Thank you jazz

This is a thank you letter
to all those who created and supported
the jazz movement.

Thank you for challenging the acceptable status quo.
For crossing musical borders in pursuit of melodic liberation;
For breaking the classical rules to usher in a brighter, freer future.

Thank you for filling the dark alleys with your songs.
Reverberating off the brick walls.
A saxophone weeping in the purest of tones.
Originating in your soul.
Finding expression through your mouth
Bring translated through that saxophone
Filling the poorest of cities with your sounds.

Thank you for giving us the words to speak
When hate had beaten our bodies to the ground.
Your melodies stitched our bleeding hearts.
Your lyrics brought strength to our bones.
And whether on a cell block floor
Or marching for our freedom in the cold
Your songs always guided us home.

Thank you for building the musical foundation
Upon which our songs were born.
Your courage was the elemental root
Upon which we have built the harmonies that now support our souls
Our actions are the overtones of your chords
Our voices are the voices harmonizing yours.

In each of our songs you can hear your cries.
Each of our words pays tribute to your rhymes
Rhymes with such might
That they can break the grip of whoever holds us down

Rhymes with which we challenge the racial
Framework that has been the slave masters disguise.
With you we strike the glass ceiling
That is invisible to the untrained eye.

Thank for giving us the eyes to see.
The sounds to scream.
The lyrics that freed.

Thank you for giving us the words to speak
The courage to stand
The hope of dreams.

Together we live in resistance
Transcending the restriction of time.
Tomorrow we celebrate our freedom
But until then, we will strive.




-mateo

Dear oppressor

Dear oppressor,

Please stand still while I have my way with you
Hold that posture
As I sculpt you into granite
And create for you a frozen stone planet that only you and your kind could inhabit

Don’t even blink
Lest I remember that you are flesh and blood
And not barbed wire woven into a clockwork system
With an automatic timer set to mangle its victims

Don’t smile or cry
Do not look me in the eye
Or I might recall that once you were a child so weak
And that your beauty left your mother void of speech

Don’t let your body speak
Do not let your stomach growl
Or I’ll start to think that from this earth you and I both eat
And that you are not just a robot or a slab of concrete beneath my own very human feet

Don’t even breathe
I forbid any display of being weak
For I might recognize your precarious life
Or consider that you have a story and are a sister, a son, a father, and wife

Dear oppressor,
As I protest for human rights
And raise my fist so high
Let me forget that we are fashioned of the same clay
Let me strip you of your humanity
Hating you is so much easier this way


With a fool's hope,

Bethany Lauren Grigsby

libre.

This spoken word or song or poem, whatever it may be is dedicated to all of those seeking freedom. They told us it was here, they told us what enslaved us was Satan, I’ve found that he is not the perpetrator anymore.
I’m sorry if you don’t understand it because its in Spanish. Id be happy to talk to you about it if you would like to know more.

Libre
Dios me ha hecho libre
Tu me encadenaste
No fue Satanas

Libre
Tu me encadenaste
Pero yo tengo la llave
Y eso a ti te duele

Mi voz
Sera la que tiembla al cantar
Pero mi voz
Sera la que oyes al pensar y decir…

Libre
Ellos ya son libres
yo los encadeno
y digo que los amo

libre
date cuenta, soy libre
por mas que no me quieras
aqui me quedare

libre
si lo que quieres
es que huya
no te tengo miedo
y no te tengo piedad

libre
mi voz tiene la llave
desato las cadenas
de tu opresion

libre
no tu no eres libre
tienes tus cadenas
de oro y de mentiras
de diamantes y de odio
de riquezas e ignorancia

libre
tu no eres libre
a tu lado sufre gente
de tu mismo color

libre
tu eres el titere
de todos los que te aman
por pensar tal como ellos

liberate
encuentra en las tinieblas
la luz de color negra
que resiste la opresion

