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Thursday
The horrors of being baselessly deported and imprisoned are becoming a daily occurrence in America, with one of the latest instances being an “administrative error.” Apparently Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a El Salvadoran man here under protected legal status and the father of a U.S. citizen, has been sent to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, even though he is innocent of any wrongdoing.
According the the Associated Press, Abrego Garcia “was arrested in Baltimore on March 12 after working a shift as a sheet metal apprentice in Baltimore and picking up his 5-year-old son, who has autism and other disabilities, from his grandmother’s house.” Although ICE was looking for someone else, they are now, predictably, claiming that Abrego Garcia is a gang member. His lawyers point out that the U.S. Government “has never produced an iota of evidence,” and Trumpism’s history of lying to cover up its crimes undoubtedly means that the charge is fabricated..
I wonder if, in her 1991 poem “What Kinds of Times Are These,” Adrienne Rich anticipated such seizures. After all, she talks about our country having “its own way of making people disappear.” So maybe, even 25 years ago, she sensed we had the potential. “Our country,” she writes, “is moving closer to its own truth and dread.”
The poem is responding to a fine Bertolt Brecht lyric where he writes that, when times are dark, “a conversation about trees is almost a crime.” The dark times he was referencing were Hitler coming to power. His point is that talking about anything else seems an indulgence:
Truly, I live in the dark ages.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
Brecht doesn’t like this state of affairs but appears to find it inevitable. While it’s necessary to focus on the evil in the world, he laments that doing so distorts us:
For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh.
Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
Rich’s counter-response is that perhaps, at such moments, talking about trees is exactly what we need.
What Kind of Times Are These
By Adrienne Rich
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
As I read the poem, Rich seems to be saying that talking about trees is a necessary counter to authoritarianism and oppression. In the growth and hope of trees, there is an implied reproof to the forces of death. Talking about trees, in other words, isn’t an avoidance of fascism but a way of connecting with the life force necessary to fight it. In this way, Rich hopes to avoid the trap that Brecht identifies.
Years ago, I attended a symposium on Iran, held at my old college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). In one session we discussed Reading Lolita in Tehran, and one political activist was critical, wondering why we were talking about literature—and why Azar Nafisi was receiving so much publicity—when there were much more pressing issues.
My response was that if the prospect of a society in which art could flourish was not one of the goals of revolution, then what was the point? It was a version of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Rich is suggesting that, by listening carefully to poetry, we discover an essential ally in times like these.
I’m certainly finding it an ally in writing this blog. Whereas most of my posts these days are about our own dark times, I find my spirits lifted by the application of literature. It functions as a stable base and a guiding compass.
Emma Goldman quotation: The Goldman quote was her wisdom nicely distilled to a tee shirt slogan by anarchist printer Jack Frager in 1973. What she actually wrote was the following:
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.