500 Mas­sac­red in Nige­ria Are Vic­tims of Reli­gious Violence

March 9th, 2010 § 1

From ABC News:

The killers sho­wed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and chil­dren, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their mache­tes. On Mon­day, Nige­rian women wai­led in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved wor­kers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tos­sed them into the mass grave. A crowd began sin­ging a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to hea­ven.” As the grave filled, the grie­ving crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 peo­ple, most of them Chris­tians, were slaugh­te­red on Sun­day, accor­ding to resi­dents, aid groups and jour­na­lists. The local govern­ment gave a figure more than twice that amount, but offe­red no casualty list or other infor­ma­tion to subs­tan­tiate it.

An Asso­cia­ted Press repor­ter coun­ted 61 corp­ses, 32 of them chil­dren, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Mon­day. Other vic­tims would be buried elsewhere. At a local mor­gue the bodies of chil­dren, inc­lu­ding a diaper-clad todd­ler, were tan­gled together. One appea­red to have been scal­ped. Others had seve­red hands and feet.

Reli­gious vio­lence is not a new thing. Some of the most endu­ring ima­ges I have from my Jewish edu­ca­tion are desc­rip­tions of the vio­lence that has been per­pe­tra­ted for cen­tu­ries against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Chris­tians and, though perhaps less often, Mus­lims. One sub­text of those les­sons was that the Jews, because we were so stead­fast in our reli­gious beliefs, because we refu­sed to assi­mi­late, have been made to suf­fer reli­gious per­se­cu­tion more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was youn­ger, I often expe­rien­ced real cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance when I heard about reli­gious vio­lence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it wide­ned, that dis­so­nance disap­pea­red. I came to unders­tand as well that reli­gion was some­ti­mes merely the jus­tif­ying veneer that one group would place over the vio­lence they wan­ted to do to another, a way of hiding their more poli­ti­cal and mate­rial motivation.

The more I heard and read about reli­gious vio­lence, the more fami­liar the scrip­ting of it became – and it is remar­ka­ble how simi­lar the scripts are; how care­fully scrip­ted the inci­te­ments to vio­lence are, if not the vio­lence itself, regard­less of the reli­gious deno­mi­na­tions invol­ved – and, even­tually, the sto­ries I would hear left me fee­ling more numb than anything else. Yes, it was horri­ble that peo­ple were killed, but, I would think, as long as reli­gion con­tai­ned within it the pos­si­bi­lity for someone to decide that he or she is follo­wing the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spi­ri­tually infe­rior and the­re­fore sus­pect, then the poten­tial for reli­gious vio­lence inhe­red in reli­gion, and there was no esca­ping it.

I con­ti­nue to believe that, I sup­pose, which is why I tend not to write about reli­gious vio­lence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be use­ful. Still, this story, which has also been repor­ted on Yahoo! News and other news out­lets – the New York Times puts the death toll at 500 – brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nige­ria, and she has tal­ked often about the ten­sion bet­ween Mus­lims and Chris­tians in her country. Indeed, this mas­sacre is said to have been reta­lia­tion for a simi­lar slaugh­ter of Mus­lims per­pe­tra­ted by Chris­tians some time ago, and I can even ima­gine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Chris­tians had she been in the country and the cir­cums­tan­ces been “right.” I feel, in other words, a per­so­nal con­nec­tion to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had par­ti­ci­pa­ted in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mis­trust, and hatred of the Mus­lims in Nige­ria ran until after our friendship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Nige­rian Mus­lims, not about peo­ple who follow Islam in gene­ral, and I believe her, and she tells sto­ries about her own expe­rien­ces in Nige­ria and the expe­rien­ces of the peo­ple she knows to jus­tify her­self. The fact that she makes this dis­tinc­tion, of course, sug­gests that the issues at stake are not really reli­gious, but the fact that they are expres­sed reli­giously – in terms of spi­ri­tua­lity and mora­lity and the one true path to God – makes it hard, even just bet­ween the two of us, to get at what those sta­kes really are; and then I think about the way our inva­sion of Iraq and ous­ting of Sad­dam Hus­sein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats – check out this NPR inter­view with Debo­rah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sun­nis: Power, Exile, and Uphea­val in the Middle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian strug­gle over the sta­tus of Jeru­sa­lem, which is so often pla­yed out in reli­gious terms. And when I think about how may more exam­ples I could list, I can­not help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, poli­ti­cal; maybe the god or gods all these peo­ple fight over is just a way of not having to take res­pon­si­bi­lity for their own poli­tics, their own desire for power, their own ina­bi­lity to share, their own fear of everything that makes them vul­ne­ra­ble; maybe the need to make your reli­gion the only true one is nothing more than fear and cowar­dice, and we all know how thin the line is bet­ween the coward who cowers and the coward who beco­mes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an under­gra­duate in fact, that I have known per­so­nally someone who could place her or him­self so easily, so firmly, so abso­lu­tely, on one side of this kind of divide and so tho­roughly for­get that the other side is also inha­bi­ted by peo­ple; and yet even as I write that, it would be disho­nest of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly reli­gious terms, in a way that denied the huma­nity of the other side.

