Last Sunday, Canada’s Governor General Michaëlle Jean stood before a gathering in Calgary, broke into a song her mother used to sing to her, as a child in Haiti. She sang a song in Creole, and then, in English, said, “It’s a song of hope. Like this woman’s song, rose from the wreckage, that song [...]
Posts from ‘January, 2010’
Protection: when the powerful offer protection, women know
The day after Obama won the Presidential election, The New York Times wrote that Obama won a decisive victory because “he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens”. At the time, I wrote that protection was the wrong goal, that from India to Haiti to Zimbabwe [...]
What is left: after solitary confinement in schools
Prison is a bad place for children. Solitary confinement is worse yet. Extended solitary confinement is lethal. These are not surprising statements, and the news that underwrites them, though dismaying, is not particularly shocking.
Immigration detention centers in the US, such as the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, run by Corrections Corporation of America, or the [...]
Black Looks: Haiti Cherie
Haiti Cherie
What word can encompass stretch its arms and wrap them around
A day when the world returns to the dust it was
Before we fashioned orderly chaos and became free
The First Negro Republic raises weakened arms to wipe
The Ash
From its eyes water and ash to mould human tragedy
What word can encompass… we have asked before
Encompass passion [...]
Abstract Space: While the air is still warm
Abstract Space: While the air is still warm
While the air is still warm
while beads of sweat still trickle down between
the blades of my shoulders
and my fingers still smell of you
while my husband is out driving, grim faced
kicking up dust somewhere
fists around the steering wheel
loveless and cold
while the approaching clouds have not managed to seal me [...]
What is left: solitary confinement
“After the bars and the gates
and the degradation,
What is left?”
Maria Benita Santamaria is a 35 year old transgender woman. In June 2009, she was arrested in northern Virginia and charged with possession of methamphetamine. In August she pleaded guilty. She was sent to Central Virginia Regional Jail, a men’s prison. The prison placed her in [...]