The Mosque of Djingareyber, built by the sultan Kankan Moussa after his return in 1325 from a pilgrimage to Mecca
Tears for Timbuktu
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I shed tears for those people whose lives are destroyed by war and by hate.
Human life is precious.
But I cannot fail to shed tears for symbols of our history, for art and architecture willfully destroyed by those whose agenda cares little for any past other than the one they now attempt to exterminate by shaping the present into alignment with their own narrow fundamentalist view of Islam.
Timbuktu, great center of African learning and scholarship, is one of my wonders of the ancient world. For me, as a black American, raised in a world where Africa and all things African were denigrated, it has always held a deep meaning in my psyche. I am thankful to have had parents who taught me of the great African Empires.
Now armed haters are destroying that history, as world agencies protest, but little action is being taken to stop the destruction.
Al Jazeera reports
A hardline religious group occupying northern Mali has destroyed 15th-century mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints in Timbuktu and have threatened to demolish the remaining 13 UNESCO world heritage sites in the fabled city, witnesses have said. The attack by Ansar Dine group on Friday came just four days after UNESCO placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger after the seizure of its northern two-thirds in April by rebels. "They have already completely destroyed the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmoud (Ben Amar) and two others. They said they would continue all day and destroy all 16," Yeya Tandina, a local Malian journalist, said by telephone.
"They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly," he said, adding that the Islamists were currently taking pick-axes to the mausoleum of Sidi El Mokhtar, another cherished local saint.
"It looks as if it is a direct reaction to the UNESCO decision," Timbuktu deputy Sandy Haidara said by telephone, confirming the attacks.
The Islamist Ansar Dine group backs strict sharia, Islamic law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam idolatrous."Ansar Dine will today destroy every mausoleum in the city. All of them, without exception," Sanda Ould Boumama, the group’s spokesman, told AFP news agency through an interpreter from the city. "God is unique. All of this is haram (or forbidden in Islam). We are all Muslims. UNESCO is what?" he said, declaring that Ansar Dine was acting "in the name of God".
...
Beyond its historic mosques, the World Heritage site of Timbuktu, once a cradle of Islamic learning, has 16 cemeteries and mausolea, according to the UNESCO website.
Sometimes called the city of 333 saints, Timbuktu is also home to nearly 100,000 ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 12th century, preserved in family homes and private libraries under the care of religious scholars.
UNESCO is powerless to do anything but speak out in horror and to appeal to world governments.
Al Jazeera speaks to Lazare Eloundou Assomo, chief of the Africa Unit at UNESCO, the UN's cultural body, about the destruction of ancient Muslim shrines in Timbuktu by the group Ansar Dine.
Assomo says though UNESCO cannot apply force to stop the smashing of the shrines and mausoleums, they can remind the world of the importance of the world heritage present in northern Mali's ancient structures
Timbuktu is not simply a site of shrines and mosques. It is also home to
priceless manuscripts, which are being studied and translated.
There is an online petition to save them.
Timbuktu tomb destroyers pulverise Islam's history
Scholars are also fretting about the fate of tens of thousands of ancient and brittle manuscripts, some from the 13th century, housed in libraries and private collections in Timbuktu. Academics say these prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance. Days after the rebels took Timbuktu, local academics, librarians and citizens were hiding away the manuscripts to stop them being damaged or looted.
Jeppie said researchers had since fled the city. Some collectors had smuggled their rarest documents out to Bamako. Diagne said the biggest fear was that historic manuscripts and artefacts would become the object of looting and trafficking for profit - just another trading commodity in the trackless Sahara, where trafficking in drugs, arms and migrants has replaced the old caravans of slaves, salt and gold.
He found it deeply ironic that the Ansar Dine tomb destroyers, who said they were upholding the name of Islam, were ignoring and denying through their acts the rich layered history and geographical spread of this great global religion. Noting the role Sufi believers played in spreading Islam beyond its Arabian heartland, Diagne said: "If it had not been for the Sufi orders, Islam would have been a local religion."
"My message to those involved in these criminal acts is clear: stop the destruction of the religious buildings now," ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told AFP in an interview in Dakar.
"This is a war crime which my office has authority to fully investigate."
She said that Mali was signatory to the Rome Statute which established the ICC, which states in Article 8 that deliberate attacks against undefended civilian buildings which are not military objectives are a war crime.
"This includes attacks against historical monuments as well as destruction of buildings dedicated to religion," said Bensouda.
