"in retrospect" and whatnot

hey its bekah, i forgot to say bye in the land of internet so i'm pirating luke's beautiful writing for a quickquick minute to spit out a poem

i think you would like

the sounds people make

sometimes the sun was

inside me & it was good

the hot blood thing

like Butterflies

in earwax

who took shits wherever they

wanted took the Beast

to the roof which was

fingertips of children

Bladed-pupils Nothing but

the singing mountain between us

A house of monks throat-pore

with paper-kites for lungs. Houses

stuffed in their Holes with

Newspaper. it hurts. Awake. Reckoner

spells made of dust. slow. Hello. to turn

to the eyes of Lions &

become water

slick thud down

the stones to

a house made of candles &

the shadows steal u for a joke.

Nose picker, Love

Medicine

for the women who fly

backwards on broomsticks. you will call yourself back from stone soup

"u know i told him

feel free

& tings

like

that"

Medicine Man

While we waited for the medicine man to come we sat in Jimmy's room and listened to Michael Jackson. (Don't you like that sentence??) so Micheal is going Thrillllerrrr....Thrii-ii---lllerrr....and then he comes in and was very serious in the face sometimes glaring his eyes in this way that makes you sit up straighter like you're a kid and you did something wrong and your moms mad... He had a priest's hat and a fancy coat that he kept adjusting. He sat in the corner with his arms crossed folding and refolding his white scarf under his coat. We all drank cokes together and clanked our glasses...so it was a real funny set of worlds all brought into this blue-blue room with a quote from the bible in Amerik on wood behind a dangling nintendo controller and the flies buzzing around us. Music from next door was blasting and a little black cat kept poking her head under the door.

He took some herbs out from his bag and through translations and a lot of hand gestures, told us what he uses them for. One for stomach ache, which was a stick that you chew on. Another for pains in the ears. One plant you boil in a pot of water for half an hour and a woman will sit over the steam to cure an infection. He gathers the herbs himself in the countryside. He said people come to him for breast cancer too and for curses and things like this. He practices abortions which are illegal...in hospitals here the traditional medicine men have a really bad rep, because a lot of girls and women are dying from their practices. Sometimes with an abortion a woman will end up bleeding too much. Its a catch-22 because a lot of these women can't afford to go to hospitals and the traditional medicine man is cheaper and easier to reach and less scary than a big hospital with doctors and paperwork and all that mess. Lisa had the idea to try to contact a medicine man so that she could hear their side of the story...and also cos we never met a medicine man before

After showing us his herbs he performed a ritual. All of us had to stand while he read from a book. He read low, sometimes whispering or muttering sing-song sometimes almost laughing. I liked how he read, he held my focus in a good way if that makes sense...In between he spat on his pile of herbs. He came to each of us and slapped us on the head. Lisa was so shocked when he slapped her she started hysterically laughing! Then he started to laugh also but said "SHH!" He came around again and kissed our hands and gave us his to kiss and then sat back down and it was done. He said whenever he practices he does this first. He said he wished we could have met his father because he had a lot of knowledge but his father is dead.

He was asking us whether people like him existed in our country. We told him how in America there is a lot a lot of pills, a lot of chemicals and machines that make you sicker than you were even. He said that his is the original, the best. I think I wish that the world of hospitals and traditional medicine men like him worked together. I think a lot more people could be helped if we took from both worlds.

Mountains

So I've been wanting to talk to somebody about the trees that live in the desert here. They're so

beautiful!!!! I swear to you they look like upside down storms because they wear their roots on their heads. Also, its been really funny for me and Lisa to see all these animals walking around. People here think we're real crazy because we're amazed at the cows crossing streets between cars. There are lots of donkeys and large birds with swollen pink necks that eat the little birds for breakfast (the big birds, not the donkeys).

