I'm not interested in the differentiating of fiction and non-fiction into separate genres, I'm interested in how fiction and non-fiction inform and deform each other constantly.

- A paraphrase of something Lidia Yuknavitch said in Tucson a few weeks ago...

The massacre of the whites [in Haiti in 1805 under Jean-Jacques Dessalines] was a tragedy; not for the whites. For these old slave-owners, those who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they go the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink. The tragedy was for the blacks and the Mulattoes. It was not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics. The whites were no longer to be feared, and such purposeless massacres degrade and brutalize a population, especially one which was just beginning as a nation and had had so bitter a past. The people did not want it—all they wanted was freedom, and independence seemed to promise that. Christophe and other generals strongly disapproved. Had the British and the Americans thrown their weight on the side of humanity, Dessalines might have been curbed. As it was Haiti suffered terribly from the resulting isolation. Whites were banished from Haiti for generations, and the unfortunate country, ruined economically, its population lacking in social culture, had its inevitable difficulties doubled by this massacre. That the new nation survived at all is forever to its credit for if the Haitians thought that imperialism was finished with them, they were mistaken. 

- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)

I don’t think I write for freedom; I feel like when I write and read, what I go for is saturation, for intensity, that I am indeed operating “under the influence” of art. That’s a sensation that feels like a kind of freedom, but also the removal of agency, perhaps even of enslaving. Art connects me, ties me up, more than liberates me; and what it connects me to is often unpleasant because, as you note in your review of Kim Hyesoon, we live a blood-bucket world. I don’t feel like I’m “innovative” or progressive. I feel like poetry is dead, but I would rather wander in the Hades of poetry than in some new and improved world without poetry and its necro-glamorous excesses.

- Johannes Göransson, in conversation with Mia You here on the Poetry Foundation blog

and that quote builds off of something like this:

A translation – like a poem – is not a whole, complete item, as the monoglossic illusion would have us believe, but a zone into which we enter when we read and when we write. This zone contains boundaries but it also traverses boundaries; it contains contexts but the contexts might extend beyond the national boundaries; they may for example suggest that the U.S. and South Korea are intimately connected through wars and global capitalism. Translations are constantly taking place. Rather than try to quarantine them, or instrumentalize them for pedagogical purposes, we want to be overcome by them, possessed by them, changed by them. Just like we would with a work in English. That doesn’t mean that we forget about “context”: we forget about context as a field of mastery, as a way of accessing the “true meaning” of the poem, as an “over there.” It brings here and there into the same zone; the context becomes part of the deformation zone. We become gross sensationalists.

- By the same author on The Volta's Evening Will Come

I think white people in movement building need to make a call about whether they will be individual activists or if they are really ready to commit to collective organizing. The latter means that you don’t have to always be the final vote on the strategy, pace, timing, tone and approach. Put another way, it means you have to learn how to share political imagination, power and work without having to always be in charge. We have some great humble, hard-working, politicized and brave emerging leaders in SONG right now, and many of them are white. Personally, I don’t want them to go to those anti-racist trainings where they get de-clawed and told that they should just sit quietly in meetings and then follow people of color around asking them what to do. (Laughs) I want them to have their claws. They need them because we are in a region, a moment, a country — where those claws are needed for the enemies who are killing us. Doing workshops with other white people is not enough. You need backbone. You need practice, you need to take risks, be uncomfortable, and stand side by side with leaders of color and do what needs to be done. You have to be willing to trust leaders of color who have the track record, integrity, and vision to get things done. That’s what I think in terms of big picture.

 - Paulina Helm-Hernandez in Willing to be Transformed: A nine year queer, cross-race work marriage

Hoy en la mañana en mi podcast de noticias en español, escuché al Papa Francisco decir que hay que trabajar a favor de las personas, no a favor de las ideas. O sea que hay valorar al servicio más allá de la ideología. Y me digo, tan pronto como la iglesia deje de trabajar a favor de las ideas, yo haré lo mismo. En el mismo instante. Y hasta ese día, seguiré en la lucha de ideas.

The search for truth is difficult. It demands that we do not exclude ourselves from criticism and that we recognize honestly that we, too, directly or indirectly, are supporting the structures of oppression.

- Dominique de Menil

As long as there is an author collecting payments as the author, depositing it into an account labeled with that author’s name, building a career under that author’s name, why must we continue to we continue to pretend there is no author? The “death” of the author towards the rise of the CEO.
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Perhaps it is time we take Santiago Sierra’s insistence that he is not capable of producing anything other than neoliberal capitalism seriously, by rejecting his work, his approach, and all celebrations of neoliberal aesthetics.

- Eunsong Kim, more here in her essay on Neoliberal Aesthetics


There is a myth that Houston had no race riots. This myth says that Houston just desegregated without any conflict, due to the forward-thinking vision of its elites. The myth also proffers the idea that there is no history of racial conflict or Black or Brown resistence in Houston. This is not the whole story.

Here is an article I wrote in 2010 for Cite Magazine about the Flashpoints on the Road to Black and Brown Power: Sites of Struggle in Houston in the 1960s and 70s.

Whatever change that has happened in Houston has only come because of struggle. Change always comes because of struggle. To think otherwise is a mistake.

Note to self: Keep working on these flashpoints, these sites. Publicize. Publicize.

En fin de semana se callan los blogs comerciales, los blogs con puros escritores pagados y los únicos posteando somos nosotros. Como antes.