One Deep Breath’s prompt is vision and over in Uttar Pradesh a couple hundred dalit call themselves Pink Vigilantes, and are enacting a new vision of ground rules that they will enforce so misuse of aid and abuse of women are checked.
When you have a system of majority thinking, it takes a critical unified mass to oppose it. What a group says and the boundaries they enforce non-equivocally is given more weight that what an individual says in thin voice. When that individual is a woman and dalit, getting the weight shouldered behind the message can be harder. Even after this aspect of the caste system was made illegal on books, the habit of perception takes longer to replace. The state of women in rural India is inequal so much that the male to female ratio of population is shifting. Women have equal rights legally but have to act to claim them.
To return to vision. As is, when someone cries foul and goes to authorities to say that they were not treated decently, were abused or raped they are not always heard. When met with a go-home-and-sort-yourself-out-and-don’t-make-trouble there is getting to be a channel of recourse. When the proper channels are used and not effective, the PInk Vigilantes step forward to talk to the perpetrator and if the person is closed to hearing how he has crossed a line, they step up the message. They beat someone so the message of incorrect behavior comes through the soft tissues. In private or if that does not work, by public shaming exhibition until it registers bodily and cognitively that this behavior will not be unnoticed, will not be tolerated and will not go without repercussions.

group intervention –
Pink Vigilantes
sticks with them
If touch and distance is a language and if communication is abuse, must the reply be in the same dialect? Would a smack change behavior leaving the mind and heart to catch up at its own speed, understanding coming after months or years but in the meantime the iterations of violence are curtailed on account o fear? A leap to curtail behavior from a contrite heart can’t happen as quickly as quickly as behavior can change. People can learn to go thru the motions of making nice even if they don’t understand why they should have to. There can be civility. To make people go the long course of being met with kindness and non-violence is asking for a lot more.
When the mind is full of anger and sadness and confusion and hormones of fight or flight, can only violence in reply be “heard” and any words are only sounds to dismiss? If the violence is off-handed, meting a beating as some people would kill a fly without thinking there is weight to it, would response in kind get the message thru?
Interesting that this collective should happen in Uttar Pradesh where women have higher literacy rates. (Aside: It’s a popular self-congratulatory western bias to link alphabet-knowledge with compassion and illiteracy with brute brutality. It seems to devalue oral cultures as backward when they can be as forward as any. It isn’t the media of knowledge but the will of how people implement the culture. Somehow I’m skeptical that print self-access can empower more than similarly persistent oral tapping into the people-knowledge base.)
The capacity for escalation and retribution is there, as the Pink Vigilantes know. They, being dalit, have nothing to lose which is a great strategic card in their favor. The women could be “put back in their place”, singly or en masse, and being a minority, the act could be swift. This is to to say I think their act is wrong, or right, but taking guts.
They are full of will to make change, and go forward willingly to change their present. They are not unnumbered in some senses. The percentage of population who are vocal against the dalit and who abused women are minorities as well. They seek to reset the boundaries of norms, the cut-off point of what is acceptable.
The intimidation tactics of a minority can cow the majority to change. Some people are wired to go to where ever the excitement is just as the majority are wired to be selective of fights and to stay well away from conflict. If the ladies are to succeed, they have a lot of challenges. The basis must remain defense, compassionate protection, correcting wrong, as they have done, set up watches on relief aid that corrupt officials decided to sell on the open market instead of distribute.
look at own hands
past them small figures
inwards another count

Individual to individual, there is no anonymity that can shrug off the idea that no one is hurt, and that’s just the way the world works. Individuals step forward in a group and say, no more with this nonsense. You’ll behave decently or we will personally make you behave. It shouldn’t be necessary. Minimum force and talk isn’t always respected, is a dialect where people talk thru cinderblock.
A couple years ago I talked about the nature of people, as violent, compassionate or indifferent. I mentioned John Mueller’s study on why isn’t there more violence? A majority can be ruled by a very small number of people. For example, “Viˇsegrad, a Bosnian city of 50,000, was substantially controlled for years by a returned hometown boy, Milan Luki, and some fifteen well-armed companions.” And by the silence of the majority.
dilate pupils
paged vision to change,
narrowed on streets?