Mali's ancient power is so reduced in today's world, that it is now one
one of the world's poorest countries.
In spite of the crippling poverty, I have never forgotten my one brief sojourn there, and the warmth and beauty of its people. They enrich the world with literature, dance and music.
If you didn't get to read this when she posted it, be sure to read Trouble in Timbuktu - my memories of Mali, by Black Kos community member mali muso. Other in-depth pieces on the Mali Empire have been diaried by dopper0189, and Ojibwa.
Tears are not going to do anything.
The U.S State Department has set up travel restrictions and removed Peace Corps personnel. The main switchboard phone number is 202-647-4000 but I was directed to the Mali desk.
send emails to desk officer for Mali Manoela Borges Borgesmg@state.gov
phone 202 647-2637.
Contact your congressperson and senator.
United States Mission to the UN
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Both these guys landed on their feet, but it's a sad commentary on life that they're not both billionaires. The Grio: Black founder of Internet domain registry, Network Solutions, reminisces on racial barriers in tech sector.
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Years before Google, before tablets, heck, before the Internet was a popular term, and even before the first domain name was offered to the general public, a predominantly African-American team actually once controlled the Internet; or at least your domain access to it. Few may know it today, but Al White was a vital part of that team and still thinks longingly about those heady days when sink or swim business decisions were made by the minute and when untold amounts of money were within grasp’s reach — if they just could have held out long enough.
Once upon a time a couple of friends got the idea that this tech stuff might be a good business opportunity. Emitt J. McHenry was working diligently at the time as a vice-president at the former Union Mutual Insurance Co. Between this position and a former one which he held as a systems engineer at IBM, he could see how the dots were beginning to connect in a new way in business so he, along with some partners, started a little company called Network Solutions in 1979.
The venture actually began as a consultancy company providing engineering solutions for such corporations like Nations Bank (now Bank of America); but one day the group got a tip from the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that the Internet was going to be big. It was suggested that Network Solutions, given its expertise, track record and core competency, put in a bid to the government to manage the domain name registration services for the Internet. They figured, “Why not?,” put in the bid, and won the contract. Won sole authority to develop the system and issue web addresses ending in .com, .net, .org, .edu and .gov.
“You have to understand,” explains White. “We had no competitors for the bid. Not AT&T. No one. No one really knew what this Internet thing was, so it was not on anyone’s radar. And had it not been for the head of the NSF at that time, it would not have been on ours either.”
Around this time, White had been brought on by his friend McHenry in order to head up corporate marketing at Network Solutions. His role included many responsibilities, but one of the main ones was to evangelize about this new platform called the Internet. He remembers that it was tough-going but that, in time, Network Solutions grew to approximately 400 employees.
“Slowly some people began to understand or at least be curious about the Internet, and we started to get more and more requests for the domain names,” says White. But the tech architecture to handle such an emerging industry was costly to create, to say the least. “We had no income producing model for this,” White explains. “The agency (NSF) would not let us charge for issuing the names. That was part of the deal, and we had no idea the thing would move the way [it] did. When you hear it now it seems crazy but, yes, we actually gave away all those domains for free. Had to.”
Capital was needed, and now. The issue was how to raise it, and that issue quickly became two-fold. One, White says that Network Solutions could not raise money because people did not believe the Internet was ever going to be anything of great value. Two, if it were something of value, it was perceived that anyone African-American couldn’t possibly be on top of it. “ I know as I was out doing my thing, I could sense that it was literally like, ‘if it was going to be big, white people would already have this thing,’” says White. “We got dismissed again and again, by white and black investors alike.” So, after 16 years of both good and bad times, they sold it to an outfit called Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for $ 4.8 million in 1997.
But this is not where the story ends.
SAIC would then turn around and later sell Network Solutions in 2000 to VeriSign for $21 billion dollars and make history in one of the biggest tech deals to be completed in the United States at that time. Network Solutions remains one of the most important companies in the Internet industry.
Albert White and Emitt McHenry, co-founders of Network Solutions, the Internet domain name registry. (Photos: Albert White)
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White privilege, racial politics, and the divide between blacks and whites on social issues are discussed in this two part essay. Race-talk: Class and Race as Competing Self Interests or Whiteness as Symbolic Politics, Part. 1
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In the heart, where empathy and compassion reside, who cares more profoundly about the welfare of the poor, the working class and the middle class in America—Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? Which of these men is more connected, emotionally and intellectually, to the struggles that millions of Americans face every day as they reach for some small measure of comfort and optimism about their future and the future of their children? Which of these men is more likely to subordinate the needs of the 99% to the wants of the 1%? Why aren’t voters asking these questions?