Te duele
Verme resistir a gritos
Con canto y con palabras
Con poemas del Corazon

Te digo que escribo porque quiero
Que ya tus dias de victima
Han llegado a su final

Me dices
Que uso solo mi emocion
Que grito y que lloro
Que mas quieres
Si me desgarras el alma
Destruyes mi sentido de ser
Y oprimes a la gente
Que solo mi Cristo supo amar

Cristo, Cristo Jesus
Identificate con nosotros
Señor, Señor mi Dios
Identificate con nosotros
Cristo, cristo Jesus
Solidarizate
No con la voz mas fuerte
Sino con la mia que quieren silenciar
Con la voz de mi gente, mi pueblo que arde
Por la libertad

dorenyse ariana diaz

Dear White-jesus/god,

There will come a time when the people will no longer sit on their hands
and kneal at your idols
they will look past your god and see their own
and in this true light of liberation
they will stand together
the ones you have labeled colors
will rise together

what will you do then when the people are tired
what will you do when survival will no longer lie in putting food on the table
but in the demands of their Freedom

will they still remain invisible to you?
how long will it take for you to acknowledge them
let me know how far will we have to go until you give us what is rightfully ours?

listen now we will speak louder so you can hear us
but we will no longer demand our freedom
we will take what you have denied us...

-Peace be with you.



Freedom♥

my trinkets and beads

I unzip the bag of pictures. Decorations for my room. Memories from my past; inspirations for my future. Here and there, there and here…nowhere and everywhere, everywhere and nowhere.

Trinkets and Beads. A movie that can’t help but disgust the human soul. Exploitation is the theme. Here and there, there and here…nowhere and everywhere, everywhere and nowhere.

Beads cover my wrists from here and there, there and here. Pictures are my trinkets of nowhere and everywhere, everywhere and nowhere. Exploitation is my practice here and there, there and here…nowhere and everywhere, everywhere and nowhere.

I need frames to display my trinkets. My beaded hands instigate the $18 transaction. The wooden shapes are placed into plastic bags. Gas is consumed, lungs blackened, all to escort my idea of art back to the white walls that protect me from the elements.

I sift through ink painted paper. Which faces, which stories, which adventures are frame worthy? Eh, this person was pretty important to me, but the picture just doesn’t look quite “artsy” enough for the wall? Oh, this one is great! A little boy whose name I don’t remember, who knows if I ever actually took the time to get the pronunciation right, is placed behind glass. The glass is cleaned.

My fingers hold the nail against the wall as I begin to hammer. They’re a path back to the beads. Back to the memories. Forward to the future.

The nail is secure, the frame is placed, my feet take a few steps back, my eyes are pleased, the walls are covered…my heart aches. The camera has captured this boys smile amidst a war. A life of killing and rehabilitation. Rejected by his village and desired by my lens. Trapped behind glass he hangs as I prepare for my future.

peace and love

a night walk

My time in India was approaching the end. For weeks I had been surrounded by women with terror stories to share about their male counterparts in society. Dowry, domestic abuse, female infanticide, rape, child sexual abuse, lack of education, assault in politics and beatings by joint family members were the common themes weaving together the lives of women throughout India. From the moment I stepped off the plane in Mumbai I was told a list of precautions to take and rules to follow, the most important being never walk alone at night.

While I had yet to have any particularly negative encounters with men in India I was growing to dislike many of them. I have always considered myself a generally open minded person, a person who didn’t judge a person based on his/her appearance, yet I found myself staring and questioning the character of the men I walked by solely because they were male and Indian. This is far from one of the proudest things I could ever admit, but my academic research (the effect of the 73rd amendment on the treatment of women in rural communities and thus the overall development of these communities), my internship (working at a women’s documentation and research center interviewing men and women about the rights of women in Pune as well as researching various abuses to women throughout Maharastra), and the stories my thirty female roommates shared with me about their lives and treatment by men left me very overwhelmed and frustrated with the male population in India. How could all of these abuses persist? How could they be so integrated to the religious, political, and societal trends throughout Indian history and contemporary life?

