Another 9/ll Anniversary

Burned out village in MyLai, Vietnam

• I am writing this on the anniversary of September 11 because I am still trying to answer the question raised by a young Pakistani girl in an article years ago, "Why is an Afghan’s life worth any less than an American’s?"  The easy answer is, of course, that the life any member of the more powerful group is always perceived as worth more than that of a less powerful group.  Growing up in the deep South taught  me that.   Still, I can’t stop asking why, as Americans , we cannot seem to come to terms with the suffering of other groups besides Americans and Israelis. Why, as this anniversary has come and gone for a decade, are we not also recognizing the horrible toll in suffering and death both the Taliban and our own bombs have taken on a poor and oppressed people?  These people too are victims of 9/11.  Many have had their villages destroyed, parents and children killed or maimed by our response to Al Quaeda’s terrorism.  Our government’s acknowledgement of their suffering has been minimal.  "War is hell," W.T. Sherman said or was it Donald Rumsfield, John McCain, and any number of others who are all too ready to engage in that hell?      

As an answer to the young Pakistani woman’s question, I would like to ask another, Is an Afghan’s life really worth less than an American’s?  Are the members of the Afghan wedding party killed by American bombs worth less than the innocent people killed in the Word Trade Center Attacks?  We all know the answer, don’t we?    

Well, don’t we?  And if we do, what better way to answer that accusatory question than by memorializing the innocent Afghan civilians killed in the War on Terror, civilians who had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, mothers, fathers, children, trying to live as best they could, going about their daily routines and celebrations, much like the janitors, and the secretaries, and the stock brokers, the passengers on that clear, sunny morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

A CELEBRATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR AND THE MUSIC OF THE DEEP SOUTH

Growing up in the deep South, I heard a lot of story-telling, on front porches, on the party-line, in kitchens, in beauty shops.   But the singing I heard (outside of church, I mean) was sung by our black neighbors and farm workers.  Background music, I grew up thinking of it, but when my friend, poet doris davenport, scolded me, saying, "We are tired of being background music for white people," I realized she was right, and more important, that I was wrong in thinking of that singing as "background music."  It was, as Evie Shockley sings in her poem, "a background in music. " 

On this day when we celebrate the life and words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I remember those voices, how their songs wove their way into my deepest self without my knowing it, and how I am still trying to learn how to harmonize with them.  

   Legato

.”..we sang everything there was to say.”

doris

                                             ---Evie Shockley

---a background in music  (from the new black, Wesleyan U.P.)

Evie

When the bell 

rang out noontime,

they lounged under oak trees
and drank from a mason jar

sweet tea    the taste

of a lemon slice lingering

at stovetops

and wash basins

cradles

and deathbeds

their voices kept

rising and falling 

like wind riffling 

cotton fields  

folding sheets

scrubbing floors,

spinning mayhaw juice

into a red thread

they were all the time

 singing

but we didn't listen

because it was backdrop

to what we sang

back ground

and ground back into

darkest leaf mold

that covered 

the root of our other

life     theirs

with which we never learned

how to harmonize.

Pembroke Magazine, 2012

With Doll, Patsy, and Lois, at a wedding celebration for Lois's son.