Writers Resist: An Anti-Inauguration on MLK’s Birthday

This Sunday, January 15, on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writers will gather across the country in a public expression of resistance against the inauguration of Donald Trump. From Seattle to Decatur, Omaha to New York, America’s poets, novelists, journalists, and storytellers will raise their voices against the rising clamor of intolerance, greed, and cruelty that threatens to define this nation’s next four years (and beyond). The main event in New York City will feature former poets laureate Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove leading an impressive cohort of writers and artists—Laurie Anderson, Alexander Chee, Masha Gessen, Roseann Cash, Jeff Eugenides, Amy Goodman, Jacqueline Woodson, and many more—in a united show of resistance to the incoming administration. In anticipation of that day, and beyond, Writers Resist has invited contributions from across the country, asking writers what resistance means to them. Today, tomorrow, and Friday, Lit Hub will publish a selection of those contributions.

_________________________

I resist a capitalist “democracy” that (supposedly) guarantees freedom of expression to individuals, while denying the economic rights by which we could survive to feel, to know, to say, to write words not yet imagined.

I resist to reach for these rights not yet won: the right to universal health care and free life-long education; the right to a job and to worker-led organizing; the right to housing and a roof over our heads; the right to unpolluted food, drinkable water, breathable air; the right to freedom from violence against our bodies and spirits because of our race, sex, gender or gender expression, sexuality, dis/ability, religion, nationality or legal status; the right to live on an earth teeming with species multiplicity; the right for all to survive and create with dignity.

Boots with Cleats

Don’t slip! says Holly, shoveling at the door.
Some people haven’t cleared their walks.

One relation of poetry to action—my boots
with cleats that dig into the glazed ice,
new-fallen snow, old ice lying underneath,
and the crunch as I push forward. I feel
that motion in the soles of my muffled feet.

Minnie Bruce Pratt
January 1, 2017

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s most recent book of poems is Inside the Money Machine (Carolina Wren Press).

_________________________

WHEN MEXICO SENDS ITS PEOPLE, THEY’RE NOT SENDING THEIR BEST

I.

my father is not rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a bad one

II.

my mother is not a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a bad one

III.

I am not a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a drug trafficker or a criminal or a killer or a rapist
or a bad one either

IV.

when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
when America elects a president, they are not electing their best
though they’ve not yet begun to hear me scream

Eloisa Amezcua is an Arizona native. Her poetry and translations are published or forthcoming from POETRY Magazine, The Journal, Cherry Tree, and others. She is the author of the chapbooks On Not Screaming (Horse Less Press) and Symptoms of Teething, winner of the 2016 Vella Chapbook Prize from Paper Nautilus Press. Eloisa is the founder/editor of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. You can find her at www.eloisaamezcua.com.

_________________________

Resistance

Resistance isn’t fun. In fact, it’s really difficult. Sometimes it means being disliked by masses, and sometimes it means just disappointing your grandparents. Either way, when you embark upon a journey of resistance you have to prepare yourself for the reality that it means you’re not going to be liked by many people, and you have to resign yourself to this fact: It doesn’t matter. What it means to resist is to prioritize your belief in what is right above your own comfort. It means enduring harsh commentary, and insults, and standing in the face of those who believe that some people have a more inherent right to life or liberty or happiness than others because of their skin color or gender or ability or age or income level or body. Resistance means doing everything in your power to legitimize all bodies and to push against the erasure of subjugated identities, and this is not fun. It means demanding to be seen and demanding that others are seen. It means sacrificing some of your privileges and the luxuries that that privileges afford to you. It means demanding your seat at the table, and doing this with the knowledge that most people at the table do not want to make space for you, and if you’re at the table it means acknowledging that your space has often been provided to you because of the decimation of indigenous groups, and the continued marginalization of other groups, and this isn’t fun to think about, and you’ve been privileged with the ability to not think about it. You’ve got to stop thinking that way, and that’s not fun. Resistance is opening your eyes. It is implicating yourself in the horrors that you haven’t had to think about, and recognizing that other people live with these horrors every day, and making it your mission to stop these horrors even if it makes you feel ‘bad’ about the things you’ve done, or the things you haven’t done. Resistance is looking at discomfort not as something to shy away from, but something to seek out because it alerts you to the places you need to grow as a human being, and growth hurts. Resistance is growing and demanding that the world grows too, which is a huge undertaking, and it isn’t fun.

Michelle Dominique Burk

_________________________

Empire

By Anna Journey

Empire by Trump is the perfect accessory for the confident man determined to make his mark with passion, perseverance and drive. For those who aspire to create their own empire through personal achievement, this dynamic scent is both compelling and leaves a lasting impression.