I knew that I didn’t want to judge every Indian man on the basis of our anatomical differences, and I was fully aware that I was becoming more judgmental than I ever want to be, so I worked on destroying any judgments or negative thoughts that may pass through my mind. I knew that I had met many kind Indian men and it was wrong to categorize all people of a particular group as having the same negative characteristics. I, after all, didn’t want to be deemed and obnoxious, ignorant, loud American before someone spoke to me, so it would be wrong of me to do the same to another group of people.

As I said before it was one of my last weeks in Pune. It was dark and I was walking home alone. As I approached Sinhgad road I could hear loud speakers and men shouting in what seemed to my ears no discernable rhythmic pattern. As soon as I turned on the road I could see traffic was at a standstill and stages were set up on both sides of the road with music blaring so loud the entire street and three-story high slum structures were shaking. Groups of men were huddled around the stages and seemed to be celebrating something as entire street reeked of cheap alcohol. Mobs, as it appeared to me, of men were jumping and shouting to the music while punching the night sky and waving tattered flags, which added some sort of organized flow to this image of chaos.

From this point it was about a thirteen-minute walk to my hostel on a normal (non-celebration) day. I knew looking at the scene before me that this would be a much longer walk, and I knew at that moment that it would probably be a slightly more interesting, for lack of a better word, walk than normal especially because there were no other women in sight. The thought of hailing a rickshaw passed through my mind, but traffic was at a halt as people were dancing on their parked vehicles and trucks were stopped with their doors wide open allowing the contribution of the drivers’ taste of music to the thunder of noise already consuming the street. It also appeared that most rickshaws were abandoned on the side of the street while their drivers made up a portion of the moshing men ahead of me.

There wasn’t much I could do at this point. I needed to get home, and I was trying to view the Indian man in a more positive light, so I was praying this walk would prove to me there was no need to worry or judge population of India who possess a penis. No need to give into the recently forming stereotypes I had of Indian men.

Within a couple yards of my walk I was approaching a small stage with about thirty jumping, shouting, dancing men, surrounding it. I was trying to think, “wow it’s really nice that they can come together and celebrate tonight,” rather than, “wow, I wonder where their wives are. Blast, I really hate the behavior of drunken men.” Within no time at all a man grabbed me and flung me into the center of the crowd.

Everything happened rather quickly. I mean in retrospect it did, but at the time it felt I would be stuck in that circle for the rest of my life, which I really wasn’t too overjoyed thinking about. I was trying to figure out what to do. I had been in semi-similar situations in other countries at various times, but this situation was different than those experiences. For one, in all the other situations I could speak the same language as the people complicating my life, so on a couple occasions a witty comment in another language would startle a person or two, as I don’t look like I should know how to speak Lingala or Isizulu. In this situation I didn’t speak Marathi and even if I could no one would be able to hear me. Another thing, this was the first time such a large group was interfering with my day. I had done enough work and research to know that if I tried to fight free, or punch one of the men, the other ones would literally kill me without hesitation. I’m just one girl, and they are thirty or so men. I knew that the only way I would be able to get out of this situation would be through the intervention of a person other than myself, which I was beginning to doubt would happen considering I was in the middle of this group and not a single one of them seemed slightly concerned about my well-being.

While I prayed and waited for someone to help me, my body was being thrashed around. Men were on all sides of me, pulling me in every direction, squeezing everything they could grab a hold of. I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening because all I could see were hands reaching for me and mouths aimed for my face. My hair was being pulled, my limbs being stretched, and some men were trying to rip my cloths off while others were trying to kiss me. Anytime I would try to turn my head away or wiggle out of the awkward positions and places I was, someone would hit my head or slap me in an attempt to get me to stay in place.

