speach tree

text: how complicated can a person get how about as complicated as an onion how about as a newspaper as an imaginary aquarium as the organ that serves as a floating device in certain fish as a political thriller??? (and on the back...:) as compplicated as a 3 year old asian girl who sits on the steps of her family's row house and says hi to anything that moves how about

text: how deep/ can this room grow as deep/ as deep as our voices/ as the Pacific/ and the words/ that wander and run into the walls like flies/ the fireflies,/ they rise up from the bog/ outside the Kaleidescope Room/ like spirits from their graves/ noting nothing/ after all they are not/ tourists falsh- ing shiny asses at the sun, / the moon/ and everything in between/ and meanwhile you/ and i we think of/ nothing, or anything, whichever/ you prefer because after all/ we are not fireflies/ and we can say/ whatever we can think of.

providence can be a brutal city, just like any other. in this glass box I watched the ocean fall in sheets outside computer clusters, braid inside the gutters. umbrellas made no difference. this is the version i actually ended up using: Providence can be and has been just as brutal as any other city in the country, but i was safe and desperately warm within the glass cage, watching the Atlantic fall in sheets, watching the acid rain braid itself into the gut- ters, wringing words like fair- trade coffee from my strained eyeballs to stain the imaginary page on my computer screen.

There is a difference between conducting a media campaign against an Ivy League university and addressing racial and youth profiling of young bike-riders in Prince George's County, MD. I talked with GM who has a lot of experience in local goings-on and has lived in the area for a long time. Here are some notes on the conversation (not direct quotes): msn (me): i had a conversation today (friday) with the students in our summer camp bike program about racial profiling, or "biking while black/brown." it reminded me a lot of the work i did at brown university to try to connect racial profiling on campus with police brutality off campus. GM: it's really important to express support for the victim(s) so that they know that they are not suffering alone. it's a problem though when campaigns become all about cultivating empathy for the victims and the victimized. msn: that may have been the main problem with our efforts to address racial profiling at brown. that's why...

RACIAL PROFILING – Bike Safety & Repair Program, Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp @ William Wirt Middle School & Center for Educational Partnership Riverdale, MD (Prince George’s County) July 2007 1. ASK: what is racial profiling? (See definition below) Have you ever heard of the phrase “DWB”? Driving While Black/Brown definition: (From an education website: http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/02/lp252-05.shtml ) racial profiling is the practice of targeting a person for criminal investigation based on his or her racial characteristics. Profiling can also be based on other characteristics, such as age (YOUTH) or gender (MALE). Discuss the following statement from ACLU: “A July 2001 Gallup poll reported that 55 percent of whites and 83 percent of blacks believe racial profiling is widespread.” 2. How is this related to bike-riding? (BWB – Biking While Brown???) 3. ASK questions below – how would you feel etc.? Ask students: Have you ever been stopped by police a...

mi-house (instead of mikasa) mikamion (mi camion) mikarro (mi carro) mikamisa (mi camisa) pinky chika reddy chu-chu

July 19, 2007 I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I finally got to talk about it with GC and DW last night, which was very helpful. But first, I should start with the problem, which is that: I tend to get more or less flustered when one of my students asks me to talk about something that I have complicated feelings about. It hasn’t always been easy to ask people about their feelings or about their families, or where they come from; but now I find this much easier than to talk about feminism, or white supremacy, or immigration. The other day one of my students (IJ) asked me about the shirt I was wearing – depicting a Zapatista with a bandana around her mouth and braids down the sides. Below, the letters EZLN. He was like: - What is that – EZ…L…N? Is that like a gang? I ended up saying something like - Well, … they’re more like… freedom fighters. To which he replied: - So are we gonna fight? And I said: - Uhhh… well, first you need to know what you’re fighting for. - We fight for...

i shd explain the name of my blog but i want to wait a little while first. i will give a small hint tho. :) it is the name of one of my favorite poems that i wrote! ahhhh, i hate having favorite poems it's kind of like having a favorite child. but i cant deny it.

