Dear people of Tuz Khurmato, Sadr City and Kirkuk in Iraq, dear people of Mai Zai in Afghanistan, dear people of Mingora and Datta Khel in Pakistan, we know that you also lost loved ones to bombs on April 15th. We share your sorrow.
No more hurting people. Love, BOSTON اهالي مدينة الصدر،اهالي كركوك الأعزاء ،اهالي ماي زاي في افغانستان الأعزاء ،اهالي منغورة و داتا خيل في باكستان الأعزاء ...نحن نعلم أنكم أيضاً فقدتم أحباب لكم في الانفجارات التي حدثت في ١٥ من ابريل. نحن نتقاسم و إياكم أحزانكم و نشد علا أيديكم ! لا لتعذيب الناس بعد الان. مع كل الحب من بوسطن، امريكا .
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Illness causes delays. I drafted this post a year ago, before a series of events, including catastrophic back pain and the cascade of complications from it, first overwhelmed my writing life and then forced me into my bed for half a year. So now it's been 41 years since my trip to Paris, and the issues I addressed are even more pressing than they were last year. The science delegation with Pham Van Dong, Hanoi, 1970. TRIGGER WARNING: Short description of sexual violence in war. [In italics in paragraph four.] December, 1970. My father joins a delegation of radical scientists from the World Federation of Scientific Workers and travels to Hanoi. There they meet with scientists, students, government officials and others. My father lectures on evolution in the underground classrooms of the University of Hanoi, because his hosts say they want to prepare for victory, to ask questions that can't be answered with guns. Under sewer covers there are bomb shelters stocked with all the essentials: water, food, first aid kits and fresh flowers to keep up people's spirits. Trigger Warnings: global warming, child sexual trafficking, famine, witch trials. A few months ago the European Space Agency announced that satellite images show arctic ice disappearing at a rate 50% faster than predicted, which could mean that it will have vanished completely by 2022, nine years from now. Not only would that lose us the cooling air currents that stream across the northern hemisphere, but also that immense white reflector that has been sending the sun's rays back into space. As a survivor of extreme early abuse, I was programed for suicide, told to kill myself rather than reveal what was done to me. It's like a kind of toxic, elevator music background noise: you should kill yourself now, you should kill yourself now. I've never obeyed, and never will, but I hear it. One night, as I was drifting to sleep, that strangely calm and impersonal instruction drifted once again across my psyche and at the edge of sleep, my response was, No, I'm going to fight for my planet. No lo entierren en un mausoleo que en vida el hombre fue puro movimiento. No lo encierren en mármol, no construyen monumentos de sus huesos, no lo convierten en estatua. El hombre siempre se repartió. No tuvo localidad. Dejen que el fuego de su corazón lo convierte en ceniza y regálalo al viento americano; que cuerpo sigue espíritu y que la tierra las nubes los ríos sean Chavez también. Dear Beloved Community-- 2012 has been a year of nightmares and miracles. I’ve skated closer to the edge of endurance than at any other time, in a life of many times more catastrophic events than the law of averages would dole out to any one person. This fall and winter, I’ve experienced more intense physical pain than ever before, more despair, more fear, more concentrated and outrageous medical abuse. And people from all over this country and several others, many of whom I have never met, have sent me money to help me get through it, to safely detoxify and withdraw from prescribed narcotics in spite of severe environmental illness, an inherited liver condition and epilepsy, all of which put many conventional resources beyond my reach. August, 1954 My mother would have been eighty-two today. She would be right now telling me to go to bed instead of blogging about her, so I'm just going to post a couple of my favorite photos of her. I miss her so much. This was taken at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, when my grandparents came to meet my six month old self. Check out Mami and Abuela Lola being all 1954 glamorous in the mirror. She turned twenty-four that month. Mami and me, around the same time. And here she is in the summer of 1946, when she turned sixteen. And here she is on our mountaintop. She loved the natural world and needed to be immersed in it at regular intervals. Its beauty restored her, as it does me. She showed me the natural world through her eyes, pointed our color and shape and the behaviors of animals and plants. She was also someone who needed solitude, as I do. In this photo she was pregnant with my youngest brother, Alejandro. It was the summer of 1965 and she was thirty-five years old. At her desk in Chicago, when she was in graduate school. It was a hard time for all of us, and I see her fatigue in this photo, but she also looks relaxed. I think it's around 1969. I was fifteen and she was thirty-nine. OK, Mami. I hear you. I'll go to bed and post more photos when I wake up, deeper into your birthday. Signing off at 5:39 A.M. Dear friends--The blog post I had here was a very intense piece of writing about my history of abuse, set in historical context. It was a good piece of writing and I am proud of it, but publishing it left me more exposed than I was ready for, and led to a painful personal backlash, so, for the present, I've removed it from public view. Thank you to those who wrote to express their support and appreciation.
I know what time the clock says it is, but my body is in some other galaxy where day and night are random stripes of dark and light, unrelated to waking and sleeping. The last time I fell asleep, it was eight in the morning after a long night of excruciating pain in my right sacro-ileac joint and a knot in my gut, in the spot called the ileosecal valve. It’s an old pain, long familiar to me, but this has been the worst episode I can remember. Inflammation in my gut overflowing its bounds and sending sharp agony outward in spirals through my whole body. When the valve between the small and large intestines is irritated and jams open, toxins from the bowel flood back into the area meant for processing food and I slip into another familiar terrible state, a nightmarish semi-consciousness of auto-intoxication, where I drift on the surface of sleep, but can’t sink. Finally at eight, wary of the thresholds of epilepsy, I take Benedryl and Ativan and sleep for a few hours. This article was just published on the web site of the National Institute for Latino Policy, in response to two earlier pieces, one claiming that "Hispanics" are the group most hostile to Israel, the other describing racism in Israel and ending with the assertion that because of what Jews have gone through, Israelis should "know better." I am a Puerto Rican Jew, born of Ukrainian Jews fleeing war and repression to become sweatshop organizers in 1910s New York, and landed gentry from Naranjito, turned working class migrants in 1930s Harlem and the Bronx, landing in the same garment shops a generation later. I'm also a lifelong activist historian who embraces complexity and has spent decades building alliances between people who misunderstand each other. |
About Aurora
Aurora Levins Morales is a disabled and chronically ill, community supported writer, historian, artist and activist. It takes a village to keep her blogs coming. To become part of the village it takes, donate here. Never miss a post!
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