it looks very much like the face of the legal citizenry,
though perhaps sometimes more hopeful
sometimes more frightened.
i remember my grandmother was always deathly afraid
of any document requiring a signature,
school report cards, etc,
because she didn't want to get picked up immigration.

still if she had ever been detected by immigration, she wouldn't have faced anything as severe as the girl faces, should she be deported (found this in today's new york times):

Young Woman Fears Deportation, and Mutilation

"Adama Bah’s schoolmates were jubilant when she returned to 10th grade at Heritage High School in Manhattan in May 2005 after six weeks in a distant juvenile detention center. Her release put to rest the federal government’s unexplained assertion that Adama, a popular 16-year-old who wore jeans under her Islamic garb, was a potential suicide bomber.

"But a year and a half later, with many of her friends planning proms and applying to college, Ms. Bah, now 18, was still wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and tethered to a 10 p.m. government curfew, restrictions that were conditions of her release. And she was still facing deportation to Guinea, where she has not lived since she was 2.

"Today, at a closed hearing in Manhattan’s federal building, she will plead for political asylum from Guinea’s entrenched practice of female genital mutilation, which has marked all the women in her extended family, including her mother. An immigration judge could decide her fate on the spot.

“I’m worried about being sent back,” Ms. Bah said on Tuesday in her first extended interview about the lasting consequences of a case that briefly became a cause célèbre in the debate over government vigilance and the protection of individual liberties. “I’m worried about being separated from my family. This is all I have left now — what hasn’t been taken.”

"Officially, she and a 16-year-old Bangladeshi girl arrested in Queens the same day were detained solely because their childhood visas were no longer valid. That remains the only reason Ms. Bah is in deportation proceedings, and the sole legal basis for an order last year that released the other girl, Tashnuba Hayder, on the condition that she leave the country immediately."

"Even now, Ms. Bah says she has no idea whether her slight acquaintance with Ms. Hayder was what caused agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hold her for questioning. Though a document provided by a federal agent at the time said the F.B.I. considered the girls “an imminent threat” to national security, it provided no evidence, and officials refused to discuss the matter.

“Why me?” she asked, before her volunteer lawyers warned that a judicial order limits what she can say about the experience. “Nobody answers, why me?”

She has had little time to dwell on the question, however, because she has been struggling to replace her father as the family’s primary breadwinner. Her father, a cabdriver who was arrested along with her and held on immigration violations, stayed in detention until his deportation last month. Her mother, illiterate and speaking little English, soon lost the family business, a trinket stand."

more here.

Labels: it takes a village, voices

Posted by call me aja at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments

they have ruined the world." so said damian marley in the song (appropriately titled "educated fools") on the album that first caused me to fall in love with him, halfway tree.

i'm inclined to agree with him, and not just cuz i love him. in fact, i think i love him because i agree. education and the supposed enlightenment it brings are supposed to be the keys to bettering the human condition, right? but more and more people are getting that education, and is the human condition improving? maybe. but i'm definitely not convinced that it is.

some people make the one-way elevator comparison. people, especially those from typically underserved communities, get lucky and get on that elevator and go all the way up and graduate from college, and then never go back to where they started and try and help out.

some say, i can't help others before i help myself. can't be too mad at that, it is understandable logic. i guess the problem with that type of thinking is that it is difficult to reckon exactly when one has helped oneself enough. there is always more one can reach for for oneself. like big, said, mo' money, mo' problems. success takes a lot hard of hard work to achieve, and a lot of maintenance once you achieve it.

i guess the best thing to do is avoid that thinking entirely. and i would guess you've gotta start early. so when i came across this article about p.s. 27, an elementary school in red hook, i was moved and impressed. all of the academic education in the world won't teach you how to live, and how to feel good about yourself, and how to reach back and help others...

"But at a public school in Red Hook, Brooklyn, "caring is part of the curriculum," says principal Sara Belcher-Barnes. So when fifth-graders raised $300 through bake sales, they donated it to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. When third-graders collected art supplies, they shipped them to a village in Ghana. And when second-graders grew lettuce and radishes, they made a salad for a Red Hook senior center.

"I was happy, because I gave something to the senior citizens," Kymani Jackson, 8, proudly explained. "They said it was really good."

the article later states:

"While improving academics and graduation rates are the top priorities, "we also want our students, when they leave us, to become very productive adults. And community service does that," said Marge Feinberg, spokeswoman for the city Department of Education.

"Red Hook is a gritty, working-class and somewhat isolated section of Brooklyn. Nearly all the students are black or Hispanic, and fewer than 40 percent meet state standards in reading and math."

well, thank you for teaching the kids that you don't have to wait til you get to the end of the elevator ride to get to doing. thank you for caring. and this might seem somewhat incongruous, but i think it isn't really, cuz i just recently read he's just not that into you, and the author stated that he believed in the verb love. love is not just a shadowy feeling or concept, it exists in an action state. and warren buffett getting old and giving vast billions to a supercharity is all good, but really, why sit around and wait for folks like him when your mind works and your eyes see and your ears hear and, wonder of wonder, you have reason and opposable thumbs of your own?

