She Said No

New on Youtube: a student at Mount Holyoke College, Son-Ca Lam, performs my poem about Christopher McCarthy, US soldier who killed a South Korean waitress in 2000.

Watch it here. The poem begins at 6:00 min. The first part of the video is a segment from Missed Sigh Gone, a parody by Giles Li of the hit Broadway musical.

The performance was part of a larger show for Asian American Interpretive Realities.

It's fascinating for me to hear and see the piece channeled through someone else's voice and body. To watch it as a spectator. Son-Ca does a beautiful job, packs it with intensity, brings out tones and textures that will inform my future performances of it. I haven't done this piece for a very long time, and I was surprised to feel myself respond to the story, the images, as if they were new to me. And also relieved - it means the poem passes the test of good writing.

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Dances With Wolves
meets
Pocahontas
meets
Last Of The Mohicans
meets
Planet Of The Apes
meets
Dragonriders Of Pern
meets
Lawrence Of Arabia
meets
$400m budget
meets
Magical Hair Fetish.

Did I miss anything?

Caught In The Act

Scene:
Courtroom in Kampala, September 2010

Defendants:
Ten university students, six men, four women. One business owner, a middle-aged woman

May it please the Court.

The accused are charged, individually and severally, under Section 195 of Uganda’s Penal Code, with:

Conspiracy to engage in homosexuality;
promoting homosexuality;
operating a brothel for homosexuality;
failure to disclose homosexuality;
aidingandabettinghomosexuality;
touchinganotherpersonwithintentofhomosexuality;
and terrorism, sedition, the eating of swine, the shaving of beards, wearing cloth of two fabrics, all abominations unto the Lord……

I beg your pardon, Your Honour. Yes, I understand. The Laws of Uganda, not the Laws of Leviticus.

You can read the rest of my courtroom satire on Uganda's proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill in The Last Word column, in February's issue of The Africa Report. It comes out on Monday.

Travel well, Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)

Thank you for your life, and your work.

Your People's History of the United States taught me more than all the years of my degree in economics and politics. Gave me a lifelong set of tools to excavate the untold histories of my own country - and the world.

When I first saw the news yesterday, what rose in my mind was Denise Levertov's poem, September 1961:

they have told us / the road leads to the sea / and given / the language into our hands

September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"--Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"--
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don't
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea...

Sundance

On Monday morning, I got a call to tell me that Bwagamoyo is one of seven projects selected for development in the 2010 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. From over 650 worldwide submissions.

Six hundred and fifty submissions.

Yes, that's Robert Redford's Sundance.

The creative advisors for the 2010 Lab are Pulitzer-prize winning playwright and director, Marsha Norman, and actor / producer, Meryl Streep.

I was dizzy all day. As in - not safe to drive or cross a road dizzy.

Here's the crazy thing. I was this close to not submitting for the competition.

I procrastinated until the day before the deadline. I didn't think I stood a chance. I worried that my script, a tapestry of poems, meditations, dirges, journalism and email exchanges, didn't look like a "traditional play" and would be tossed out in the first cut.

I've never written a "traditional play". How do you decide what a "scene" is? How do you lay it out?

I questioned whether the blow-by-blow details of Kenya's crisis, mapped on the terrain of the male body and my own family history, would speak in any way to US judges.

Finally, at 9pm, I had to decide. Go for it, or drop it. If you drop it, deal with all the regrets, self-loathing, and "what ifs" that will follow.

I googled "play manuscript formats" and picked the guidelines that looked easiest. I channeled the faces, voices, and energy of everyone who's been a part of Bwagamoyo's journey. I worked through the night to make my manuscript look like "a real play". I pressed Send one hour before the deadline.

This morning, Philip Himberg, the artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Lab, told me that the seven projects chosen were those the judges considered:

the most dynamic and innovative content; the most muscular, poetic and compelling writing.

I don't recommend procrastinating out of terror, then working all night to meet a submission deadline.

I do recommend reminding ourselves:

My job is to submit my work. Rejecting it is their job. I'm going to do my job, not theirs.

I do recommend reprogramming:

I don't know how

in our brains, with:

I can learn how to do what's required, to get my work where I want it to go.

I do recommend loving the work, and the journey, more than we love our fears and doubts. Then showing up, doing the job, and releasing the outcome to the gods.

you can't stop

my heart from turning
inside out
try to stop my world from turning
inside out

My theme song for early morning sessions of wrestling with revisions and rewrites. The Mighty Lemon Drops wrote it for me. Just for me. Really.

The video captures perfectly that twitching-under-the-table moment each day at 5am, when I open the folder and meet my manuscript again.

Clutching on the last straw
Seeing things I've never saw
Must be time I fell
Down to a place I didn't know too well

I watch the feet walk by, the legs engage and disengage with total certainty, from floor level. I look up at finished people, doing finished dances, and try to stay connected to this amorphous thing emerging from between my shoulderblades. One word at a time. I let the work come at me like everyone I've ever loved, everyone I've ever lost (1).

you can't stop my heart from turning
inside out
try to stop my world from turning
inside out

Sometimes, if I'm lucky, the work is suddenly upright, players in place on the stage, looking quizzically down at me like

Get off the floor, drama queen - we've got a set to do.

(1) Props to Junot Diaz for this haunting line, borrowed from his blurb for Tania James' Atlas of Unknowns

Get your brain out of your gun

When the Wall Street Journal presents Cubans as heroes and US soldiers as paranoid idiots, you know the screw-up must be off the scale.

Secure The Water Against The Starving, my opinion piece on the US militarization of Haiti's disaster, is now up on The WIP.