Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Ti Tide
Since I have had one eye glued to alJazeera following their Egypt coverage, I didn’t miss this story:
Haiti allows ex-president's return
Haiti's government has said it was ready to issue a new passport to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former president, to would allow him to return to his country after almost seven years in exile in South Africa.
They also had this brief report:
Baby Doc' wants Haiti presidency
Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Haiti's former president, retains ambitions of returning to the presidency, despite the fact that he is currently facing charges of corruption and theft of funds, his lawyer has told Al Jazeera. "He is a political man. Every political man has political ambitions," Reynold Georges, Duvalier's lawyer, told Al Jazeera in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Wednesday.
Asked if Duvalier retained ambitions of returning to power in Haiti, Georges replied: "That is right. Because under this new constitution, and let me tell you I am one of the persons who wrote that constitution, he has the right to do two mandates. Two!"
Just a day earlier, Haitian prosecutors charged Duvalier over a number of offences related to the tens of billions of dollars that allegedly went missing from state funds during his 15-year rule.
Baby Doc seeking return to the Presidency is enough to give an sane follower of Haiti and Haitian politics pause.
Let me state my bias up front. I hope Aristide does return, even though it will probably create strife. I have been following his career since the days of the Catholic Church Liberation theology movement in Latin America.
Jean Bertrand Aristide, affectionately known as "Ti Tide" by his adherents and supporters is a complex figure .
He has been painted with a pretty negative brush here inside the US in a variety of media, and was never the US government choice for a puppet to continue ruling Haiti like the others we have either supported and sustained over the years, or those we are currently propping up.
And yes he has his detractors in Haiti as well, but we would do well to stop and think about the fact that his Party, Lavalas was denied participation in the electoral process (with the agreement of the US government)
Yet, on 28 November, nearly three quarters of Haitians did not vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections. That is what we at the CEPR found when we went through 11,181 tally sheets from the election. This is a ridiculously low turnout for a presidential election.
One reason that most Haitians did not vote is that the most popular political party in the country, Fanmi Lavalas, was arbitrarily excluded from the ballot. This was also done in April 2009, in parliamentary elections, and more than 90% of voters did not vote. By contrast, in the 2006 presidential elections, participation was 59.3%. And it has been higher in the past, even for the parliamentary (non-presidential) election in 2000.
So let us go back into time briefly and explore who he is, what he believes, and why he is a key figure in the Haitian crisis – even though he has been in exile for 7 years.
Early life and church career
Aristide was born into poverty in Port-Salut, Sud Department. His father died when Aristide was only three months old, and his mother moved the family to Port-au-Prince, seeking a better life for her two children. In 1958, Aristide started school with priests of the Salesian order. He was educated at the College Notre Dame in Cap-Haïtien, graduating with honors in 1974. He then took a course of novitiate studies in La Vega, Dominican Republic before returning to Haiti to study philosophy at the Grand Seminaire Notre Dame and psychology at the State University of Haiti. After completing his post-graduate studies in 1979, Aristide traveled in Europe, studying in Italy, Greece and Israel. He returned to Haiti in 1982 for his ordination as a Salesian priest. He was appointed curate of a small parish in Port-au-Prince.
Throughout the first three decades of Aristide's life, Haiti was ruled by the repressive dictatorships of François "Papa Doc" and Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The misery endured by Haiti's poor made a deep impression on Aristide, and he became an outspoken critic of Duvalierism. Nor did he spare the hierarchy of the country's church, since a 1966 Vatican Concordat granted Duvalier the power to appoint Haiti's bishops. An exponent of liberation theology, Aristide denounced Duvalier's regime in one of his earliest sermons. This did not go unnoticed by the regime's top echelons. Under pressure, the provincial delegate of the Salesian Order sent Aristide into three years of exile in Montréal. By 1985, as popular opposition to Duvalier's regime grew, Aristide was back preaching in Haiti. His Easter Week sermon, "A Call to Holiness," delivered at the cathedral of Port-au-Prince and later broadcast throughout Haiti, proclaimed, "The path of those Haitians who reject the regime is the path of righteousness and love."
When I think of Aristide, he in many ways is a modern day Renaissance man:
As a result of his travels, Aristide learned to speak six languages (Spanish, English, Hebrew, Italian, German, and Portuguese), in addition to Creole, the native language of Haiti, and French, the official language of the country. He also studied music and learned to play several instruments, including guitar, piano, and saxophone.
