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November 22, 2007
I feel like there are several things we talk about when we talk about Thanksgiving.
There's the ubiquitous, cliché, rarely-done-well List of Things I'm Thankful For. For the more progressive crowd, there's the Angry Diatribe Against Colonization, also known as Genocidal Origins of Thanksgiving and Ongoing Oppression Against Native Peoples (Free Mumia!!).
And then there's food. We talk about it as we're preparing it, we talk about it as we bless it, and then we eat it. We talk about it as we're eating it. After eating, we call up a friend or relative, and we talk about what we ate and what they ate, and if it was delicious. This is what we like to do on Thanksgiving.
So, to honor these great Thanksgiving conversation traditions, I will touch on all three.
Food: I first thought of food in the context of it being Thanksgiving while I was preparing a lunch of tuna sandwiches. I thought it rather ludicrous and somewhat pathetic to be eating tuna sandwiches on Thanksgiving. I said as much to Raldy, who was in the kitchen frying up some plantains.
"You're not supposed to eat tuna on Thanksgiving?" he asked.
It's not that, exactly -- it's actually Lent that you're supposed to give up certain foods. It's more that we tend to eat everything on Thanksgiving. Just tuna is sort of an insult to Thanksgiving.
What I'm Thankful For:
- I've discovered the great hidden value of Thanksgiving. One big reason to be thankful for Thanksgiving, besides the fact that you get two days off of school, is that it serves as a buffer zone between No-Holds-Barred Christmas Season and the Rest of the Year. In places like the Dominican Republic, where Thanksgiving is only celebrated at the U.S. Embassy and a few snooty mall exhibits, the Christmas spirit begins infecting commercial establishments and radio stations like Cima Saborrrr Navideññoooo!! around mid-October. Thank you, Thanksgiving, for at least in some countries keeping your finger in the dike against rising tides of red and green.
- I'm especially thankful for construction paper turkeys, the ones you make by tracing your hand on paper and then coloring in the fingers as if they were the plumage. Awesome.
- For Life (one of the world's most excellent cereals), Liberty (the name of Carlos's bicycle that someone is hopefully making good use of now after snatching it out of our back patio), and The Pursuit of Happyness (a good flick featuring Will Smith and cute misspellings).
Lastly, the Obligatory Rant Against the European Invasion of America:
You and your smallpox, you and your private property laws, you and your screwed-up conceptions of religion and sex: Out! (When we rewrite the history books, we will depict you as a momentary cancerous scourge in the life cycle of Mother Earth, which she was finally able to purge.)
Yeah. So there. Free Mumia!!
November 17, 2007
Standing here again in Aeropuerto Internacional Las Américas, waiting for this girl I like to come through those doors. Standing, as I have stood so many times, watching CONFIRMADO-CONFIRMED flashing next to the flight from New York, I find myself thinking about economics.
Chicks pressed close around me in halter tops and heels, smelling like paradise, man - and I'm watching the automatic doors slide open and closed. Thinking about economics.
The Dominican Republic's major airport - officially, I think, now called Aeropuerto Internacional Las Américas José Franscisco Peña Gómez - was rechristened after the death of this country's Great Black Hope. Peña Gómez and Reagan both got their airports: Reagan because he made his name breaking them, and Peña para que no digan que somos racistas.
The doors at the top of the ramp slide open, and across the threshold into the Caribbean heat pass this country's two economic support beams: tourists and Dominicans living en lo países. Both import what everybody here wants - glasses, glitz, New Era caps slightly askew with the sticker still on the bill. And flying power.
Nowadays chicks don't care what your last name is or if you got your own ride. They don't care how many papeletas you'd drop on them in a night. What chicks want to know these days is, ¿tú viaja? You travel?
All the ladies after a visa because here, tú sabe que aquí no hay na'. Don't matter how many times a guy can shake his head and say, Ain't no better in Washington Heights - stay here - here is tranquilo - chick's thinking about the time she went along to pick up her neighbor's cousins en el Aeropuerto. Dudes had a strut. Gliding down that ramp with their Yankees caps and braids, stacks of suitcases, ice hanging off 'em like MTV. No arguing with that.
El Aeropuerto José Franscisco Las Jodías Américas is what restores Dominicans' faith in progress. This is the place where it all makes sense. Sharp-looking people coming down that ramp, people who got it goin' on. Not a single dude coming home a loser. Even los negros pelo malo are flexin' in their shades and puffy jackets.
I'm telling you, all it takes is a ride in a plane. Transforms you, mi hermano. Óyeme. Turns a pariguäyo into a verdugo, turns the nerdy kid into everyone's pana. Y tú, ¿viaja?
