Brecht: Don’t Become Numb to Suffering

By Robin Bates | Published: April 3, 2022
Bucha, Ukraine after the Russian occupation

Monday

Following the withdrawal of Russian troops from certain Ukrainian towns they had seized, we are getting a full measure of the evil that Vladimir Putin is visiting upon the country. According to the mayor of now liberated Bucha, some 270 civilians were found in two mass graves and another 40 were lying dead in the streets.

Not that we should be surprised. Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, observes that Russia has fought wars this way for some time. “They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender,” he observes, pointing out that this is how Putin’s forces “fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II.” Putin cares neither about Ukrainian lives nor Russian lives.”

I’ve come to think of Vladimir Putin as Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Vlad Dracula), one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s vampire. The 15th century Vlad used horror, especially impaling people (including women and their babies) to cement his authority and terrorize his enemies. Like Stoker’s Dracula, Putin lives off the blood of others, a leech who takes kickbacks from Russian mineral extraction without using the windfall to grow the economy and create a lasting prosperity. Indeed, rampant corruption is one reason why Russia’s military has failed so badly.

We should pay attention to the horror we currently feel because there’s a danger that we will become inured to it. So warns Bertolt Brecht in his poem “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain.”

Brecht, a German who had to flee Nazi Germany, witnessed how the world closed its eyes to Hitler’s evil-doing until it became too evident to ignore. Until Ukraine, the world similarly closed its eyes to Putin’s atrocities, so it could do so again. In his poem, Brecht notes the different ways we manage to ignore people who have witnessed horrors:

When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain

Like one who brings an important
letter to the counter after
office hours: the counter is already closed.
Like one who seeks to warn the
city of an impending flood,
but speaks another language. They do not understand him.
Like a beggar who knocks for the
fifth time at the door where he has four times been given
something: the fifth time he is hungry.
Like one whose blood flows from
a wound and who awaits
the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.

So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being
butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred
were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered
and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of
silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out
“stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When
sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer
heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

May what is happening in Bucha, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities never become invisible. It will require all our powers of empathy to keep our focus on the Ukrainian people, however. Their suffering, already unendurable, looks as though it will continue for some time.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Jesus: Choose Life, Not Death

By Robin Bates | Published: April 3, 2022
Painting from Church of St Mary Magdalene in Catalonia

Spiritual Sunday

Reprinted from March, 2016

I’ve long been puzzled by today’s Gospel reading in which Mary anoints Jesus’s feet with costly perfume, only to be chastised by Judas for wastefulness. There’s something sensual about her wiping the feet with her hair, but what role does the episode play in Jesus’s journey?

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1-8)

My friend John Morrow, a retired Episcopal priest, tells me that Jesus is looking ahead to the crucifixion and essentially saying that the current focus must be on that. He is definitely not advocating a lackadaisical attitude towards poverty, although that is how his response to Judas has sometimes been interpreted. The time will come again when the disciples will be expected to minister to the poor.

Although this explanation sounds right, I nevertheless find myself focusing on another element. Judas in the account sounds like one of those earnest activists that take people to task when they pause for refreshment. Mary, who elsewhere gets criticized by Martha for listening to Jesus rather than helping out in the kitchen, here is criticized for not focusing at all times on the movement’s goals. Jesus, in such a reading, is telling Judas that there is a time to play as well as a time to work, a time to enjoy as well as a time to minister.

To hold this reading means that I must disagree with St. John’s explanation that Judas just wants a bigger pot that he can steal. This doesn’t sound plausible to me, especially if, as some scholars think, Judas was in fact a radical Zealot who wanted Jesus to lead a revolt against the Romans. In my alternate interpretation, Jesus is telling Judas to chill for a moment. If we don’t pause to honor an act of love and gratitude, what’s the point of the movement.

