Back to bow and scrape to get your spoiled food – hell no! This is what GOP wants to do to struggling families that include many enlisted soldier’s families!

I have zero patience for the food box idea from this administration. First off, it’s likely DOA. What’s not is the massive spending cuts they’re planning for SNAP/EBT.

This administration couldn’t even get food to Puerto Rico effectively and we’re supposed to believe that they’re actually going to be able to get boxes of food to every American on SNAP? Yeah… No.

Also, the items suggested are high glycemic index foods for the most part, meaning adults and children with diabetes are going to struggle with these boxes without accommodation. How about people without transportation to get the boxes, if they aren’t delivered to the home? This administration cut meals on wheels funding claiming the program wasn’t efficient. They want to cut USPS claiming the same thing. Who’s delivering these boxes?

Finally, how about gluten intolerant folks, or those with peanut allergies? A mom friend of mine has an autistic son, and sometimes all she can get him to eat is cherry tomatoes and one specific type of frozen chicken nugget. Like, he won’t eat for two days otherwise. How about special cases like hers?

This is rooted in the idea that the poor don’t deserve nice things and should be punished for poverty. It pisses me off because I’m receiving SNAP right now because I had to quit working way earlier than anticipated while pregnant, and I can’t return to work right now with my son on oxygen, and my twins being only three weeks old.

My brother is in town and I may use my EBT card to buy some steaks to grill. Some good fucking steak. Why? Because I haven’t seen him in two years and we’re celebrating the babies coming home. Fuck anyone who side-eyes me over it.

Also, if people wanna get worked up over poor people eating cake or whatever because GUBMINT SPENDIN’, they can take that opinion, write it on a Post-It, and shove it up their ass sideways when we just gave billionaire motherfuckers tax breaks for private jets and gave the capitalist class a 1.5 trillion dollars wet kiss on the backs of the working poor. Because the majority of SNAP recipients do work, they just don’t make enough to feed themselves. And that’s hella fucked.

/Rant

The Alt-Right is Killing People:

antifainternational:

The so-called “alt-right” has murdered more than 100 people over the last three years.  But we’re expected to concede public space to them and provide them with platforms to espouse genocide and encourage/organize further violence?

You’ve probably seen the photo: a young African-American girl walks to school, her eyes shielded by sunglasses. She is surrounded by a hateful crowd of angry white people, including a girl caught mid-jeer, her teeth bared and her face hardened with anger. It’s one of the most famous images of the civil rights era, but it turns out that the story of the young women in the photo is even more complicated than the racial drama their faces portray.

Elizabeth Eckford (right) attempts to enter Little Rock High School on Sept. 4, 1957, while Hazel Bryan (left) and other segregationists protest. (Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives)

On September 4th, 1957, nine African-American students entered Little Rock Central High School as the school’s first black students, including Elizabeth Eckford. On her way to the school, a group of white teenage girls followed Eckford, chanting “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!” One of these girls was Hazel Bryan. Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later described her as “screaming, just hysterical, just like one of these Elvis Presley hysterical deals, where these kids are fainting with hysteria.” Bryan is also credited as shouting, “Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!”

After the photo became public, Hazel started to receive “critical” mail, all from the north. Author David Margolick wrote that while Hazel only found the criticism “surprising”, “Hazel’s parents, though, found her sudden notoriety sufficiently alarming to pull her out of the school.”

Bryan left her new school when she was 17, got married to Antoine Massery and began a family. After that, her attitude toward Martin Luther King and the concept of desegregation changed. “Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective… One day, she realized, her children would learn that the snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.”

The crowd gathered outside Little Rock Central High School. The military men were ordered by Governor Orval Faubus to surround the school and prevent Black students from entering the grounds. (William P Straeter/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

In 1963, having changed her mind on integration and feeling guilt for her treatment of Eckford, Bryan contacted Eckford to apologize. They went their separate ways after this first meeting, and Eckford did not name the girl in the picture when asked about it by reporters.

During the time after Little Rock, Hazel had become increasingly political, branching out into peace activism and social work. David Margolick discovered, “She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize.”

These nine teenagers integrated the white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were kicked, ridiculed, threatened, called every name, spat on, ignored, and had acid thrown in their faces. Bottom row (L-R): Thelma Mothershed, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray; Top row (L-R): Jefferson Thomas, Melba Pattillo, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Daisy Bates (NAACP President), Ernest Green, 1957. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bryan hoped her reputation could be gained back, but this did not happen until the 40th anniversary of Central’s desegregation in 1997. Will Counts, the journalist who took the famous picture, arranged for Elizabeth and Hazel to meet again. The reunion provided an opportunity for acts of reconciliation, as noted in this editorial from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on the first day of 1998:

One of the fascinating stories to come out of the reunion was the apology that Hazel Bryan Massery made to Elizabeth Eckford for a terrible moment caught forever by the camera. That 40-year-old picture of hate assailing grace — which had gnawed at Ms. Massery for decades — can now be wiped clean, and replaced by a snapshot of two friends. The apology came from the real Hazel Bryan Massery, the decent woman who had been hidden all those years by a fleeting image. And the graceful acceptance of that apology was but another act of dignity in the life of Elizabeth Eckford.