While all this was happening I was beginning to get pretty hopeless and quite disgusted by Indian men. I didn’t understand why not one of the men there was opposing this behavior and why no one was coming to help. At this point my body hurt and I had no idea what would happen next. Suddenly a man was walking by and somehow saw me unable to defend myself consumed by this crowd of men. He walked in and grabbed one of my arms trying to pull me out. His attempt was failed as there were so many men on the opposite arm resisting his efforts, so he resorted to punching a couple of them, then picked me up and put me on the street. He shouted towards me to run and made sure none of the men came after me. Here was a miracle. An Indian man who came to my rescue and risked his well being to help out my stupid self after I had made the mistake of ignoring the numerous warnings not to walk home alone, especially at dark.

I made it a couple more meters down the street when I was suddenly flung to the ground. A man had grabbed my purse from behind me and pulled it back so forcefully that my entire body gave into his yank, and I found myself struggling to get up from the dirty road. He started to choke me then grabbed my arm and pulled me toward him, squeezing my face so hard it felt he may puncture a hole through my cheek. He was trying to force his tongue down my throat and for a couple seconds I was able to resist, but when he finally succeeded he tasted the same as the other men. They all tasted like alcohol, the same cheap liquor that also contributed to the anger that led to abuse for so many Indian women. One of his hands began to go up my shirt while the other kept a grip on my face and I began to feel a connection to so many of the women I had listened to. Not that this experience was even a fraction of what those women live with for years on end, but this was a woman’s husband. This man would go home and do the same thing to his wife, possibly a girl even younger than me. If I was scared right now, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live with this on a daily basis. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in a cycle of abuse and oppression by such a man.

Again too weak to get out of this situation, all I could do was pray and wait for someone to help me. By this point I was farther down the road than I had begun, obviously, which meant there weren’t many people around because most of the people on the street were near the stages. Luckily, before things got too out of control, another man came and punched this guy so that he let go of me. I began to wander down the street completely dazed and confused, but grateful for the man who had just appeared, when the man that had flung me to the ground came sprinting after me and grabbed me again,. This resulted in yet another series of sloppy undesired kisses. Thankfully the man who had punched him saw this and ran after him, holding him away from me long enough for me to get a safe distance away. Again an Indian man had come to my aid when I was in this negative situation because of my own choice to walk home alone at dark. A completely innocent man risked his safety to help me break free from a terrible predicament.

As I was walking another man came to me and held onto my arm. His grasp was much different than the other ones I’d encountered earlier on my walk. It was a gentle one, one offering protection, yet I pulled my arm free and moved away from this man. Despite the fact two men had already helped me that night, I was still deterred from being too close to any Indian man because of my encounters with the more violent men that night. This man was trying to ask me where I was going, and I knew enough Marathi to respond, so I did, but I kept my distance. I was skeptical, even though there was something about him I felt was safe. My mind wasn’t strong enough to get over my hesitation of Indian men at this moment. He noticed I remained a safe distance from him and he didn’t try to break that distance. He walked several feet to the left of me the whole way back home, watching out for me to ensure I’d be okay. He did all this, and yet I was still timid around him because he was male and Indian. What a terrible thing I did to him. I categorized him as one of them. One of the men who had hurt me. One of the men that hurt their wives and daughters. How wrong of me.

I didn’t tell anyone about this because I didn’t want it to be a big deal. I knew I shouldn’t have been walking alone and I knew me telling someone would just cause a lot of ruckus when there was nothing that could be done. I suppose had I known who the men were I would be able to press charges and have them arrested, but beyond the fact I would never be able to recognize all the faces of the men who had attacked me, I wouldn’t want to do this. So many women face the same treatment and worse daily, yet because they are Indian women, and not white women like myself, police officers never reprimand their abusers. Also, I had learned enough about the prison system to know that had I been able to identify one of the men and decided to have him arrested he would have been severely beat up by the police who arrested him and he would have been prohibited from working in whatever sector he was currently working. This would mean his family would have no source of income considering it is significantly more difficult for women to get jobs and many men don’t allow their wives to work. If I were to arrest him, his entire family would suffer. His children who couldn’t choose to be born, and his wife who most likely didn’t choose to marry him. I couldn’t do that to her, to the woman I never would meet.

