i was insulted today

while having a difficult discussion at work.

boy oh boy. i am ready to leave.

this is important

and i am, again, asking you to pray if that's a practice you keep.

this week has been a bit catastrophic, and at press time both my mother and my roommate are in the hospital. my mother's shattered knee is nothing to sneeze at, and i appreciate any prayers you will offer up for her expedited recovery, but i'm looking more for prayer for my roommate.

she's on a respirator. again. and has been in the hospital since tuesday after having an allergic reaction to a pear. i'm concerned about her. there are tears in my eyes as i type this.

a few words of blessing would be sufficient. her name's melissa, if you think that will help your god locate her spirit.

thanks. it's hot out there, no?

i was going to write a post about tortilla chips

but when i called my mom to tell her how good my homemade tortilla chips are, she told me that she just got a call telling her that my 13 year old cousin william passed away this morning. he'd been struggling with leukemia for about a year.

somehow my formerly delicious chips have lost their flavor.

goodbye william. i miss you.

r.i.p. aime cesaire

(1913-2008)

you forever changed the tempest for me, and for that i am thankful.

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That's the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well. (162)

aunt deedee

these are the only words that came to me tonight as i sat at my great-aunt's wake. i don't really know what else to say.


st. john's was
full
tonight
my aunt deedee is gone.

every pew packed.

lord i care not for riches
neither silver nor gold
i would make sure of heaven
i would enter the fold

it's hard not to believe in heaven
when you've lost
when those you cherish are no more

speaking of amazing women
and men
means speaking of deedee and george
of
virgie and albert
it means speaking of my family
and the beauty we hold

my heart is heavy tonight
like it has been before
this is one of the times
i would (almost) enter the fold

"ethnic dress for success tips"

completely idiotic thoughts from my (least) favorite "diversity" website, diversity inc.

for this month's electronic issue, yoji cole, diversity inc's token black guy (this is the site, by the way, that features a "ask the white guy" column), goes to town on giving some suggestions to ethnic women in the workplace on toning down (or up, if they're asian) their looks. some choice "this is how you've been seen "historically" and the only way to get away from that is to assimilate" stereotypes:

"For example, many Latinas prefer bright colors, low-cut tops and short skirts..."

really, now? and do many professional Latinas (who, culturally of course, prefer skimpy clothing) wear those clothes to the office?! because when i think of low-cut tops and short skirts in the workplace i think of samantha on sex and the city or ally mcbeal. last time i checked, they were both white.

"Black women tend to wear big earrings, she notes."

i'm sorry, but WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?! what. the. fuck. i tried to laugh at this shit, but i started to get tears in my eyes. if this is what corporate america thinks "we" need, i need to move to a different fucking universe.

the rest of the article is available here to subscribers.

and if that isn't enough, check out diversity inc's article on "7 things not to say to your LGBT coworkers." this shit is so laughable, i'm surprised they don't list tina fey as a fucking source.

argh.

ay yi yi

this article on the hutto family detention center and others like it hurts my heart. why do we jail people who have committed no crime other than seeking safety?

grrrr. beginning of article after the jump, complete text found here.

The Lost Children
What do tougher detention policies mean for illegal immigrant families?
by Margaret Talbot March 3, 2008

In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things like “If you aren’t divorcing him, then you are supporting him, and we will therefore arrest you and torture you.” That October, Masomeh also escaped from Iran and joined Majid in Toronto, where they lived for ten years. Majid worked in a pizza place, Masomeh in a coffee shop. She dressed and acted the way she liked—she is blond and pretty and partial to bright clothes and makeup, which she could never wear in public in Iran—and for a long time the Yourdkhanis felt they were safe from politics and the past. Their son, Kevin, was born in Toronto, in 1997, a Canadian citizen. He grew into a happy, affectionate kid, tall and sturdy with a shock of dark hair. He liked math and social studies, developed asthma but dealt with it, and shared with his mom a taste for goofy comedies, such as the “Mr. Bean” movies. In December, 2005, however, the Yourdkhanis learned that the Canadian government had denied their application for political asylum, and Majid, Masomeh, and Kevin were deported to Iran.

Upon their return, the Yourdkhanis say, Masomeh was imprisoned for a month, and Majid for six, and during that time he was beaten and tortured. After Majid was released, the family paid a smuggler twenty thousand dollars to procure false documents and arrange a series of flights that would return them to Canada.

