Archives for April, 2007

“You must be so excited.” Quickly.
A beat.
“You don’t sound excited.” Hesitantly, now.
And I smile. Politely; sardonically.

Tread softly, because

I was excited.
Back in December, when I finally pulled through the queasiness and created this thing called a proposal, when I was counting and collecting reference letters, when I was thinking of this airy space called grad school, I was excited. If I could whistle, I would have whistled then as I dropped off fat manila envelopes in boxes around the city. I padded through the streets and university architecture adrift in something like dreams. I wouldn’t have called them dreams, then. This is a word with connotations too sweet and too stagnant for me. I would have called them desires maybe, or bright eyes glinting, a baring of teeth, a fire in my belly. And really, I might as well have said dreams.

Now, no. I’m not excited, no.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t want to start my MA in September. I do, but to be excited you have to think the world is going to change, that you are going to change. That something new is about to happen.
New.
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One of the things that enrages me – yes, enrages, as in I feel the urge to pick up my computer and throw it across the room and watch it shatter into a million pieces, knowing full well that my otherwise awesome warranty that I paid close to $300 for will not cover this – about the York website is that it provides no ready access to any contact information. I am trying not to swear, but every time I visit the student services site my mind turns into a minefield of profanity. I begin to sound a like sailor, a pretty sheltered sailor yes, but a sailor nonetheless. And I begin to wish again that I could speak more than just English, because I’ve been told every other language in the world has English beat for searing insults.
But. I am not. Going to degenerate. Into mere. Cussing. Here.
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by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Dear FOX News,

As always, thank you for your breathtakingly impressive investigative journalism. But for your truly astounding journalistic skills, I would have been persuaded by Cho Seung-hui’s repeated references to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ into believing that Cho had been drawing on Christian texts to justify his rampage. I might even – I am ashamed to admit this now – have believed that Cho was Christian. Only you, FOX News, had enough perception and insight to immediately realise that Cho had to be Muslim. I still can’t get over the fact that everyone else seems not to understand the significance of “Ishmael X.” I mean, does the world not know that one of Islam’s prophets was Ishmael? After all, Muslims did steal Ishmael from Christianity – you remember, Ishmael, son of Abraham, brother of Isaac? Exactly. When you, FOX News, informed me that not only was Ishmael a Biblical figure, but that he was an Islamic one, it all came together.

I mean, of course. How else could Cho have become so proficient at gunplay? I mean, when was the last time you heard of someone who wasn’t Muslim spraying a campus with bullets? Seriously, just name one campus shooter who wasn’t Muslim.
Exactly.

And it’s not like America teaches its kids that violence is A-OK. Only Islamofascists do that. Did you know that fundamentalist Muslims allow their kids to enact fantasies of mass murder? It scares me to death to think that they think it’s normal that their teenage sons brandish firearms for fun. I don’t mean to sound racist or anything – not that Muslims are a “race” – but really, they need to be taught that civilised people just do not do things like this. We’re a civilised people here in the West, so we’re not going to physically force them to fit in with the rest of us, but until they prove their loyalty to us, we simply cannot allow them near weapons at all. Only then will we be able to prevent such tragedies as these.

Again, I want to tell you, FOX News, how much it means to that you are so dedicated to the propagation of truth. I always know exactly where to go to find out who the enemy is. Everyone else is so wishy-washy about issues of paramount importance, issues like security and patriotism and faith. You, FOX News, make things so clear for me. Life is so much simpler because of you. Because of you, I know who to hate.
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by Sahir Ludhianvi
Translated by Ali Husain Mir & Raza Mir

When the world hears my angry songs, it assumes
That perhaps my heart abhors songs of love
That I derive pleasure from the turmoil of war and conflict
That by nature, I get pleasure from stories of bloodshed

Would that they could witness those anguished nights
When I cast my eyes on the stars and weep
When forgotten encounters become remembered imaginations
When for hours, I tremble with the intensity of my grief

I am a poet, I have great love for the sights of nature
My heart can never be the enemy of song writing
I am young, youth is a storm of passion
My words can never be coloured by temperance

If there is a reason for my angry songs, it is this
That when I see the farmers dying of hunger
The poor, the oppressed, the helpless
My heart cannot bear the celebration of high culture
Even if I wish, I cannot give voice to dreamy songs

*

- Original in Urdu on Noaman’s site.

Sometime during the crush of essays I made a to-do list. It’s a comprehensive list, written in pale pencil letters on a blank piece of printing paper. I made it then, when technically I shouldn’t even have had enough time to eat, because I knew that once I found myself adrift in free time that I’d forget everything I’d intended to do. My mind works in strange and terrible ways. So I make these notes in my agendas, in various notebooks, on the internet, on my clothes to remind me of the things I’ve done so that I remember the things left to do. It’s a specific, perpetually changing placement: a watching of the background forever receding, the foreground forever advancing. A losing battle, but it gives me something to do in the midst of doing and scribbles to mark the doing.
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My brother has just had a shower and sits down at the living room computer, hair glistening and fresh smelling.
“I’m growing hair,” he says.
“Yeah.” I’m coding. “Most people do.”
And then. “Wait, where?”
“In my private parts.”
There is silence for a while and then I laugh, “Yeah. Ok.”
He thinks I don’t believe him. “Really! It’s this long!” And he holds his fingers apart a bit. “I’m not joking!”
My mother in the hallway hears him. “What are you not joking about?”
“I’m going through the period.”
My mother: “What?”
They have a conversation, mostly consisting of my brother recapping science class (my mother refutes nothing), and my brother ends it by saying, as though something has just become clear to him, “That’s why my stomach hurts all the time.”

I decide to walk to the next bus stop. It’s not as warm as it could be, but it’s a start. This is the last day, though I don’t realise it at the time, that I will really be outside in a while. That I’ll be alone and with the city.

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Yaser and Yasmine*, I think you are confused about something. I think you are confused about my 30 pages. Let me explain to you and to everyone else who might also have the wrong idea about what I’ve been doing these last few days, what it is I’ve been doing.

You see, I did not have 3 days to write 30 pages. I only had 2. Yeah, I counted wrong.
Also, it’s not 30/2 = 15 pages/day, if that’s what you were wondering. No, it was 2 papers: 20+10.

So, children, within the space of 24 hours (I kid you not) I wrote 5854 words (not including cover page and biblio).

Let me put this into context for you:

        that is a lot of words
        and very little time.
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I say to myself, out loud but not so loud, “I can do this – ” and I put on my glasses, “because – ” I look at my freshly scrubbed reflection and say with an absolutely straight face, absolutely in tune, “I’ve got the power.”