The next morning I walked, again alone but in daylight, to meet a friend for breakfast. The restaurant was on the same street where the previous nights’ encounters happened. As I walked by the places where I had met those men I felt sick. At one point I was afraid I was going to collapse, and my whole body still ached. With a scarf around my neck and long sleeves and pants to cover any marks I made it to the restaurant. I sat down and listened to the conversation two of my friends were having. My mind couldn’t focus on their words. I was sitting with my face directed towards the street. I was watching a man emaciated by a system of caste and class oppression as he smashed rocks. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, and my eyes were cemented on him. He pulled a dirty cloth from his pants to wipe his eyes and his glance met my stare. He was one of them. One of the men from the night before.

This man was a poor slave to the system, desperate for liberation. He was helpless and my heart broke. Everything in me began to ache, not from the bruises and scratches, but from a deep feeling of sadness. This man was not a bad man, he was a man who didn’t know how to live because his days didn’t make a life of growth and development, rather they made a series of redundant battles that kept him trapped into this hell of poverty, disease, corruption, hard labor, forced marriage, absence of education, and a cycle of oppression his children will also face as they have the same last name as him, and are born into the same backward caste. The only time his voice is heard is when he uses it to lash out against his wife. He has no power, no authority, over any other being than her. Standing atop a pile of rocks that needed to be broken apart stood a robust man in a suit, puffing on a cigar, glaring down at him. The man in the suit directed some harsh sounding statement to the man with the sweat filled eyes, and as his head lowered so he could again begin to pick under the blazing sun he spoke to me with his eyes, and at that moment I realized maybe it wasn’t sweat in his eyes, maybe they were tears. He was working for his children, working for food, working for something he didn’t understand and he was desperate for something he may never taste…freedom and hope.

He remedied my heart and my issues of stereotyping and hating Indian men. I remembered all people are good; it’s just a matter of revealing this in the world around us.

peace and love

New Additions to Nuestras Voces

Hey everyone!

It is my privilege to welcome three new writers to Nuestras Voces: Ahmad Demery, Bethany Grigsby, and Kaitlin McGarvey. We are very excited to be challenged and encouraged by their contributions as we continue to walk hand in hand in this process.

Para la liberación,

mateo

Naked Words.

and what if i dragged them away from my words
kickin' and screamin'
and left my words without emotion
alone
able to speak on their own
so the "average" person
can get WHY

FUCK

so my FUCKing Professor can get WHY
Him "teaching" this BullSHIT isn't teaching me shit
only making the problems worst
because after class I face blue eyes trying to explain to them
that MY people didn't lay down and take shit from no one
we all fought back
and that our dumbass Professor got that shit wrong

and to prove that
after class I have to find and
FUCKing dig and search for some truth
and then come back to class and
explain it to YOU
without tears
without yells
and without

FUCK

without anything
inorder for YOU not shut me out
as another kid who has lost my way

BUT

if I was left without the emotional baggage
that ties me to what I scream for
i feel as if I will be left empty
there would be no reason to fight
there would no reason to tell them

FUCK

What we have to say matters
WE are real
WE are real
WE are FUCKing real
WE matter
and I worry sometimes that my
tears silents my words
and it gives the pass for people to shut me out
but god do they make them so much more real
and when I cry between words
of struggle, of anger,
for FREEDOM
I do so NOT because
I am weak
but
because
this shit is real
its real
not something i picked up in my FUCKing global studies class
not something that I experienced on LA term
or on Bridges or on a FUCKING missions trip to the whole FUCKing continent of AFRICA
not something that "god has put on my precious FUCKing heart"
but real like
when I go home I stare at an empty fridge real
like in my face
i see the tears of my mom real like
not sleeping because the streets never do real
real like this is my life real
that the revolution is for me and my people real
like when WE become liberated
we will not SHIT on you like you have continually have done to us
real (and thank Paulo for that)

so FUCK you!

and when I'm trying to explain myself
why this SHIT smells like FUCKed up people who have too much power
and I cry
ignore my words at that moment and look at my tears
because that emotion explains it all
it explains it all

FUCK.

