The 'Scourge' of War

Exactly on a year ago, I was made to be busy running around to get exclusive scoop about the investigations into the terror attack by Mohammad Ajmal Kasab and his nine other friends. He had been captured by then and whisked away into an undisclosed location, while the rest of the city was "under siege". AS a crime reporter for a tabloid, we understood that it was a "TV day" -- all the action would be on TV and there was little we could write about. So, the focus of our reporting had to be on investigations.

I was clueless -- didn't understand the mayhem around me and was only wondering "why? why? why?" Why do we have a war? Why do we have a country so apathetic to the daily war-like situations that the 90 per cent of India faces daily, and suddenly wakes up only when the "impregnable" Taj Hotel is under attack?

Enough had been said and done and cribbed and cried and candles burnt for. The city melted enough candles on a single day, and the price of candles suddenly skyrocketed. I am not surprised at this "make hay while the sun shines" attitude. But, if this one 26/11 really moved us to "tears" and woke us up to realise that the city will "never give up", think about the reasons why it will not give up -- it will be too expensive to give up.

Here is a poem by Emmanuel Ortiz, a third-generation Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American community organiser and spoken-word poet. He resides in Minneapolis and currently serves on the board of directors for the Minnesota Spoken Word Association, apart from being the coordinator of Guerrilla Wordfare, a Twin Cities-based grassroots project bringing together artistes of colour to address socio-political issues and raise funds for progressive organising in communities of colour, through art as a tool of social change. This is a poem he penned on September 11, 2002 -- yes, the day the world woke up with images of New Age "terrorism". This poem reflects best why I do not want to "remember" 26/11, 9/11, 7/11, 26/7.....

Before I start this poem,

I'd like to ask you to join me

In a moment of silence

In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you

To offer up a moment of silence

For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,

disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes

For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...

A full day of silence

For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the

hands of U.S.-backed Israeli

forces over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,

mostly children, who have died of

malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.

embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,

Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,

Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.

Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of

concrete, steel, earth and skin

And the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,

not a war - for those who

know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their

relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.

A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of

a secret war ... ssssshhhhhhh...

Say nothing

we don't want them to learn that they are dead.

Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,

Whose names, like the corpses they once represented,

have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.

An hour of silence for El Salvador ...

An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...

Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...

None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.

45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas

25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found

their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could

poke into the sky.

There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.

And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of

sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...

For the hundreds of millions of Indigenous peoples from this half

of right here,

Whose land and lives were stolen,

In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek,

Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.

Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the

refrigerator of our consciousness ...

© Javed Iqbal

So you want a moment of silence?

And we are all left speechless

Our tongues snatched from our mouths

Our eyes stapled shut

A moment of silence

And the poets have all been laid to rest

The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,

You want a moment of silence

You mourn now as if the world will never be the same

And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.

Not like it always has

been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.

This is a 9/10 poem,

It is a 9/9 poem,

A 9/8 poem,

A 9/7 poem

This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.

And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:

This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.

This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.

This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes

This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told

The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks

The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored.

This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?

We could give you lifetimes of empty:

The unmarked graves

The lost languages

The uprooted trees and histories

The dead stares on the faces of nameless children

Before I start this poem we could be silent forever

Or just long enough to hunger,

For the dust to bury us

And you would still ask us

For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence

Then stop the oil pumps

Turn off the engines and the televisions

Sink the cruise ships

Crash the stock markets

Unplug the marquee lights,

Delete the instant messages,

Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,

And pay the workers for wages lost.

Tear down the liquor stores,

The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the

Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,

Then take it

On Super Bowl Sunday,

The Fourth of July

During Dayton's 13 hour sale

Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful

people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence

Then take it NOW,

Before this poem begins.

Here, in the echo of my voice,

In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,

In the space between bodies in embrace,

Here is your silence,

Take it.

But take it all...

Don't cut in line.

Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.

But we,

Tonight we will keep right on singing

For our dead.