Staceyann Chin

The Aborigines...

... are resting tight upon my chest these last few days.

Their absence from the cityscape of Sydney and, I have been told, Melbourne too, speaks volumes of the silence they endure in Australia. As I look toward my second visit- I am holding all the parts of me accountable for writing them into my experience.

My fingers tremble at the impossibility- the irrelevance of such foreign fingers attempting to denote the sound of something not inate.

My own people, the scattered ruins of the searing brush with poverty and marginalisation, remain faceless under the polished glimmer of tourism in Jamaica.

The parallel is apparent in the Native American face peering round corners of casinos and alcohol. In the great abandon of that reality, no mention is made of Joy Harjo's work or Sherman Alexi's contention- in the large jingle of coins and slot machines, everyone is all a-feathers and healing- the brochures do not speak of the drunkeness, the defeat in the eyes of the poor who live in the Townships in Soweto- or just outside of Rosebank in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I suspect I already know the expression on the faces of children in New Dheli, or Calcutta, or fucking Rwandha.

I am made powerless by my own inaction.

What are we doing here in this new century?

all these chips and bombs and softer toilette paper and creamier brie.

what of the faces?

the hearts. Unfolding into broken
bloody letters that never get sent to the lovers?

what are we doing as the century settles in it's turning
what am I doing in this apartment with the windows

and the artificial heat
warmer than it is safe for Muslim men to fly from Qatar
to Khartoum

from Los Angeles to Minneapolis
An Arab woman

who writes more beautifully than I could wish to
gently explains why she does not argue with the immigration officer in London
or Paris
or New York City

especially in New York City
and my dragons rage for her

for me
and the number of times

people assume I know where to get good weed

or that being lesbian means I was raped
or that I was not
or that my father never loved me

or that my love does not expand to encompass
the large jeweled grins of dark faced men
in Ghana

or the silly eighteen year old boy who insists that dinner over candles
would be perfect for the beginning
of how he wants to love me

All of them
Black men in Norway

Burnt sugar smiles of men in Brixton
they are my brothers and my love for them is wider than the Sargasso

and I speak for them
do not assume that Black men

cracks a divide in my politics
My brother is a black man in Austria

he travels from Montego Bay to Rome to Berlin
and I make bargains for his safety

burn sand and mark his image with walls around it

I paint in cracks so that love may find it's way to him

Do not assume me
Black or female
or lesbian
or Asian
or immigrant

if any of it means I am not the exhausted heel of an Aboriginee
the broken shoulder of a Muslim mother in Dakkar
the slip disc of an Arawak in 1492

assume me an arm of a people
displaced

somewhere Venus is searching for me
and I intend to be found

these rants have me believing
and not believing

these rants are just words

and the voice in sometimes without legs
but we run anyway

run nigger run
the new nigger ain't nuttin but a dollar removed from the wallet of some fool
working long hours

for better credit
give me back my name
and take back these bloody numbers

there is flesh here
and tendons pulling at the forced motion of palms
flat against chests

mimic me the touch of a lover and I might fall for your fury
but if you kiss me without my permission

it is still rape?

These words are for the babies
and the grandmothers
and the men who have buried sons

this is that lamentation-

write your own rant- read it to someone-
in poetry,
Staceyann

Posted by staceyann at January 28, 2004 10:24 AM