This is the scent
I’d never buy: those notes
of peppermint and apple,

spicy chai. I smell
musk under the aromatic black
tea that heats up

around me—secretions
from the male musk deer’s
anal glands. The red stink

burns in the gamey
base notes of certain perfumes.
The cologne spray

in which the wrists, with each
pulse, say, This is my domain,
this is my way. I smell

cold cheeseburgers, cheap
neckties. I smell
moral decay, the bite

of a spray tan’s
chill aerosol. All day
I’ve thought of my high school

friend Joey who once farted
into an empty pickle jar,
then cinched the lid shut to create

a “pet fart.” 1996. He promised
in twenty years
to release it.

Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), Vulgar Remedies (LSU, 2013), and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her debut essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in March 2017.

_________________________

The Fire in the Distance

On the last day of the old world I sat in a chair in the office of my erstwhile professor, where I once spent many hours sitting as a young poet. He had introduced me to Moshe the Beadle in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, the mad man prophet who had seen the fire in the distance and cried out even if no one listened. He introduced us to Primo Levi who wrote how in Auschwitz not only man died but the idea of man. With him we read Emanuel Ringleblum’s Warsaw Diary where he documented the cruelty that was going on in the ghetto, and Chaim Kaplan who did the same thing with lyricism.

These writers and prophets described a barbarism beyond anything we’d ever known. We vowed to keep their memories alive. To never forget. My professor listened to and honored my words, my melancholy and my search for truth. He became my mentor which meant each week I’d bring a new poem to his office and he would listen to it and change what got in the way of my own music. He heard my timid voice grow louder through the years although he preferred whispers to screams.

On the last day of the old world my daughter turned 19 at the same university, which is why I returned to the chair in the corner of my professor’s office. My daughter arrived here with her own music, a rich a soulful voice which brought her to the sacred music Jewish studies program. During the past two months she has studied the history of Judaism before the inquisition, the Israel/Palestine conflict and has sung on campus and in other cities with the Jewish a capella group she belongs to. My husband, 15-year-old son and I came to Bloomington on election day instead of to swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan so we could canvass and be with our daughter on her birthday, cheer in the election of the first woman president together, or so we believed.

Or so we believed as we strolled down a street of hope, one I’d never been down before near east Second, surrounded by other more run-down streets. On this newly developed avenue, each house is a different bright purple or green. There are sprawling porches with tricycles, stones and summer shoes still drying out, solar heating, and signs everywhere that say: Fire Pence, Clinton/Kaine 2016 and trees still carrying the deepest reds of autumn. When we rang the final bell and a light rain began to cover our materials, we returned to the Democratic headquarters, handed back unused flyers and looked at the returns on TV and the newly concerned faces of the workers there. “How do things look,” I asked anxiously, having been away from media all day and not sensing a jubilant mood. “Too early to tell, not enough votes counted to really tell anything yet,” a worker responded, thanking us for our day of walking through the blue streets of a red state.

I returned to Ballantine Hall where I spent my formative years camped out in the hallway waiting for my professor, the campus where the falling leaves of my first year here brought me to poems I’d written with abandonment, love, innocence and a sense that anything was possible, that there was a huge poem living in me that I needed to learn how to release. It wasn’t going to happen in my psychology classes so I switched from a psych major to English, and the classrooms and halls of Ballantine where I met Roth, Lessing, Maimonides, Rich, Levi, Wiesel and a man in a ripped yellow sweater who would become my boyfriend and a woman with tired eyes who would become my best friend. In our literature classes the truth of our existence could be found in the books we shared. My professor never spoke of his own life but of worlds where Jews weren’t free, where anti-Semitism and finally death camps defined the life of a Jew. Some of the words that began to enter our conversations were: Resistance. Uprising. The Third Reich.

Thirty-six years later the hallway seems so narrow I can barely pass those sitting and waiting. I lean into my professor’s same office with the hesitancy of a 19-year-old until his eyes look up with shock and welcome; he invites me to sit down in the chair in the corner.

I am not here to discuss my poems as I joked on my way in, or to ask why no one believed Moshe the Beadle when he spoke of the fire in the distance. I am here to offer my condolences, having recently received news that my professor’s wife died suddenly and unexpectedly on an ordinary September afternoon, hours before the Sabbath and days before the beginning of the Jewish New Year. I sit quietly and listen to the story of her last day: a typical breakfast together, a day at work, a scheduled doctor’s appointment followed by a collapse in a parking lot. I absorb his emotion the way I once absorbed his words. He tries to bring me back and release me from his cloud of sadness by asking after my life, my writing. Aware of the student waiting in the hallway, I prepare to leave as we share our concern about the election results and even the slightest possibility of a Trump victory brings us to despair. Although my professor has traveled throughout the world these past decades, and has spoken on different topics in Jewish Studies, he tells me that these days he only speaks about anti-Semitism because it is so prevalent. Out the window the day darkens into late afternoon.