Aristide tells his own story in his Autobiography
In order to understand this man who was a priest and who became a President, it is important to understand his philosophy of Liberation Theology and its roots in Latin America.
Ignacio Martín, who co-founded liberation psychology and was one of El Salvador’s murdered Jesuits, described spirituality for him with the words, "The concern of the social scientist should not be to explain the world but to transform it."
Here is Aristide speaking on Liberation Theology:
Aristide & Liberation Theology - part 1
Aristide & Liberation Theology - part 2
Aristide & Liberation Theology - part 3
The Church
Aristide became a leading figure in the ""ti legliz movement"" - Kreyòl for "little church." In September 1985, he was appointed to St. Jean Bosco church, in a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Struck by the absence of young people in the church, Aristide began to organize youth, sponsoring weekly youth masses. He founded an orphanage for urban street children in 1986 called Lafanmi Selavi [Family is Life]. Its program sought to be a model of participatory democracy for the children it served. As Aristide became a leading voice for the aspirations of Haiti's dispossessed, he inevitably became a target for attack. He survived at least four assassination attempts. The most widely publicized attempt, the St Jean Bosco massacre, occurred on 11 September 1988, when over one hundred armed Tonton Macoute wearing red armbands forced their way into St. Jean Bosco as Aristide began Sunday mass. As Army troops and police stood by, the men fired machine guns at the congregation and attacked fleeing parishioners with machetes. Aristide's church was burned to the ground. Thirteen people are reported to have been killed, and 77 wounded. Aristide survived and went into hiding.
Subsequently, Salesian officials ordered Aristide to leave Haiti, but tens of thousands of Haitians protested, blocking his access to the airport. In December, 1988, Aristide was expelled from his Salesian order. A statement prepared in Rome called the priest's political activities an "incitement to hatred and violence," out of line with his role as a clergyman. Aristide appealed the decision, saying "The crime of which I stand accused is the crime of preaching food for all men and women." In a January 1988 interview he said "The solution is revolution, first in the spirit of the gospel; Jesus could not accept people going hungry. It is a conflict between classes, rich and poor. My role is to preach and organize...." In 1994 Aristide left the priesthood, ending years of tension with the church over his criticism of its hierarchy and his espousal of liberation theology. He married Mildred Trouillot, a US citizen, the following year. They have two daughters.
Paul Farmer, whose name many of you are familiar with for his work in Haiti dealing with health issues, and most specifically HIV/AIDS, and his organization Partners in Health wrote a long piece back in 2004 published in the London Review of Books:
Who removed Aristide? Paul Farmer reports from Haiti
The article covers a lot of ground in depth, and I encourage you to take the time to give it a full read. I am going to dip into it pretty liberally.
On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the Central African Republic.
An understanding of the current crisis requires a sense of Haiti’s history. In the 18th century it became France’s most valuable colonial possession, and one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies there has ever been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying two-thirds of all of Europe’s tropical produce. A third of new arrivals died within a few years.
Noam Chomsky covers some of the same history, covered by Farmer in this lecture:
US role in Haiti destruction
Fast forward to Farmer:
By the mid-1980s, the hunger, despair and disease were beyond management. Baby Doc Duvalier, named ‘president for life’ at 19, fled in 1986. A first attempt at democratic elections, in 1987, led to massacres at polling stations. An army general declared himself in charge. In September 1988, the mayor of Port-au-Prince – a former military officer – paid a gang to set fire to a Catholic church as mass was being said. It was packed with people, 12 of whom died. At the altar was Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the nemesis of the dictatorship and the army. Aristide was a proponent of liberation theology, with its injunction that the Church proclaim ‘a preferential option for the poor’, but liberation theology had its adversaries: members of Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it less Christian than Communist. ‘US policy,’ they said, ‘must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the "liberation theology" clergy.’
Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or French, had few kind words for him. ‘He’s a cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one Haitian businessman was quoted as saying. ‘If it comes to a choice between the ultra-left and the ultra-right, I’m ready to form an alliance with the ultra-right.’ Haitians knew, however, that Aristide would win any democratic election, and on 16 December 1990, he got 67 per cent of the vote in a field of 12 candidates. No run-off was required.
