Appropriate poem for 4th July

From Iraqi Democrats against Occupation

America, America
God save America
My home sweet home!
by Saadi Youssef*

The French general who raised his tricolour
over Nugrat al-Salman where I was a prisoner thirty years ago . . .
in the middle of that U-turn
that split the back of the Iraqi army,
the general who loved St Emilion wines
called Nagrat al-Salman a fort . . .
Of the surface of the earth, generals know only two dimensions:
whatever rises is a fort
whatever spreads is a battlefield.
How ignorant the general was!
But Liberation was better versed in topography.
The Iraqi boy who conquered her front page
sat carbonised behind a steering wheel
on the Kuwait–Safwan highway
while television cameras
(the booty of the defeated and their identity)
were safe in the truck like a storefront
on rue Rivoli.
The neutron bomb is highly intelligent,
it distinguishes between
an “I” and an “Identity”.

God save America
My home sweet home!

(Blues)

How long must I walk to Sacramento
How long will I walk to reach my home
How long will I walk to reach my girl
How long must I walk to Sacramento
For two days, no boat has sailed this stream
two days, two days, two days
Honey, how can I ride?
I know this stream
but, O but, O but, for two days

La L La La L La
La L La La L La

A stranger gets scared
Don’t fear dear horse
Don’t fear the wolves of the wild
Don’t fear for the land is my land

La L La La L La
La L La La L La

A stranger gets scared
God save America
My home sweet home!

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and Long John Silver’s parrot and the terraces of New Orleans
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American. Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age!
I need neither oil, nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the donkey.
Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this wooden bridge.
I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers.
I need the village not New York.
Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to the teeth?
Why did you come all the way to distant Basra where fish used to swim by our doorsteps.
Pigs do not forage here. I only have these water buffaloes lazily chewing on water lilies.
Leave me alone soldier.
Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear.
Leave me my migrating birds and the green plumes.
Take your roaring iron birds and your Tomahawk missiles. I am not your foe.
I am the one who wades up to the knees in rice paddies.
Leave me to my curse.
I do not need your day of doom.

God save America
My home sweet home!

America
let us exchange your gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond’s golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe’s giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.

Take the Afghani Mujahideen’s beard
and give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussain
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.

Now as I look across the balcony
across the summer sky, the summery summer
Damascus spins, dizzied among television aerials
then it sinks, deeply, in the stories of the forts
and towers
and the arabesques of ivory
and sinks, deeply, from Rukn al-Din
then disappears from the balcony.

And now
I remember trees:
the date palm of our mosque in Basra, at the end of Basra
the bird’s beak
and a child’s secret
a summer feast.
I remember the date palm.
I touch it. I become it, when it falls black without fronds
when a dam fell hewn by lightning.
And I remember the mighty mulberry
when it rumbled, butchered with an axe . . .
to fill the stream with leaves
and birds
and angels
and green blood.
I remember when pomegranate blossoms covered the sidewalks,
the students were leading the workers’ parade . . .

The trees die
pummelled
dizzied,
not standing
the trees die.

God save America
My home sweet home!
We are not hostages, America
and your soldiers are not God’s soldiers . . .
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods
the gods of bulls
the gods of fires
the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song . . .
We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor
who emerges out of the farmers’ ribs
hungry
and bright
and raises heads up high . . .
America, we are the dead
Let your soldiers come
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him
We are the drowned ones, dear lady

We are the drowned
Let the water come


*Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 in Basra, Iraq. He has published thirty volumes of poetry, seven books of prose, and has rendered into Arabic major works by such writers as Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, Nuruddin Farah, and Wole Soyinka. He left Iraq in 1979, and after many detours, working as a journalist, publisher, and political activist.

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Inmates' words: The poems of Guantanamo

From The Independent
21 June 2007
Leonard Doyle reports

The publication of an anthology of works, composed on paper cups by detainees, provides a harrowing insight into the torments and fading hopes of prisoners.

[...] The thoughts of the inmates are considered so potentially dangerous by the US military that they are not even trusted with pen and paper. The only exception is an occasional 10-minute period when they are allowed to write to their families via the International Red Cross. Even then the words they write are heavily censored.

The 380 or so inmates of Guantanamo include some avowed Islamic militants and al-Qa'ida fighters. But the majority are there because they were swept up by the police and intelligence services of other countries working on behalf of the US. In their despair many of these detainees have turned to verse to express their innermost feelings.

Others have attempted or committed suicide. One of the poets is a Bahraini man who has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003. He has tried to kill himself 12 times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.

There are other tragic tales behind the verses. The "cup poems" of Guantanamo speak of the strange absence of flowers in spring, the bangles worn by young women and handcuffs on the militants.

Fragments survived in the memory of the poet Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost after his eventual release, but thousands of lines of poetry he wrote in prison have disappeared.

Dost, a respected religious scholar, poet, and journalist - and author of nearly 20 books - until his arrest in 2001, spent nearly three years in Guantanamo with his brother. Sent home two years ago, the brothers were picked up by Pakistani intelligence and they too disappeared. Nothing has been heard of them since.

Aami al Haj, a Sudanese national, was a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan for al-Jazeera television, when, in 2001, he was arrested stripped of his passport and press card and handed over to US forces. He was tortured at both Bagram air base and Kandahar before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay. The US military says he was a financial courier for Chechen rebels and that he assisted al-Qa'ida but has offered no evidence to support the claims.

"When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees, Hot tears covered my face," he wrote from his prison cell. "They have monuments to liberty And freedom of opinion, which is well and good. But I explained to them, that Architecture is not justice."

THE POEMS

Humiliated In The Shackles

By Sami al Hajj

When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees,

Hot tears covered my face.

When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed

A message for my son.

Mohammad, I am afflicted.

In my despair, I have no one but Allah for comfort.

The oppressors are playing with me,

As they move freely around the world.

They ask me to spy on my countrymen,

Claiming it would be a good deed.

They offer me money and land,

And freedom to go where I please.

Their temptations seize

My attention like lightning in the sky.

But their gift is an empty snake,

Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom,

They have monuments to liberty

And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.

But I explained to them that

Architecture is not justice.

America, you ride on the backs of orphans,

And terrorize them daily.

Bush, beware.

The world recognizes an arrogant liar.

To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears.

I am homesick and oppressed.

Mohammad, do not forget me.

Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man.

I was humiliated in the shackles.

How can I now compose verses? How can I now write?

After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears,

How can I write poetry?

My soul is like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish,

Violent with passion.

I am a captive, but the crimes are my captors'.

I am overwhelmed with apprehension.

Lord, unite me with my son Mohammad.

Lord, grant success to the righteous.

An Al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami al Hajj, a Sudanese, was visiting his brother in Damascus after the 11 September attacks when he got a call asking him to go to Pakistan to cover the impending war in Afghanistan. Instead, he ended up in Guantanamo where he claims he has been severely and regularly beaten, scarring his face.

Death Poem

By Jumah al Dossari

Take my blood.

Take my death shroud and

The remnants of my body.

Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,

To the judges and

To the people of conscience,

Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,

Of this innocent soul.

Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,

Of this wasted, sinless soul,

Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors of peace".

Arrested in Pakistan and held in solitary confinement since 2003, Jumah al Dossari's mental wellbeing is worrying his lawyers. The 33-year old Bahraini national has tried to kill himself 12 times since his incarceration in Guantanamo. On one visit, his lawyer found him hanging in a bedsheet noose, with a deep gash in one wrist. In a letter Mr Dossari wrote in 2005, he said: "The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people and I have been destroyed."

Is It True?

By Osama Abu Kadir

Is it true that the grass grows again after rain?

Is it true that the flowers will rise up again in the Spring?

Is it true that birds will migrate home again?

Is it true that the salmon swim back up their streams?

It is true. This is true. These are all miracles.

But is it true that one day we'll leave Guantanamo Bay?

Is it true that one day we'll go back to our homes?

I sail in my dreams. I am dreaming of home.

To be with my children, each one part of me;

To be with my wife and the ones that I love;

To be with my parents, my world's tenderest hearts.

I dream to be home, to be free from this cage.

But do you hear me, oh Judge, do you hear me at all?

We are innocent, here, we've committed no crime.

Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still

Justice and compassion remain in this world!

Shortly after 11 September, Osama Abu Kadir travelled to Pakistan to perform charity work in Afghanistan with the Islamic missionary group Tablighi Jamat. The US claims Tablighi was providing fighters for jihad in Afghanistan and arrested Mr Kadir near Jalalabad in November 2001. In his native Jordan, he was known as a dedicated family man who worked as a truck driver. In Guantanamo, he is known as prisoner number 651.

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40 YEARS of OCCUPATION and still the cheap shots against the Palestinians from the usual suspects

It is too easy for me to pick on the Jewish News and it would be a cheap shot to vilify its Six-Day War 40th Anniversary Issue.
Then again, I live in a neighbourhood where this right-wing paper is free in the local supermarket and I am angry, ANGRY about its puerile, bullying tone, and sickened by its facile propaganda. So in answer to one gloating cheap shot against the Palestinian people - the fortieth birthday celebration of an illegal occupation - here is my own:
How can a paper that dares to call itself the Jewish News, endorse such inhumanely biased and pitiful journalism? In an item called Key rhetoric from the 1967 war of words, I looked in vain for a considered exposition on the impoverished rhetoric that triumphs in times of war. As Jacqueline Rose says in her Guardian feature on the poetry that came out of that war, Words without borders, to speak the unspoken, "When rhetoric has played such a key role in establishing the political reality, to challenge that rhetoric is to unravel political conviction at its source."
The JN is not interested in such unravelling, rather it seeks to reaffirm a false dichotomy to be found throughout its paper, between the peace loving Israelis and the bloodthirsty Arabs:
"Spearheading those forces lined up against Israel, Egypt's Gamal Abdal Nasser made no secret of his intentions ahead of the war when he declared: "We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood."
The JN then adds that the most important statement of war on the Israeli side came from Defence Minister Moshe Dayan:
"following the reunification of Jerusalem, he announced: "To our Arab neighbours, we extend our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights. We did not come to Jerusalem for the sake of other peoples' holy places, and not to interfere with the adherents of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and to live there together with others in unity."
On the facing page, there is an interview with Moshe Dayan's daughter, Yael, who is asked how her late father would now regard the situation. Her answer is in part a very muted recognition of the failure of Israel to live up to the 'promises' of her father: "he certainly wouldn't have wanted to sit in the middle of a dense Palestinian populations with these kind of settlements." The paper would not seem to agree with her, as elsewhere the odious columnist, Charlie Wolf claims to hardly be able to hold back his tears of laughter when reviewing the Independent paper, that regularly covers Israeli war crimes: "The Independent had 'uncovered' a memo written by a legal advisor in the Israeli Foreign ministry at the time opining that settlements on the West Bank would contravene the Geneva Convention." Wolf finds that the case they make for the settlements being illegal is 'pretty weak'. He adds contemptuously that "history also records Israel offered to give the territories back soon after the war but the Arabs declined - another missed opportunity for their Palestinian brothers."
It is only in the opinion section that the JN gets to the heart of the matter, however. A man who is introduced as the Executive Director of NGO Monitor (and what a sinister sounding NGO it is), Prof Gerald Steinberg, challenges the 'myth of occupation'. He charges that "The myth that "occupation" is the cause of the conflict rather than a symptom and consequence, is also spread by powerful political organisations that exploit the rhetoric of humanitarian assistance and human rights." Hence his heroic career choice presumably. It is Steinberg that puts the word occupation in speech marks, thus questioning its validity. He is much encouraged, however, by the collapse of the Oslo "peace process" (my own speech marks) which ended: "for the vast majority of Israelis, the era of simplistic slogans and wishful thinking."
Here I beg to differ; wishful thinking is alive and well in the Jewish News, exemplified in Alexander Bligh's leading feature on the six-day war, Forty years on: "Within three hours, the Arab forces were destroyed and within 144 hours Israel controlled a territory almost three times its size. [...] On the Eastern front most failures of the War of Independence were corrected." To suggest that the occupation of East Jerusalem was a corrective act - in other words, one that put things straight/ reversed an incorrect state, and thereby resolved an unfortunate mistake, is beyond comprehension.
Jacqueline Rose reminds us that 1967 was a time 'when the language of triumph was wiping out the possibility of justice. She suggests that Darwish, in his poem, "A soldier Dreams of White Tulips", is "uncompromising in his political judgment, at the same time as he has given to the young solidier the profoundest knowledge of the damage that his nation was doing, and would go on doing, both to the Palestinians and to itself. Language as much as deeds laid down the lines of a political tragedy still unresolved today." The triumph of rhetoric over reality has engendered only violent words that destroy the possibility of dialogue, "or any form of meaningful contact".
The reality of the Jewish state precluded the option of extending the hand of peace to Jerusalem's' Arab inhabitants as Dayan proclaimed. Rather Rose writes, "in the heady euphoria of victory, two days after the fall of the Old city, its Moroccan sector, home to more than 200 Palestinians who had lived there for generations, was razed to create what was essentially a parade ground in front of the Wailing Wall." And by August 1967 Moshe Dayan "was insisting that Israel must never return to its former borders, citing Ben-Gurion who had once said - again according to [Amos] Elon - that the borders of 1948 were a cause to 'lament for generations' because they had not included the West Bank." Not only that, but when the Oslo accords affirmed the West Bank and Gaza to be one unity, Israel undertook to open four safe passages between them, an obligation that it has violated from the first day. The clear desire of Israeli's leaders to extend its imprisoning borders puts into serious question columnist Wolf's defensive reaction to the Independent story, that "this was a defensive war not of Israel's choosing." When, one wonders will the Israelis acknowledge a offensive role in the Middle East crisis?
The Israeli poet, Amichai further questions the Israeli state's illusion of securing better, more secure borders: "Loneliness is always in the middle/ protected and fortified. People were supposed/ to feel secure in that, and they don't."
No we don't.

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