[News] On Refuge and Language, Suheir Hammad

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  On Refuge and Language, Suheir Hammad


  I do not wish
  To place words in living mouths
  Or bury the dead dishonorably

  I am not deaf to cries escaping shelters
  That citizens are not refugees Refugees are not Americans

  I will not use language
  One way or another
  To accommodate my comfort

  I will not look away

  All I know is this

  No peoples ever choose to claim status of dispossessed
  No peoples want pity above compassion
  No enslaved peoples ever called themselves slaves

  What do we pledge allegiance to?

  A government that leaves its old
  To die of thirst surrounded by water
  Is a foreign government

  People who are streaming
  Illiterate into paperwork
  Have long ago been abandoned

  I think of coded language
  And all that words carry on their backs

  I think of how it is always the poor
  Who are tagged and boxed with labels
  Not of their own choosing

  I think of my grandparents
  And how some called them refugees
  Others called them non-existent
  They called themselves landless
  Which means homeless

  Before the hurricane
  No tents were prepared for the fleeing
  Because Americans do not live in tents
  Tents are for Haiti for Bosnia for Rwanda

  Refugees are the rest of the world

  Those left to defend their human decency
  Against conditions the rich keep their animals from
  Those who have too many children
  Those who always have open hands and empty bellies
  Those whose numbers are massive
  Those who seek refuge
  From nature's currents and man's resources

  Those who are forgotten in the mean times

  Those who remember

  Ahmad from Guinea makes my falafel sandwich and says
  So this is your country
  Yes Amadou this my country
  And these my people

  Evacuated as if criminal
  Rescued by neighbors
  Shot by soldiers

  Adamant they belong

  The rest of the world can now see
  What I have seen

  Do not look away

  The rest of the world lives here too
  In America



************************************************************************
  "Love the people, serve them and become a part of them."--Leila Khaled 
('My People Shall Live')



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