That we all have this capa­city within us is by now a cliché, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in someone who has become your friend? Because if you can­not accept it – which is not the same thing as appro­ving of it, or allo­wing it to go uncha­llen­ged – then there can no lon­ger be a real friendship. This is the ques­tion that I am confronting.

Evan­ge­li­cal Chris­tians Are Shoc­ked – Shoc­ked, I Tell You! – To Find Out Their Anti-Gay Rhe­to­ric Might Encou­rage Uganda’s Push To Make Homo­se­xua­lity A Capi­tal Offense

January 4th, 2010 § 1

Jef­frey Gett­le­man, in this New York Times article, wri­tes about how three Evan­ge­li­cal Chris­tians from the Uni­ted Sta­tes–Scott Lively (click here to read quo­tes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brun­didge and Exo­dus Inter­na­tio­nal board mem­ber Don Sch­mie­rer – are now trying to dis­tance them­sel­ves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “how to make gay peo­ple straight, how gay men often sodo­mi­zed tee­nage boys and how ‘the gay move­ment is an evil ins­ti­tu­tion’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a cul­ture of sexual pro­mis­cuity.’ The rea­son for their back­pe­da­ling is that the event con­tri­bu­ted to the cli­mate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homo­se­xua­lity a capi­tal crime. In a rhe­to­ri­cal move that is remar­kably simi­lar to the ways in which the reli­gious right tries to dis­tance itself from peo­ple who mur­der doc­tors that per­form abor­tions, each of these men or their orga­ni­za­tions has issued sta­te­ments about how their mes­sage is one of love and com­pas­sion, not hatred and vio­lence. Read the article and follow some of the links. Their hypoc­risy speaks for itself.

I do have to share, though, my favo­rite quote from Gettleman’s article. Refe­rring to the Ugan­dan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Sch­mie­rer says, “That’s horri­ble, abso­lu­tely horri­ble. Some of the nicest peo­ple I have ever met are gay peo­ple.” (Makes me won­der if any of them are Black.)

“The Myths of Libe­ral Zio­nism,” by Yitzhak Laor — I want to read this book

January 1st, 2010 § 1

Wri­ting in the January issue of Harper’s Maga­zine, Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:

It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is just […] a tex­tual pro­blem. If so, then the muddle of mea­ning that must be analy­zed lies in par­sing not Pales­ti­nian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epithets have been dis­se­ve­red can some sort of dia­lo­gue begin, bet­ween two poli­ti­cal enti­ties and not bet­ween two (or three) reli­gions or Peo­ples. Until then, “Israel” will con­ti­nue to be vili­fied as a word that means something other than what it should, while all cri­tics of Israel will be accu­sed of anti-Semitism.