Labels: brooklyn, education, it takes a village

Posted by call me aja at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments

Published: August 9, 2006

The youngest inmates of Rikers Island have plenty to worry about: their pending court cases, resolving their charges, when they might reunite with their families. More immediately, they worry that the guards will spontaneously search their bodies and cells.

Yet on a recent morning, Jackie Sheeler, who leads poetry writing workshops at one of the jail’s four schools, encouraged the young men there to worry about other things, like putting their thoughts into verse.

“I know you had a lockdown this morning and you’re in jail, not to mention you’re in summer school,” she told the 14 students in her class at Horizon Academy, a high school at the jail for inmates ages 16 to 21.

Lamenting how hard things can sometimes be, she added that “some of my best writing has come from the worst times of my life.”

Ms. Sheeler, 48, a dark-haired woman with black tattoos resembling vines snaking up her arms, was invited to teach at the jail by Marty Flaster, an English teacher at Horizon who had seen her appear at a poetry reading series she moderates at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village.

He wanted to pay her for her time, she said. But knowing Horizon had a shoestring budget, and a dearth of visiting artists, Ms. Sheeler suggested that she be named “poet laureate of Rikers Island” as her reward.

“The idea kind of came to me out of the blue,” said Ms. Sheeler, whose latest collection of verse, “The Memory Factory” (Buttonwood Press), was published in 2002.

With no one else clamoring to be chief poet of the city’s largest jail complex, the Department of Correction had little reason to object, although a spokesman pointed out that the position was not an official one. Ms. Sheeler was named to the post at the Horizon graduation ceremony in late June. Within days, she had updated shoutedword.com, her Web site, to take note of her new title.

“She really gets to them,” Gloria Ortiz, the Horizon principal, said of Ms. Sheeler’s students. “It’s not above their heads. She touches on issues that affect them and she makes writing fun, which it’s what it’s supposed to be.”

Ms. Sheeler said that poetry and writing in her youth helped lift her above poverty and drug use. Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she said, she had an “abusive” and “racist” father who kept her mother’s Puerto Rican heritage a secret.

“I’d sit in the windowsill in my room and cry and write these pathetic little couplets,” Ms. Sheeler said. “I would go to the page to figure out how I felt.”

Between smoking marijuana and drinking beer in a nearby park, she found time to attend English classes at Lafayette High School. She said a beating by her father, provoked by her kissing a black man, was a “real turning point for me in terms of wildness.”

She began having sex, using harder drugs and exploring Greenwich Village. At 16, she discovered Poez, a street performer in Washington Square, and Sylvia Plath.

“Between Poez and Sylvia Plath, who I really didn’t understand because of the density of her language, poetry wasn’t just writing poems, there was this whole other wild place you could go with it,” Ms. Sheeler said.

She lived in several communes before she met a man, a heroin addict who had been imprisoned for burglary. Although “heroin was supposed to be off limits” when they decided to be married, “once we took that limit off the table, it was off to the races,” Ms. Sheeler said.

“I went down further and faster than I had ever done before.”

In “Witnessless,” published in “The Memory Factory,” Ms. Sheeler described her courthouse wedding in October 1987 as “blurry with methadone and bad coke.” The couple lost their apartment and panhandled to support their addiction, she said. In July 1989, her husband disappeared. By the end of the month, she had entered drug rehabilitation, and the couple divorced three years later. Her former husband committed suicide in 1995, she said.

Upon her release from rehab, Ms. Sheeler threw herself into the arts. In addition to writing her collection of poetry, she has edited “Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About Police,” which was published in 2003 by Soft Skull Press in Brooklyn. She is also the lyricist for the Manhattan rock band Talk Engine and maintains a regional poetry calendar at poetz.com.

On the recent morning at Rikers, Ms. Sheeler entered a series of checkpoints and was escorted into a classroom, where her students trickled in after the lockdown. She began class by explaining poetry’s relationship to hip-hop and cracking jokes on the “dead old white men from England” who were poetry’s primary audience 300 years ago. The young men were energized.

“The best poetry is jail poetry,” one of the students remarked. “Because that’s where you let out all your feelings.”

“I think the best poetry comes from pain,” she replied.

Like many of the students, Anthony Ayala, 20, used a free-writing exercise to delve into the gloom of incarceration.

Give me light

Life is light, but

Will I be able to see it

If I got released from prison

Then my light will be a given.

“When in rehab, or when in prison,” Ms. Sheeler said, “and you’re with people who basically have nothing, if you can bring that gift in self-confidence, that ‘aha’ — that’s what it’s all about to me.”