Here is something like a poem for you:

The bowing noises

Of wing-things and trees

Carry miles on their backs

Somehow I buried

The beatboxing Atlantic

In the dirt of my poems

& found her

In the trees of the desert


Yesterday I climbed (meaning walked a long long road uphill) the Mountain EnToto (sp?) in Addis Ababa. I guess because im a new york city-kid (or maybe I'm just ignorant) I thought, you know, mountain....Bear mountain...that kinda thing....I didn't know people really lived on the mountain.

There are all these patches of trees that look like the land of the elves cos of the green color of the moss. Many rows of slanted houses and a lot a lot of kids looking for water. While I was walking they were asking for plastic bottles and for pens, because their parents live far and they want to write home.

Because yesterday was Sunday, the holy day, people were singing their prayer on the mountain but I didn't see them so I said to Jimmy (as in Jimmy Carter from a few entries back) that it sounded like the mountain was singing...and he said "Oh yes! all by itself!"

Also, yesterday I met Jimmy's brother, David (yes, these are their real names) who is a poet. He read me some poems in Amerik. My favorite one was about a girl who comes from the countryside to the city looking for a better life but her dreams end up broken. I like how you can talk to a poet anywhere you go...I asked him why he writes and he said, "You know, I just write...how I feel..." Each of us is the same-same-same...

Water

In a community kind of near (in car-speak) to Zeway, we met a woman in a pink dress with bright eyes and tattos on her cheeks. I saw a lot of these tattoos in Zeway, they are really really beautiful, sometimes patterns of lines, or a moon. The woman invited us over to her house so she could tell us on film about the problems women have where she's from.

We drove through sand or dust off of car roads to come to the hut which was made of sticks woven around and around. The half-built houses look like huge bird nests because they are upside down like a round cup made of wood. Inside the house, tied in the corner were baby goats..I never saw a baby goat before so I had no clue what they were, but I was all excited because they looked like sweet-faced tiny aliens.

The woman sat with her mother and a circle of men including her husband and some of the little kids. They told us how its hard, its common for women to die in childbirth because the hospital is so far away. They also told us the main problem they're having is with water. They had sent the rest of their kids out to find water early that morning and they hadn't come back yet. Again with how generous everyone here is, they apologized for not offering us water, but sometimes they didn't have any for days.

I noticed even though they are having this....hard time (an understatement- but phwoooshh I'm trying to make my words fit their meanings), theres so much laughter and light between them. It made me think of how a few days before a woman in that same community had spoken about America, "We are poor," she said, "but I think they have a different kind of starvation."

Tigist

On our way to the hospital she had asked if the sky was touching the land and that it looked like it was going to fall…I think that for this place maybe she was right, I think here it would.

She is Tigist. She is 17 years old. She has a soft face, one of the sweetest I've met. Hers is the kind of face that makes you want to go to long lengths, jump a mile, make it rain…whatever you can do to get a smile. At the safe abortion clinic in Zeway she was the first girl to volunteer to tell her story.

She wore an orange skirt with flowers sewn in and the traditional white veil on her head for the heat. While she spoke she watched her feet move like mine do when I'm nervous. She has no family, she told us. She had gone to work as a maid and ran a man's house just by herself. He asked to marry her and when she said no, he raped her. She said all this in a simple, factual way. She had already come to the free clinic in Zeway for 3 days and had been turned away, so you can imagine it was…even harder when they told her she was too far along to have the abortion done at the clinic, because they don’t have the right materials. They told her she would have to go to a hospital, and she started to cry because she didn't have the money. She also hadn’t gone to the police about the man who raped her, and so they say they would have no way of knowing if she was in one of the "legal categories" for getting an abortion, one of the categories is rape. ((I’m sorry if I’m talking kind of like a robot but its hard to pin words on all this)

She has a friend she grew up with, they were neighbors in the same village. Her friend, Belaynesh was in the same situation, also too far along to have the abortion at the free clinic.