Yes – the NY Times has played its part in the demonization of Aristide, feeding the meme and distorted portrait being developed to suit our own world view of Democracies which don’t fit our cookie cutter imagery.
The reporters from Times were not listening to the Haitian people,, and the Haitian people were not reading the Times nor heeding their own US backed elites.
Marc Bazin, who was the favored candidate of the George H W Bush administration and Haiti's beige aristocracy, got only 14% of the vote.
Farmer hammers home a point about money. Huge sums of money extorted from Haiti.
That the US and France undermined Aristide is not a fringe opinion. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Union have called for a formal investigation into his removal. ‘Most people around the world believe that Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said.
Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and . . . should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.
Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’
There is so much more to read in Farmer's piece. Please take the time to do so.
There are many voices, not just in Haiti, but those here in the US calling for his return.
Prominent blacks back call by Aristide to be allowed to return to homeland
With ousted dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier back in Haiti, several prominent blacks have issued a call for another ousted leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to be allowed to return to the country from which he was forcibly ejected despite having been democratically elected. In a full-page "urgent call" letter published Sunday, Jan. 23 in The Miami Herald, more than 150 individuals and organizations said there were no legal obstacles to Aristide’s immediate return. The letter was signed by individuals, actors and activists, including Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Oliver Stone, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Eusi Kwayana, a noted Guyanese Pan-Africanist now living in the United States.
A report in the Jan. 15 Huffington Post said a tearful Aristide spoke to reporters in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he lives in exile, to convey his desire to return. "As far as we are concerned, we are ready to leave today, tomorrow, at any time to join the people of Haiti, share in their suffering, help rebuild the country, moving from misery to poverty with dignity," said Aristide, his wife Mildred next to him, eyes downcast, twisting a handkerchief.
The letter in The Herald said more than 20,000 signatures had been collected on a petition circulated by Haitian women."A broad sector of Haitian grassroots organizations, women’s groups, human rights activists and educators have made it clear that now is the time to end president Aristide’s forced exile in South Africa," said the letter, paid for by Haiti Action Committee. The letter accuses the Haitian government, the United States, France, Canada and the United Nations forces in Haiti of blocking Aristide’s return. It said the Haitian government had not responded to Aristide’s request for a passport and that U.S and U.N. officials had issued public statements opposing Aristide’s return.
What will the future hold for Haiti?
Haitians say "Lespwa fè viv." (Hope makes one live)
Where there is the will and the hope for a future, the Haitian people will never accept defeat. Let us hope that the return of Aristide helps that hope along.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A high school has defended its decision to segregate students by race and gender. Mail Online: School defends experiment to separate black students in a bid to boost their academic results.
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A high school has defended its decision to segregate students by race and gender.
The scheme, at McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, separates black students from the rest of the school pupils, and then further breaks it down into black females and black males.
The separation is only for a short period - six minutes each day and 20 minutes twice a month - but it has drawn criticism for raising the spectre of racial segregation.
Today the school's principal defended the policy.
Bill Jimenez said the school noticed that black students were not performing as well as other students, and that research had shown that same-race classes with strong same-race role models led to better academic results.
Mr Jimenez admitted that no other students were divided by race at the school, but he added that academic data dictated the school take a different approach with its black students.
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Fields in which not one African American earned a Doctorate in 2009. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
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In 2009, 49,562 doctorates were awarded by American universities. As previously reported by JBHE, there were 2,221 black U.S. citizens or permanent residents in this country who earned a doctorate in 2009. This is an all-time high.
But not all the news is good. African Americans earned only 1.6 percent of all doctorates awarded in the physical sciences by American universities. The 25 blacks who earned a Ph.D. in mathematics were only 1.6 percent of all doctorates in the field given out by U.S. universities. African Americans earned only 1.8 percent of all doctorates in engineering.
In 2009, 1,418 doctorates were awarded in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, theoretical chemistry, paleontology, number theory, logic, marine science, chemical and physical oceanography, nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, agronomy, horticulture, wildlife/range management, animal breeding and nutrition, Spanish, and the classics. Not one of these 1,418 doctorates was awarded to an African American.
