yours eternally

“i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen / for what i am: a boundless, burning wick.”

When words wound, to borrow critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s phrase, the first injury is confusion. How do we understand the link between the word and the wound? Is it the physical manifestation of intention that injures us? Or is it the historical context and origin—the discursive nature—of a word that lacerates our sense of belonging in this world? What if the language used was our own language appropriated against us?

“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.”

“You have the blood of a poet. You have that and always will. You show, in the middle of savage things (that I like), the gentleness of your heart, that is so full of pain and light.”

In March the earth remembers its own name. Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking. The rivers begin to sing. In the sky the winters stars are sliding away; new stars appear as, later, small blades of grain will shine in the dark fields. And the name of every place is joyful.

“One speaks of the moods of spring, but the days that are her true children have only one mood: they are full of the rising and dropping of winds, and the whistling of birds. New flowers may come out, the green embroidery of the hedges increase, but the same heaven broods overhead, soft, thick and blue, the same figures, seen and unseen, are wandering by coppice and meadow.”

“‘I found this environment unbearable. I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.”

“While occupying the islands, the American soldiers referred to the Filipinas as ‘little brown fucking machines powered by rice.’ A sex industry sprang up to cater the U.S. military men, offering ‘a girl for the price of a burger.’ It was the imperialistic conquest of the islands by the Americans that jump-started the sex entertainment industry in the Philippines. During the Vietnam War, five U.S. military bases stationed in Thailand sheltered 40,000 to 50,000 American GIs at any given time. Between 1966 and 1969, as many as 70,000 U.S. soldiers came to Thailand for ‘Rest and Recreation’ (R&R) and ignited a sex industry. R&R facilities have been, and continue to be, a vital component of the U.S. military policy. With pervasive disrgard for human rights, the military accepts access to indigenous women’s bodies as a ‘necessity’ for American GIs stationed overseas. After the Vietnam War ended, ‘there was a major campaign on tourism’ targeting White men to sustain Thailand’s sex industry. By the early 1990s, several million tourists from Europe and the United States visited Thailand annually, many of them specifically for its sex and entertainment industry. In 1995, for example, a study reported that sixty-five percent of tourists to Thailand ‘were reported single men on vacation.’ The White conquest of Asia is 'far from being a thing of the past but is a lived experience of many.’”