-no sensation because I'm afraid that if I feel it will hurt too bad. To know truth is to be in constant agony, constant ache. And I know I have the privilege to keep that away. So I'm not sorry because I know that in many ways I myself am responsible for this terror. How can I apologize when I am a participant?
I don't know how it is possible for the Israeli government to hate so much that innocence is forgotten. These are people; mothers, fathers, daughters, brothers, sisters-and our cousins. These are people, humanity. They have eyes and ears, hearts, lungs, blood that pumps. These are people, they feel, laugh, cry, hurt, love just like we do. Wherever there is oppression we forget that there are people there.
I have no words, only breath right now. I am breathing for those bodies at rest right now. I don't know what to do to change ignorance & hate because it seems so deeply embedded in the psyches of those who have power. Can we replace power with people? With hands? Smiles? Life instead of death? Babies instead of corpses? There is no justification to murder. There is no excuse, no explanation.
I was born Jewish, born Palestinian.
And what about the rest of my Jewish-Americans? Irena Klepfisz says Jews have made the mistake of thinking that to “transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it’s kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression-not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression.”
Where are our voices? Our anger? Are we going to be passive? What if it was us? Is not one of the 10 commandments to love thy neighbor? Sometimes I wonder where God is at in this mess. I'm disgusted that people believe that this war is justified, that violence is acceptable and that retaliation is the answer.
And really we do not know how bad it is over there because we are here and you can't understand until you live it, feel it, breathe it, eat it, sleep it, shit it, cry it.
We can never understand the power, the torture of hate until we are the hated.
In peace,
Leora
Monday, December 29, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
A Political Love Poem from an Angry White Girl
Here is my spoken word piece, posted by popular demand, parts 1&2. WARNING: There IS profanity. Thanks for checking out the blog! Namaste, Leora
A Political Love Poem from an Angry White Girl
I.
What is the poem that is burning up my chest?
Baby, only this poem knows how much I be loving you
How come only African American Vernacular English
can capture my depthitude of my feelings for you?
It means I loved you in the past
I love you now and
I’ll love you in days that we yet can’t foretell.
And on this first chilly night in November
As I rode my bike past the projects and
I saw the light shining on the different colored leaves on the trees
I felt the magic that the changing seasons have
Like it was the first time
In my life
I was watching the seasons change
In that moment
I understood that change is real
That change [be] just like love [be]
Except, maybe/ evenmorecomplicated
Even though October didn’t answer my questions
It changed the questions themselves
And even though last month I grew further away from you
As you so cautiously positioned
Thin/
Metal
Bars
around your heart
So
Delicately protecting what is left of that
Brokenness
That even when I tried to salvage just one piece
From the rubble
That one piece
Could barely slip through the slit of your prison wall
In my worn hands I grasp it so delicately
So, cautiously
Not to crush your
Fragileness
With my fingers
The same fingers that are holding this pen,
Give me this voice that I claimed four years ago
(maybe before that, but I can’t remember details)
Because there is too much shit in this world baby
And maybe it’s really me,
That is my heart breaking
And you are my escape from reality,
My favorite distraction
Because it is easier to look at you,
Love you,
Then it is to love me
And maybe I’m the baby.
The one who can’t look in the damn mirror
Too afraid that it will break
The one that sees fatness where there’s flesh,
The one that you would never choose because of what
I stick in my mouth.
Hatred makes the belly wider
And any love I had for myself was no love at all
Cause I lost it now that you’re gone.
I hate hating me.
I’m so tired of defending my body/
in order to protect my emotions/my psyche/my mentality
ME
Every comment you make on my appearance it’s like you’re
Choking me suffocating me
Your fingers are so
Purposely pressing into
That
Area of my throat where
I place my very own fingers sometimes to see how
Asphyxiation would feel.
It’s as if you’re silencing me from being me.
166.9 or 150 fuck you.
And if you peeled off all my layers
all my pounds that so intricately guard what remains
then you would find a woman, not a girl
so vulnerable simply trying to live
as an odd soul in a fucked up world.
And as a girl with an eating disorder I can’t lie-
I judge your pounds too.
Thick or thin
It doesn’t matter.
I do to you what others do to me ALWAYS.