Ms. Sheeler, talking about her workshops, added: “In all the groups, there’s this inherent human fear of the blank page. This is about self-expression, and helping the students past those type of barriers. Helping them to understand that punctuation and spelling are not necessarily about good writing, but getting some good images on paper, getting the words out there.”

Labels: it takes a village, poetry

Posted by call me aja at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments

i'm on a million listservs, and i just got this email containing a link to a very interesting article on yahoo, entitled: "Minorities seek history class changes." the article goes on to detail common misconceptions people hold because, as well all know, history is written by the victors. it says:

"American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads. The lessons have left out a lot.

"Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War. And Asian-Americans had been living in California and Louisiana since the 1700s."

you can find the rest of the article here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060820/ap_on_re_us/forgotten_history

ok, so they've got me hooked with the first two paragraphs. and while it's not telling me anything new, its kinda nice to see old facts in the news if they are facts that people often deny, or at least skirt. but reading further, i came to this paragraph which absolutely made my head spin:

"Some tales have gone untold because, in the less-diverse America of the past, minorities didn't make the decisions on textbooks and other means of passing along history. And in many cases, minorities who had faced blatant discrimination wanted to discard evidence of past horrors."

the LESS-DIVERSE AMERICA OF THE PAST? i was under the impression that this article was about the little-acknowledged fact that america has always been a diverse place, and now needs to start acting like it. but apparently, i misunderstood. apparently, america has always had its token minorities, and now that today's token minorities are making noise and having rights and stuff, its time to make a bit of a bow to them, and throw them in the history books.

if the lesson of history is supposed to be that people of all sorts were here from the founding of america, then we can't say that some tales have gone untold because america was less diverse. the paragraph has it almost right: these minorities didn't have any say in what information was deemed true and valuable history, and what was not. i don't know why that less-diverse america of the past bit was tacked onto that paragraph, because those few words, in my view, undermine the work of the entire article.

what a small, harmless, blamefree phrase -- a phrase, that is, that refuses to admit of blame. as though a diverse america only recently happened, as though diversity is a new and surprising, phenomenon, as though we kind of like it, but we think the way it was back in the day weren't so bad either. as though we could take this new way or leave by the roadside. and minorities, minorities, minorities...it really kinda makes me sad that we use this word, that we are not more conscious of our word choices. minority--as though a living, breathing individual who works and contributes to society is, in fact, only a small part of it. funny how we apologize to pluto and several other smaller heavenly bodies and rewrite the definition of the word planet to offer them inclusion, and they can't even feel. but we don't fully rewrite the definition of citizen, because we don't care how people feel when they learn that their history doesn't matter. not that much. ok, maybe a little. but just a little.

we don't think before we speak, and that's a shame, because words are so powerful. obviously, they are powerful--powerful enough that slaves were forbidden to read, powerful enough that people who could not perfectly recite the lord's prayer could be hanged as witches in colonial america, poweful enough that joseph mccarthy could get books banned, powerful enough that the federal government has recently upped the fine for using "inappropriate language" on primetime television. minority is not just a figure of speech. cuz speech is voice is life. and life is what you make it.

and here's the rub: the silencing of the histories of millions of people is no small, harmless, historical anomaly that's really no one's fault. part of the work of telling the whole story has to be recognizing, openly admitting, the fact that that silencing was a choice on the part of society.

but folks, here's the good part, we can now choose to not remain silent. and we can choose to listen, really listen, when other folks choose to openly use their voice.

Labels: it takes a village, never forgetting, so opinionated

Posted by call me aja at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

i worked very late last night (got home at around midnight...my cat was quite irritated at the lateness of her dinner).

so i was in the car, coming home from work, and i was talking to the driver, a very nice man from tibet. i'd asked him where he was from, and he said guess, so i guessed almost every country in asia until he finally, laughingly said he was from tibet. he said that he was a mountain man, and you could tell a tibetan by his ponytail. he did, in fact, have a very nice, longish ponytail. he'd been in new york nine years, and he drove very much like an nyc car driver. so i learned a few facts - tibet is roughly 12,000 feet above sea level. and that brad pitt movie seven years in tibet was actually filmed in argentina.

so, i know there isn't really much to this story, but then i thought, you never really know what all the person next to you has seen in the world, what he or she really knows about the world. and i'd never met anyone from tibet before, and i may never ever go to tibet, but even the things that seem most insignificant to my daily life...

(read: a continuing sovereignty conflict in a small mountain country may or may not have been the/a reason why a man left his home country and moved to another, became a driver, and picked me up and brought me home on a late night at work - yes, that conflict may or may not have put that man in charge of my safe conveyance home, that is, in charge of my life and limb)

...are really not all that insignificant. and what's funny is that sometimes if the news doesn't lead with a story that's happening in brooklyn, i don't even care to watch it.

Labels: it takes a village, other stuff

Posted by call me aja at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments