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Monday, June 18, 2007

SLEEPERS AWAKE

Dear Sally,

I read the beautiful, well-reasoned letter from the Palestinian poet to her inducted and would-be terrorist brethren [printed below]. It is sweet and sincere but to me futile. The people she addresses are not amenable to her pleas, nor will they be until things change greatly. That change lies with us who as yet do not see our co-dependency with them through incitement and fear. Let me explain myself.

Slowly the gleaming platinum-shiny surface of race, ethnicity, religion is revealed as a plating with a shelf life shorter--hopefully, much shorter--than the true heart and body of gold it conceals. It is that skin we all share as common fact/faculty. And once the skin is shed, and we stand revealed in our true, shared softer flesh of shining, there can be no killing and, for some of the stoutest hearts, not even the thought of it. Terrorists have already refused any but their second skin. Their belief in it is dissoluble only through death (usually suicide). We must reach the people who drive them to this point. But we must do so purged of the emotions that drive them to the terrorist's point of no return.

For me, there can be no killing, even, I pray, in self-defense. I have seen and heard and read of despicable men whose acts are so ignominious that I would be tempted to inflict cruelties commensurate to their own upon them. But who will undertake them on my behalf? Why should I ask another to commit an act I could never perform?

I have a friend who wrote a book about four of America's dwindling band of professional executioners. I asked him how he felt about capital punishment after he finished writing the book and he answered, "I can now see both sides of the argument." Writing the book actually opened him up to the possibility that taking life could be justified. I wondered if the book had been worth the change from being against the death penalty to racking ambivalence about it. Amy who cried when they sentenced Timothy McVeigh to lethal injection (or was it the electric chair?) told me after he was executed that she believed his sentence was a justifiable exclusion to her opposition to capital punishment. When she said that, I cannot tell you how much I missed the Amy who had wept at his sentence.

I realized this morning, after reading about addiction last night, that citizenry is an avowed state of awareness. I also realized that the Declaration of Independence is a series of vows and commentaries on those vows. My first vow is what the Buddhists call mindfulness. Without the substrate of mindfulness, America, to me, is nothing but a nation of Hungry Ghosts where the first duties of its inhabitants (willingly stripped of their citizenship from any covenantal standpoint) are fear and craving.

Lately, I have had to fight some long-lingering demons who I did not recognize as such because they served at and for my pleasure. Now they scream like banshees for resumption of servitude within me. I feel like I have one last chance at true life but, at the same time, pray for one last shore leave on the isle of the damned. There's only one trouble with 'escape.' The isle of the damned is clearly showing signs of age and authorship in my mind. My sisters of mercy are using far more botox than I remember.

Now here's the good part of hell. God will, if asked, keep us company even there. As Ramakrishna said to the womanizer who begged for his help: "Never stop seeing the Mother in any woman that you desire or touch."

Slowly the thought of unity, the way of oneness, the deepest human ontology of God become the habits and habitat of this hand-me-down consciousness. As the Zen Master said, "My robe is worn out from a lifetime of walking in dew-covered grass." The karma-mind is also becoming threadbare, giving way to the Dharma-mind. Fatigue from craving is bringing glimpses of the original mind, awakening from a cryogenic sleep in this fangless, fearless haunted house where I was tempted to think it was held hostage. But it was just waiting for its first true use in my life. One cry to it in a context of deepest need and nothing can keep it from taking full occupancy of the house. This can happen. Each one of us knows it can happen and secretly suspects that we were born for the purpose of such an event. In that sense Dostoevsky is right, "Each one of us is happy, but we just don't know it." It is that happiness that is enshrined in America's Declaration of Indepen dence. But it is a pursuit--as in discipline.

I write all of this to you because I don't know if pleading with terrorists is the way to set the stage for a better world or a greater number of illuminations. I have chosen instead to plead with those who create the intolerable conditions which push terrorists over the edge of reason--knowing that in their lack of compassion and ignorance of their contribution to the plight of such people and their irreparable states of mind that they become equally dispossessed of their humanity.

