Voices and Soul
“… we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green… “ — Rita Dove “Parsley”
“Echoes in Time and The Resonance of History”
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Editor
On 2 October 1977, my Son Israel Putnam was born. I assisted in his birth and placed his wrinkled, writhing body on his mom's stomach. I let the others in the delivery room attend to the umbilical cord and such. I had already done so with several calves and foals on the farm and ranch growing up in Oregon, it was enough to stroke my wife's forehead and help clean his tiny hands. It was a momentous day, to be sure.
On 2 October 2009, I visited Israel and my three grandkids in Salem, Oregon. I embarked from the Amtrak terminal in Emeryville, California, not far from my then- Berkeley home in the Elmwood. I love to take the train. It was a practice our family embraced when I was a toddler in the late 50's and I've used it often since. I enjoy the trains in Europe much more of course, but the Amtrak Coast Starlight is still a great way to see the West Coast of the United States.
Almost a year later, sitting in the Salem rail station for my return back to the Bay Area after a short visit with Israel and the kids, I engaged in a conversation with a young Army Ranger, dressed in desert camo and burdened with desert camo duffle bags, who was on his way to visit relatives in Portland. A pretty black-haired goth girl gave the perfunctory genuflection, uttering the requisite mantra of patriotic thanks. I was more curious when and where he was going back. I was more concerned he had to go at all.
He was closing a camp near the Euphrates and moving it to the Afghan-Pakistan border. He only had two days with his relatives in Portland, on 2 October 2010, he would be with his fellow Rangers in Iraq.
On that train 15 years ago, I was sat in the dining car next to a young man who worked for an NGO in Ecuador building schools. In the mid-80's, I worked for a contractor hired by UNICEF drilling water wells for schools in Honduras, so we spoke of Latin America and how the problems of abject poverty complicate matters. He was on his way to the offices in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, before traveling back to Guayaquil. He was then due to be in the tiny village of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on 2 October 2010.
On 2 October 2010, thousands marched in Washington, a show of solidarity against the TeaBircher demonstrations that were gaining traction against a Black president. A gathering of workers and mothers, small business owners and students, gays and atheists, catholics and lesbians, protestants and teachers, nurses and shias, housekeepers and lawyers were arrayed against the obvious racism masked as ‘economic anxiety.” It was a momentous day.
As I sat in the viewing car that night almost fifteen years ago, watching the full moon as we rolled through the Cascades, I thought of the petty nature of bigotry and how the actions of those two young men, the actions of the marchers in DC stood against that pettiness. I thought how the struggle is long and hard and how we cannot allow that pettiness to go unchallenged, but the pettiness festered in spite of our best efforts, government-sanctioned pettiness now rules the day. Masked gestapo thugs federalized by the feds are ransacking Chicago apartment buildings in the middle of the night, dragging zip-tied, naked kids out to the street and thrown in moving vans, Black US citizens are made to stand shoeless in the dark morning cold for hours, while their domiciles are turned upside down, electronics, furniture and cash stolen with no ability to redress.
It is said history may not rhyme, but it certainly resonates. The MAGA SCOTUS has ruled a mere latin accent is enough for the goon squads to arrest the obvious dangerous criminal, disappear them and erase their very existence. We are so close to another 2 October, this time in 1937, when Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered 20,000 Black Haitians killed because they could not roll the letter “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for Parsley.
- JP
1. The Cane Fields
There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the cane appears
to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General
searches for a word; he is all the world
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,
we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R—
out of the swamp, the cane appears
and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.
There is a parrot imitating spring.
El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp. The cane appears
in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.
And we lie down. For every drop of blood
there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp the cane appears.
2. The Palace
The word the general’s chosen is parsley.
It is fall, when thoughts turn
to love and death; the general thinks
of his mother, how she died in the fall
and he planted her walking cane at the grave
and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming
four-star blossoms. The general
pulls on his boots, he stomps to
her room in the palace, the one without
curtains, the one with a parrot
in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders
Who can I kill today. And for a moment
the little knot of screams
is still. The parrot, who has traveled
all the way from Australia in an ivory
cage, is, coy as a widow, practicing
spring. Ever since the morning
his mother collapsed in the kitchen
while baking skull-shaped candies
for the Day of the Dead, the general
has hated sweets. He orders pastries
brought up for the bird; they arrive
dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.