In the ever increasing discourse over the “red-state, blue-state” phenomenon, popular culture pundits, social scientists, political analysts, scholars, journalists and just plain folk are trying to make sense of the behavior of millions of White working class and middle class Americans whose voting behavior in presidential elections often appears to betray their own deeply vested self-interest. Popular author Thomas Frank dissects this phenomenon in his 2004 book, What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. In a 2004 interview Frank explained that Kansas is a metaphor for the rest of the country. What’s wrong with Kansas is that it is becoming increasingly conservative and this pronounced slide to the right has caused the people of the state to vote against their own economic interests. Much of the state, Frank said, is “in deep economic crisis – in many cases a crisis either brought on or worsened by the free-market policies of the Republican party – and yet the state’s voters insist on reelecting the very people who are screwing them…”.
Frank and other political observers have puzzled over the behavior of millions of White voters in the states that won the White House for George Bush in 2004. This perplexity stems from the prevailing hypothesis that voting behavior is driven by political attitudes and that political attitudes are formed, maintained and energized in direct relationship to an individual’s assessment of material gain and wellbeing—variables like financial status, health, domicile, and family security. Inherent in this hypothesis is the notion that “people develop or change attitudes which maximally satisfy their needs or serve their interests when incentive-contingencies change…” (Sears, 1978; Sears, 1979 ).
One salient explanation for this paradox is found in research on the formation of symbolic attitudes and the process of cognitive consistency. Researchers in this area suggest that:
• Attitude development may take place without regard to whether or not the individual’s needs are satisfied, such as by a process of simple conditioning. That is, attitudes may often be acquired simply by being paired with positive or negative unconditioned stimuli (Staats, 1958).
• A child will hate communism if that concept is paired with contemptuous or derogatory expression each time he or she hears it. The individual’s needs or interests are irrelevant to attitude formation (Lau, 1978).
• By this line of thinking, people acquire stable affective preference through conditioning in their pre-adult years, with little calculation of the future costs and benefits of these attitudes. The most important of these are presumably some rather general predispositions, such as party identification, liberal or conservative ideology, nationalism, or racial prejudice. When confronted with new policy issues later in life, people respond to these new attitudes on the basis of cognitive consistency. The critical variable would be the similarity of symbols posed by the policy issue to those of long-standing predispositions. Political attitudes, therefore, are formed mainly in congruence with long-standing values about society and the policy, rather than short-term instrumentalities for satisfaction of one’s private needs (Sears, 1980).
Class and Race as Competing Self Interests or Whiteness as Symbolic Politics, Part 2
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The oil money may start to trickle down in Angola. Economist: Boom boom.
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Teams of gardeners are putting the finishing touches to manicured lawns, palm trees, tropical shrubs and paved walkways. Soon these will stretch the whole way along the Marginal, the seafront road that is being turned into a grand six-lane highway sweeping around the horseshoe-shaped bay of Luanda, Angola’s buzzing capital. Modern offices, hotels and apartment blocks are sprouting up behind, replacing the pretty pink-and-white colonial buildings, drab crumbling flats and teeming shanty-towns. Across the bay, fancy yachts and speed boats crowd the shores of the Ilha, a once almost deserted strip of sand used mainly by poor fishermen, on which smart restaurants and nightclubs for the new elite are now springing up.
In the surrounding suburbs, brand-new dormitory towns are rising from the bush, relieving the city-centre crush. Shiny shopping malls are filled with everything the Angolan heart could desire, from gourmet food to the latest fashions and car models. Prices are wildly inflated. Virtually everything, even basic building materials, still has to be imported. Luanda has been reckoned the world’s most expensive capital, though Tokyo recently overtook it.
It is also becoming a bit more efficient. A few years ago, a hundred or so ships could usually be counted outside the harbour, waiting their turn to dock. But with the deepening of Luanda’s port and the opening of others down the coast, only half a dozen ships are now in the queue, helping to cut Angola’s astronomical costs.