Because it’s my own insecurities,
My own way of self-mutilating to view you
How I see me.
How do you see me? Beneath all this?
I know you didn’t choose it, cause you didn’t want it.
I understand, I really do.
If I’m as repulsive to me as I am to you then
Who would want
This?
Do you find this true too?
I hope one day I can read this and say who the fuck was that girl?
Can you not see the rawness of my skin?
Hear my tears in the night?
Watch the breaking glass shatter to the floor when I look in the mirror?
If I’m not beautiful enough for you then baby,
Just say so.
I know you must have noticed the extra weight.
Is that what’s holding you down?
Or is it your toomuchmisunderstood
dilemma
that makes you unable to connect
to the rest of the world?
Your selfishness?
Your isolation?
Your privileged white ass that doesn’t allow you to understand
Shit about reality?
II.
Maybe only this poem knows the truth-
Even your truth
The multitude of truths
Truth of
The lies we’ve been told
For years
That defends white social positioning
In the caste system
Which we have here
In the
United States of America
The same
United States of America
That
Only forty years
Ago granted
Black People
The right to
VOTE
To be citizens in a country
That was
Built on the backs
Of
Black People
Black People/who were
Brought Here
As
SLAVES
From Africa
Treated less than human
Women , young girls, as young as 11
Sometimes even younger
RAPED
By white men
Seen as nothing more then
Erotic Sexual Bodies
Animal Like
Bodies
For
White dicks
To assert their power
Over a race
And black men, boys
Killed like Emmett Till, 14
Beaten, eye gouged out, shot in the head
Thrown into the river
With a 75 pound cotton gin fan
Tied to his neck with
Barbed wire.
These black men
Lynched/beaten/burned
Has your white skin blinded you?
And I don’t care if your family
Got off the boat
Years after
Slavery “ended”
Don’t you see the privileges you’re granted
That you don’t deserve?
The greatest privilege of all is
that your skin color is not a matter
of life/death or
fear and suffrage, which comes in between
when you are considered less than.
Where every color that is not white
Is considered
Other.
This poem is a plea to white people
To pick up a damn book by DuBois or
Collins, Wright, Baldwin, hooks, Mumia Abu Jamal or
Angela Davis
Almost any black writer, really
And stop being so fucking defensive
About your white skin.
I want you to know what it feels like dammit
to be scared because of the
color of your skin.
I want you to feel scared
I want you to feel SCARED
I want you to feel all the fucking injustices
I want you to feel the same fear the Jews felt during the Holocaust
The same fear the Palestinians feel now at the hands of Israel.
I want you to feel the fear whiteness provokes when whiteness feels threatened.
It is fear filled with hate.
And I feel so much rage, coraje
I want to curse all white people out
(even myself none of us are innocent as whites when it comes to racism)
When they claim not to be racist
Cause if you really knew anything about
Racism you’d know
That statement makes you sound like a dumb fucker.
Sometimes I actually feel bad for the white wo/man
Because them and even you
So called liberals will never know truth,
When your social positioning is built on lies
Built on other
peoples suffering.
You disgust me. Even you baby, even you.
Hell yea I’m angry.
I want you to feel my anger
I want you to feel my pain.
I want you to feel furious.
I want you to know how three children were shot
Right by where I live.
I want you to know
White people,
(don’t worry about killing Black People they’re already killing each other)
Because of their rage at the white institutions that
Keep them imprisoned, literally and figuratively.
Keep them oppressed.
They take out all this frustration and pain on each other
Because no one gives a damn
When a black wo/man is killed.
If you don’t believe me, then pick up a book
And read Fanon.
It’s not my job to educate you and your
Ignorance. Which is a choice, not a mandate.
How come we’re always hearing about little white children
Getting abducted?
When the federal government has the Rail to Jail, putting all the
Black Children into Juvi?
Dear Lover,
It’s November now. You still don’t have a bloody consciousness. I’m out. If you change your thought process meet me at the revolution. I’ll be the one with the sign that says, “Our Words Are Our Weapons”. I’ll most likely be wearing a ski mask, like Marcos. If too many years pass I might have a baby on my breast nursing milk, life, we be struggling for freedom, together with the rest. Although I have hope, clearly I don’t have much left. The fight is forever. Join me or witness my death. Complicity is a participant when it comes down to it. Do you get it yet?