FREEDOM first FUCK grace!

Some random thoughts on Conquest, Missions, and Salvation

It seems to me that our understanding of learning is drenched in a mentality of conquest. More often then not people see learning a subject such as multiplication as ‘conquering’ the subject. I am even guilty of telling people that they should 'own' a subject before a test. The cross application of this mentality to learning another culture brings with it some obvious problems. In order to avoid falling into paternalistic patterns of thoughts and action we need a new way of looking at the process of learning.

Instead of seeing knowledge as this outside source that we conquer as a means of adding it to our collection of thoughts, like animal heads on a hunter’s wall, what if we saw knowledge as persons? Like subjects, we often dehumanize culture, i.e., we take the human out of the reality to make dealing with it easier. Once either is separated from its humanity it becomes very easy for someone in the 21st century to think of it in terms of conquest. Knowledge as well as culture are not things outside of us that we seek to conquer, but instead the thoughts of human beings that we should strive to befriend and get to know like we would any neighbor.

Along side this idea of befriending, it is very important to keep in mind some important aspects of friendship. First, friendship cannot be forced upon a person; friendship must be a mutual decision made by two independent individuals. Secondly, friends respect each other. This includes their religion and culture. They believe that each has something valuable to say and encourage each other to speak by fostering a healthy environment.

Considering these two criterions of friendship I do not see how a missionary can be a friend. Missionaries more often then not force themselves upon a people. This of course applies to pre-colonized areas. Once the first missionary has come in it is often the case that the colonized individuals become dependent on the presence of a missionary there after. Secondly, I think that missionaries come in thinking that they have the truth while the persons they are going to meet lack it, or even worse hold false beliefs. This relationship is not mutual, it is one sided. The mentality of the missionary is not one of an adult going to befriend other adults, but that of an adult going to educate a child. This has been the mentality of European conquest as the civilized ‘adults’ go to the world and pull up the primitive ‘children’ of the non-European world.

More and more I hear talk of adopting an incarnation model for missions. This model, as it was explained to me, begins with committing to a life-long or at least long-term ministry. Using the story of Jesus as an example the proponents of incarnation ministry advocate for becoming a part of a foreign community, a putting on of the flesh if you will as a means for sharing Christianity. The underlying assumption that goes unchallenged is that those from Europe and the United States represent the divine God while those in other lands represent sinful humanity. If a missionary represents God and the other represents humanity then a missionary is infallible, omniscient, and all-powerful while the other represents vice ridden, lost, weak sheep that are blind to the truth. There is no respect of friendship in this.

In recent years a move has been made to rely less on missionaries from Europe and the U.S. and more heavily on ‘local’ leaders. I put local in quotes because most of those who are selected to lead have more often then not abandoned practically every element of their person that made them local. As Schreiter notes in “The Study of Culture” those who are selected as local leaders are selected because of how successful they were in ‘rising up’ to mimic the divine, i.e., Europeans/American. They have been chosen because they were the most successfully “alienated from the roots of their own culture [and] socialized into the invading culture.” In short they were the most successful converts, the products of conquest.

Though many Christians today see the growing number of Evangelical churches in Latin America as proof to the success of missions, after spending some time there studying the ‘workings of the spirit’ I think that it is more accurate to say that this growth is another indicator of the success of the European/U.S. conquest. People all over are abandoning their traditional songs, rejecting the words of their sages, spiting upon their history and going to the church to be saved from the ‘foolishness’ of their culture.

This is the current state of the colonized because of the colonizers decision to see Latin Americans not as possible friends, but as a mission field, a place to sow and reap. I hope humanity will learn from its history and re-humanize our methodology.

-Mateo