It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen put­ting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of thin­king, to asking these kinds of ques­tions, whether I ulti­ma­tely agree with the book or not, is a book worth rea­ding. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.

Trans­la­ting Clas­si­cal Per­sian Poetry: Why Retrans­late Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama?”

December 30th, 2009 § 0

Farid Al-Din Attar is one of the most impor­tant wri­ters in the Per­sian canon. Not only is he a major poet in his own right, but his work offers cru­cial insight into Sufi thought and expe­rience, while pre­fi­gu­ring other impor­tant poets like Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. As well, once trans­la­tions of clas­si­cal Per­sian lite­ra­ture began to appear in English in the 18th and 19th cen­tu­ries, Attar’s work — along with, among others, that of the three poets I just men­tio­ned — pla­yed an impor­tant role both in hel­ping the English-speaking world of the time unders­tand Per­sian and Isla­mic cul­ture and in brin­ging into English lite­ra­ture an influence felt by the likes of Matthew Arnold and Lord Byron, and that con­tem­po­rary wri­ters like Robert Bly con­ti­nue to find impor­tant. It is both iro­nic and a shame, the­re­fore, that only one of Attar’s major works, Man­teq al-Tayr, exists in a con­tem­po­rary trans­la­tion for a gene­ral English-language rea­dership, The Con­fe­rence of the Birds, published in 1984 by Afkham Dar­bandi and Dick Davis. Rea­da­ble, enjo­ya­ble and poe­ti­cally power­ful, The Con­fe­rence of the Birds is the kind of trans­la­tion we deserve of a lite­ra­ture that has influen­ced ours in such sig­ni­fi­cant ways. Unfor­tu­na­tely, wha­te­ver its merits on scho­larly grounds, the same can­not be said — at least not with the same enthu­siasm — for John Andrew Boyle’s out-of-print trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama, The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God, published by the Uni­ver­sity of Manches­ter Press in 1976.

In an essay called “Repre­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East,” Chris­topher Shac­kle cri­ti­ci­zes Mar­ga­ret Smith’s 1932 trans­la­tion of Man­teq al-Tayr for being writ­ten “in a prose whose archaisms, inc­lu­ding bibli­cal ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s stu­diously clear style with a patina of reve­rence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suf­fers from the same weak­ness. Here, for exam­ple, is his ren­de­ring of the pas­sage in “The Tale of Mar­juma” where the woman bera­tes her brother-in-law for trying to have his way with her:

She said to him: “Art thou not asha­med before God? Dost thou thus show res­pect to thy brother?
Is this thy reli­gion and thy pro­bity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wic­ked thought.”

That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must satisfy me at once,
Other­wise I will cease to con­cern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straigh­ta­way now I shall cast thee to des­truc­tion, I shall cast thee into a fear­ful plight.” (32)

As well, Boyle too often relies on a lite­ral­ness that ends up being unin­ten­tio­nally comic and/or almost impos­si­ble to com­prehend. The first line of the final sec­tion of the “Exor­dium,” in which Attar prai­ses and medi­ta­tes upon the great­ness of God — “Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27) — is an exam­ple of the for­mer. In “The Tale of Mar­juma,” to give an exam­ple of the lat­ter, when the female pro­ta­go­nist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s ren­de­ring of that scene:

When the woman lear­ned of these wic­ked men’s fee­lings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She ope­ned her mouth [and said]: “O Kno­wer of Sec­rets, pre­serve me from the evil of these wic­ked men.” (38)

The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly rela­tes to the idea in Per­sian cul­ture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emo­tion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of sen­ses, is far from clear. By way of com­pa­ri­son, here is my ver­sion of those lines:

When she lear­ned
what the men inten­ded, she tur­ned
and saw in the sea surroun­ding her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
pra­yed: “Pro­tect me, Kno­wer of Sec­rets!
Save me from this wickedness.”