Yours in Struggle,
Leora
A Political Love Poem from an Angry White Girl
I.
What is the poem that is burning up my chest?
Baby, only this poem knows how much I be loving you
How come only African American Vernacular English
can capture my depthitude of my feelings for you?
It means I loved you in the past
I love you now and
I’ll love you in days that we yet can’t foretell.
And on this first chilly night in November
As I rode my bike past the projects and
I saw the light shining on the different colored leaves on the trees
I felt the magic that the changing seasons have
Like it was the first time
In my life
I was watching the seasons change
In that moment
I understood that change is real
That change [be] just like love [be]
Except, maybe/ evenmorecomplicated
Even though October didn’t answer my questions
It changed the questions themselves
And even though last month I grew further away from you
As you so cautiously positioned
Thin/
Metal
Bars
around your heart
So
Delicately protecting what is left of that
Brokenness
That even when I tried to salvage just one piece
From the rubble
That one piece
Could barely slip through the slit of your prison wall
In my worn hands I grasp it so delicately
So, cautiously
Not to crush your
Fragileness
With my fingers
The same fingers that are holding this pen,
Give me this voice that I claimed four years ago
(maybe before that, but I can’t remember details)
Because there is too much shit in this world baby
And maybe it’s really me,
That is my heart breaking
And you are my escape from reality,
My favorite distraction
Because it is easier to look at you,
Love you,
Then it is to love me
And maybe I’m the baby.
The one who can’t look in the damn mirror
Too afraid that it will break
The one that sees fatness where there’s flesh,
The one that you would never choose because of what
I stick in my mouth.
Hatred makes the belly wider
And any love I had for myself was no love at all
Cause I lost it now that you’re gone.
I hate hating me.
I’m so tired of defending my body/
in order to protect my emotions/my psyche/my mentality
ME
Every comment you make on my appearance it’s like you’re
Choking me suffocating me
Your fingers are so
Purposely pressing into
That
Area of my throat where
I place my very own fingers sometimes to see how
Asphyxiation would feel.
It’s as if you’re silencing me from being me.
166.9 or 150 fuck you.
And if you peeled off all my layers
all my pounds that so intricately guard what remains
then you would find a woman, not a girl
so vulnerable simply trying to live
as an odd soul in a fucked up world.
And as a girl with an eating disorder I can’t lie-
I judge your pounds too.
Thick or thin
It doesn’t matter.
I do to you what others do to me ALWAYS.
Because it’s my own insecurities,
My own way of self-mutilating to view you
How I see me.
How do you see me? Beneath all this?
I know you didn’t choose it, cause you didn’t want it.
I understand, I really do.
If I’m as repulsive to me as I am to you then
Who would want
This?
Do you find this true too?
I hope one day I can read this and say who the fuck was that girl?
Can you not see the rawness of my skin?
Hear my tears in the night?
Watch the breaking glass shatter to the floor when I look in the mirror?
If I’m not beautiful enough for you then baby,
Just say so.
I know you must have noticed the extra weight.
Is that what’s holding you down?
Or is it your toomuchmisunderstood
dilemma
that makes you unable to connect
to the rest of the world?
Your selfishness?
Your isolation?
Your privileged white ass that doesn’t allow you to understand
Shit about reality?
II.
Maybe only this poem knows the truth-
Even your truth
The multitude of truths
Truth of
The lies we’ve been told
For years
That defends white social positioning
In the caste system
Which we have here
In the
United States of America
The same
United States of America
That
Only forty years
Ago granted
Black People
The right to
VOTE
To be citizens in a country
That was
Built on the backs
Of
Black People
Black People/who were
Brought Here
As
SLAVES
From Africa
Treated less than human
Women , young girls, as young as 11
Sometimes even younger
RAPED
By white men
Seen as nothing more then
Erotic Sexual Bodies
Animal Like
Bodies
For
White dicks
To assert their power
Over a race
And black men, boys
Killed like Emmett Till, 14
Beaten, eye gouged out, shot in the head
Thrown into the river
With a 75 pound cotton gin fan
Tied to his neck with
Barbed wire.