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery at Little Rock Central High School in 1997. (Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives)

Feeling awkward when they first met, Eckford and Bryan surprisingly became friends afterwards:

They went to flower shows together, bought fabrics together, took mineral baths and massages together, appeared in documentaries and before school groups together. Since Elizabeth had never learned to drive, Hazel joked that she had become Elizabeth’s chauffeur. Whenever something cost money, Hazel treated; it was awkward for Elizabeth, who had a hard time explaining to people just how poor she was.

Soon after, the friendship began to fray. In 1999, David Margolick travelled to Little Rock and arranged to meet Elizabeth and Hazel. According to Hazel Bryan, she said, “I think she still… at times we have a little… well, the honeymoon is over and now we’re getting to take out the garbage.” As Eckford began to believe Bryan “wanted me to be cured and be over it and for this not to go on… She wanted me to be less uncomfortable so that she wouldn’t feel responsible anymore.” The other eight of the Little Rock Nine didn’t want this friendship to last any longer. The friendship quietly dissolved in 1999, when Elizabeth Eckford wrote “True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past” on the brick of Central High. This message affected their friendship.

Elizabeth Eckford in front of the main entrance of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 2007. Eckford was the first of nine black schoolchildren to make history on September 4th, 1957 when she arrived, alone, for the first day of classes at the all-white high school. (Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

The principal of Central High School stated “I just had hoped that I could show this picture and say, ‘This happened, and that happened, and now…’ and there is no ‘now’.” She added, “And that makes me sad. It makes me sad for them, it makes me sad for the future students at our school, and for the history books, because I’d like a happy ending. And we don’t have that.”

For Valentine’s Day, we bring you two new translations of love poems by Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani:

By Rachel Schine

Artwork by Molly Crabapple, used with permission.

In his obituary to the celebrated Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, published a few days after his death in May 1998, Adel Darwish writes that “for Qabbani, national liberation was meaningless without sexual liberation.”

Qabbani, who had spent much of his life as a diplomat and ardent Arab nationalist, also spent much of his life as a romantic in more conventional terms, and through verse he brought his world and its muses into vivid, living color. Much of the way in which Qabbani achieved this was by using the language of the everyday, stripped of pretense and elitism. In the plain speech of the two poems presented in translation below (an “Ode to Sadness,” or, Qaṣīdat al-Ḥuzn, and “You Want,” or Turīdīna), one may detect a sort of plaintive hope laced with a countervailing, often tongue-in-cheek cynicism: there is a hope that the narrator can be enough for the woman he adulates, that his words can satisfy, and that she can fulfill him in turn.

There is also a hope in these poems that the landscapes the poet has traversed — the cities and communities that he has had occasion to inhabit and speak on behalf of throughout his life — might meld with, accommodate, or elucidate his love for another human being. In the first poem, we are told that his lover has taught him “how to see Beirut” (to which he migrated after ending his government career) as a harlot on promenade, bedecked with beautiful robes but also divulging pain. In the second poem, the narrator laments that he is unable to give a woman all that she dreams of because he is “A laborer from Damascus — poor,” who “soak[s his] morning loaf in blood/ [his] hair in spit.” Wrapped up in the complications of love are the complexities of the poet’s relationship with these classed geographies, lending credence to Darwish’s point that Qabbani viewed the health of the nation and the free expression of sexuality as intertwined; his humble Damascene roots are thus both a source of pride and anxiety during courtship, while his lurid portrayal of Beirut goes hand in hand with learning the art of sadness from a practiced, female teacher. Indeed, it is through these ambivalent depictions of contemporary locales and the socioeconomic realities that they intimate that the poet fashions some of the most poignant portions of the poems.

In contrast, one of the great joys of these verses is that Qabbani consciously relishes looking backward through the centuries and across a more extensive regional terrain, revivifying the clichés of classical Arabic love poetry. In the spirit of rediscovering old chestnuts anew, he tells the reader in “Ode to Sadness” (the title of which is itself a throwback to the traditional qaṣīda with its opening refrain of love lost and its peripatetic, camel-mounted middle section) that his lover teaches him to act like a child, to read stories of knighthood and gallantry, and to think of women in terms of all the visually delighting but timeworn tropes that the canon has to offer; reading across the two poems, we find a woman whose lips are like pomegranates and whose eyes are like gulf water — she is redolent with fragrance and her eyes are kohl-rimmed. With respect to imagery, this is a very back-to-basics, classicizing approach to depicting a lover, though encased in the modern structure of free verse rather than the old-school ghazal, or metered love poem. In addition to pairing himself with his beloved, Qabbani marries his Christian, Arab, and more trans-regionally Middle Eastern identities and experiences in these pieces: we find references to church bells and heaven-sent manna alongside allusions to the erstwhile courtyard of the Sasanian sovereign Khosroes (the iwān kisrā) in Ctesiphon and the Thousand and One Nights.