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A new Philadelphia museum, the President's House, dramatically illustrates how the nation's first president tried to thwart his slave's quest for freedom. But Oney Judge prevailed. The Root: George Washington and His Runaway Slave.
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"I am free now and choose to remain so." These are the words that haunt the new exhibit, "The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation." Now, directly in front of the famous Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the President's House is the first and only federal site designed to memorialize enslaved African Americans.
That defiant affirmation of freedom was uttered by Oney "Ona" Judge, a runaway slave formerly owned by George and Martha Washington who successfully evaded the first president's many attempts to capture her. It is her story, told through a video reenactment, that introduces the exhibit. In it, an actress playing an older, bonnet-clad Judge recounts how she stole her freedom from the man who helped this country secure its own independence.
Directed by independent documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah and written by novelist Lorene Cary, Oney's story appears alongside several other video vignettes. Hung like paintings over brick fireplaces are flat-screen video panels featuring black actors in period costumes, narrating the stories of nine enslaved African Americans -- all of whom worked for and lived with the country's first president when Philadelphia was the nation's capital.
It is these colliding tales of American freedom and black enslavement, of fugitive slave laws and an interracial abolitionist movement, that are at the heart of the President's House, a $11.2 million, open-air structure that opened last year to much fanfare and controversy on Dec. 15.
As the first "White House," the President's House was the executive mansion of Washington and John Adams, the nation's first two presidents. In 1947 Congress designated the building a historic site, but by 1952 it had been demolished.
In 2002 it found new life when the public historian Edward Lawler Jr. published the article, "The President's House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark," in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Lawler argued that the house should be restored, rather than moving the Liberty Bell to the heart of Independence Mall and on top of the foundation of the President's House.
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Excited by the success of Glee and the acceptance of gay characters on mainstream TV, some are saying that gays have won the culture war. But the black gay community may still be fighting that battle. The Root: Gay Revolution on Television Isn't Exactly Inclusive
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I would have joined in on the celebration going on at Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly, but I stopped believing in fairy tales after finding my mama's signature on "Santa's receipt" some 20 years ago. While I applaud Glee's efforts and adore DeGeneres for simply being alive, Hummel's high notes and DeGeneres' nonthreatening dance moves have aided only a portion of the gay population.
Many gays of color certainly don't see themselves in this revolution. Though we are seeing a lot more gay faces on TV, many of them are of the same ilk. And are we really challenging the tolerance levels of Americans that much by asking them to accept versions of gay people that they've long grown accustomed to seeing?
That's akin to arguing that the mainstream popularity of The Real Housewives of Atlanta star NeNe Leakes will help black women become more endearing to the American public.
Sure, getting people to embrace certain members of a minority group helps boost overall acceptance to some degree, but wouldn't showing off the diversity of that group do more to achieve that feat?
Chris Colfer with Golden Globe for best supporting actor (Kevin Winter/Getty);
Antoine Dodson (Frederick M. Brown/Getty)
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For nearly 30 years, the Sundance Film Festival has been the undisputed champion of independent filmmaking. "Precious" got its start there. This year, there was a record representation of black films. Is Sundance becoming "Blackdance"? The Root: The Black Side of Sundance.
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For those bemoaning the lack of diversity in the Oscar nominations, they can at least take heart in knowing that diversity at the Sundance Film Festival is alive and well and flourishing, with no fewer than a combined 30 black filmmakers and films. 2011 is proving to be a banner year for black films and black filmmakers at the festival, which wrapped yesterday. This year, there were more features, documentaries and shorts by blacks and about blacks than at any other time in the prestigious festival's history, which began in 1978 as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival.
Sundance Senior Programmer Shari Frilot, who is the only African American on the seven-member programming panel, attributes the record number to several factors, including "accessibility to filmmaking," saying, "it used to be elitist -- not anymore." Yes, the cost of making movies has gone down as the technology has gotten better, but that is only part of the reason more blacks are making films and more of those films are being shown at Sundance. Frilot, who has been with the festival for 11 years, credits an older generation of black filmmakers with paving the way for the new guard. "The groundwork was laid before them and they are coming from programs that support them," Frilot says.
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It's sad to see an exemplary career have to hit a major road block like this. Washington Post: Rep. Charles Rangel reflects on his censure and his legacy
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After it was all over - the bear hugs, the whispers, the somber theatricality - one question lingered about Charlie Rangel's censure, and it was wider than Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem. How did the savvy old pol let this happen?