This is a lesson that Jesus himself must learn in D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Man Who Died. In Lawrence’s account, which some have found blasphemous, Jesus, upon returning from the dead, realizes that he has never truly lived. He has been so devoted to a life of self-denying service that he hasn’t opened himself up to the plenitude of life. When he meets Mary Magdalene in the garden after the resurrection,  he has the following interchange with her:

[Your lovers] were much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for salvation from your own excess. And I, in my mission, I too ran to excess. I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation. Don’t run to excess now in living, Madeleine. It only means another death.”

She pondered bitterly, for the need for excessive giving was in her, and she could not bear to be denied.

“And will you not come back to us?” she said. “Have you risen for yourself alone?”

He heard the sarcasm in her voice, and looked at her beautiful face which still was dense with excessive need for salvation from the woman she had been, the female who had caught men at her will. The cloud of necessity was on her, to be saved from the old, wilful Eve, who had embraced many men and taken more than she gave. Now the other doom was on her. She wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the warm body.

Put aside the fact that Mary Magdalene wasn’t actually a prostitute and also the very male misconception that prostitutes get more than they give. This is a work about moving beyond a life-denying austerity, and by the end of the novella Jesus has learned how to revel in the richness of the world. Crucial in his awakening is a priestess of Isis, with whom he makes love. He comes to the follow realization:

Suddenly it dawned on him: I asked them all to serve me with the corpse of their love. And in the end I offered them only the corpse of my love. This is my body–take and eat–my corpse–

A vivid shame went through him. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death. Perhaps he loved me in the flesh, and I willed that he should love me bodilessly, with the corpse of love–‘

There dawned on him the reality of the soft, warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight. “And I told them, blessed are they that mourn,” he said to himself. “Alas, if I mourned even this woman here, now I am in death, I should have to remain dead, and I want so much to live. Life has brought me to this woman with warm hands. And her touch is more to me now than all my words. For I want to live–“

This story meant a lot to me when I read it in college because I, like Lawrence, was struggling against the Victorian notion that duty was everything and pleasure was a shameful indulgence. Lawrence helped me move into a fuller appreciation of life, which is one reason why I included a Lawrence poem in my wedding ceremony. Reading him led to my own awakening.

I am well aware that one can go too far and take more than one gives. Our society right now has a problem with selfish people who are not willing to sacrifice pleasure for duty. Lawrence himself believes that there must be a balance. But encountering the story when I did helped me find that balance, and the hair-anointing scene remains a useful reminder to stop and smell the perfume.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

Poem (?) for the Day

By Robin Bates | Published: March 31, 2022
Hogarth, The Distressed Poet (1736)

Friday, April 1

I’m going
to put down
a few words
in a
column
and if they
get printed
some
people
will think
they’re
reading a
poem.
But they
aren’t.

Joan Drew Ritchings, “April Fool”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Authors as Nationalist Symbols

By Robin Bates | Published: March 30, 2022
Sandbags piled to protect Kharkhiv statue of Ukrainian national poet Shevchenko

Thursday

Watching events unfold in Ukraine, I’ve been struck by how Vladimir Putin sees no dividing line between Russia and Ukraine. Experts in the field will be able to speak to the relations between the two countries as I cannot, but I can observe that many of authors and works I associate with Russia either come from Ukrainian cities or speak fondly of them. Perhaps this fact helps convince Russians that Ukraine is, in fact, Russia.

That being said, sometimes you have to let go of what you love. Burning Ukraine’s cities to the ground would identify Russia as an abusive lover.

Chekhov’s sublime “The Lady with the Dog”  first got me thinking along these lines. There we have couples strolling along the boardwalk in Yalta, located in the Crimea (which Putin annexed in 2014).

One evening he was dining in the gardens, and the lady in the béret came up slowly to take the next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, and the way she did her hair told him that she was a lady, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was dull there…. The stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great extent untrue; he despised them, and knew that such stories were for the most part made up by persons who would themselves have been glad to sin if they had been able; but when the lady sat down at the next table three paces from him, he remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know, suddenly took possession of him.