Generally deemed wretched after a 14-year war for independence from Portugal followed by 27 years of civil war that only ended in 2002, Angola is now one of Africa’s economic successes—thanks almost entirely to oil. With a population of 20m, it has Africa’s fifth-biggest and fastest-growing economy. Between 2004 and 2008 its GDP surged by an average of 17% a year, topping 22% in 2007. It is the continent’s second-biggest oil producer after Nigeria. Foreign investment is pouring in at a rate of more than $10 billion a year. In the past decade GDP per person is said to have tripled.
Yet most of its people are still very poor. Two-fifths are undernourished. One in three adults is illiterate. Infant and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world, life-expectancy among the lowest. Corruption is rampant. Angola’s human-rights record is poor, the police brutal, the courts and the press both still hobbled. In an array of league tables, Angola comes near the bottom.
Luanda
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The war on voting. The Nation: Florida to People of Color: Don’t Vote Here.
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In May 2011, Gov. Rick Scott signed into law HB 1355, a bill that once again put Florida at the center of the national debate over free and fair elections. The law dramatically changed the rules for both early voting and voter registration, creating a proc-
ess so complex and legally risky that groups like the League of Women Voters opted out of registering in the state altogether. Instead they sued, charging that the law is unconstitutional and violates the National Voter Registration Act. In late May of this year, a federal judge blocked the law’s most controversial provisions pending a trial. (In June, in a separate case, the Justice Department sued Florida to stop Secretary of State Ken Detzner from purging the rolls of 2,600 alleged noncitizens, hundreds of whom have since been shown to be legal voters.)
HB 1355’s still unfolding story offers a stark example of the changes that have taken place in the conversation about voting rights nationally over the past two years. Besides Florida, dozens of other states have passed or debated onerous changes to their voting rules since 2010. Advocates of these measures claim that the true threat to democracy isn’t low voter registration or turnout—it’s fraudulent voting.
But as the Florida ACLU recently pointed out, voter fraud is rarer than shark attacks in the state, a claim backed up by PolitiFact, which found just forty-nine investigations of fraud in Florida since 2008. In June the Orlando Sentinel reported that 178 cases of alleged voter fraud had been referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement since 2000, with just eleven arrests and seven convictions. So if fraud is virtually a nonexistent problem, what does Florida’s HB 1355 accomplish?
As its sponsor, State Senator Mike Bennett, made clear when the bill passed last year, its intent is to make voting more difficult. “I don’t have a problem making it harder,” Bennett said. “I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. This should not be easy.”
If reinstated, Bennett’s bill could unravel years of work by voting rights activists like Bracy to tear down the barriers that discourage African-Americans, Latinos and young people in particular from participating in our democracy. The law mandated for the first time in Florida’s history that people who conduct voter registration drives must themselves register with the state before signing up new voters. Once they register a new voter, they have forty-eight hours to submit that registration to the county under exacting specifications. Late or improper applications can result in stiff fines or even felony fraud charges and jail time. These requirements were burdensome enough to scare away even national groups with sophisticated processes for ensuring their registrations are valid. As the League of Women Voters’ Florida chapter president, Deirdre McNab, told MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, “These new laws frighten people from registering voters.”
Florida voting booth, Colorlines
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The 5-4 ruling [last week], the Supreme Court handed was a massive victory for the expansion of health care, but there are some cautionary side notes to that victory. Colorlines: How the Supreme Court’s ‘Obamacare’ Ruling May Lock in Racial Inequity.
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In a 5-4 ruling [last week], the Supreme Court handed President Obama a massive political victory, but not as large as many think. By weakening the federal government’s ability to expand Medicaid through the states, the court threw health care reform for black and brown America into disarray, and flung half of the law’s potential beneficiaries into legal limbo.
As a result, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s longterm effectiveness is in doubt, and the racial and economic inequalities at the very heart of the health care system stand to be reinforced.
Medicaid—funded jointly by the federal government and the states—is the nation’s health care plan for the working poor, those in poverty and their children. Enlargement of Medicaid is the single most important provision of the Affordable Care Act for people of color. It’s the way that almost all non-whites covered by the law would receive insurance.
If implemented as written, the law expected to cover 32 million Americans, accounting for 80 percent of those currently uninsured. Half of the 32 million are to be brought into the system through Medicaid, and three out of four of those individuals are people of color.
As passed by Congress, the Affordable Care Act broadened Medicaid by compelling states to participate under the threat of a severe penalty. Specifically, it would withdraw all Medicaid funds from a state that did not admit more of the working poor into the program. Yesterday’s ruling declared that method unconstitutional.
