Posting this here because it’s one of my rant-y pomes, and therefore not really the kind I’d submit anywhere!

(c) Nin Harris 2012-2013

I smooth warpaint on
my features as a mark of
war, not of seduction.

It is a reminder that the inner face
remains for the intrinsic me.

The warpaint is read as
an invitation for conquest.

There is no happy ending
for this tale; no rant
against being objectified
will be effective.

I have elected to be
a woman and by being a woman,
I mean painting my features
not hiding my curves
and letting my hair flow
like a war-general
rather than a seductress

Naturally this means
I cannot be a feminist
because I have not
decided to be gender-neutral
because I have not decided
to obliterate everything
that is womanly about me.

*

I have had a lifetime
of having a boy-cut hairstyle;
dressed in little girl clothes
chosen by an abuser
aimed at suffocating
any sign of sensuality
or womanhood.

I choose beauty not so I
can be prey or victim.

I choose beauty as an
act of aggression.

*

I choose love,
not because I like being vulnerable
I choose love because there
is nothing more empowering
or as humbling
as true knowing
and encountering.

I choose love — and this is a
fine distinction. I choose it.

Poets have written about
love being an animal
that chases you down
dark alleyways
but the truth is that in love
as in war, there is always choice,

There are many loves,
and one does not need to be
the recipient of a love given
grudgingly, against the
better nature and inclination
of its giver.

If love is not to be war then
love must be given freely
or not given at all.

If beauty is not to be war
then we should be allowed to wear
all of our colors boldly without
anyone insisting that
we remain weak and vulnerable
for them alone

Love is not the fetishising
of unnatural and imbalanced
power dialectics.

Love is not of imposed
choices by those who do
not know the strength
and complication
of our individual hearts.

If Love is not to be war
then let us choose to
be powerful and glorious
in all of our unions.

(c) 2012  TAB

 

There’s a popular idiom among estadounidense which dates back some time, referring to ‘squares’- people who are relatively conservative in their social attitudes. Here is the entry for ‘square’ from etymonline.com, which uses several print works for its database of etymological derivations:

square (adj.)
c.1300, “containing four equal sides and right angles,” from square (n.). Meaning “honest, fair,” is first attested 1560s; that of “straight, direct” is from 1804. Sense of “old-fashioned” is 1944, U.S. jazz slang, said to be from shape of a conductor’s hand gestures in a regular four-beat rhythm. (Square-toes meant nearly the same thing in 1771, from a style of shoes then fallen from fashion.) Squaresville is attested from 1956. Square one “the beginning” is first recorded 1960, probably from board games; square dance first attested 1870.

Many of us are familiar with the usage here listed as “”old-fashioned”", and considering it apparently goes back 78 years that’s not surprising. Of course, the positive and negative connotations of this word shifted among many during the Civil Rights Era and subsequent generations’ progressives have associated it further with a sort of obstinate refusal to come to terms with liberatory movements and their social impacts, and therefore with a (paleo)conservative outlook towards society. I’m not quite clear if neoconservatives are on board with being squares, considering that they espouse radical changes which many (including myself) feel are in fact negative. On the other hand, that is something for those who identify with conservatism to hash out amongst themselves. What is clear is that squares are a common staple of political identification for our times; whether you are a square or find it retrogressive, or simply don’t care, the squares have been among us and still are. Quite possibly, they have been among us since before anyone else was around to be an ‘us’ in opposition to the fact- though paleoanthropology may not support such claims.

What has come up as a topic with scholars of political and social change is that there are unexamined aspects to power structures and their social implications are often hidden. This statement may seem to be made especially general in order to apply well, but it pops up in such a variety of places that it is difficult to phrase so easily in more particular terms. In formal academic discourse, it may often be the case that a person applying politically progressive ideals is doing so from within a critical position that attempts to universalize that which is not truly universal. In this way, assumptions about often-studied social oppressions such as those centered around sex/gender/orientation, class, and race are overlaid upon each other to the detriment of the theory. What seeks to be a positive prescription for humanistic purposes can therefore be rendered incapable of seeing past the originator’s perspective, or that of their close peers, and instead of shining light into the issues which prevent humanity’s progress they instead can therefore obscure them. This tendency has been increasingly pointed out and critically deconstructed in efforts to provide a fuller picture, and over the past two decades academics with critical perspectives have been able to better understand the nature of oppressive power structures without relying on the same methods of perception which those structures engender and enforce. Reading some wikipedia- a good starting point is the article Intersectionality-  is probably of more use than an attempt to cover this topic comprehensively here.