How did one of the shrewdest operatives in the House of Representatives, a man who rose to become chairman of the most powerful committee, Ways and Means, an expert in tax law and spending procedures, a hero to black America, get caught chiseling on his taxes? How did he let himself become the latest example of ethical lapses in Congress?
Weeks after he was censured by the House - a rebuke suffered by only 22 others in congressional history - Rangel, 80, sat for two interviews in his Capitol Hill office. Reviewing the events of the past two years, his answers were full of contradictions that seem to defy easy explanation.
He doesn't bother to conceal his rage and lashes out, in that deep Orson Welles voice, in many directions: He admits he made mistakes, but also lays blame upon a conservative ethics group and their efforts to expose him. He fingers a former chief of staff who he says didn't pay attention to details.
And he laments a political climate in which veteran members of Congress are treated like the amateur performers at Harlem's Apollo Theater (which Rangel helped save from extinction), their fate dependent on the whim of the audience.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The anti-apartheid, white South African poet, writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach, was exiled after marrying a French national of Vietnamese descent while studying in Paris in the early '60's. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and The Immorality Act of 1950 made it a criminal offense for a white person to have sexual relations with a person of a different race. He made a trip to South Africa in 1975, was discovered in the country, (it has been reported that the ANC betrayed him to the government because they didn't trust him), arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for High Treason. Massive international intervention ultimately secured his release in 1982, he returned to Paris and obtained French citizenship.
Nigerian poet, novelist and musician, Chris Abani has a prescience that is almost uncanny. His first novel, Masters of the Board, about a neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria earned him praise as "... (A)frica's answer to Frederick Forsyth." The government, though, believed the book to be a blueprint for an actual coup and sent the 18 year old Abani to prison in 1985. After serving six months, he was released; but he went on to perform in a guerilla theatre group which led to his arrest and imprisonment at the notorious Kiri Kiri prison. He was released again, but after writing his play Song of a Broken Flute, was arrested a third time, sentenced to death and sent to the Kalakuta Prison; where he was jailed with other political prisoners on death row.
Languishing most of the time in solitary confinement, Abani was finally and fortunately released in 1991. He lived in exile in London until 1999, when he emigrated to the United States; where he currently teaches at UC Riverside in California.
With events in Egypt unfolding; and the following poem written in 2006, it seems Abani's prescience is once again put to the fore.
Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach
There are stones even here
worn into a malevolence by time
gritting the teeth and tearing
the eyes with the memory.
Out in the desert, the wind
is a sculptor working the ephemera
of sand. Desperately editing steles
to write the names of thousands of slaves
who died to make Pharaoh great.
It is a fool’s game.
And we are like the blind musician
at the hotel who tells us with a smile:
I’ll see you later.
The guard at the pyramid eyes me.
Are you Egyptian? he demands,
then searches my bag for a bomb.
At the hotel they speak Arabic to me,
don’t treat me like the white guests,
and I guess, even here, with all
the hindsight of history we haven’t
learned to love ourselves.
I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot
explain why. How do you say: In my country
they buried me alive for six months?
And so you lie and tell yourself this is love.
I am protecting the world from my rage.
Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves
here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa.
Do you have a knife? Do you have one?
the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me,
searching us. We call this on ourselves. We
are clearly political criminals.
I trace the glyphs chipped into stone.
As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could
I too would carve myself into eternity.
Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me
you’ve found a spelling mistake in it!
A line of miniature statues is placed
into the tomb to serve the pharaoh.
One for each day of the year. Four hundred.
The overseers are a plus. I think
even death will not ease
the lot of the poor here.
Statues: it seems the more I search the world
for differences the more I find it all the same.
Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too
when he said we are all one.
Mona argues about who should pay
to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can
treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists.
A woman nearby tells her husand she can see
dead bodies at work. Why pay?
Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask.
That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees.
From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops
spread out like a conference of coffee tables.
Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs
like family secrets sunning themselves.
Two white goats on a roof chew
their way through the debris.
On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me
she wants to be Celine Dion.
She is my sister calling me home to Egypt.
Perhaps one day I will be ready.
For now it is enough to know I can
be at home here.
-- Chris Abani
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