While Yalta shows up in a lot of Russian fiction, Odessa shows up even more—that same Odessa that is currently readying itself for a Russian attack, including mining popular tourist beaches to ward of a Russian sea invasion. Sally McGrane’s 2013 New Yorker essay on Odessa’s literary past has filled me in on the city’s literary side:

Walking along Pushkin Street on the kind of dazzling spring day the Odessan writer Aleksandr Kuprin warned visitors to avoid—the smell of acacias in bloom, he wrote, can induce newcomers to fall in love and take foolish steps, like getting married—I crossed Bunin Street, named for the Nobel Prize-winning short-story writer, then Zhukovskogo, a street named after the romantic poet said to have been Pushkin’s mentor. Near the opera, a golden sign announced the Odessa Literary Museum.

Writers fall in love with cities all the time. But ever since Pushkin spent thirteen months here in 1823, Odessa has been a city infatuated with its writers. At the Odessa Literary Museum—housed in a dilapidated palace in the city center, it is one of the largest shrines of its kind in the world—docents can tell you the number of days a given writer was here (Chekhov, who once spent half his paycheck on Odessan ice cream, came four times and stayed a total of sixteen days) and who wrote which chapters of their greatest works while in residence (Pushkin completed the second chapter of Eugene Onegin and half of the third here, but despite the popular claim that he began Onegin in Odessa, the poet actually rewrote the first chapter here, which more or less counts). They can also tell you who burned manuscripts written in Odessa (Gogol relegated most of the second part of Dead Souls” to the flames on his return to Moscow after wintering here), whose wife was probably Odessan (Nabokov’s, Vera), which great writers passed through here yet never revisited the city in prose (maybe Nabokov, definitely Leo Tolstoy), who included Odessa in his fiction sight unseen (Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Balzac), who wrote in a letter to a friend of his intentions to visit but never did (Dostoevsky). And that’s just by the by: the museum’s twenty rooms feature some three hundred writers associated in one way or another with this city on the Black Sea that was, once upon a time, the glittering, cosmopolitan third capital of the Russian Empire.

Because the museum harkens back to the Soviet era, it underplays Odessa’s most famous native son, Isaac Babel. Give Ukrainians’ antipathy to Russia, however, I suspect Babel is going to grow in their esteem since he was victimized by the Soviet state. Author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories and acclaimed as “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry” (thanks Wikipedia), Babel was imprisoned and executed by Stalin.

At the time of the New Yorker article, Babel had only four modest displays (and no mention of how he died) in the Odessa Literary Museum. After the current war, Ukrainians may honor him more as they look for authors who can elevate the nation.

Russian authors have long performed this function. One reason that Russians see themselves as exceptional is because they are the country that produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (The symbolic significance of the two authors helps explains why tens of thousands of Russians attended their funerals.) A poet currently functioning as a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism is Taras Shevchenko, a 19th century poet who was one of the first to write in Ukrainian and who is now the country’s national poet. At the moment in the besieged city of Karkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, sandbags have been piled high in the city center to protect his statue against Russian shelling.

Years ago, when I visited Slovenia on a Fulbright fellowship, I was struck by the extent to which they honor their authors, most notably Francis Preseren, whose statue overlooks the central square in Ljubljana and who was the first great poet to write in Slovenian. Although authors are sometimes unappreciated when alive, they can grow in symbolic value after they die.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Addressing a Long and Sad History

By Robin Bates | Published: March 29, 2022
Emmett Till, after whom the new antilynching law is named

Wednesday

It’s progress of a sort, I guess, despite coming so late: Joe Biden has just signed the “Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law,” legislation that southern legislators fought for over a hundred years. As of yesterday, lynching is now a federal hate crime.