My daughter and I wait near a stairwell in Ballantine for the rest of the family, when a blond, chunky student in a red Trump shirt and hat passes us with what I see as a glaring look. I clear my throat and my daughter sternly whispers, “Don’t say anything.” On that day in November, election day, my daughter’s 19th birthday, this Trump supporter in a college town in Indiana is still a surprise. The sight of him and the aggressive sound of his boots hiking up steps sends a shiver through my body. At this moment I still think he is an aberration, not a foreshadowing.

We celebrate our daughter’s birthday at our favorite Afghani restaurant.

We get a corner table and look out the window at the continuing light drizzle and blackening sky.

My husband thought we would be celebrating a Clinton victory by now, that we would toast to our daughter’s first election and to our first woman president, and then return to our town where celebratory cocktails would be waiting for us across the street and down the block. But numbers, that we avoid listening to, are inconclusive. We try to cast the shadow aside and enjoy the four of us together for our daughter’s first birthday in college.

On the way home I drive and my husband navigates through rain and fog and a radio that is calling states red that we never expected to turn red. I ask my husband to turn off the radio because the sound is distorted and distracting and this can’t be true. Too many votes haven’t been counted. This can’t be true. As we get closer to Chicago my phone buzzes with texts from my Evanston friends who are on their way back from Ohio where they helped with voter protection. Their messages say things like “are you as sick as I am” and “I’m going to throw up.” One friend has already checked out the website about moving to Canada. In our green Subaru my husband, son and I are also concerned but we think this is still inconclusive. This doesn’t seem right. Can’t be right.

A day or so later we understand that we saw the beginning of the country changing on a dark road in Indiana.

Even after Hillary’s eloquent concession speech, even after Trump’s victory has been declared and the first horrific cabinet members chosen, even after the people around me begin to accept this and discuss the things we’ll have to fight for and be vigilant about over the next four years, I am still in the place I was on the dark road in Indiana. I am still saying: This. Cannot. Be. I look for any way out. I wait for proof that Russia influenced the election through hacking. I support Jill Stein’s recount efforts. All I can see is the fire in the distance. All I can look for is a way out.

From day one I talk about the electoral college and how it is their job to make sure an unfit, dangerous demagogue does not become president. When I say things like this during the first post-election week, before this idea has gained momentum, men of good will, including my husband, look back at me in surprise and dare I say judgment. These men say: That won’t happen. That can’t happen. There would be a revolution. And I say yes. I can’t remember a time when we were more in need of a revolution. In gatherings at rallies, synagogues and town squares, people are still speaking of the next four years. I am still saying “this can’t happen.” I am Moshe the Beadle. I can’t forget the fire in the distance.

We gather in front of Trump Tower to protest Trump’s choice of Bannon. My fifty-something friends and I are with mostly twenty-something Jews from a far left organization that I don’t agree with on much except that we must speak out against Bannon. They are carrying signs in Hebrew. They sing Hebrew songs, smile, and say things like “we are the Jewish resistance.” Those words alienate me to the point of tears. I want to say no: the Jewish resistance was Abba Kovner who said to his people, especially the youth in the ghettos of Vilna in 1941, we must fight with everything we have. The Jewish resistance was Emanuel Ringelblum who smuggled his Warsaw Diary through milk bottles hidden underground, documenting the daily horrors. We are Jews gathered together on a cold December night in Chicago. I want to say to these youth that yes we need to fight the anti-Semitism we see spreading around our world but we need a new language. We are not yet fighting for our lives. Our president-elect is not Hitler. We are not Jews in ghettos.

Yet hate has been unleashed everywhere in this country. The president-elect has given permission to hate women, Blacks, Queers, Muslims, Latinos, and Jews. As Jews we need to speak out against all forms of hatred. We need to stop it in its tracks.

The people around me, especially the men, continue to look at me with alarm when I wait for electors, or recounts, or evidence of Russian interference to turn this around. People tell me to stop dreaming of the impossible. They say he is going to be president. There is nothing we can do. This is a Democracy. An elector has never betrayed his state.

I say we have never had a leader who is as dangerous as our president-elect. It is time to do what’s never been done.

Even after a Republican elector from red Texas says he won’t vote for Trump. Even after

proof of Russian hacking. Even after recounts show slimmer and slimmer margins of Trump’s victory, friends tell me to wake up. That this is going to happen. I say it can’t.