But use of similar protocols, carrots and sticks is the way that the federal government has grown Medicaid since its implementation in 1965. Now, states are left to decide what they want to do about the ACA’s Medicaid provision without the threat of federal enforcement. And that’s a problem, particularly in the Southern, GOP-led states where huge numbers of working poor blacks and Latinos live.
The majority of states, due to the recession, want to cover less not more people. There’s more demand for Medicaid services and less money to pay for them. As former Republican governor, now Senator Lamar Alexander told The New York Times, “If I were governor of Tennessee, I would not expand Medicaid.” Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana echoed the point.
Fortunately, other parts of the Affordable Care Act were saved. Most prominent of these is the individual mandate, which hung in the balance too. Without the mandate, two thirds of the nation’s uninsured would have remained without coverage and individual health care costs could have skyrocketed 40 percent. Through the mandate, the ACA will make a real difference in the lives of many.
But for millions more, the Supreme Court’s ruling will only exacerbate inequities at the core of our national health care crisis, and force the battle over the law back to the states.
Tea Party rally at the Supreme Court, Colorlines
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Domestic terrorism. Race-talk: Arson Attack on Women’s Health Organization in New Orleans.
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Women With a Vision (WWAV), a New Orleans advocacy and service organization that provides health care and other support for poor women of color, was the victim of a break-in and arson late Thursday night. A small organization that has won a national reputation for their work, WWAV was founded in 1991 by a collective of Black women as a response to a lack of HIV prevention resources for those women who were the most at risk: poor women, sex workers, women with substance abuse issues, and transgender women.
WWAV has made national news (including here on Huffington Post) for leading the fight against Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Statute, which targeted poor women of color, transgender women, and anyone forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night. The law forced women to register as sex offenders in a state database and placed a “sex offender” label on their driver’s license, among other requirements. With the grassroots leadership of WWAV, a national coalition that also included Center for Constitutional Rights, Loyola Law School, and police misconduct attorney Andrea Ritchie was able to get the law off the books and has won a series of further victories in the process of removing the sex offender registration requirements for those convicted in the past.
The attack seemed political in its nature, directly targeting the crucial information, files, and materials needed for WWAV’s work. According to an email report from Bill Quigley, a social justice attorney and friend of the organization:
“Major fire damage was done to a room which contained education and outreach materials. The arsonist seemed to have deliberately targeted this room. Destroyed were: three plastic and silicone breast models which were used to help people learn how to do self-examinations for breast cancer; a plastic pelvic model of a vagina; a two feet by one and a half foot plastic model of a woman’s reproductive system; boxes of male and female condoms; flip charts demonstrating the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV; several wooden penises which were used for condom demonstration; and boxes of educational materials. The fires in that room seem to have been set with some accelerant and scorched the walls, ceiling fan and ceiling and destroyed everything in the room….The offices were ransacked leaving drawers pulled out and papers and files on the floor. A TV and a laptop were taken but many valuables were left including computer monitors, office equipment, even some beer left over from a reception held earlier in the week. Several small fires were started inside the offices, in the bathroom, the hallway and in a sitting room.”
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Since I was a child, I have been both enamored and appalled at the increasing militancy of our nation. We glory the Soldier as a Hero, one whose pedestal is not to be sullied. Songs are sung and films are broadcast about yellow ribbons and Gold Stars and red sky at morning and Johnny come marching home and tears at Arlington on Memorial and Veteran's Day with 20 gun salutes and full metal jackets shredding jungles and deserts and seas and air.
Everywhere I look, supplicants genuflect and tithe at the Altar of the Military; politicians and preachers sky pilot high school football homecoming prom dances, while daddy works in a coal mine going down down down burning fossil microbes to steam a turbine while economies and marriages suffer from codified martial strategies of weapons procurement and international arms sales.
A pedestal not to be sullied; a Hero exalted. Semper Fidelis until Johnny needs a job and a shoulder to lean on when the slide show of dismembered limbs and dead babies scorched against the charred breasts of scattered skeletons scrolls behind closed eyelids on a lazy summer afternoon; an exalted Hero until stumbled on the cold winter night theater district broken sidewalk, hungry and lame and mumbling about the Newburgh Conspiracy and how he is just a festering scar on the nation and no amount of cleaning the wound will stop the seeping ooze of his forgotten service, no amount of slicing away the rotting flesh will justify the public amnesia.