The capacity for the group to get heady with their power of speech and become small tyrants and unjust themselves or not careful to make sure stories are true is there. Once blood heats up, cycles of getting even can engage. What if the Pinks make an example of someone not guilty as accused? Their reputation grows and weakens both if engage themselves in punishing men who are the subject of squabbles and lies. Everyone involved must remain honest. We must keep the issues the same and not end up with the mob rule that Martin Luther King Jr. felt we must not employ. If the system falls to chaos instead of being rejigged to be more just, then all sides have lost.

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.
[…] You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations […]underlying causes […]
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine
whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.

MLK in Letter from a Birmingham Jail via F/K/A
It’s a delicate walk, especially once we leave the habit of talk and it is face to face with members of the community and all the real complexities of losing face, hurt feelings, anger and embarrassment. Private or public confrontation with a different sure reality must be done to shift the base presumptions, if not of what it right, then of what is going to happen.
Shame is a potent weapon to engage and wave around, far more than sticks, more volatile than silence yet may be the only path to lasting change.

Rawi Hage is in Toronto appearing as part of “An Evening of Readings for Project Hope.”

Project HOPE (Humanitarian Opportunities for Peace and Education), is a non-profit volunteer organisation whose goal is to provide a participatory, educational space for Palestinian youth and children. Together Fundraisers are an Arab/Jewish Group in Toronto raising money for projects in Palestine.

An Evening of Readings for Project Hope: Moderated by Judy Rebick
January 20, 2008
Lula Lounge
1585 Dundas St. W.
Toronto, ON
Doors open at 6:00 pm, event starts at 7:00 pm
Tickets available at The Toronto Women’s Bookstore or through email at togetherfundraisers{at}gmail.

—

Book of Hopes and Dreams via Crafty Green Poet

THE BOOK OF HOPES AND DREAMS
is a charity anthology of poetry, which will raise funds for Spirit Aid’s operations in the Baglan Province on North East Afghanistan, providing mobile clinics, doctors, nurses and medical supplies for the region, where there has been virtually no medical facilities for the past quarter of a century.

As well as raising money for charity, the aim of The Book Of Hopes And Dreams is to help spread the spirit of optimism and activism as a counter-balance to the negativity and ennui that seem so prevalent today. The poetry in this book is generally unfashionably positive in outlook: full of the power of hopes and dreams. Read this book and you may well find yourself infected with optimism, even in the face of so much overwhelming evidence from the pessimists. If the infection takes hold, who knows what will happen? Maybe you will become one of those people who actually tries to do something to help to change the way things are – stepping boldly away from the majority, who prefer to just moan about it.

When it comes to which piece of literature I spent more hours with than any other, second might be Treasure Island. Stephenson’s book and I lived together daily for at least 3 months when I was 13 or 14 years old.

Only university Macroeconics came close to rivalling that book for its ability to put me to sleep within sentences. I was astonished every time I woke up. It was like a cavity I kept tonguing. Could it really be like that? I didn’t want a sleep aid. I really wanted to read the classic, but the farthest I ever got in one sitting was a page and half.

Persistence wins.

I think because it was oversold so my expectations were too high. The experience became anti-climatic. Rather like seeing mountains with my own eyes, or Niagara Falls. After so much lead up, they were such a piffle. How could I be disappointed by something so large scale?

I do prefer small scale things. And I like what I happen on by serendipity. A thing I didn’t expect can be what it is, start at face value to grow or decline.

[Incidentally first longest sit with literature was (hands down, hands up, alleluia years) the Bible in various cross-check translation protestant editions. ]

I like something I can go back thru with pleasure back and forth raking over the same small ground. There’s such a press to create new that what is long common gets sidelined or underappreciated. One needs to listen more than talk. A spin on the old can make it be seen again.