According to this NBC news article, anti-lynch legislation has been voted down over 200 times since 1900. That’s because lynching was the muscular threat that undergirded Jim Crow segregation, especially when it came to African Americans voting. White terrorism has long reigned in much of America but it was especially evident in the American south in the century following the Civil War. Nor has it entirely ended, as Biden noted as he signed the legislation:

From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery to countless other acts of violence, countless victims known and unknown, the same racial hatred that drove the mob to hang a noose brought that mob carrying torches out of the fields of Charlottesville just a few years ago.

There is much African American literature that refers to lynching. James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” has a particularly graphic account of a lynching and is based on the actual lynching of Jesse Washington, in Waco Texas on May 15, 1916. There’s also Billy Holliday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit” (original poem by Abel Meerpool):

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees

Langston Hughes too wrote a number of poems about the subject, one of which particularly haunts me. In it we see a “dark girl” mourning her lover:

Song for a Dark Girl

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a crossroads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.

The deep sadness tears my heart in two while the power of the final two lines throws me back in my seat. No bill can make up for the tragedies undergone by America’s African American community but at least it’s something.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments closed

Lucille Clifton on Turning Red

By Robin Bates | Published: March 28, 2022
Publicity illustration for Turning Red

Tuesday

My granddaughters, who turn 10, 8 and 6 this year, are excited by the new Pixar film Turning Red, although the youngest girl (along three-year-old Ocean, the only boy) is most enthusiastic about the notion of having a red panda tail that can be waved about. The older two are a bit more attuned to the protagonist’s mood swings although they too are still too young to fully grasp the film’s maturation theme.

For those of you don’t know, the film is about a Chinese American girl who has inherited an ancient family trait. At a certain age, girls transform into red pandas at those moments in life when their emotions spiral out of control—which, for adolescent girls, is pretty much constantly.

The red panda, of course, stands in for menstruation but also for self-expression and self-assertion. One’s inner panda, we learn in the course of the film, can be repressed by a family ceremony where one makes a formal break with that side of oneself. Which is to say, one makes the decision to repress one’s feelings.

As Freud informs us, however, that which is repressed returns as a monster. When protagonist Mei Lee refuses to abandon her panda side the way her mother has, the mother’s inner panda returns in a creature the size of Godzilla. The film’s point is that women should develop a healthier relationship with their red panda sides.

After watching the film, I thought of several Lucille Clifton poems where she wrestles with, and then overcomes, the fear of letting her red panda show. The three I have chosen can be seen as a before, during, and after.

In “the way it was,” the speaker remembers a time when she felt the need to hold things in. While the cultural dynamics for African Americans are different than they are for Chinese Americans, there are resemblances:

the way it was

mornings
i got up early
greased my legs
straightened my hair and
walked quietly out
not touching

in the same place
the tree   the lot
the poolroom   deacon moore
everything was stayed

nothing changed
(nothing remained the same)
i walked out quietly
mornings
in the ‘40’s
a nice girl
not touching
trying to be white 

Clifton was a pioneer among poets about celebrating her inner panda—which is to say, about loudly proclaiming sides of herself that, until she came along, women were supposed to keep hidden. “homage to my hips” is one such poem but, since we’re going with a red theme in today’s post, I share “poem in praise of menstruation.” In this poem Clifton celebrates the “wild” river that returns faithfully each month to the same delta. She also prays that it connects her with animals (including, presumably, red pandas) that are beautiful and faithful and ancient and female and brave.”

if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon          if

there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta          if there

is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain          if there is

a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel          if there is in

the universe such a river          if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave  

The last poem, “to my last period,” was written following the poet’s hysterectomy. In it, the poet waves goodbye to her red panda, or at least to one of its manifestations.

well, girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.
now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?

Beautiful in retrospect, anyway. But there’s no reason to be ashamed of her.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

The Very Model of a Modern Russian General

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2022
Illus. from Pirates of Penzance

Monday

It’s been just over a month since the Russians invaded Ukraine and virtually everyone is surprised–not only at the effectiveness of the Ukrainian resistance but at the poor showing of the Russian army. It appears now that the Ukrainians have killed seven Russian generals, an astounding number. I’ve seen three tweeters turning to literature to capture the situation, sometimes resorting to dark humor.

