194 Racism and discrimination poems

I’m not sure whether it happened in Manitoba or Alberta:go home, they complained,go back, wherever pakis or niggers come from. Was 
I seven years old? Was I five? The day was cloudy; there was wind, and a sidewalk underfoot — a path of cement on which we kids marched. In whose place was I a guest, if home wasn’t this flat territory we were on? The hard sidewalk under my shoes, their sense of here. 
I walked home alone — I say “home” — I went where my parents paid rent, right? Our house wasn’t ours? Overhead, the sky spread out; the sky’s country was itself. We had moved from Ontario, but my gut got that they didn’t mean there. Immigrants, all of us, we’d chorused in assembly — the more immigrants, the kindlier the country, the folksier the mosaic. First the English and the French, then Western Europeans and the Ukrainians, I guessed, then Chinese and Indians, then the Guyanese and other such Commonwealth stragglers? Eventually we’d bring into “us,” Canadians, a panoply of the human race — so my sweet young self, in Trudeau’s aftermania, believed. Those children’s hate had a kind of guilelessness, however, that conveyed my abjection straight from their Canadian parents’ hearts. I was foreign to clear distinctions between master and savage — to fantasies of homesteaders who, by subjecting trees to their saws, had “mixed their labor” with “unowned” lands. Homesteaders, they called themselves, by principle: “home” was theirs, because they were first to fence it. As if we still were at war with whatever made entreaty against their fencing, my existence existing too near threatened. My very being entreated something before I ever opened my mouth.Get lost! Here kingly kids drink from institution’s cup. Something older than English yea well knows what with his guts he must disagree. Something français dit bon, histoire-là, je parle 
au-dessus du poète: domination, Dominion, domicile, home. I protested: one of my parents is here’s occupying family! Don’t blacken 
me! Please see my colonists’ blood, inside! They practiced the 
policing of reserve on the surface of my brown skin. They practiced homing in on enemy. The clouds above, the sky above, witnessed. The land underfoot said, here was here first. We thought about 
beginnings.

I am afraid of your transcendental death. When people say think of a man. I think of a brown man. Sometimes the earth grows khella because she can feel our suffering. Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis. When people say think of a man. I think of a white man. I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain. Yooooooing beneath Costco tikis. I was drunk holding my teeth in like students. I am meant to hold you in your oblique pain, your map-driven pain. You die like an actor. I was drunk holding my teeth in like students. My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water. You die like an actor. I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person. My body was a brown dog I shoved back into the water. Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme. I beseeched but couldn’t stay out of the first person. Where does it hurt, we say. Hold me, hold me, hold me, holdmeholdmeholdme. I am afraid of your transcendental death.

My daddy understood the richness of color and shunned my oldest sister’s whitewashed birth. Who the white child belong to? He asked in the delivery ward shaming himself as the source. Shadism colored my siblings’ perception. An ideal hierarchy with light skin the pinnacle after the paper bag test proved me cocoa dark and of less value. Burned biscuit defined what I could not erase. When they tired of sidewalk chalk and strike ’em out their feigned indignation made my smile give and give unsuccessfully, reaching eyes where ducts emptied silently. Turned my cheek on juvenile acceptance and sibling rivalry reminding myself that After all, I’m the real thing and it comforted me.

Race, friends, is boring.  Everyone says so. Hashtag all lives matter, the channel turns, we ourselves live and turn, and moreover the TV told me yesterday (unendingly) ‘Ever to talk about race means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no Inner Resources, because all I see is race. People have race, literature has race, especially great literature, Henry has race, with his blacks & whites made up as his feelings about love & sex & art, which have race. And our social ills, & sin, in Chinese drag are somehow a dog that’s eaten itself, & its tail miserably remains as our mirror, bone or breaker, heaving on tide: us, flag.