It seems fitting, given the date but also the times, to dive into some poetry that deals in the many and hybrid types of love described above, for women, memories, nations, cultures, and of course, for one’s own self.

An Ode to Sadness

By Nizar Qabbani, tr. Rachel Schine

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.

And I have needed, for ages

A woman to make me sad

A woman in whose arms I could weep

Like a sparrow,

A woman—to gather up my pieces—

Like shards of shattered crystal

Your love has taught me, my dear,

The worst of habits

It has taught me to fill up my glass

A thousand times per night

And to sample the treatment of druggists

To knock at the diviners’ door

It has taught me— I now leave my home

To comb the roadside flagstones

And I stalk your visage

In the rain, and in the lights of cars

I stalk your specter

Even… even…

In sheets of advertisements…

Your love has taught me…

How I’ve been love-lost in my own face—for hours

Searching for a gypsy poem,

That every gypsy girl might envy

Searching for a face—a voice—

Your love is all the faces and all the voices.

Your love has made me enter, my dear

Cities of sorrows

Before you, I had not entered

Cities of sorrows—

I had never known—

That a tear was a person

That a person without sadness

Is the memory of a person…

Your love has taught me…

To behave like kids,

To draw your face—

With chalk upon the walls

And on the sails of fishermen’s crafts

Upon the church bells,

And the crosses.

Your love has taught me…

How love alters the turning of time—

It has taught me that when I love,

The earth holds back its spinning

Your love has taught me things…

That were never part of the accounting

So I read the stories of children—

I entered the palaces of the jinn kings

I dreamed that the daughter of the sultan

Married me—

Those eyes of hers… purer than the gulf waters

Those lips of hers… more luscious than a pomegranate’s bloom

And I dreamed that I safeguarded her

Like the knights,

I dreamed that I gifted her,

With strands of pearl and coral

Your love has taught me, my dear, what delirium is

It has taught me how life goes on,

With the sultan’s daughter never coming.

Your love has taught me…

How I love you in all things

In the naked tree

In the desiccated, yellow leaves

In the rainy weather—in the storms

In the smallest of cafes—

In which we, of an evening, drank our black coffee

Your love has taught me to seek refuge

In nameless hotels

In nameless churches

In nameless cafes

Your love has taught me…

How the night distends with strangers’ sorrows

It has taught me… how to see Beirut:

A woman… a madame of seductions

A woman, wearing each and every night

The finest garments she possesses

Sprinkling perfume on her breasts

For the sailors—and the princes—

Your love has taught me…

To weep for lack of crying

It has taught me how sadness sleeps

Like a young boy with severed feet

On the streets of Rūsha and Ḥamrā’

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.

And I have needed, for ages

A woman to make me sad

A woman in whose arms I could weep

Like a sparrow,

A woman— to gather up my pieces—

Like shards of shattered crystal

You Want

By Nizar Qabbani, tr. Rachel Schine

You want, like all women do,

The treasures of Solomon

Like all women…

Cisterns of perfume

And combs of ivory

Swarms of serving girls

You want, my Ladyship,

Him to proclaim your name like a parrot

To say, “I love you” at dawn

To say, “I love you” at dusk

While washing your legs with wine

O, Shahrazad of women,

You want, like all women do…

You want the stars of the sky from me,

And dishes of manna

And platters of quail

And slippers of chestnut blossoms

You want…

Silks from Shanghai

And from Isfahan—

Onagers’ skins.

But I am not one of those prophets,

Who casts his staff

And splits the sea

Who hews his solid stones from light…

You want, like all women do,

Fans of feathers

And kohl

And fragrance

You want a slave

Of profound idiocy

To read you bedside poetry

You want…

At one and the same time,

Rashid’s palatial court,

And Khosroes’ arching hall,

And a parade of bondsmen and captives

Keeping your skirts’ train in tow

O Cleopatra,

But I am not

Some globetrotting Sindbad,

Who can make Babel appear between your hands

Nor the Pyramids of Egypt

Nor the archway of Khosroes

I do not have a lofty lamp

With which to bring you sunrays through the night

As you desire… all you women…

And what’s more,

O Shahrazad of women,

I am a laborer from Damascus—poor

I soak my morning loaf in blood,

My hair in spit…

I live simply.

And I believe in bread and saints,

And I dream of love like the others,

And a partner patching up the holes

In my robes

A child sleeping on my lap

Like a field sparrow

Like the glow on the water

I think of love like the others

Because a lover is like air

Because a lover is a sun, shining

Upon the dreamers behind castle walls,

Upon the toiling breadwinners,

Upon the wretched

And those who lay down in beds of silk

And those who lay down in beds of sobbing

You want, like all women do…

You want the eighth Wonder of the World,

But I have nothing,

Except my boasts.

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Rachel Schine is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, focusing on premodern Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Persian literature. Her research interests include orality and storytelling practices, gender/sexuality and race/race-making in popular texts. Her dissertation is titled, “On Blackness in Arabic Popular Literature: The Black Heroes of the Siyar Sha‘biyya, their Conception, Contests, and Contexts.”