First, there is “Decoding Trolls,” who writes that Russia

has done a Reverse-Napoleon. Tolstoy brilliantly shows Russian General Kutuzov’s strategy in War & Peace: draw the French further & in, so their supply lines are stretched. Napoleon sat in Moscovy waiting for Moscovy to surrender. Never did. French died retreating.

Tweeter Mark Gongloff (@markgongloff), meanwhile, does a riff on an Oscar Wilde line in The Importance of Being Earnest. Towards the end of the play, Jack must reveal to Lady Bracknell that he doesn’t know who his parents were:

Bracknell: Are your parents living?
Jack: I have lost both my parents.
Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Here’s Mark Gongloff’s tweet:

To lose one general is a misfortune, to lose two er three er four what five oops six um seven just looks careless.

Actually, there’s an explanation for the high loss rate. As an article in the Washginton Post explains,

Military analysts and Western intelligence officials say the Russian generals in Ukraine may be more exposed and serving closer to the front because their side is struggling — and that senior officers are deployed closer to the action to cut through the chaos.

One Western official suggested that Russian generals were also needed to push “frightened” Russian troops, including raw conscripts, forward.

Finally, tweeter “Andrej” riffs off of the “Modern Major General” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. If you know the song, you’ll recall that this particular general’s knowledge is vast until it comes to modern warfare. As he puts it, “For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and Adventury/ Has only been brought down to the beginning of the Century.” This means that he has not yet learned to distinguish “a Mauser rifle from a javelin,” and he knows no more about tactics, elemental strategy, or “what progress has been made in modern gunnery” than “a novice in a nunnery.”

Andrej finds similar incompetence in the Russian commanders:

I am the very model of a Russian Major General
My standing in the battlefield is growing quite untenable
My forces, though equipped and given orders unequivocal
Did not expect the fight to be remotely this reciprocal

I used to have a tank brigade but now I have lost several
My fresh assaults are faltering with battle plans extemporal
I can’t recover vehicles but farmers in a tractor can
It’s all becoming rather reminiscent of Afghanistan

My ordnance is the best but only half my missiles make it there
I would have thought by now that we would be controllers of the air
But at the rate the snipers work my time here is ephemeral
I am the very model of a Russian Major General

In times of war, one looks anywhere one can for a little humor.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Mary’s Courage In Saying Yes

By Robin Bates | Published: March 26, 2022
Philippe de Campaigne, The Annunciation (1644)

Spiritual Sunday

This past Wednesday many Christians celebrated “the Annunciation,” which was the moment when the angel Gabriel annunciated (announced) to Mary that she would be carrying God’s child. March 25, after all, is nine months before December 25. I like the seasonal symbolism in the two dates, with the Annunciation occurring almost on the Spring Equinox and first day of spring (with all the hope that that implies) and Christmas falling close to the winter solstice and the darkest day of the year (when Jesus’s birth brings with it the promise of spring and new life).

I grew up thinking that Mary didn’t have much say in the matter, but Levertov changes my view. As she sees it, it’s a choice. We all face versions of such a choice.

First, here’s Luke’s account:

And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

Who having heard, was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God. Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the most High; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever. And of his kingdom there shall be no end.

And Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?

And the angel answering, said to her: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren: Because no word shall be impossible with God.

And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:26-38)

The moment when Mary agrees to carry Jesus is symbolic of all those times in life when we are presented with momentous choices.  Too often we turn away from them.  Levertov challenges the traditional depiction of Mary as meek and describes her rather as courageous.  It takes a brave woman to step into destiny.

So here’s to the courage of the mothers who carry us and give birth to us.  They are participants in an event that it no less miraculous for being common.  

The Annunciation

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.

Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent. God waited.

She was free
to accept or refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another in most lives?
Some unwillingly undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

She had been a child who played, ate, spelt
like any other child – but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked

a simple, “How can this be?”
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –

but who was God.

The poem was a favorite of my friend Maurine Holbert-Hogaboom, an extraordinary woman who made her way from a small Texas town, via Burlesque, to New York City during the Great Depression. There, by dint of her charisma and determination, Maurine made a living as an actress until she was blackballed during the 1950s for supporting Civil Rights. Eventually she made her way to St. Mary’s City, Maryland, which is where I got to know her. I read the poem at her funeral—she died at 98—because of the way the poem captures her own momentous decisions.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

A Hughes Poem in a SCOTUS Hearing

By Robin Bates | Published: March 24, 2022
Booker cites Langston Hughes in Judge Jackson’s Senate hearing

Friday

As Senate Republicans went after Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in hearings that Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson notes were characterized by “racism, sexism, feigned outrage and general ugliness,” New Jersey’s Cory Booker (the Senate’s one Black senator) turned to a Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again,” to capture the true significance of the event. Poetry helps us regain our bearings when other uses of language fail.

Booker quoted the poem’s penultimate stanza as he celebrated Judge Jackson. With her probable elevation to the Supreme Court, Booker was saying, the founding dream of America will come a little closer to fulfillment for African Americans:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

The poem, like “I Too Sing America,” serves as both an homage and a corrective to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, in which Whitman uses long lists to capture the spirit of America. After each of the first three stanzas of “Let America Be America Again,” after invoking America’s founding ideal, Hughes delivers a devastating reality check in the form of a parenthetical aside:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

The following two-line stanza sets up two questions, one from an exploiter tangled in “that ancient endless chain/ Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!” (the first question) and one from poor Whites, Blacks, Indians and poor immigrants (the second question):

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

In Wednesday’s post, I cited another Langston Hughes poem that applies to Judge Jackson’s remarkable rise, not to mention the rise of Black women generally. “Mother to Son” captures the determination to keep keeping on, despite all the obstacles that one encounters. Yesterday on Morning Joe I heard the Rev. Al Sharpton reference the poem, talking about how life for Jackson has been “no crystal stair.” And indeed, at one point in the hearings Jackson herself—when asked how she would counsel young women in color—replied with the word that best characterizes the poem: “perseverance.”

Returning to “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes’s Whitmanesque list (although he doesn’t couch his list in free verse and he even has some rhymes and half rhymes) makes it clear he’s not only talking about African Americans but all those in our history who have been oppressed and marginalized. And because, as much as any other American author, Hughes is obsessed with the American dream, which he often refers to as “the dream deferred,” he makes clear how all of these figures are unified by their dreaming. Thus, even though they have all suffered because America has fallen short of its ideals (he provides multiple examples), nevertheless the hope lives on:

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.

Even as he says “free,” Hughes realizes the word sounds hollow. It’s “a dream that’s almost dead today,” he admits. But “almost” is not “entirely” and the poem ends on a note of hope.

That’s why Booker quoted it and why he was so excited to see Jackson sitting in front of him. At a time when the Senate has reached a stagnant gridlock and when the forces of reaction appear able to shut down any forward movement in the country as a whole, he felt hope stir.

Will his citing the poem do any good? Republican leader Mitch McConnell is calling Jackson a radical leftist and vowing to vote against her, so the Hughes poem didn’t sway him. I think, however, Booker quoting Hughes reminded people of the high ground after the sordid tactics of the Ted Cruzes, Josh Hawleys, and Marsha Blackburns (my own senator, I say to my shame). By reminding people of the momentousness of the dream, the poem may be enough to get all the Democrats to vote for her (including conservative Joe Manchin) and maybe even pick up a handful of Republican votes.

Poems often have the ability to put us in touch with our best selves. Some GOP members of Congress may not be altogether deaf to their better angels.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed