Archives for April, 2005

For a long time, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that I liked so much about Outlandish’s Walou video. I knew that but for the video, I wouldn’t have been as impressed by the song as I was.
And the video has its faults. I’m not a fan of close-ups, for instance. Especially when the people being zoomed in on are wearing puppy-dog big-eyed faces.
It’s the later half of the video that I enjoy so much. The visual metaphors are sophisticated and unforced.
That’s what I love, seeing poetry come alive.

Almost like moving concrete poetry.

That said, someone explain the little boy’s story to me. Because I don’t understand it.

Many people believe that you should never define anything in terms of itself. That would be a kind of circularity, they say.
- Java: An Introduction to Computer Science and Programming

When I saw him last, I was as old as my brother is now and he was as old as I am now.
In the kitchen today, I stood staring at my brother: but this is what I was like, then? How is that possible? I was real, the world was real to me and nebulous only where it befits a bourgeoning world to be so. I was defined; I knew who I was as, as much as I ever would.
And that is, of course, all a lie. I was a kid; that’s what past versions of ourselves always are.

And he was as old as I now, but in my memories he was much closer to my age. We talked, so I remember, as though the words did not have to navigate the years. And it embarrasses me now to remember it, that I could have been that naive. Worse, that I still believe it possible to speak the same language, if only fleeting, as someone else.
He was tall enough to dwarf my father, who, though not all that tall himself, gives the impression of towering height.

That’s the thing about Tantramars revisited, you are brought face to face with a past that, despite your desire, refuses to be resurrected.

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
“Shihab”–”shooting star”–
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Two things I learnt today, while studying for Physiology:

1. “Pregnancy is not a requirement for lactation, and some women who have adopted babies have been successful in breast-feeding.”
2. “Although prolactin release requires the mechanical stimulus of suckling, oxytocin release can be stimulated by various cerebral stimuli, including the thought of the child. Many nursing mothers experience inappropriate milk release triggered by hearing someone else’s child cry.”

That actually interested me. Fancy that.