These black men
Lynched/beaten/burned
Has your white skin blinded you?
And I don’t care if your family
Got off the boat
Years after
Slavery “ended”
Don’t you see the privileges you’re granted
That you don’t deserve?
The greatest privilege of all is
that your skin color is not a matter
of life/death or
fear and suffrage, which comes in between
when you are considered less than.
Where every color that is not white
Is considered
Other.
This poem is a plea to white people
To pick up a damn book by DuBois or
Collins, Wright, Baldwin, hooks, Mumia Abu Jamal or
Angela Davis
Almost any black writer, really
And stop being so fucking defensive
About your white skin.
I want you to know what it feels like dammit
to be scared because of the
color of your skin.
I want you to feel scared
I want you to feel SCARED
I want you to feel all the fucking injustices
I want you to feel the same fear the Jews felt during the Holocaust
The same fear the Palestinians feel now at the hands of Israel.
I want you to feel the fear whiteness provokes when whiteness feels threatened.
It is fear filled with hate.
And I feel so much rage, coraje
I want to curse all white people out
(even myself none of us are innocent as whites when it comes to racism)
When they claim not to be racist
Cause if you really knew anything about
Racism you’d know
That statement makes you sound like a dumb fucker.
Sometimes I actually feel bad for the white wo/man
Because them and even you
So called liberals will never know truth,
When your social positioning is built on lies
Built on other
peoples suffering.
You disgust me. Even you baby, even you.
Hell yea I’m angry.
I want you to feel my anger
I want you to feel my pain.
I want you to feel furious.
I want you to know how three children were shot
Right by where I live.
I want you to know
White people,
(don’t worry about killing Black People they’re already killing each other)
Because of their rage at the white institutions that
Keep them imprisoned, literally and figuratively.
Keep them oppressed.
They take out all this frustration and pain on each other
Because no one gives a damn
When a black wo/man is killed.
If you don’t believe me, then pick up a book
And read Fanon.
It’s not my job to educate you and your
Ignorance. Which is a choice, not a mandate.
How come we’re always hearing about little white children
Getting abducted?
When the federal government has the Rail to Jail, putting all the
Black Children into Juvi?
Dear Lover,
It’s November now. You still don’t have a bloody consciousness. I’m out. If you change your thought process meet me at the revolution. I’ll be the one with the sign that says, “Our Words Are Our Weapons”. I’ll most likely be wearing a ski mask, like Marcos. If too many years pass I might have a baby on my breast nursing milk, life, we be struggling for freedom, together with the rest. Although I have hope, clearly I don’t have much left. The fight is forever. Join me or witness my death. Complicity is a participant when it comes down to it. Do you get it yet?
Yours in Struggle,
Leora
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Welcome
Hello!
Speaking Our Truths originated at Simmons College in Boston, MA as a space for women to engage in dialogue outside of the classroom.
We want to develop a community and sisterhood that embraces the concept of identity politics, the personal as political and the political as personal that came out of third-wave multiracial feminism. As women of all colors, sexualities, socioeconomic backgrounds and spiritualities we come together to build bridges in a society that structurally keeps us divided.
This blog is a collaboration in solidarity of each others struggle. We are witnesses to each others silence.
If you want to be heard we would love to listen. Please contact us to be a contributor. Essays, articles, poems, spoken word and other forms of expression are encouraged.
Welcome!
Yours in struggle,
Women of Consciousness
speakingourtruths@gmail.com
Speaking Our Truths originated at Simmons College in Boston, MA as a space for women to engage in dialogue outside of the classroom.
We want to develop a community and sisterhood that embraces the concept of identity politics, the personal as political and the political as personal that came out of third-wave multiracial feminism. As women of all colors, sexualities, socioeconomic backgrounds and spiritualities we come together to build bridges in a society that structurally keeps us divided.
This blog is a collaboration in solidarity of each others struggle. We are witnesses to each others silence.
If you want to be heard we would love to listen. Please contact us to be a contributor. Essays, articles, poems, spoken word and other forms of expression are encouraged.
Welcome!
Yours in struggle,
Women of Consciousness
speakingourtruths@gmail.com
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