Debridement
Black men are oaks cut down.
Congressional Medal of Honor Society
United States of America chartered by
Congress, August 14, 1958; this certifies
that STAC John Henry Louis is a member
of this society.
“Don’t ask me anything about the
medal. I don’t even know how I won
it.”
Debridement: The cutting away of dead
or contaminated tissue from a wound
to prevent infection.
America: love it or give it back.
Corktown
Groceries ring
in my intestines:
grits aint groceries
eggs aint poultry
Mona Lisa was a man:
waltzing in sawdust
I dream my cards
has five holes in it,
up to twenty holes;
five shots out of seven
beneath the counter;
surrounded by detectives
pale ribbons of valor
my necklace of bullets
powdering the operating table.
Five impaled men loop their ribbons
’round my neck
listening to whispers of valor:
“Honey, what you cryin’ ’bout?
You made it back.”
Caves
Four M-48 tank platoons ambushed
near Dak To, two destroyed:
the Ho Chi Minh Trail boils,
half my platoon rockets
into stars near Cambodia,
foot soldiers dance from highland woods
taxing our burning half:
there were no caves for them to hide.
We saw no action,
eleven months twenty-two days
in our old tank
burning sixty feet away:
I watch them burn inside out:
hoisting through heavy crossfire,
hoisting over turret hatches,
hoisting my last burning man
alive to the ground,
our tank artillery shells explode
killing all inside:
hoisting blown burned squad
in tank’s bladder,
plug leaks with cave blood:
there were no caves for them to hide—
In the Projects
Slung basketballs at Jeffries
House with some welfare kids
weaving in their figure eight hunger.
Mama asked if I was taking anything?
I rolled up my sleeves:
no tracks, mama:
“black-medal-man ain’t street-poisoned,”
militants called:
“he’s an electronic nigger!”
“Better keep electronic nigger 'way.”
Electronic Nigger?
Mama, unplug me, please.
A White Friend Flies In from the Coast
Burned —black by birth,
burned —armed with .45,
burned —submachine gun,
burned—STAC hunted VC,
burned —killing 5-20,
burned —nobody know for sure;
burned —out of ammo,
burned—killed one with gun-stock,
burned —VC AK-47 jammed,
burned —killed faceless VC,
burned —over and over,
burned —STAC subdued by three men,
burned —three shots: morphine,
burned —tried killing prisoners,
burned —taken to Pleiku,
burned —held down, straitjacket,
burned —whites owe him, hear?
burned —I owe him, here.
Mama’s Report
“Don’t fight, honey,
don’t let ’em catch you.”
Tour over, gear packed,
hospital over, no job.
“Aw man, nothin' happened,”
explorer, altar boy—
Maybe it’s ’cause they killed people
and don’t know why they did?
My boy had color slides of dead people,
stacks of dead Vietnamese.
MP’s asked if he’d been arrested
since discharge, what he’d been doin’:
“Lookin’ at slides,
looking’ at stacks of slides, mostly.”
Fifteen minutes later a colonel called
from the Defense Department, said he’d won the medal;
could he be in Washington with his family,
maybe he’d get a job now; he qualified.
The Democrats had lost, the president said;
there were signs of movement in Paris:
Fixing Certificates: Dog Tags: Letters Home
Our heliteam had mid-air blowout
dropping flares—5 burned alive.
The children carry hand
grenades to and from piss tubes.
Staring at tracer bullets
rice is the focal point of war.
On amphibious raid, our heliteam
found dead VC with maps of our compound.
On morning sick call you unzip;
before you piss you get a smear.
“VC reamed that mustang a new asshole”—
even at movies: “no round-eye pussy no more”—
Tympanic membrane damage: high gone—
20-40 db loss mid-frequencies.
Scrub-typhus, malaria, dengue fever, cholera;
rotting buffalo, maggoted dog, decapped children.
Bangkok: amber dust, watches, C-rations,
elephanthide billfolds, cameras, smack.
Sand&tinroof bunkers, 81/120 mm:
“Health record terminated this date by reason of death.”
Vaculoated amoeba, bacillary dysentery, hookworm;
thorazine, tetracycline, darvon for diarrhea.
'Conitus’ : I wanna go home to mama;
Brown’s mixture, ETH with codeine, cortisone skin-creams.
Written on helipad fantail 600 bed Repose;
“no purple heart, hit by ’nother marine.”
