Today is my father’s birthday. Since he was a poet, translator, lover of, and professor of comparative literatures, it is fitting that he should be born in World Poetry Month. The poems and visual arts today are a tribute to him (Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, 1938-2020)). The poems below would have engaged him and certainly been part of his reading and teaching of comparative literature.

I’ve entitled today’s blog Citizen Heart, because to withstand and overcome the injustices that impede the flowering of literature, art, health, future, we need to embrace our own humanity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophers and writers like Hegel and Joseph Conrad concerned themselves with the banality of oppressive colonial or class laden evil, arguing that brutality enmeshed in systems of oppression and enslavement brought out the dehumanization of the oppressor as much the oppressor’s attempt to dehumanize the persecuted and oppressed. But the pain of resistance makes those who are being exterminated, human–more human. Whether Indigenous or Black peoples in the Americas, African nation-building attempts, the sovereignty of a socialist Viet Nam, the Haitian people barely surviving against the longest running blockade in the world, the survival of the Palestinian people is yet another feat of how people manifest the spirit of existence as resistance. And language and visuals and music are integral to those processes of resistance and solidarity.

It’s this paradox we see unfolding, as the young of the oppressors want nothing to do with this genocide carried out with the daily subsidy from the U.S.A.

While the world seems no closer to resolving the situation of Palestine and making the genociders accountable, countless lives are being destroyed. The U.S government, like a desperate wildly thrashing crocodile, has just committed nearly $100 billion dollars in warmongering for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, striking out with its tail against its opponents, Iran, Russia and China. .

But in spite of the tragedy that is the United States, students and youth have once again shown their courage, conviction and commitment to justice, equality, and anti- colonialism/imperialism. They are protesting their governments’ and institutions’ support for an ongoing genocide.

Students are showing up in droves on campuses across the U.S. It’s beautiful. In the midst of the genocidal project which attempts to destroy hope as well as living people, these young people are the sparks that may light the flames of a much needed social change. Along with some brave faculty members, they are the light in the cracks of hegemony, and in that, they have understood, like the artists and authors below, that hope is a principle of justice. They show us the way to what Antonio Gramsci termed, ““Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” 

Yesterday we had the privilege and honour of seeing the Palestinian-American poet and translator Fady Joudah read from his latest book, entitled […} written between October 2023 and December 2023. A poetics of genocide in real time. And I was reminded again why poets are dangerous and feared by dictatorships. They speak truth to power without intermediaries! And so I present the following pieces for your consideration.

Benediction

Pale brown Moses went down to Egypt land

To let somebody’s people go.

Keep him out of Florida, no UN there:

The poor governor is all alone,

With six hundred thousand illiterates. 

America, I forgive you…I forgive you

Nailing black Jesus to an imported cross

Every six weeks in Dawson, Georgia.

America, I forgive you…I forgive you

Eating black children, I know your hunger.

America, I forgive you…I forgive you

Burning Japanese babies defensively –

I realize how necessary it was.

Your ancestor had beautiful thoughts in his brain.

His descendants are experts in real estate.

Your generals have mushrooming visions.

Every day your people get more and more

Cars, televisions, sickness, death dreams.

You must have been great

Alive. 

–Bob Kaufman

[from Callaloo, John Hopkins University Press, Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2002]

The Poetry Foundation tell us ” A Beat poet, and founder of the journal Beatitude with Allen Ginsberg and others, poet Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 to a German Jewish father and a black Catholic mother. As a young man, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, briefly studied at the New School in New York, and moved to San Francisco, where he associated with such writers as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg.“.