The knot in his throat starts to twitch;
he sees his boots the first day in battle
splashed with mud and urine
as a soldier falls at his feet amazed—
how stupid he looked!— at the sound
of artillery. I never thought it would sing
the soldier said, and died. Now
the general sees the fields of sugar
cane, lashed by rain and streaming.
He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth
gnawed to arrowheads. He hears
the Haitians sing without R’s
as they swing the great machetes:
Katalina, they sing, Katalina,
mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows
his mother was no stupid woman; she
could roll an R like a queen. Even
a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room
the bright feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone
calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother’s, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprigs
men of his village wore in their capes
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed
for a single, beautiful word.
- Rita Dove
"Parsley"
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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With the passing of Assata Shakur and the current administration openly targeting opponents take a look at how FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeted, spied on, and sabotaged Black activists in the name of “national security” under J. Edgar Hoover. The Root: Inside COINTELPRO: 13 Ways the FBI Unleashed a Secret War on Black Liberation
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The FBI’s COINTELPRO was a covert weapon aimed directly at Black liberation in the 1960s — a program built to spy on, sabotage, and extinguish the very fire fueling our activism. Figures like Assata Shakur, the prominent member of the Black Liberation Army who died recently, became targets of this extensive surveillance and repression. The organization went after our leaders, grassroots organizers, and community programs by way of infiltration and downright violence under the direction of former FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. It is imperative that you know exactly what COINTELPRO is, and never forget that the fight for Black liberation has always been under attack.
According to the FBI’s records, COINTELPRO — short for Counter Intelligence Program — was created in 1956 for the purpose of disrupting the activities of the “Communist Party of the United States.” By the 1960’s the agency expanded to include the Ku Klux Klan, Socialist Workers Party, and especially the Black Panther Party.
Former FBI director J Edgar Hoover created the Counter Intelligence program in 1956 to “neutralize” specific political groups in the United States. In 1967, a secret surveillance campaign was created, aimed at “subversive” civil rights organizations and Black leaders including the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and others, per Berkeley Library.
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Texas’ redistricting effort resulted in a new congressional map that potentially gives Republicans five new House seats ahead of the midterms. Newsone: Racial Gerrymandering Lawsuit Filed Over Texas Voting Map
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Over the summer, Texas triggered a nationwide redistricting battle by redrawing its congressional maps to protect the Republican Party’s narrow majority in the House of Representatives. A panel of federal judges is set to review the map after several civil rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the Texas redistricting effort of being little more than racial gerrymandering.
According to AP, the NAACP and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed the lawsuit in late August, arguing that the new map violates the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by intentionally undermining the influence of Black and Hispanic voters. “There is growing animus against African-American and other communities who have historically been disenfranchised,” said Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s national president. “This is consistent with the current climate and culture germinating from the White House.”
The new map eliminates five of the nine “coalition” districts in the state, where no one minority group has the majority, but they collectively outnumber white voters. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office argued in a court filing that the map isn’t a racial gerrymander, but simply a partisan gerrymander, which the Supreme Court ruled legal in 2019. “Whenever they do not get what they want, they cry racism,” the filing said.
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The United Nations has adopted a resolution to transform a security mission in gang-dominated Haiti into a larger, fully fledged force with military troops.
The new unit can now have a maximum of 5,500 uniformed personnel, including police officers and soldiers, unlike the current mission, which is just law enforcement. The US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, said the vote by 12 security council members to “transform the multinational security support (MSS) mission to the new gang suppression force, a mission five times the size of its predecessor” showed the “international community was sharing the burden”.
Washington co-sponsored the enlargement push with Panama.
Currently 1,000 officers, mostly from Kenya, are deployed in Haiti under the security mission aimed at supporting the Haitian police in their fight against rampant gang violence, but it has had mixed results.
“Every day, innocent lives are snuffed out by bullets, fire and fear,” Laurent Saint-Cyr, who heads the Haitian Transitional Presidential Council, told the UN’s signature diplomatic gathering last week. “Entire neighbourhoods are disappearing, forcing more than a million people into internal exile and reducing to nothing memories, investments and infrastructure.
“This is the face of Haiti today, a country at war, a contemporary Guernica, a human tragedy on America’s doorstep,” he added.
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