The reality may well be that these people - I'm talking about the Dominican diaspora now - are getting their bodies blasted and their souls sucked dry in the dirty kitchens and hotel basements of Nueva York. The reality may well be that this steady stream of eager immigrant labor is the basis of staggering levels of capital accumulation among the few who own the means of production.
But reality has never meant much when compared with the perception of reality - and the perception of reality is, in our case, that Damn! Homeboy lookin' good! (E' que estaba en lo países...)
This is the escape valve that keeps Santo Domingo from blowing its pressure cooker top and spraying habichuelas and the bodies of politicians all over the kitchen ceiling. The Dream.
These days the dream is Spain. Everybody lining up before dawn outside the consulate, trying for that chance. Went to the salón the night before and hardly slept. Getting up in the middle of the night to match skirts and shoes.
I know a girl who went this year. We all said yeah right, like you're going to España. But one day I called over there and her little girl answered. No, mami no 'ta aquí. Mami se fue pa Paña.
And the crazy thing is, this is success. I'm telling you, this girl's going to come back a hero, and that's going to be the reality. Not your far-out talk about racism and migration law lowering real wages and increasing profit margins for the wealthy. None of that exploitation and alienation bullshit.
Who's alienated now? Not the girl with the bags stuffed with all the hottest brands from Ethpaña. Joder, tío.
November 13, 2007
You know, I don't get you, man. Carlos tells a joke about a drunk and you write about it. You read a line you don't like in a magazine, you write about it.
And yet seven feet of water pour down on your island in five days, hundreds of people dying, washing whole neighborhoods downstream or off their slopes, sinking people up to their necks in water and mud and shit, rotting out the year's crops, and opening the floodgates, as it were, for massive sleazy-politician-advantage-taking -- and for two weeks, you write nothing. What's up?
Maybe there's just too much to write. Maybe I just don't have it in me to write a really heart-wrenching post about the children who were torn out of their mothers' arms in one whoooosh of the surging river the middle of the night -- or the old men who have been thrashed by this beast a few times too many, and this time they can only ball their fists -- or the shivering, huddled masses waiting for the aid helicopters that never come, who pass slowly and silently into the category of ones and zeroes.
Junot Díaz would call it fukú. The Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite 'discovering' the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, in the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral's very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukú's Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.
I, however, am of the generation of Daddy Yankee and Big Papi, the camera phone and chicharrón. (Okay, so every generation is the generation of chicharrón.) What I mean to say is, we don't buy the hocus-pocus of the old folks. We think it's sort of cute when we hear the stories about how decades after Trujillo was offed, many of the old folks would shushhh you and warn that he merely faked his own death to see who came out against him. See, we're far enough removed. We think that stuff's cute.
Like relatively few of my iPod-grooving peers, though, I am a student of neoliberalism and the scorching, snarling fukú it unleashes on the world even on sunny days. It's La Corona for entire peoples: it's having a wet rope cinched tight around your head and being sat in the middle of a field all blazing afternoon. As the rope dries, la corona tightens, slowly, and the pain begins to crank through your head like corkscrews. It's the economy, señores.
Who needs the fukú of the Admiral when you've got privatization, free trade and global capital? This is La Corona of the Third World: the black masses at the stoplights selling oranges, trinkets, cell phone chargers, puppies -- the masses that will be nearly plowed a dozen times a day making a 5-peso sale of cookies -- the rope drying around their temples as they work in the shadow of 60-foot-wide video billboards flashing images of white people, their gleaming SUVs and their windblown hair. One day I'll own a pair of Nikes and the new flipfone.
The storm and the flooding and those poor cows stuck in the middle of all that water! did you see that? are not the disaster. Neither is the child ripped from her mother's arms in the swollen river, thrashing and then going under with a glub. The real disaster, the ongoing disaster, the disaster that was only made visible for an instant when the rains came, is this whole bloody rotten thing.
And it's not supernatural. Unless fukú has learned to take human form, in which case I too will be forever pursued by the Curse of the Admiral, for whispering the name of the guy on the right. Milton Friedman. The guy on the left is of little historical import compared to this guy. Has brought the whole world to its knees, not with bombs, but with the slow-drying ropes of economic policy. That's the real disaster.
The third paragraph was taken from Junot Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as was the description of the Corona torture treatment. The photographs were copied without permission from the internet. For the rest of this mess I can thank teachers of all shapes and colors, most recently Naomi Klein. Watch this short video based on her new book, The Shock Doctrine. |