We shared a life-span of a few days with these girls. It’s crazy to me how well you can communicate when you don’t share a spoken language with somebody. We had a translator, Asnagatch, who helped us for more wordy things…which is you know, mostly everything that can’t be communicated in hand gestures, hello, goodbye, thank you, I love you...Something I realized though, is that body language and wanting closeness are more than exact words. I think the true language is laughter and stomach growl, that’s the real poem; everything in between can be a lesson in grammar. It was arranged for us to go with them to a hospital where a doctor who knows IPAS (the organization that does research and gives training on safe abortion procedures) agreed to perform the surgeries. (theres my inner robot again) They were scared because they had never been to a hospital before, or in a car. They are so brave… I don’t have a true enough word for it, but they’re safe now and it’s a big breath to be able to say that. After the surgery between lying down Tigist sat up fast, "so no more baby??" and then started crying, they kept saying "we are so happy now, we are so happy.."

A day before the surgery they brought us to their home. They live together in a compound in Zeway. It struck me as funny (again with laughing like hydrogen peroxide for the pain-wound) how welcoming everyone in the compound was to us. They had never seen us in their lives and brought out chairs for us and all of us focused on laughing at the toddlers, probably because it was the most obvious thing we could share. Imagine some Ethiopian women with cameras walking into some random apartment in NYC or into white picket fence-land in middle America, I really don’t think people would be pulling out chairs and letting them play with their kids.

I hear that these girls’ story is common here. One thing Belaynesh said was, "I never regret for anything I am…God has created it." So that sentence kind of shattered every organism in my chest……From what I’ve seen, the people here have been open-open-open and giving, so my brain hurts from trying to understand why it’s so hard to be a woman in this place.

Bekah in Ethiopia 3.10.08

Hello world! Or, Salaam as they say here. So....we have arrived. Its been real crazy so far & also beautiful, spinningly. Outside the window is green & green & mountains & stacks of houses. Birds are diving kamikaze-style. Somebody is singing from the back of their throat and it sounds like water ripples that he's moving up and down to make the sound. I wish I could sing like that... Roads are packed, color-swarms. I keep wishing I had 10 or 20 more eyes to look at everything with. Inside the taxi we were just in the driver had a photo of Haile Selassie and a teletubbies sticker. A boy reached in to try to sell me a 50 cent tape-I thought that was hilarious...

I keep getting struck (as in-Arrow to the heart) by how crazy-beautiful everybody is. Ugly people are really hard to find...I swear its something in the water (I know, I know I can't help it I'm corny :) ) ...Everyone is so proud of their history, it really makes BE-ing in a place. Within the first few minutes of talking they tell us about how Ethiopia was never colonized and that all of us have this great-great-great (times a million) grandma who lives here. Her name is Lucy and I hear she's really small.

It has been a brain-squeeze (the kind that ouches and messes up your chest) to be put up in the fancy Hilton hotel while outside little kids are hustling hard for their money. Their hustle is....guess what...us! Or, guiding us foreigners round town. Our first friend is also a guide. His name is Jimmy (after Jimmy Carter). He wears a rainbow one love bracelet on his arm. He was telling us some funny stories (funny, like how ignorance is funny because it makes it swallow-able) about foreigners who come here with ideas about how Ethiopia is starving...apparently this one business man came and his wife had packed him all this food because she thought there wasn't going to be any here. While we were walking with Jimmy to share some pizza (yes, pizza) I saw this graffiti somebody had scrawled on a wall "my name is love"- thats the big feeling I've gotten from the people here, and it gave me a small poem in my head that goes like-

us of one heart
us of the dirty planet
all belong....

Today we met with the IPAS people, and tomorrow we're moving to a "countryside location" where Lisa is gonna start filming about unsafe abortion. The meeting was intense but not scary like I thought. I got to watch Lisa do her thing, and she does it very fancy. The woman was talking about how illegal abortion here is a huge problem..a lot of women are dying because of it. Also I found out that a lot of abortion here is done without anesthesia or pain killers (I can't even say ouch or make a noise to describe that)....so thats really horrifying to me..but also I see how this film is even more important than I thought...