Which brings me to how I spent 3 days with frogments from the frag pool and came back to it for a few more hours over other days. I mentioned it in passing half a year ago. Gary Barwin and derek beaulieu played to the page Basho’s frog pond poem, re-angling in many ways. I loved the athletic dexterity of the energy playing with filters and vantage points on the poem. Many that I loved were visual plays. (Scanning something would mean making my HP bow to me again. It’s creakily resistant to my will. Persistence…) But these reconceptions, reperceptions sample too,

p. 76

o
frog leaping
into the centre of
itself

p. 51,

basho
frog shift

the sounds remain
the fronds refrain

I was glad to have curiosity whetted in Gary Barwin’s interview in the 12 or 20 questions series. It showed more of his interesting lively energied intelligence. Playful and amusing thruout but this stuck out too,

publishing chapbooks and other small things with my serif of nottingham press. My first vertebrate publication was…

What a fun press title.

The idea of books as living, as vertebrates and invertebrates tweaks my interest. Reminds me I just got in the mail Jim Knowles’ stapled chapbook with title on the spine. That link describes his production with the 4 signatures under the 4″x5″ cover.

His 17S poems aim for the brevity of haiku but without the haiku moment or subjects or line breaks, such p. 26

-Gold, Jade –

beaten down
when striking gold.
sunshine from fans.
Joy has no jade.

or p. 19

Press on,
See what we can do.
Things are grey.
But shit leaves the busy shoe.

We’re developing a strategic plan to help us continue to grow the Festivals – and we’re hoping for as much input from the public as possible, so we would appreciate your feedback and input through a short confidential survey. You can find it here.
If our appreciation isn’t enough incentive, how about a Festival Pass for the Fall 2008 Edition, plus a $25 gift certificate from Nicholas Hoare books? After completing the survey you can leave your name and contact details if you would like to enter a draw for this prize package. The survey will close at 5pm January 31st and the winner of the prize draw will be contacted on February 1st.

Some awarenesses rise to the surface in the process I’ve run thru a few times now.

Last year I took a Lampman sonnet, cut it up, put it back together in a new arrangement of the words. What struck me is that although the meter seemed stiff, the word combinations he had were stellar. When broken down to the level of word, there was a balanced mix of parts of speech. There was enough internal rhyme that I could pick new end rhymes for another piece from his selections. He used figurative language but the words were all concrete, common and simple to great effect.

In contrast while trying the same process of cutting down to word level Pauline E Johnson’s The Train Dogs, the results were quite different. There was no internal rhyme to speak of. Each rhyme was for the end point and only couplets. There was a spate of consonance but not running thru as a thread of sound. Hers is not a sonnet. Each stanza has 39 beats and with one refrain line per stanza. A certain amount of repetition is expected in a lyrics like. It uses a strict dactyl. (Dactyl the same meter used in Longfellow’s Evangeline.) When I took the poem into word lists by part of speech, it was quite different than Lampman’s set. “The”, “and” and “of” were a much heavier proportion. What remained had a lot of slanted language adjectives, the pronoun selection was only “they”. On the word level the poem revealed its nature of emotionalism. Reading the right margin gave some content words but felt generic and gave little away. To try to put it back together and keep all the 20 odd 18 instances of “the” was an anathema. The meter made a vigorous feel but taken apart felt padded.

In taking apart Charles G Robert’s The Furrow I was surprised to find the horse and fog missing. Where was the central image? Explicitly he had used words that built images of the plough and horse and man at dawn but had not used the word light and I had seen the sweat of his back and on the withers but there were only the harnesses and nostril to represent the whole horse. The mood words, out of context, became as much mood laden as a dictionary. Almost the entire right margin are slant rhymes yet reading it I hadn’t felt bashed over the head. Words he chose have become, or were then, archaic. A pity really. Griding as the sound of grinding is a lovely idea. Glebe is the earth belonging to a parish, presumably where the local place name comes from. His use of whence marked his time, perhaps why his poems have less currency now.

In deconstructing Yevtushenko’s Monologue of a Polar Fox On An Alaskan Fur Farm I found, reading the right margin, gave a plot and mood synopsis. It runs as a Cole’s note. The poem in translation without end rhymes yet proportionally I was surprised to find how much words with o ran thru. It is a lamenting poem and, as with Johnson’s sample, the language is stilted to explicit emotionalism. The story didn’t entirely fall apart when in word set. The word I is heavily represented in a poem from the pov of a fox, as political allegory.

It is not the words alone but how they are arrange. Interesting to find how much a poem is a poem down to the word choices alone as well.