Monthly Archives: June 2018

Daddy: Reflections of Father-Daughter Relationships Edited by Dr. K E Garland

24 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Recommended Reading, United States

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Book Cover - Daddy Reflections of Father-Daughter Relationships Edited by Dr K E Garland

 

So much noise scrambling my thoughts as I read Daddy: Reflections of Father-Daughter Relationships edited by Dr. K E Garland. On arrival at our southern border with Mexico, refugee children – referred to as illegal migrants – are separated from their parents. A two-year-old girl screams while a U.S. Border Patrol agent questions her mother. Where is her father, I wonder?

Back to my reading of Daddy.

In her account, “Abandoned at Breakfast,” BB – a writer, wife, and mother whose parents had divorced when she was a kid – recalls her emptiness when her father didn’t show up for her baby shower.

“Behind the makeup and flashing cameras, I was still the little girl who longed for her father’s embrace,” BB recalls. “I wanted [my father] to accept me and tell me that I was beautiful, even fifty pounds heavier.” Continue reading →

Happy National Caribbean American Heritage Month

10 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Immigrants

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Celebrate National Caribbean American Heritage Month

 

June is National Caribbean American Heritage Month – a time for celebrating the legacy of Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in American history and culture. Given the silence in the mainstream media, no one seems to care.

In her June 7th article, “It’s a Month to Celebrate Caribbean Immigrants but Who Really Cares?” Felicia J. Persaud – a New York-based, Guyana-born journalist and media entrepreneur – observes that the silence on NCAHM goes beyond media outlets. Not a word, she says, from the many Caribbean-American federal and state officials from across the country. Not even from celebrities like Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Jason Derulo, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Shaggy, and others. Persaud’s list goes on.

I understand Persaud’s concern that “if as Caribbean immigrants we show we don’t care about our own month, then no one else will.” Yet, I can appreciate the silence. We are not living in normal times, especially for immigrants from what our President denigrates as “shithole” countries. US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are on the prowl for undocumented immigrants deemed animals, drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and terrorists. When one is targeted for verbal and physical abuse, incarceration, and deportation, one doesn’t go about waving a flag or twerking in a celebratory street carnival.

Our white American brothers and sisters in towns and cities devastated by the flight of American manufacturers are suffering. While the hopeless are killing themselves with opiate use, others are voicing their anger. They know not that we are all victims of a capitalist system that cannibalizes human and non-human life. A system that discards the useless and worthless. They know not how the free flow of capital and production sweeps across our once secure lives, leaving us struggling for footing and air.

In a recent interview with Karl Marlin of Truthout, Henry A. Giroux, an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic, notes:

When selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression, exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective, their understanding of how power works and the ways in which the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices.

As a Caribbean immigrant and writer in America, I plod forward in building bridges, however narrow or rickety. We all share the same humanity. As a fellow blogger and poet, Miriam Ivarsam, expresses so eloquently in her poem “Per Universum,”

Through universe we flow
and It through us.
Ever increasing harmony.

Happy NCAHM to my fellow Caribbean immigrants and Caribbean-Americans across this land that we love and call home!

“american child” – Poem by normal

03 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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Four-year-old American child learns to us a machine gun

Four-year-old American child – in the age of the National Rifle Association – learns to use a machine gun
Photo Credit: ABC News Video (January 2014)

 

My Poetry Corner June 2018 features an excerpt from the poem “american child” by normal. Raised in Passaic, New Jersey, normal is a poet and registered nurse now retired and living in Saugerties, New York.

As a young poet in the early 1960s, he began reading his work at the Rafio Café in Greenwich Village, frequented by Beat poets and writers. Among the poets who influenced normal’s sensibilities is the American poet, e.e. cummings (1894-1962), whose use of low-case letters and minimal punctuation he emulates.

The following excerpts come from normal’s chapbooks, Blood on the Floor (1999) and American Child (2001).

His poem “blood on the floor” brings to mind America’s powerlessness to end mass shootings, stealing the future of our children.

don’t slip
there is blood on the floor.

blood of apathy
blood of the dispassionate
the ignoring
blood of those numbed by dumb
life
blood of those who pretend it
never happens / the cheerfully
humbled who go about it all
smiling.

Meanwhile, the raindrops are loaded / with the eyes of children.

The featured poem, “american child,” portrays Americans in all our glory and shame. Penned on Labor Day 2000, the poem begins with the plight of the American worker.

i am the child of america
the sierra madres are bleeding
i am america
the mad & the magnate marry
the factory wolf howls
i am america
the mantra rumbles with the kinds & the cripples.

Trappings of American life ring through the verses: dinty moore stew, soup kitchens, porno talkshows, paparazzi, honkytonk queen, sams club, home depot, tickertape parade, flophouse, and more.

Four stanzas speak of “death to” individuals, special groups, historical events, and man-made systems. Among the targets are lewis & clark, manifest destiny, trail of tears & of schemes, and the american dream. The poet also boots the capitalist, communist, anarchist, antichrist, and atheist. (I would like to add racist and misogynist.)

Apart from lewis & clark, normal mentions several other personalities that make up the American character: joe dimaggio, thomas jefferson, geronimo, benedict arnold, einstein, and chief joseph. (No shout out to Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King?)   

In the following stanza, the poet captures the schizoid character of the American child and his impact on the world:

i am beauty
i am invention
i am wonder
i am the united fruit company
i am promontory point pikes peak & mai lie
i am the glory
i am the savior
i am the black tide of the acid sky

(mai lie instead of My Lai reframes the massacre in Vietnam.)

[…]

fool / genius // the kind of heaven & hell // the arithmetic eyes of the bureaucrat robot

Yet, for all his flaws, the American child is a fighter and survivor in a crazy world, as normal concludes in his final verses.

i am the feral infant dancing on the freakstage / of the final sunset // i am the child of america.

Much has changed over the past seventeen plus years since normal’s portrayal of the American child. How could he have foreseen Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump? I live in hope that an American child – rising from a bloody school floor; less feral and more inclusive – has now embarked on the path to the presidency.

To read the excerpt from the featured poem and learn more about the work of normal, go to my Poetry Corner June 2018.