fathima cader

Come, let us be known to one another Let us make simple our work Let us love and be loved No one will inherit the earth.

"Our ancestors’ struggles, accomplishments, and errors may have blessed us with an acute sense of analysis, but privilege and comfort make us slow to initiate change. It's up to our elders, we figure, to create a bandwagon fly enough for us to jump on. Unfortunately, the problems don’t go away while we wait. Instead, racism, sexism, inadequate education, escalating rates of incarceration, piss-poor health conditions, drugs, violence continue to corrupt the quality of our lives every day. Relying on the older heads to redefine the struggle to encompass our generation’s issue is not only lazy but dangerous."

"Community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist."

"god slithering in the parched paintwork in brown & grey leaves, circling hospitals; god playing sitar to the grass-seed wreckage, facilitating the corruption of gunpowder; god’s face in the scissored moon his hands in the branched machinery, god in Assyria in the sandy mouths of heads god in the lungs, pulping to worms; god’s fingertips prodding Van Gogh’s bird god’s elbows winging on the roadside god’s tongue the sticky needle god in the city, the sunflower-husk city the vile and sickened flesh of the artichoke; i’ll forgive god only when he coils into my voicebox and rips the cataract from the vast whale eye of the world."

"The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer."

"His most famous betrayal, of course — that’s how many saw it — was his support for the Iraq war and George W. Bush. One could almost hope, too, that this was something he did in a decade-long drunken binge; that he’d wake up one day with a hundred thousand Iraqi corpses around him, like the smashed glass and broken friendships relicted after a more ordinary bender, and go into a twelve-step and start rifling his Rolodex for people to apologize to."

That Other Kickstarter

And if we don't fight if we don't resist if we don't organize and unify and get the power to control our own lives Then we will wear the exaggerated look of captivity the stylized look of submission the bizarre look of suicide the dehumanized look of fear and the decomposed look of repression forever and ever and ever And there it is

"I sympathize with his mourning for a remarkable friend. But “queer” — as I learned to use it in my salad days, the days of AIDS and spreading death, of militancy and Queer Nation — implies something more than either uniqueness or understanding. It means a consistency in rebellion, refusing to fit in or satisfy the mandates of authority, refusing to kowtow or conform, either to settle for the average or sell out for privilege. It means holding fast to the impalpable stuff of difference, always situating yourself in its uncertainties and unplotted crevices rather than in a safe or named or protected place. It means not merely speaking truth to power, but startling it with the odd well-timed obscenity. It means saying “no” whenever “yes” would be easy. It means that solidarity with the dead matters more to you than the approbation of the living. Hitch was queer at times in his career, I’ll grant you that. But not at the end. You can be gay, or lesbian, or even trans and sit down at Paul Wolfowitz’s dinnertable. But queer? No. Not my kind."

"The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutionalised crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power’s condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more peripheral effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."

"Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative wellspring. But left melancholy is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present."

"But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

"Mother loosen my tongue or adorn me with a lighter burden"