There are small circles of people who speak as I do. The long-time journalist Dan Rather warns that this is not a time to sit but to stand and fight. He is a voice of reason. Those in this small circle of people who see the fire and don’t want to walk into it, who see injustices breaking out like an epidemic, ask why Obama and Clinton don’t seem to be fighting hard enough for a recount or a probe into Russian involvement. Why aren’t they shouting their outrage? Dan Rather says we will one day have to explain what side we were on and what we did to fight. Some days I am paralyzed with fear. Other days I post articles that support the small ways I think we have no choice but to fight.

Months ago in the world before this one, resistance was an academic exercise. More poetically than politically inclined, I began to collect poems of resistance. I gave a talk for an open house at the university where I teach, on the way different poets used their art to sometimes document and other times protest injustice. I have always been drawn to poets of witness and resistance.

I loved most the poets who continued to sing or shout during dark times: Bertolt Brecht, Adrienne Rich, Carl Sandburg, Jammal May, newly discovered women poets from Syria.

This summer I planned a course called “Can Poetry Save Us?” and when it came time to teach it on November 20th, it no longer felt theoretical and distant. We read the Holocaust poets Paul Celan, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and we got so lost in the way they crafted their anguish, fear and hope that we never made it to the American poets, Rukeyser or Rich. The only weapon I have ever been taught to use is language.

It was different for my grandfathers. In early 1900 my father’s father Saul, was imprisoned in Russia for being part of the movement that resisted communism. My father’s Uncle Leo, newly arrived in America, went with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to Spain to fight fascism. He fell in his first battle. My father flew a plane and dropped bombs on Germany during World War II.

On Pearl Harbor Day 2016, one month after election day, my father and I pack my green Subaru and return to the road to Indiana to help my daughter move to a new room. This is the road where I first saw the country change, and over the past month grow more profoundly polarized than I have ever known. In my mind everything has become good and evil, black and white. I read reports from a newly formed group, Pantsuit Nation, about the injustices that women and minorities are facing throughout the country. When someone cuts me off on the highway in a big jeep I imagine he is a Trump supporter. I come from a progressive town where people say hello when passing and where many come to each other’s aid. There are racial divisions, areas of poverty and crime but so many of us try to fight this together. When a Quran at the Evanston Public Library was defaced with swastikas, a group of Jews and Christians immediately replaced it. Early in the morning, running along the lake, I’m aware that almost everyone I pass takes a moment to smile, brighter than usual, in a way that says we are all in this together.

But I know the main roads in the rest of the country are different. I don’t want to drive or stop at gas stations alone. On this long Indiana highway I ask my father to tell me the story of Pearl Harbor, what he was doing on a day when he saw the unfathomable happen, a day he felt his country change. My father had been in the middle of an ordinary day of school and then work at his father’s store in Humboldt Park.

My father listens to my fear of the fire in the distance, the grassroots efforts to resist that I read about on Facebook. He hasn’t read about any of this in his paper copy of the New York Times. Many times this month he has said things like, We will get through this. This trip helps me to believe this for moments at a time. It becomes my respite. When have I last spent uninterrupted time like this with my father? When have just the two of us had pizza and beer? When during this last month have I forgotten the state of my country for more than two minutes? On our first night in Bloomington at my daughter’s a capella concert, we hear her perform, among other things, a song of peace in Hebrew, Arabic and English.

In the morning I bundle up against 19-degree winds and jog along the Jordan River that runs through campus, where 36 years ago my early poems fell into my lap as leaves tangled in my hair. A student whose face is covered in a winter mask runs towards me and I panic before realizing he is just late to class. Another man running towards me against the cold quickly reaches in his pocket for his phone, it turns out, and I flinch again. I do not visit my professor this time because I don’t have much time and because suddenly it feels too painful. I still want to know why no one listened to Moshe the Beadle. I want to shout in my poems and conversations. My professor prefers whispers. I run faster and faster against these snowy paths, search for an image that will help me describe where I am today, one month after the world has begun to change. All I can find is my three-word refrain: This. Can’t. Be.

Dina Elenbogen, an award-winning poet and prose writer is author of the memoir, Drawn from Water (BKMk Press, University of Missouri) and the poetry collection Apples of the Earth (Spuyten Duyvil, NY). Her work has appeared in anthologies such as City of the Big Shoulders (University of Iowa Press) Beyond Lament (Northwestern University press), Where We Find Ourselves (SUNY Press) and magazines and journals such as december magazine, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Bellevue Literary Review, Tikkun, Paterson Literary Review and New City Chicago. She has a poetry MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago Graham School. You can visit her at www.dinaelenbogen.com