Holiday's "Strange Fruit"

When I think of protest songs, Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" comes to mind. This protest song par excellence, articulates the horrors of lynching in particular and racism in general. She translates her bitterness, abhorrenc , and pain with such depth that we can't but read them faithfully and share her sentiments. I wanted to share Holiday's powerful performance of Abel Meeropol's equally powerful protest poem "Strange Fruit."

"no sleep for the wicked"

 muttering notes easing to the edge of my bed
genuflecting in submission to memories I do not own
i'm that which is absent
walking endlessly in silence
and when i do call, no response
still, i can't sleep

abbrev.

facing decaying brick walls and i remain fixated with the I/you binary:

i, an abbreviated thought
you, a run-on sentence
we, a fragmented phase
no, not a phase, but a phrase
no, even that is too giving
perhaps we are a feathered hat floating on the moon
or a whisper heard when eavesdropping on the sun
probably an obscure gesture breathing in the summer air

but, there's no wisdom in this ageless and one-sided emotion
that twists, turns, and twirls--a talented dancer--
into a sinuous silence that breeds
painful privacy

this is neither calculated nor edited.
it remains a vague, if not empty, signifier.

the walls

i've been able to preserve my sanity because of the liliac coloured walls. monstrous intimacy gets lost in their monotone warmth with a hint of closure. it turns me low and slows my machinic thoughts into warped phrases, upside down commas, and then a string of silence. we merge, finally.

absence

My thoughts scintillate below the raging summer sun—they are minuscule, a flash disappearing in jagged lines. They are of you and to you they are nothing. A longing, I confess, an accidental longing, a mere coincidence of the flesh, a fragile presence. Directionless. I sit and converse with absence.

the absence of feeling

desultory neurons bellowing
names names names
empty raindrops sinking
corpses corpses corpses
wooden bench wasting
shadows shadows shadows

The American Jeremiad of the Disenfranchised (?)

Well, it's 2012 and i have a few things on my mind, mainly, American literature. I've recently been thinking about the American Jeremiad and how, I believe at least, it has been reinscribed by minority writers as a space of productive melancholia. So, what is the American Jeremiad? The Jeremiad is a sermon that accounts for the calamities of the present time as justifiable due to the sins of a community or a nation, but also imagines the possibilities of change. Jeremiad is named after the Biblical prophet, Jeremiah, who was also known as the weeping prophet. The jeremiad is often used as a rhetorical figure to perpetuate the American myth of progress. Yet, the jeremiad, which is inextricably linked to the ideology of American exceptionalism, is based on a paradox that constitutes America as a nation. That is, the paradox of community and the individual, oscillating between the two, but also constructing an exclusionary community based on the auspices of democracy. I will suggest that the American Jeremiad of the minority is characterized by failed mourning that maintains the possible return of the object of loss. The spectre, or the ghost, represents this American Jeremiad of the minority. Spectre, as Derrida defines it in Spectres of Marx, "is some "thing" that remains difficult to name." Toni Morrison's Beloved attempts to name the unnameable, which is paradoxically named Beloved, by either returning to or finding oneself faced with the irrevocable past. But, I would like to argue, that this space can be productive, a means by which to reinscribe spaces of oppression as sites of subversion and resistance. Beloved is about the traumas of African American slavery, and the healing power of "rememory" as the protagonist, Sethe calls it. However, this return, as Sethe discovers can be life-threatening as Beloved attempts to strangle her. Sethe who had attempted to kill her children, and successfully killed her youngest daughter, Beloved, in order to safe them from slavery is haunted by the return of her daughter. The return both seals and opens wounds. It returns without warning, yet can only be removed, in the novel at least, by a community. The imaginary reconstruction of the past is never total; it reveals gaps and fissures that remain unbridgeable.
The American Jeremiad of the minority, perhaps minority isn't the proper term to use, maybe disenfranchised in more encompassing, evokes another type of lamentation that threatens our present, but asks of us to give it voice, even if it remains at times inaudible.