The net result, or at least one of the results, of such ongoing debate is that there is a growing recognition of the lack of very many universals when it comes to human existence. While some things may readily apply to everyone (such as needing air, water, and food), nearly all cultural and social norms at some point can be found to apply differently by groups, whether this is an intentional effect of oppression or an unrecognized by-product of some other normativity which causes oppressions that are obscured in some way to those who are not experiencing them. Ultimately, those who are able to clearly take into account differences are able to see that there are too many to adequately refer to any universal pattern of oppression. There are too many social norms to consider more than the basic minimums needed for a civil existence (or perhaps a shared strife in more realistic terms) to be universal. There are therefore too many ways to analyze and model society to apply any of them universally. The tendency to do so anyway, in disregard of such realizations, can be called hyperuniversalizing or hyperuniversalism (depending on which part of the sentence you’d like to use it).

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Sort of a musing rant about some themes that I’ve returned to often since I was a kid, and my development into my current perspectives- mostly the impact of my earlier experiences on them rather than more adult experiences. random events and people and such, and inspirational-ish things that have caused my growth as a person. some of these are very mythic in nature. any comments will be appreciated.. it doesn’t feel quite finished yet but right now I’m not going back to it just yet, so feedback would help with the next round of going-over. also, the timeline may not be perfect- I did no cross-referencing of it with anyone else; not that i could easily get a hold of the people i’d need to ask anyway.

Growing Up Misanthropic
(c) TAB 2010

3
Institutions provide structure, rules, ways to act formally, ways to avoid not knowing where you stand. Twenty years after starting on this course and with the benefit of having studied history and politics and society for all that time- since a young age and barely able to recall twenty years as a real unit of time now- has kept some of those structures easy to recognize and others ever more invisible, it would seem. Still being a student, it’s easiest to count according to the timing of children, by school year. One of the first institutions I remember being aware of as such- without that vocabulary yet, was Vista del Valle Elementary School, for some unexplained reason home of the Vikings. There are people inside it, adults with pot bellies or flowery blouses, and neatly trimmed hair, that sit at desks or stand before chalkboards or walk around with grease on their pants and a wrench in their hand fixing the air conditioning, adults who have kids that might be in one of the classrooms with closed doors lining the hallway, under the old steel canopy with its dusty rain gutters that see use twice a year, facing out on the grass that drinks all the water the city will give it, trampled by hundreds of little shoes in the slight smoggy wind- all silently pumping in irritation now under their desks inside somewhere. I have been ejected from the structure because I have been caught breaking the rules; this is only important to me in that I have been caught. I lean on a steel support pole of the canopy and feel the varying depths of dozens of layers of paint through the back of my t-shirt and kick my black sneakers at nothing. I never wore white sneakers, they just got dirty, and my lazy kicks would have scuffed them. I think of all the kids with white sneakers on and their stupid, meaningless days and their endless pulling and pushing against each other, in eddies and ripples of taunts and violence and prestige competitions. I share words like these with the adults, but not with the other kids. It hasn’t really hit me yet that in fact I don’t share them even with many adults. I have been sent outside now for over fifteen minutes and know that the teacher, Mr. Bergen, is occupied with trying to coax unwilling minds to wrap themselves around some useful yet boring concept. When I interrupted the class we were going over some piece of social studies, from the textbook word for word. I finished reading the textbook last month. It is early summer, April perhaps, and the white-flies are dancing in their huge swarm in the lowest part of the ditch between the bungalow-style buildings. I wonder if it would be worth it to sneak off somewhere, maybe the bathroom, maybe into the huge yard or even the park next to it where the invisible mental fence the school puts up in our heads is all that will keep us from wandering away. That and a Saturday in the library or gym, or more likely a free day off where you’re not even allowed to come to school- as if the administrators really had no idea how resiliant a kid can be in the face of being yelled at twice and given a day of free time. I daydream about going all the way out to the old fire truck that sits in sand near the opposite corner of this block, furthest from the school but close enough to several houses across the street, where some well-meaning woman at home will call the school to report that there is a small boy playing on the fire truck in the middle of the day, and my daydreaming leads me to a lazier structure, one with more holes in it, and I decide I should check to see if I need to take a leak maybe. I walk calmly to the bathroom knowing no one will really protest if they catch me at it, knowing what automatic words and phrases to say, what ritual will appease whatever adult might happen to come across me, and go over the memorized act in my head. It doesn’t occur to me to call it an act, it’s just another formality, another structured interaction. These words also don’t occur to me. I only have a ninth grade reading level in third grade. I make it inside the bathroom, the huge steel door closing slowly, buffeted by its own wind, and the smog inside is thicker but wetter with a very different and older pollution, and cooler than the dry hot air beyond this cave. I imagine goblins for a moment, while I realize or decide I don’t actually need to be here. I check my stoneface in the scratched-up steel mirror for a few minutes, testing out possible tics and tells, checking to be sure I’ve gotten rid of them and can see them coming from inside, practice for the next time I talk to someone I want to reveal nothing to. I get bored, pick a spot on the wall, take out my pen and start scratching my tag idly into the grout.

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