“Vascular repair, dissection, debridement”:
sharp bone edges, mushy muscle, shrapnel: stainless bucket.
Bodies in polyethylene bag: transport:
'Tan San Nhat Mortuary’
Blood, endotracheal tube, prep
abdomen, mid-chest to scrotum—
“While you’re fixin' me doc,
can you fix them ingrown hairs on my face?”
“They didn’t get my balls, did they?”
50 mg thorazine—“Yes they did, marine!”
Street-Poisoned
Swans loom on the playground
swooning in the basket air,
the nod of their bills
in open flight, open formation.
Street-poisoned, a gray mallard
skims into our courtyard with a bag:
And he poisons them —
And he poisons them —
Electronic-nigger-recruiter,
my pass is a blade
near the sternum
cutting in:
you can make this a career.
Patches itch on my chest and shoulders—
I powder them with phisohex
solution from an aerosol can:
you can make this a career.
Pickets of insulin dab the cloudy
hallways in a spray.
Circuits of change
march to an honor guard—
I am prancing:
I am prancing:
you can make this a career.
Makin’ Jump Shots
He waltzes into the lane
’cross the free-throw line,
fakes a drive, pivots,
floats from the asphalt turf
in an arc of black light,
and sinks two into the chains.
One on one he fakes
down the main, passes
into the free lane
and hits the chains.
A sniff in the fallen air—
he stuffs it through the chains
riding high:
“traveling” someone calls—
and he laughs, stepping
to a silent beat, gliding
as he sinks two into the chains.
Debridement: Operation Harvest Moon: On Repose
The sestina traces a circle in language and body.
Stab incision below nipple,
left side; insert large chest tube;
sew to skin, right side;
catch blood from tube
in gallon drain bottle.
Wash abdomen with phisohex;
shave; spray brown iodine prep.
Stab incision below sternum
to symphis pubis
catch blood left side;
sever reddish brown spleen
cut in half; tie off blood supply;
check retroperitoneal,
kidney, renal artery bleeding.
Dissect lateral wall
abdominal cavity; locate kidney;
pack colon, small intestine;
cut kidney; suture closely;
inch by inch check bladder,
liver, abdominal wall, stomach:
25 units blood, pressure down.
Venous pressure: 8; lumbar
musculature, lower spinal column
pulverized; ligate blood vessels,
right forearm; trim meat, bone ends;
tourniquet above fracture, left arm;
urine, negative: 4 hours; pressure
unstable; remove shrapnel flecks.
Roll on stomach; 35 units blood;
pressure zero; insert plastic blood
containers, pressure cuffs; pump chest
drainage tube; wash wounds sterile
saline; dress six-inch ace wraps;
wrap both legs, toe to groin; left arm
plaster, finger to shoulder: 40 units blood.
Pressure, pulse, respiration up;
remove bloody gowns; scrub; redrape;
5 cc vitamin K; thorazine: sixth
laparotomy; check hyperventilation;
stab right side incision below nipple;
insert large chest tube; catch blood drain bottle ...
The Family of Debridement
Theory: Inconvenienced subject will return to hospital
if loaned Thunderbird
Withdrawn. Hope: Subject returns,
Treatment:
Foreclosure for nine months unpaid mortgage;
wife tells subject hospital wants deposit,
Diseased cyst removal:
'Ain’t you gonna give me a little kiss good-bye’
Subject-wife: To return with robe and curlers—
Subject tells friend he’ll pay $15 to F’s stepfather
if he’ll drive him to pick up money owed him.
“This guy lives down the street,
I don’t want him to see me coming.”
“It looked odd for a car filled with blacks
to be parked in the dark in a white neighborhood,
so we pulled the car out under a streetlight
so everybody could see us.”
Store manager: “I first hit him with two bullets
so I pulled the trigger until my gun was empty.”
“I’m going to kill you, you white MF,” store manager
told police. Police took cardload, F and F’s parents for
further questioning. Subject died on operating table: 5 hrs:
Subject buried on grass slope, 200 yards
east of Kennedy Memorial,
overlooking Potomac and Pentagon,
to the south,
Arlington National Cemetery.
Army honor guard
in dress blues,
carried out assignment
with precision.
-- Michael S. Harper
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Welcome to the Front Porch
Front Porch Music from Mali
The track "Soumbou Ya Ya" is taken from the Grammy Award Winner album "In The Heart Of The Moon" (2005) of Ali Farka Toure´ & Toumani Diabate´.