Craig Santos Perez, from "understory" (Split this Rock poem of the week)

Poem of the Week: Craig Santos Perez   from understory (to my wife, nālani and our 7-month old daughter, kai) kai cries from teething-- how do new parents comfort a child in pain, bullied in school, shot by a drunk APEC agent? #justicefor -kollinelderts-- nālani gently massages kai's gums with her fingers- how do we wipe away tear-- gas and blood? provide shelter from snipers? disarm occupying armies? #freepalestine-- nālani sings to kai a song about the Hawaiian alphabet-- what dreams will echo inside detention centers and cross teething borders to soothe the thousands of children atop la bestia? #unaccompanied-- nālani rubs kai's back warm with coconut oil-- how do we hold violence at arm's length when raising [our] hands up is no longer a universal sign of surrender? #black livesmatter-- kai finally falls asleep in nālani's cradling arms, skin to skin against the news-- when do we tell our daughter there's no safe place for us to breathe #...   *** From  Hawai'i Review special online issue, Write for Ferguson. With special thanks to editors Anjoli Roy and No'u Revilla.  Used with permission. *** Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa.  We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. Please, visit the poem at our site. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!   If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor. Split This Rock www.SplitThisRock.org 202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org

abu ghraib arias: a reading (from Sand Opera)

The abu ghraib arias: a reading

With the release of the so-called “Torture Report” yesterday, I’ve been casting back to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. After the invasion of Iraq, from late 2003 to 2004, U.S. military police of the Army and Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of outrageous abuses of Iraqi detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, abuses that had been tried and exported from Guantanamo Bay prison and secret "black sites" around the world. Because of extensive photo and video documentation of the abuse by military police themselves, the scandal became an international embarrassment that led W.J.T. Mitchell to declare it, not without hyperbole, the moment that the U.S. lost the war in Iraq.

Sand Opera began out of the vertigo of feeling unheard as an Arab American, in the decade after the terrorist attacks of 2001. After 9/11, Americans turned an ear to the voices of Arabs and Muslims, though often it has been a fearful or selective listening. Even Errol Morris chose to interview only Americans for his Abu Ghraib film, “Standard Operating Procedure.” One centerpiece to Sand Opera is the “abu ghraib arias." It is a dialogue between Standard Operation Procedure for Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, the soldiers who served in Abu Ghraib, and the Abu Ghraib prisoners. I draw upon a number of sources: a Standard Operating Procedure manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (thanks to WikiLeaks); the testimony of Abu Ghraib torture victims found in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: America and the War on Terror; the words of U.S. soldiers and contractors as found in Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’s The Ballad of Abu Ghraib; the official reports on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (the Taguba Report, the Schlesinger Report, etc.); interviews with Joe Darby and Eric Fair (two whistle-blowers); the Bible; and the Code of Hammurabi. 

The following audio performance of the arias involved the piano work of Philip Fournier, and the voices of Danny Caine, Jackie Orchard, Paige Webb, and me (Philip Metres), and was engineered by Mike MacDonald.

http://philipmetres.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/abughraibarias-2-audio-2013.mp3

Mahmoud Darwish's "The Dice Player"

Split This Rock call for poems: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest

December 5, 2014   Updates Poetry and Action for Justice, Black Lives Matter National Action Network March Against Police Violence, Dec. 13, 10:30am Split This Rockin' Holiday & Birthday Bash: Poetry Tag, Dancing, S'moresDec. 13, 7pm Abortion Rights Poetry Contest Now Accepting Submissions: DueJan. 5, 2015 Quick Links       We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest -    Call for Poems that Resist Police Brutality  & Demand Racial Justice Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son-we who believe in freedom cannot rest.                      - Ella Baker Even as our hearts break in rage and anguish over the murder of Black and brown people throughout the land by police who are not held accountable, here at Split This Rock we are heartened by the powerful actions in the streets and the visionary leadership of mostly young people of color in this growing movement for justice. We are also moved by the poets, who continue to speak out, and especially by BlackPoetsSpeakOut and its manifesto: "I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry." Another powerful forum is VONA/Voices Against Racial Injustice. In solidarity, Split This Rock offers our blog as a Virtual Open Mic, open to all:  Send us your poems on the long history of the brutalization of Black and brown bodies and we will publish them on Split This Rock's blog, Blog This Rock, to create a running open mic. We welcome poems new and old, whether previously published or not. (Please include credit information for previously published.) Thematically we are wide open: resistance, mourning, rage, celebration. Send the poem(s) as email attachments (.doc or .docx only) with the subject line "We who believe in freedom" toinfo@splitthisrock.org. From the open mic collection, we will choose poems to run as Poem of the Week in the weeks ahead. We will contact you directly if we decide to use your poem for Poem of the Week. We are proud to begin this series today, with "bitter crop," as our Poem of the Week, by Kelli Stevens Kane. Please share her poem and this call widely. As the virtual open mic grows, we hope to print out and present all the poems to the U.S. Department of Justice, along with the national demands for police accountability and racial justice articulated by Ferguson Action. Stay tuned for details. In grief and resistance, Split This Rock Poem of the Week:  Kelli Stevens Kane      bitter crop  blueberry blackberry as always bleeding, back road or boulevard, our boy crowned with baton, breathing, barely, if you believe the breeze is just  air blowing through branches above the fruited plain have a seat. when our baby left we believed he'd come back in his body. we believed youngberries grew into elderberries. but now, when the wind blows against your necks, know it's him, you feel him now that he's up above the fruited plain don't you? I hate pavement, I hate summer, I hate yellow tape, I hate chokeberry, pokeberry, the way it'll always be too late to comfort him. the way I'll never dare to say I hate you back to our strange America that only protects the few above the fruited plain                                     -for Michael Brown and     *** Used with permission. Kane reads her poem in solidarity withBlackPoetsSpeakOut.  ***   Kelli Stevens Kane is a poet, playwright, and oral historian based in Pittsburgh, PA. She's a Cave Canem Fellow, an August Wilson Center Fellow, and a Flight School Fellow, and has twice received Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grants from The Pittsburgh Foundation. She's studied at VONA, Hurston/Wright, and Callaloo. She reads her poetry and oral history, and performs her one woman show, BIG GEORGE, nationally. For more information, please visit www.kellistevenskane.com and kskpoet.wordpress.com.      ***     We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. Please,visit the poem at our site. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!    If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor. Split This Rock www.SplitThisRock.org 202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org