I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no bet­ter solu­tion to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my trans­la­tion will endure is a ques­tion that only time and rea­ders will ans­wer, but the value of brin­ging Ilahi-Nama into 21st cen­tury Ame­ri­can English poetry is not only, and not even pri­ma­rily, that it might be suc­cess­ful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sus­tai­ned enga­ge­ment trans­la­tion is — both in the wri­ting and the rea­ding — with another culture.

On the one hand, the value of such enga­ge­ment is, or ought to be, self-evident, requi­ring no further jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. On the other hand, howe­ver, given the current natio­nal and inter­na­tio­nal poli­ti­cal moment, it is, or ought to be, impos­si­ble to talk about trans­la­ting Per­sian lite­ra­ture without also tal­king about both the state of rela­tions bet­ween Iran and the Uni­ted Sta­tes and the poli­ti­cal unrest that has focu­sed world atten­tion on Iran since the con­tes­ted pre­si­den­tial elec­tions there in June 2009. Each of those dyna­mics demands that the peo­ple of the Uni­ted Sta­tes learn as much about the Ira­nian peo­ple, their cul­ture and their his­tory, as we pos­sibly can, espe­cially since our collec­tive igno­rance about Iran has been pro­found since diplo­ma­tic rela­tions bet­ween our two coun­tries ended after the Isla­mic Revo­lu­tion in 1979 – 80. Boyle’s trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which peo­ple are likely to go for that kind of lear­ning, most imme­dia­tely because it is out of print, but also because its archaic dic­tion and bibli­cal style is more likely than not to alie­nate them.

I am neither naïve nor arro­gant enough to assume that my trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran rela­tions or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, howe­ver, that each trans­la­ted book made avai­la­ble to a rea­ding public inc­rea­ses the like­lihood of such change taking place. At the very least because it offers a radi­cally dif­fe­rent view of Islam from the ver­sion prac­ti­ced and pro­mul­ga­ted by the current Ira­nian govern­ment and can the­re­fore help to com­bat the anti-Muslim ste­reoty­pes currently in fashion, but even more sig­ni­fi­cantly because it is a great work of lite­ra­ture writ­ten by one of the world’s grea­test poets, whom we in the Uni­ted Sta­tes deserve to know bet­ter than we do, a new lite­rary trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books making such change possible.

Sour­ces

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Per­sian Heri­tage Series, Vol. 29 Manches­ter: Manches­ter Uni­ver­sity Press, 1976.

Shac­kle, Chris­topher. “Repre­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East: Trans­la­tions of the Man­tiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spi­ri­tual Flight. Eds. Leo­nard Lewi­sohn, and Chris­topher Shac­kle. Lon­don: I. B. Tau­ris, 2006. 165 – 93.

Trans­la­ting Clas­si­cal Per­sian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama”

December 28th, 2009 § 1

One of eight major works that can reliably be asc­ri­bed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­ti­mes, Divine Book) has, accor­ding to Encyc­lo­pe­dia Ira­nica, been trans­la­ted once into English, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal narra­ti­ves, each one dea­ling with a dif­fe­rent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­rience. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asce­ti­cism, which Sufis unders­tand to mean a dis­ci­pli­ned stance of detach­ment and indif­fe­rence towards one’s desi­res so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fe­ren­tia­tes Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pa­red, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fe­rence of the Birds), his best known work in English. The two poems are simi­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enligh­ten­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fra­ming narra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­ti­que of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true unders­tan­ding. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about lear­ning to mas­ter oneself.

The fra­ming narra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (fae­ries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desi­res Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the sec­rets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son covets the ring Solo­mon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his ans­wer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how sha­llow and mate­ria­lis­tic the son is for wan­ting what he wants and, second, how the son should unders­tand his desire so he can use it on the path to enligh­ten­ment. None of the sons, howe­ver, accept their father’s les­sons at face value, arguing that he has misun­ders­tood their desi­res and that the les­sons he wants them to learn, the­re­fore, are mis­gui­ded. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and righ­teous woman who, after her hus­band lea­ves on pil­gri­mage to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at nothing to have her — the son accu­ses his father of wan­ting to eli­mi­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explai­ning that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­tra­tes how sex, pro­perly com­prehen­ded and ente­red into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achie­ves apotheo­sis,
sex gives birth to a love without limits;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spi­ri­tual love emer­ges; and when
spi­ri­tual love can grow no further, your soul
will vanish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the narra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depra­ved and debauched men get their comeup­pance than one about the spi­ri­tual nature of sexua­lity, the son’s mis­rea­ding of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a rea­ding, howe­ver, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desi­res without a strug­gle. They are, in other words, neither evil nor merely sla­ves to their desi­res; they are human and fla­wed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and willing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has punished them with a paraly­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mea­ning — they can be hea­led only by con­fes­sing to the woman everything they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «

Rea­ding Joshua Kryah’s Glean

September 23rd, 2009 § 0

“My faith lies elsewhere.” When I finished rea­ding Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Night­boat Books, 2007)1 and star­ted thin­king about what I would write in my review of the book, that is the sen­tence that came to me, almost as if it had been wai­ting — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the sur­face of my cons­cious­ness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in Kryah’s book:

Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given your­self over?

Who dis­solve
your body like a host on their tongue?

What stop­ping place will be pro­vi­ded, what
rest?

Where am I in this emer­gence—
who comes?

The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith pla­ces on the other side of the absence that is all, accor­ding to the monotheism I was taught gro­wing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two ques­tions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into them­sel­ves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, the­re­fore, in itself perhaps the dee­pest and most fun­da­men­tal test of faith — who will those peo­ple be? At the same time, the spea­ker of the poem is clear that something is emer­ging — something which, based on the first two ques­tions, we can assume the spea­ker belie­ves to be God. Then, out of that cla­rity another ques­tion emer­ges. What is the speaker’s posi­tion in the emer­gence, not in rela­tion to it, as if he were stan­ding outside of it, watching what was hap­pe­ning, wai­ting to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the spea­ker pla­ces him­self within this emer­gence, who is emer­ging is no lon­ger clear. The pos­si­bi­lity exists in the lan­guage that it is the spea­ker who is emer­ging, that he is watching him­self become, that he has dis­co­ve­red his god within him­self, that he has come to accept that he is him­self, somehow, within his god.

Ques­tions of faith have been impor­tant to me since I was a tee­na­ger and I belie­ved my future lay in the rab­bi­nate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have deman­ded of me, howe­ver, I did not set aside the strug­gle to come to terms with the final, indif­fe­rent and abso­lute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a mea­sure of Kryah’s suc­cess that, des­pite the fact my faith lies somewhere very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spi­ri­tua­lity — the poems in Glean nonethe­less con­fron­ted me with the ques­tion of just where, pre­ci­sely, my spi­ri­tua­lity does lie. In large mea­sure, the poems accom­plish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for exam­ple, are the first few lines of “My Easter:”

Breath­bloom, the resu­rrec­tion lily
spent on its stem,

the pale throat thrown back
announcing — what?

Behold, all at once,
the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal relea­sed, their beauty un–
mis­ta­kably and

already gone.

And here is “O Hie­roglyph (for­got­ten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:

As if the wet vowel might speak.

As if, plun­de­red,
it might give up its blank stare, and
sud­denly, shud­der in my mouth.

We exchange a lan­guage
dumb as flesh, pres­sed into and brui­sed
beyond recog­ni­tion, its only res­ponse the black eye’s dull circle of speech.

Blue, blue-brown
each color off­set by the surroun­ding skin,
the cal­cite thought of your retur­ning again.

I can­not mus­ter
what I should have lost, and in the wish gai­ned
more stead­fast: your curio, what swings from a loc­ket upon my chest,

a mes­sage that now only speaks
with its fist.

The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, simply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line reca­lled for me Holy Son­net #14, “Bat­ter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself thin­king of Donne’s Holy Son­nets often while rea­ding Glean, so much so that I read through the sam­pling of them in the edi­tion of the Nor­ton Antho­logy that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are roo­ted in the body, though very dif­fe­rently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metapho­ri­zes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the phy­si­cal world in gene­ral, to give pre­sence to the absence in the face of which he ques­tions, asserts and main­tains his faith, Donne posi­tions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose pre­sence in the world the poems them­sel­ves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Son­nets while rea­ding Glean because, des­pite the fact that Kryah’s poems are writ­ten in a very free verse — the sen­tence frag­ment and the uncon­ven­tio­nal spa­cing of the poems see­med to me just about the only two for­mal devi­ces used con­sis­tently throughout the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of lan­guage as something phy­si­cal, something to be felt, held in the mouth, savo­red and then released.

In all honesty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not something I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and com­mit­ment, the honesty and cou­rage that went into wri­ting it. It is the kind of book I think ever­yone should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will trea­sure for the rest of their lives.

  1. This review was ori­gi­nally pos­ted on a lite­rary blog that no lon­ger exists called The Great Ame­ri­can Pinup. My unders­tan­ding is that the blog was hac­ked and that attempts by the peo­ple who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuc­cess­ful. I am repos­ting the review here because I think the books are impor­tant enough that the review should con­ti­nue to be avai­la­ble.

In Iran, One Young Man’s Pro­test on Inter­na­tio­nal Women’s Day: Death to the Patriarchy

April 1st, 2009 § 2

On March 8th, which was Inter­na­tio­nal Women’s Day, the young man in the two pic­tu­res below could be seen wal­king through the streets of Teh­ran. His tee shirt reads – and excuse my perhaps awk­ward trans­li­te­ra­tion of the Per­sian–Marg bar Mard­sa­lari, which my wife trans­la­tes as “Death to Patriarchy.” That he is wea­ring a hajeb – or, in Per­sian, roo­sari – speaks for itself. As I unders­tand it, he was arres­ted almost imme­dia­tely after the pic­tu­res were taken. I have not been able to find out anything about what has hap­pe­ned to him s

Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Per­sonhood as Metapho­ri­cal Thin­king (Repost)

March 6th, 2009 § 2

Author\‘s Note: This post at Femi­niste – about the Catho­lic Church\‘s excom­mu­ni­ca­tion of the mother of a nine-year-old girl who became preg­nant with twins, appa­rently after having been raped by her step-father, and the doc­tors who per­for­med the abor­tion that ended the girl\‘s preg­nancy – has been roi­ling me since I read it. It did, though, put me in mind of a post of my own, \“Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Per­sonhood as Metapho­ri­cal Thin­king,\” that seems rele­vant to me in thin­king about the reli­gious (impli­cit and expli­cit) oppo­si­tion to lega­li­zed abor­tion. I want to say up front something that I also say very late in the post, i.e. that I am aware that there are pro­gres­sive Catho­lics wor­king very hard and with real inte­grity against the sexism and misogyny in the Church, and my pur­pose in this piece is not to trash Catho­lics or Catho­li­cism. Rather, I am trying to tease out one strand of thin­king that seems to me quite pre­sent in much anti-abortion thin­king and acti­vism, as it rela­tes to Chris­tia­nity. I pos­ted this ori­gi­nally in 2006 and so some of the legis­la­tive news that it refers to is dated. I have not edi­ted the piece much, howe­ver – except to correct a con­fu­sion in the ori­gi­nal bet­ween the imma­cu­late con­cep­tion and the vir­gin birth (and I hope I got it right this time) – because, while the intro­duc­tion is long, I think it is still impor­tant to work through before get­ting to my main argument.