Some years there exists a wanting to escape— you, floating above your certain ache— still the ache coexists. Call that the immanent you— You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you. Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence. And still this life parts your lids, you see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave— / I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place. Wait. The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. The opening, between you and you, occupied, zoned for an encounter, given the histories of you and you— And always, who is this you? The start of you, each day, a presence already— Hey you— / Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day. The outside comes in— Then you, hey you— Overheard in the moonlight. Overcome in the moonlight. Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you hear this—what happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you He is speaking of the legionnaires in Claire Denis's film Beau Travail and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze— The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. / And still a world begins its furious erasure— Who do you think you are, saying I to me? You nothing. You nobody. You. A body in the world drowns in it— Hey you— All our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer. / Don't say I if it means so little, holds the little forming no one. You are not sick, you are injured— you ache for the rest of life. How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body? Even now your voice entangles this mouth whose words are here as pulse, strumming shut out, shut in, shut up— You cannot say— A body translates its you— you there, hey you / even as it loses the location of its mouth. When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places, when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on, you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you. You slow all existence down with your call detectable only as sky. The night's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle to the sun ready already to let go of your hand. Wait with me though the waiting, wait up, might take until nothing whatsoever was done. / To be left, not alone, the only wish— to call you out, to call out you. Who shouted, you? You shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you, go nowhere, be no one but you first— Nobody notices, only you've known, you're not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad— It's just this, you're injured. / Everything shaded everything darkened everything shadowed is the stripped is the struck— is the trace is the aftertaste. I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done— The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much to you—

/ You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind. As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going. / When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in 
silence you are bucking the trend. / When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you. He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say. Now there you go, he responds. The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile. / A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers. / The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked. At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard? It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry. I am so sorry, so, so sorry. /

This is the g-dropping vernacular I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it. I’m grinning to this vernacular like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic marching band. Be cool & try to ride the beat the same way me, Pryor, & Ra did driving across the 30th Street Bridge, laughing at these two dudes with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into the water & looking at the stars. Right before Officer Friendly hit his lights. Face the car, fingers locked behind your heads. Right after the fireworks started popping off.Do I need to call the drug dog? Right after the rattling windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before the thrill of real planets & pretend planets spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up three West Side fingers, each ringed by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club down swinging at almost the exact same time Pryor says,Cops put a hurting on your ass, man.& fireworks light up in the same colors as angry knuckles if you don’t duck on the double. Especially on the West Side—more carnivorous than almost any other part of Earth Voyager saw when it snapped a blue picture on its way out of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.

Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand around on the sidewalks if we’re black or brown. Vanetta’s over the trestle, and that’s our town. The hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after your row the river, and the graveyard’s on the hill, cold in the springtime blow, the graveyard’s up on high, and the town is down below. Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house, thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn’t attend, died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end. When a man said I feel poorly, for any reason, any weakness or such, letting up when he couldn’t keep going barely, the Cap and company come and run him off the job surely. I’ve put them DOWN from the tunnel camps to the graveyard on the hill, tin-cans all about—it fixed them!— TUNNELITIS hold themselves up at the side of a tree, I can go right now to that cemetery. When the blast went off the boss would call out, Come, let’s go back, when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come, let’s go back, telling us hurry, hurry, into the falling rocks and muck. The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water, the camps and their groves were colored with the dust, we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust. Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves, it stayed and the rain couldn’t wash it away and it twinkled that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles. As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.

“It seems to me,” said Booker T., “It shows a mighty lot of cheek To study chemistry and Greek When Mister Charlie needs a hand To hoe the cotton on his land, And when Miss Ann looks for a cook, Why stick your nose inside a book?” “I don’t agree,” said W.E.B., “If I should have the drive to seek Knowledge of chemistry or Greek, I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look Another place for hand or cook. Some men rejoice in skill of hand, And some in cultivating land, But there are others who maintain The right to cultivate the brain.” “It seems to me,” said Booker T., “That all you folks have missed the boat Who shout about the right to vote, And spend vain days and sleepless nights In uproar over civil rights. Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse, But work, and save, and buy a house.” “I don’t agree,” said W.E.B., “For what can property avail If dignity and justice fail. Unless you help to make the laws, They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause. A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot, No matter how much cash you’ve got. Speak soft, and try your little plan, But as for me, I’ll be a man.” “It seems to me,” said Booker T.— “I don’t agree,” Said W.E.B.

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window, open to ask directions. I was always asking directions and always driving: to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror. The floors of my apartment would never come clean. Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp, smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke. What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar. Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre. Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head. I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg. No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.