I know I'm posting a little late so I wanted to give you guys a couple options to consider so that hopefully everyone feels like there's something to respond to:
1.) So below is an INCREDIBLE poem by June Jordan. She is an African-American poet that was featured in a documentary we watched in my ethnic studies class. I was hoping to find a video of the poem because I think it's such a powerful poem to hear (in the documentary she was reading it herself which was so cool) but I couldn't find one so instead I just posted it below. It's kinda long but if you can push through it, she has a very powerful message to share that I think ties in nicely with the class.
Poem About My Rights by June Jordan
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can't
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening
alone on the streets
alone not being the point
the point being that I can't do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God
or thinking
about children or thinking about the world
all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can't do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was
wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted one
a boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one
a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad
I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of my self
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it's about walking out at night
or whether it's about the love that I feel or
whether it's about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and disputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
because I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
2.) I found this article somehow and I thought it also provided very interesting commentary regarding social "norms" and gender roles that are prevalent even in our society today. I wasn't sure how I felt about this author's colloquial tone though. I couldn't decide if it made the poem easier to read and connected the reader with the author of if it made the piece too unprofessional to be taken seriously and gave it more of a mocking tone. Thoughts? (the link is listed below)
http://thecurrentconscience.com/blog/2011/09/12/a-message-to-women-from-a-man-you-are-not-“crazy”/
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletei want to challenge the assertion that this is a 'powerful' poem.
ReplyDeletePower:
Capacity for exerting mechanical force or doing work; (Physics) the rate at which work is done or energy is produced; the rate at which energy is converted from one form into another. (Pavg=ΔW/ΔT)
if these words do any work it is simply to translate a political anger into a static pile of lines. the energy is lost in the act of writing. i feel no less ambivalent about this than i do about those anti-municiplization ads on youtube. it is no less a contrivance.
we are dealing with overt abstractions and generalizations, i.e. 'i am rape.' how can you take the physical energy of rape and convert it into figurative energy without it becoming cold and stale? how is this any more than a querulous litany? from the writer's perspective, these are all very real concerns, very heavy obstructions, but what about the reader?at the very best we can simply commiserate, and only that if we share some of these obstructions.
more formally speaking, since power is a function of time (wiki page example: 'burning a kilogram of coal releases much more energy than does detonating a kilogram of TNT, but because the TNT reaction releases energy much more quickly, it delivers far more power than the coal.'), i think the long lines and repetition are muddying the 'power' of the reading itself.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting, as Winn has pointed out, when we look at the different connotations of words within their various academia and definitions therein. As pointed out, a word like "power" has completely different implications concerning physics than it does concerning sociology, philosophy, etc. The word, in its various definitions, moves more and more into a space of indefinability, which is ironic--see, the more definitions we prescribe to a word, the less defined it actually becomes. I would agree that this is a very powerful poem, under the definition of power that the poems is working with. However, I also agree with Winn, that the poem only purports social figurations of that power. I personally was most struck with the sentiment of the poem, in which the persona refuses to accept her own placement (not place) in the world. In that placeMENT, where she has been forced into, she finds herself denying that space and the connotations therein. The poem is unsophisticated, as Winn has pointed out, but there is a point therein. The point being that in this space there is no sophistication but a primeval desire to escape the perpetuated system at work.
ReplyDelete