from kundiman: c/o Regie Cabico ! This exercise helps you work on your comic timing! stand around in a circle one person starts by clapping her/his hands once while looking into the next person's eyes the next person must "catch" the clap by looking into the clapper's eyes and clapping in time to the original clap the person who catches the clap must then turn around to face the next person in the circle to pass on the clap. to shake things up: clapping twice sends the clap back to the clapper. another one from Regie: stand in a circle and each person has to say a letter of the alphabet, but in 3 totally different ways with three different dramatizations. from summer camp: This exercise is sometimes called "A Big Wind Blows" but I think that name is totally dumb. So I call it "Revised Musical Chairs," or if that doesn't work, " Shout Outs ." One person is in the middle and says "I love all my peoples who..." Anyone in the ci...

The Orange House, headquarters for Estacion Libre in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chis., MX, home base for all delegations to Zapatista Liberated Territory from the U.S. since 1998, safe-space for people of color... will cease to exist after August 2007. from the Estacion-Libre listserv: "Dear Sisters and Brothers, We are writing to you after a long silence to officially let you know that we will be closing down the Orange House that has served as our home in San Cristobal. The house has served as a container for beautifully frustrating and productive struggle. In the beginning, as you all may know, we opened our home to address the need for a People of Color space in a revolutionary setting. Our goal has been to learn from the Zapatista struggle about rebellion and how to bring these lessons to our communities in the United States and Canada. It served as a space for movement building, fostering connection, popular education, strategizing, refining our political analyses, transce...

a lot of these come from various anti-oppression workshops, but we just did these recently at the Free Minds Collective "Educator's Institute" - a 28-hour anti-oppression training for educators in the Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp 2007. the educators come from various backgrounds: me from brown u. and japan and suburban VA. WF (teaching bike repair with me and AS) from the Dominican Republic by way of the Bronx and now Greenbelt MD. Ms JM from 30+ years of teaching in the public school system. CC raised and educated almost entirely in Prince George's County... i would say that of the 30ish educators who attended the institute about 8 are college students at the University of Maryland, 9 are high school interns from the area, and maybe 9 or 10 are teachers who have been in the system for anywhere from 4 to 30+ years. Then there were a few random recruits from craigslist (the photography teacher, from El Salvador by way of FL) and other networks, like the...

(from the Free Minds Collective Yahoo Grps "Description"): "The Free Minds Collective is a summer enrichment program at the Center for Educational Partnership and William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale Heights, MD. Educators are teams made up of lead instructor(s), a University of Maryland student, and a Parkdale high school student working with middle school students. Programs include breakdancing, photography, bike repair, organic gardening and cooking, drumming, drama, capoeira, spoken word, and mural painting. We value multicultural, peace-centered, democratic education." I am really inspired right now by how this model is happening for us. I've been talking to a lot of people about what inspires me and what frustrates me about this experience - so forgive me if you've already heard a lot about this. I just want to post periodically throughout the rest of july about some experiences here, in the hopes that these experiences might be useful to others tha...

This is one of the retreats that gave me some real strategies to take back home... For those of you who don't know about Kundiman go to kundiman.org! This is a revised version of what I submitted to the directors as a testimonial: Language is my homeland, and even this landscape is always moving and changing. The Kundiman Retreat was like an unexpected homecoming. Unexpected because I never knew I could feel so much connection, despite the initial awkwardness. At first, I felt a little “out of place,” and was self-conscious about the fact that I had only begun to really embrace poetry within the past two years. I never doubted that I was a poet, but I didn’t feel comfortable connecting with other, more experienced poets about the process of creating it. But on the second day, my workshop faculty member brought about a huge movement in how we related to each other. Myung Mi Kim found what connected the very different poetics in our workshop, while recognizing the very different expe...

this blog is the result of a few deliberate thought-threads and a few spontaneous ideas: the internet is crazy and by no means as democratic as a lot of people want us to think. but it has its uses. the gym class heroes made a song about facebook. there are so many good ideas floating in the world that ought to be shared. i feel like i always do these retreats that are life affirming for a minute, then i return to this place that everyone calls "the real world." (what's so real about it?) i love sharing strategies. i love telling stories.