Then, on the last leg of the journey, the family ran into someone else’s bad luck. On February 4, 2007, during a flight from Georgetown, Guyana, to Toronto, a passenger had a heart attack and died, and the plane was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico. American immigration officials there ascertained that the Yourdkhanis’ travel documents were fake. The Yourdkhanis begged to be allowed to continue on to Canada, but they were told that if they wanted asylum they would have to apply for it in the United States. They did so, and, five days later, became part of one of the more peculiar, and contested, recent experiments in American immigration policy. They were locked inside a former medium-security prison in a desolate patch of rural Texas: the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

Hutto is one of two immigrant-detention facilities in America that house families—the other is in Berks County, Pennsylvania—and is the only one owned and run by a private prison company. The detention of immigrants is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in this country, and, with the support of the Bush Administration, it is becoming a lucrative business. At the end of 2006, some fourteen thousand people were in government custody for immigration-law violations, in a patchwork of detention arrangements, including space rented out by hundreds of local and state jails, and seven freestanding facilities run by private contractors. This number was up by seventy-nine per cent from the previous year, an increase that can be attributed, in large part, to the actions of Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. In 2005, Chertoff announced the end of “catch-and-release”—the long-standing practice of allowing immigrants caught without legal documents to remain free inside the country while they waited for an appearance in court. Since these illegal immigrants weren’t monitored in any way, the rate of no-shows was predictably high, and the practice inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment.

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

Private companies began making inroads into the detention business in the nineteen-eighties, when the idea was in vogue that almost any private operation was inherently more efficient than a government one. The largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, or C.C.A., was founded in 1983. But poor management and a series of well-publicized troubles—including riots at and escapes from prisons run by C.C.A.—dampened the initial excitement. In the nineties, C.C.A.’s bid to take over the entire prison system of Tennessee, where the company is based, failed; state legislators had grown skeptical. By the end of 2000, C.C.A.’s stock had hit an all-time low. When immigration detention started its precipitate climb following 9/11, private prison companies eagerly offered their empty beds, and the industry was revitalized.

One complication was that hundreds of children were among the immigrant detainees. Typically, kids had been sent to shelters, which allowed them to attend school, while parents were held at closed facilities. Nobody thought that it was good policy to separate parents from children—not immigration officials, not immigrant advocates, not Congress. In 2005, a report by the House Appropriations Committee expressed concern about “reports that children apprehended by D.H.S.”—the Department of Homeland Security—“even as young as nursing infants, are being separated from their parents and placed in shelters.” The committee also declared that children should not be placed in government custody unless their welfare was in question, and added that the Department of Homeland Security should “release families or use alternatives to detention” whenever possible. The report recommended a new alternative to detention known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program—which allows people awaiting disposition of their immigration cases to be released into the community, provided that they are closely tracked by means such as electronic monitoring bracelets, curfews, and regular contact with a caseworker. The government has since established pilot programs in twelve cities, and reports that more than ninety per cent of the people enrolled in them show up for their court dates. The immigration agency could have made a priority of putting families, especially asylum seekers, into such programs. Instead, it chose to house families in Hutto, which is owned and run by C.C.A. Families would be kept together, but it would mean they were incarcerated together.

god i'm sad i don't have tix to the apollo

this weekend. i will NOT see the roots. tear.

my heart continues to break as i listen to the stream of the new single, "75 bars," over at Soulbounce.

i'll leave you with one of my forever favorites:

a few thoughts on cuba (kinda)

i grew up in miami, florida in a section of town called carol city. carol city was mostly black. some caribbean, but lots of african-americans too. carol city sat right next to opa-locka and hialeah. opa-locka was mostly black as well, while hialeah was known to be largely latino (i didn't know the term latino at the time, and the assumption, at least in my family, was that most, if not all, latinos were cuban, so we said hialeah was cuban. i have no idea if that is actually true.)

i went to school in two major areas, neither of which was my own neighborhood. i went to school first in aventura, a section of north miami beach about 20 minutes from my house. the school i attended had a gifted program. in order to get permission to attend the school, i took an i.q. test at the age of four and then had to go in for a one-on-one interview. i had to prove my worth to a very kind woman named ms. hagan, who told me i was very bright and helpful, and buzzed around like a little bee. that interview sealed my fate. if i had not impressed ms. hagan, i don't think i would be where i am today.

i then went on to win a scholarship to a prestigious private school in 6th grade. throughout my middle school and high school years, i was surrounded by the cuban privileged, people who chanted "castro no, cuba si!" in p.e. i heard stories of houses seized and midnight flights to new york city from havana, tales of jewels left behind.

it wasn't until i was in college that i realized that cubans could be black, too. this was not from a lack of understanding of the caribbean, mind you. but there was something about the way that cuban rafters were always allowed to stay, and haitian rafters were always sent back, that suggested to me that cubans were always lighter and "righter" than people like me. my family was lucky-- our relatives lived in the bahamas, and coming to america always seemed easy enough, as long as they went back to nassau eventually and only spent their time here scrubbing floors/laying concrete/curling hair. my cousins would come through for year or two, sleep in an extra room, on the couch, convert the garage, while they made some money, and then they would head back, never to really be seen again.