I don't think I'll be able to write for the next 4 or 5 days....
so in the mean time
love-love-love and hugs and uhhhh...all things fuzzy,
-Bekah

ps. apparently in Amheric one of the languages here, "Be-kah" means "Enough!"...
just thought that was funny
pps. Lisa says hi!
okayokaybye...for real now....

I Am & I Am Not African...

On Saturday, February 16, 2008, the MYTH OF THE MOTHERLAND crew reunited to discuss our future goals and aspirations regarding our beloved project. It was an exciting time; about 6 or 7 hours of non-stop productive and thought provoking discussion. One of the highlights of the day was the free-write exercise provided by our brother and mentor, Carlos Andrés Gómez.

"I don't want you to think too much for this exercise. Just write whatever comes to mind. Start it off with the words... I AM AFRICAN because..."

Simple enough. We all got down to writing. Scribbling as we went, smiling about making the connection with our family abroad. Many of us wrote about our ancestry and descendency, our complex lineage, but common humanity. Others wrote about what defines connection and family, how even by relating to another's pain and joy bonds you to them by spirit and experience. It was a great success.

"Now, I want you to write another poem... I AM NOT AFRICAN... because..."

The mood around the room went pensive. We knew that a truth that so often we refuse to acknowledge would manifest itself in our words. For the next 10 minutes, we wrote. We wrote in silence, expressing our disconnect from a peoples an ocean away. We wrote the very words that our society acts on every single day. "I AM NOT AFRICAN..."; and most of the time we don't even care to explain or reflect on the "because" part of it.

After going around the room, reading our perspective on the topic, we had a great discussion relating both exercises; connection and disconnection being the central points. In our poetry, we took time to elaborate and create a dialogue amongst ourselves. So often, we choose to disassociate with what's going on outside, and not just outside of our country, but even outside of our communities, outside our blocks, outside of ourselves. By speaking to one another and reconnecting through this exercise as well as highlighting the ways that we so often DISCONNECT from our outside communities, we found ways to further combat this phenomenon that is today so common within our society.

I believe that essentially that is our goal with this project. To reconnect our global community and to further develop mutually respective relationships abroad as well as right here in our own country. We are all extremely grateful to have had Carlos help us to elaborate on that shared sentiment through our love for poetry. Peace familia. Love. ~ Frank




*Frank's Poems*

(I AM AFRICAN...)
Because I am human.
Because I eat, sleep and breathe just like you.
Because we all love our mothers and anticipate out first kiss.
Because we are all made out of pain and joy, fear and sorrow.
I AM AFRICAN...
Because I am Dominican because I am Spanish...
Because once upon a time a slave master fell in love
or fell in, or inside a slave...
So I am, so we are, as much oppressor as we are oppressed.
I AM AFRICAN...
Because I am tired of thinking that way,
divided inside by blood and tribe; by myself, BY myself.
SO I AM AFRICAN...
Because I simply am.
And nobody, not even I, can tell me otherwise.


(I AM NOT AFRICAN...)
Because it is simply not that convenient.
Because my taste buds are accustomed to first-world McDonald's
and so is my wallet.
Because I cannot possibly fathom being the richest kid on the block,
or wearing no socks... and that's a lot, coming from a Dominican...
...Because sometimes, I rather crack jokes about it,
than really think about little barefoot kids surrounding me asking for change...
"Homie, I am not the Ford Foundation and do not work for Make A Wish,
but bust this, let me spit you a verse instead, rap thoughts around your head, and make it easier for me to go to bed..."
I AM NOT AFRICAN...
Because to even begin to relate would mean civil war with myself,
every day of my existence... like...
"Damn, I'm so lucky,
Damn, I'm so blessed
Damn, what have I done today? and...
Damn, I'm so stressed."
Because to relate, would mean to contemplate
my place in your existence...
and to do that... is not convenient in this instance.




STAY TUNED FOR MORE POEMS!