To me, humanity is nothing less that our collective sentience risen through sightings and sittings with embodiments such as Christ and Buddha to full and full-time awareness. If our individual humanity still sees the embodiment as other and therefore as an impossible measure of conduct, then to me it has not discovered that to worship God requires commitment to the complete flowering of consciousness and the well-being of the entire mankind-composite. "I only give you what you are ready for," Bawa said a thousand times after cracking our skulls with his staff.

Unawakened sentience is too often the shroud of our divinity. For me, awakening requires a balance between non-engagement of our lives in the constant fear and craving that have become our most familiar forms of allegiance to our world and engagement in activity to alleviate the suffering of those who do not have the leisure that I do to pursue happiness. Henceforth my letters and remonstrations will be directed to those sleeping co-dependents whose awakening is the only hope and cure for the threats and curses they force their 'enemies' to heap upon them.

Love,

David

Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab-American Poet:

To Any Would-Be Terrorists

I am sorry I have to call you that, but I don't know how else to get your attention. I hate that word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East? And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that's what they wanted to do, please know the mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now.

Because I feel a little closer to you than many Americans could possibly feel, or ever want to feel, I insist that you listen to me. Sit down and listen. I know what kinds of foods you like. I would feed them to you if you were right here, because it is very very important that you listen. I am humble in my country's pain and I am furious.

My Palestinian father became a refugee in 1948. He came to the United States as a college student. He is 74 years old now and still homesick. He has planted fig trees. He has invited all the Ethiopians in his neighborhood to fill their little paper sacks with his figs. He has written columns and stories saying the Arabs are not terrorists, he has worked all his life to defy that word. Arabs are businessmen and students and kind neighbors. There is no one like him and there are thousands like him - gentle Arab daddies who make everyone laugh around the dinner table, who have a hard time with headlines, who stand outside in the evenings with their hands in their pockets staring toward the far horizon.

I am sorry if you did not have a father like that. I wish everyone could have a father like that.

My hard-working American mother has spent 50 years trying to convince her fellow teachers and choir mates not to believe stereotypes about the Middle East. She always told them, there is a much larger story. If you knew the story, you would not jump to conclusions from what you see in the news. But now look at the news. What a mess has been made. Sometimes I wish everyone could have parents from different countries or ethnic groups so they would be forced to cross boundaries, to believe in mixtures, every day of their lives. Because this is what the world calls us to do. WAKE UP!

The Palestinian grocer in my Mexican-American neighborhood paints pictures of the Palestinian flag on his empty cartons. He paints trees and rivers. He gives his paintings away. He says, "Don't insult me" when I try to pay him for a lemonade. Arabs have always been famous for their generosity. Remember? My half-Arab brother with an Arabic name looks more like an Arab than many full-blooded Arabs do and he has to fly every week.

My Palestinian cousins in Texas have beautiful brown little boys. Many of them haven't gone to school yet. And now they have this heavy word to carry in their backpacks along with the weight of their papers and books. I repeat, the mission was a terrible success. But it was also a complete, total tragedy and I want you to think about a few things.

1. Many people, thousands of people, perhaps even millions of people, in the United States are very aware of the long unfairness of our country's policies regarding Israel and Palestine. We talk about this all the time. It exhausts us and we keep talking. We write letters to newspapers, to politicians, to each other. We speak out in public even when it is uncomfortable to do so, because that is our responsibility. Many of these people aren't even Arabs. Many happen to be Jews who are equally troubled by the inequity. I promise you this is true. Because I am Arab-American, people always express these views to me and I am amazed how many understand the intricate situation and have strong, caring feelings for Arabs and Palestinians even when they don't have to. Think of them, please: All those people who have been st anding up for Arabs when they didn't have to. But as ordinary citizens we don't run the government and don't get to make all our government's policies, which makes us sad sometimes. We believe in the power of the word and we keep using it, even when it seems no one large enough is listening. That is one of the best things about this country: the free power of free words. Maybe we take it for granted too much. Many of the people killed in the World Trade Center probably believed in a free Palestine and were probably talking about it all the time.

But this tragedy could never help the Palestinians. Somehow, miraculously, if other people won't help them more, they are going to have to help themselves. And it will be peace, not violence, that fixes things. You could ask any one of the kids in the Seeds of Peace organization and they would tell you that. Do you ever talk to kids? Please, please, talk to more kids.


2. Have you noticed how many roads there are? Sure you have. You must check out maps and highways and small alternate routes just like anyone else. There is no way everyone on earth could travel on the same road, or believe in exactly the same religion. It would be too crowded, it would be dumb. I don't believe you want us all to be Muslims. My Palestinian grandmother lived to be 106 years old, and did not read or write, but even she was much smarter than that. The only place she ever went beyond Palestine and Jordan was to Mecca, by bus, and she was very proud to be called a Hajji and to wear white clothes afterwards. She worked very hard to get stains out of everyone's dresses -- scrubbing them with a stone. I think she would consider the recent tragedies a terrible stain on her religion and her whole part of th e world. She would weep. She was scared of airplanes anyway. She wanted people to worship God in whatever ways they felt comfortable. Just worship. Just remember God in every single day and doing. It didn't matter what they called it. When people asked her how she felt about the peace talks that were happening right before she died, she puffed up like a proud little bird and said, in Arabic, "I never lost my peace inside." To her, Islam was a welcoming religion. After her home in Jerusalem was stolen from her, she lived in a small village that contained a Christian shrine. She felt very tender toward the people who would visit it. A Jewish professor tracked me down a few years ago in Jerusalem to tell me she changed his life after he went to her village to do an oral history proje c t on Arabs. "Don't think she only mattered to you!" he said. "She gave me a whole different reality to imagine - yet it was amazing how close we became. Arabs could never be just a "project" after that."

Did you have a grandmother or two? Mine never wanted people to be pushed around. What did yours want? Reading about Islam since my grandmother died, I note the "tolerance" that was "typical of Islam" even in the old days. The Muslim leader Khalid ibn al-Walid signed a Jerusalem treaty which declared, "in the name of God, you have complete security for your churches which shall not be occupied by the Muslims or destroyed." It is the new millenium in which we should be even smarter than we used to be, right? But I think we have fallen behind.

3. Many Americans do not want to kill any more innocent people anywhere in the world. We are extremely worried about military actions killing innocent people. We didn't like this in Iraq, we never liked it anywhere. We would like no more violence, from us as well as from you. HEAR US! We would like to stop the terrifying wheel of violence, just stop it, right on the road, and find something more creative to do to fix these huge problems we have. Violence is not creative, it is stupid and scary and many of us hate all those terrible movies and TV shows made in our own country that try to pretend otherwise. Don't watch them. Everyone should stop watching them. An appetite for explosive sounds and toppling buildings is not a healthy thing for anyone in any country. The USA should apologize to the whole world for sending this trash out into the air and for paying people to make it.

But here's something good you may not know - one of the best-selling books of poetry in the United States in recent years is the Coleman Barks translation of Rumi, a mystical Sufi poet of the 13th century, and Sufism is Islam and doesn't that make you glad?

Everyone is talking about the suffering that ethnic Americans are going through. Many will no doubt go through more of it, but I would like to thank everyone who has sent me a consolation card. Americans are usually very kind people. Didn't your colleagues find that out during their time living here? It is hard to imagine they missed it. How could they do what they did, knowing that?

4. We will all die soon enough. Why not take the short time we have on this delicate planet and figure out some really interesting things we might do together? I promise you, God would be happier. So many people are always trying to speak for God - I know it is a very dangerous thing to do. I tried my whole life not to do it. But this one time is an exception. Because there are so many people crying and scarred and confused and complicated and exhausted right now - it is as if we have all had a giant simultaneous break-down. I beg you, as your distant Arab cousin, as your American neighbor, listen to me. Our hearts are broken, as yours may also feel broken in some ways we can't understand, unless you tell us in wo rds. Killing people won't tell us. We can't read that message. Find another way to live. Don't expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read Arabic poetry. Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing. A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, "If we read one another, we won't kill one another." Read American poetry. Plant mint. Find a friend who is so different from you, you can't believe how much you have in common. Love them. Let them love you. Surprise people in gentle ways, as friends do. The rest of us will try harder too. Make our family proud.

naomi shihab nye

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