I have wan­ted to write about this for a while, now, ever since I read through the thread called (Very) Basic Eco­no­mics and Abor­tion over at Alas. Since then, though, a num­ber of things have hap­pe­ned: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case con­cer­ning so-called \“partial-birth abor­tions,\” South Dakota has pas­sed the most res­tric­tive law in the country against abor­tion, Utah has a pro­po­sed law that would eli­mi­nate incest excep­tions in its paren­tal noti­fi­ca­tion law, and I have been in another con­ver­sa­tion, What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice, on Alas, the ini­tial post of which con­cer­ned a com­mon stra­tegy used by peo­ple who are anti-choice to try to silence those of us who are pro-choice: what would have hap­pe­ned if your mother had cho­sen to have an abor­tion ins­tead of giving birth to you?

At one point the thread became a con­ver­sa­tion about whether the imma­cu­late con­cep­tion was an ins­tance of divine rape or not (start rea­ding here). This was rele­vant because it went to the ques­tion of what it means for women to have real choice in terms of preg­nancy and child­birth — which also means in terms of when and whether and under what con­di­tions to have sex — and, though I don\‘t remem­ber that this point was brought out expli­citly, to the ques­tion of what we model our unders­tan­ding of women\‘s repro­duc­tive choice on. (I have ita­li­ci­zed this because it will become impor­tant later on, towards the end of what I want to say.) What I want to do here is to try to tie all these various things together under the title I have given this post because I think it goes to the heart of unders­tan­ding a rarely arti­cu­la­ted aspect of what is at stake in the anti-choice posi­tion, whether it is arti­cu­la­ted in expli­citly reli­gious terms or not, and because, under the gene­ral stra­tegy of \“know thine enemy,\” I think this is an impor­tant unders­tan­ding to reach. It\‘s going to take a while, and I\‘m going to have to make a num­ber of leaps, to get where I want to go in this, so I hope you will bear with me.

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Talk about a goyishe kop!

March 2nd, 2009 § 0

I saw this on Femi­niste:

CRESAPTOWN, Md. (AP) — You’ve heard of kosher salt? Now there’s a Chris­tian variety.

Reti­red bar­ber Joe God­lewski says that when tele­vi­sion chefs recom­men­ded kosher salt in reci­pes, he won­de­red, “What the heck’s the mat­ter with Chris­tian salt?”

By next week, his tra­de­mar­ked Bles­sed Chris­tians Salt will be avai­la­ble from sea­so­nings manu­fac­tu­rer Ingre­dients Cor­po­ra­tion of Ame­rica. It’s sea salt that’s been bles­sed by an Epis­co­pal priest.

The company’s pre­si­dent hopes to mar­ket the salt through Chris­tian bookstores.

Go here to read the rest.

Cross-posted on Alas.

What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) anti­se­mi­tism and Israel — 4

January 31st, 2009 § 45

To me, the point was obvious. Basing the Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own rea­ding of the Hebrew Bible was asking the overwhel­mingly non-Jewish world to accept as objec­tive and incon­tro­ver­ti­ble the truth that Judaism clai­med as its own, never mind the impli­ca­tion that the disen­franchi­se­ment of the Pales­ti­nians was somehow the will of the monotheis­tic god. To assert that line of rea­so­ning as an argu­ment for Israel’s right to exist, I sug­ges­ted, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a belie­ving Jew, it was a cor­ners­tone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the collea­gues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My hus­band,” she said, “would say you were an anti­se­mi­tic Jew.”

I sta­red at my collea­gues across a sud­den gap of estran­ge­ment I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I unders­tood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revea­led myself as a Jew who accep­ted an anti­se­mi­tic defi­ni­tion of Jewish­ness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teachers always used it to explain the anti­se­mi­tism of non-Jews who were cri­ti­cal of Israel: To sug­gest that there might be a pers­pec­tive from which Israel’s exis­tence as a Jewish state was not self-evidently valid, my reb­bes would say, in many dif­fe­rent ways, over and over again, was to sug­gest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a peo­ple ought not even to be.

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