i went to college in california. it was there that i learned that all latinos are not cuban or brasilian or ecuadorian or puerto rican or colombian. not all latinos ate black beans and white rice and danced samba and merengue and hicieron lechones in the backyard. it was in california that i ate my first tortilla and had homemade salsa for the first time. these were not things "we" did. it was in california that i got the crazy (according to my family and friends back home) idea to study abroad in cuba. i decided to see if things were really as bad as everyone said they were.

what i learned in cuba changed my way of seeing. i don't agree with everything fidel castro has done, or, even, the length of his rule. there is also something to be said about the people that remain in a country that has been neglected by the rest of the world for so long as a result of our american bullying. there was structural inequity in the capitalist cuban state that, as a matter of course, transferred into the revolutionary state in certain ways. there was no mistake about who was left behind to suffer at the hands of a capitalist, cold-war usa. i will only say that more current cuban nationals look like me than did any of the kids i knew back in miami.

i wrote my grandma a postcard from havana. it pictured three cuban girls in school uniforms. i told my grandma that i couldn't believe what i saw.

"cuba could be our country, grandma," i said. "i see you and me all around."

cuba could my country. and for that reason more than any other, i hope this transfer of power is simple and sound. i hope my friend yordis is released from prison, and that the embargo is lifted. i hope that the capitalist world will not take advantage of a country of young people that are so naive in so many ways. i hope those people who could be my people survive.

si se puede?

sick to my stomach

Death Toll Rises to 6 in Campus Attack

this american life: post-9/11 truth

listening to last week's "this american life" episode brought me to tears this morning on the train.

"shouting across the divide" is a set of stories about muslim-non-muslim relations, and act 1 (which is as far as I got between 125th and 34th streets) is the story of a young girl whose family is ripped apart post-9/11 by the unbelievable power ignorance and blind faith can have in a culture that discourages critical thought. i won't be silly enough to suggest that our culture is the only one that fits that description, but i will be bold enough to say that we are a part of that sad, sad group.

Stream it, and know this young girl's story.

i could accept any blame i understood

...
Reaching for you with my sad words
between sleeping and waking
what is asked for is often destroyed
by the very words that seek it
like dew in an early morning
dissolving the tongue of salt
as well as its thirst
and I call you secret names
of praise and fire
that sound like your birthright
but are not the names of friend
while you hid from me under 100 excuses
lying like tombstones
between your house and mine

I could accept any blame I understood.
Picking over the fresh loneliness
of this too-early morning
I find relics of my history
fossilized into a prison
where I learn how to make love forever
better than how to make friends
where you are encased like a half-stoned peach
in the rigid art of your healing
and in case you have ever tried to reach me
and I could not hear you
these words are in place
of the dead air
still between us.
...
Nothing
is more cruel
than waiting......and hoping
an answer will come.
...
~audre lorde, "sister, morning is a time for miracles"

actually important: DREAM ACT REJECTED

Senators reject legal status for children of immigrants

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The so-called Dream Act would have allowed young people to gain citizenship through education or the military.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immig25oct25,0,4001492.story?coll=la-home-center

what is wrong with us?

you didn't really want to know this, but

the last time i was in california i was with him. we flew into LAX, just like i did last night. we drove the same stretches of road.

just those facts were enough to have me crying in the shower this morning.** to wake me up with bad dreams of missing him, of wanting him back, last night.

when will it ever end, i ask.


**fuck it, i'll be honest. i'm crying right fucking now. i can't stop fucking crying.
someone is going to have to fucking pay me to trust a man again. it just ain't happenin' of its own accord.

half of a yellow sun

i will be glad when this emotional precariousness is gone; i am better, but i am not yet whole. thankfully, i think i am happier and more fulfilled than i have been in awhile, but that only shows how unhappy i was in the midst of things with him.

this evening has been somewhat depressing- between the rain and the body bag i witnessed being removed from the 72nd street station on the way home, there haven't been a whole lot of pick-me-ups.

one plus, though, is the book i'm reading, half of a yellow sun by chimamandda ngozi adichie. long quote, but as i read it for the first time it caused one of those moments when you know you're not alone in a feeling that makes you curse your humanity and your weakness. it's those moments that make me such a voracious reader, always looking for the line that will make me feel like i belong, like i'm not alone:

She walked over to the stove and ran a sponge on the warm surface, over and over, her back to Odenigbo. She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother's behavior to upset her...But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo's expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought. He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
...
She shook her head. She would not let him make her feel that there was something wrong with her. It was her right to be upset, her right not to choose to brush her humiliation aside in the name of an overexalted intellectualism, and she would claim that right. "Go." She gestured toward the door. "Go and play your tennis and don't come back here."

- p. 128-129, Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


another:

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

-same source

salt

he is as salt
to her,
a strange sweet
a peculiar money
precious and valuable
only to her tribe,
and she is salt
to him,
something that rubs raw
that leaves a tearful taste
but what he will
strain the ocean for and
what he needs.

~lucille clifton