Wednesday, May 24, 2017

keep oakland creative calls for community input on new city budget



May 24 at 8:54 PM


CITY COUNCIL [SPECIAL BUDGET] MEETING
Oakland City Hall
TUESDAY, MAY 30th starting at 5:30 pm in City Hall City Council will be holding a Special Budget Meetingwhere Council President & Vice MayorLarry Reid will be presenting the Council’s budget. Councilmembers need to hear the community's priorities! Make your voice heard! This will be one of the last opportunities the public has to influence our councilmembers within their Council Chambers before the City's 2017-19 budget is finalized
We need the room packed with at least 100 OCNC members!!

YOUR CALL TO ACTION:
TURN OUT!
SPREAD THE WORD!
Meet at Betti Ono at 4:30pm to pick up your t-shirt and talking points. We'll also have printouts for you at City Hall. All meetings will be inside Council Chambers on the third floor of City Hall.

Right now fill out a speaker card + RSVP on Facebook: 
Go to https://solar.oaklandnet.com/Speaker/form.
1) Put  "Open Forum" in as the agenda item you wish to speak on


Make your elected officials say YES to more
arts and culture funding to
 
#KeepOaklandCreative


What we WANT: 

1) RE-ESTABLISH AN ARTS & CULTURE COMMISSION that is progressive, prioritizes equity for low-income communities of color, and accountable to community members; 
2) SET ASIDE MORE ARTS & CULTURE FUNDING  to protect and sustain arts and culture communities and spaces, as well as increase funding that impacts low-income communities of color. We want to be visible to elected officials so that they take our demands seriously and incorporate them into the 2017-2019 budget.

These talking points will guide your public comments.
*TAKE A LOOK at our budget policy memo HERE. We’ve been sharing this with Oakland’s elected officials which specify our platform and asks for the 2017-2019 budget cycle.

We want to be visible to elected officials so that they take our demands seriously and incorporate them into the 2017-2019 budget.

The time to act is NOW! See you on May 30th! RSVP right now!

Thank you to all that could make it to all the Oakland Budget CommunityTown Hall meetings hosted in each district by City Councilmembers these past 2 weeks! We have heard promising feedback from city officials and councilmembers that our voice is being heard, but that we need to KEEP SHOWING UP! 
As a reminder, the last Oakland Budget Community Forum is this Thursday, May 25th, 2017 from 6:30-8:30pm @ Lincoln Recreation Center, 261 11th St., Oakland, CA 94607. District 2/ Abel Guillen will be hosting this town hall.

If you have any questions, please send an email to keepoaklandcreative@gmail.com
  
Please be on the look out for our reminders and updates on developments with the budget.
  
Until soon!
#KEEPOAKLANDCREATIVE


WHY NO BANNERS IN THE BAMBD/ GODDAMN!

 

 

3rd Street Poles Get Red, Black and Green Stripes In Honor Of Bayview's Black Heritage

This morning, SF Public Works began a Baybeautification initiative, painting the poles along the Third Street commercial corridor (from Evans to Jamestown avenues) with red, black and green stripes to celebrate the neighborhood's African-American heritage.
The project was spearheaded by District 10 Supervisor Malia Cohen, who issued a statement explaining the reasoning behind the painting:
“The intention of painting the flagpoles is to create a unifying cultural marker for the Bayview, in the same vein as the Italian flags painted on poles in North Beach, the designation of Calle 24 in the Mission and the bilingual street signs and gates upon entering Chinatown.
This is about branding the Bayview neighborhood to honor and pay respect to the decades of contributions that African-Americans have made to the southeast neighborhood and to the city. It’s also beautification for the streetscape.”
With Black History Month around the corner, many neighbors were pleased to see the tribute to African-Americans' community legacy. Several early risers in the community took photos of the poles being painted, expressing their gratitude.



Tyson of SF Public Works paints a pole. | Photo: Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines

memorial day





Memorial Day, 2007

I am a veteran
Not of foreign battlefields
Like my father in world war one
My uncles in world war two
And Korea
Or my friends from Vietnam
And even the Congo “police action”
But veteran none the less
Exiled and jailed because I refused
To visit Vietnam as a running dog for imperialism
So I visited Canada, Mexico and Belize
Then Federal prison for a minute
But veteran I am of the war in the hood
The war of domestic colonialism and neo-colonialism
White supremacy in black face war
Fighting for black power that turned white
Or was always white as in the other white people
So war it was and is
Every day without end no RR no respite just war
For colors like kindergarten children war
For turf warriors don’t own and run when popo comes
War for drugs and guns and women
War for hatred jealousy
Dante got a scholarship but couldn’t get on the plane
The boyz in the hood met him on the block and jacked him
Relieved him of his gear shot him in the head because he could read
Play basketball had all the pretty girls a square
The boyz wanted him dead like themselves
Wanted him to have a shrine with liquor bottles and teddy bears
And candles
Wanted his mama and daddy to weep and mourn at the funeral
Like all the other moms and dads and uncle aunts cousins
Why should he make it out the war zone
The blood and broken bones of war in the hood
No veterans day no benefits no mental health sessions
No conversation who cares who wants to know about the dead
In the hood
the warriors gone down in the ghetto night
We heard the Uzi at 3am and saw the body on the steps until 3 pm
When the coroner finally arrived as children passed from school

I am the veteran of ghetto wars of liberation that were aborted
And morphed into wars of self destruction
With drugs supplied from police vans
Guns diverted from the army base and sold 24/7 behind the Arab store.
Junior is 14 but the main arms merchant in the hood
He sells guns from his backpack
His daddy wants to know how he get all them guns
But Junior don’t tell cause he warrior
He’s lost more friends than I the elder
What can I tell him about death and blood and bones
He says he will get rich or die trying
But life is for love not money
And if he lives he will learn.
If he makes it out the war zone to another world
Where they murder in suits and suites
And golf courses and yachts
if he makes it even beyond this world
He will learn that love is better than money
For he was once on the auction block and sold as a thing
For money, yes, for the love of money but not for love
And so his memory is short and absent of truth
The war in the hood has tricked him into the slave past
Like a programmed monkey he acts out the slave auction
The sale of himself on the corner with his homeys
Trying to pose cool in the war zone
I will tell him the truth and maybe one day it will hit him like a bullet
In the head
It will hit him multiple times in the brain until he awakens to the real battle
In the turf of his mind.
And he will stand tall and deliver himself to the altar of truth to be a witness
Along with his homeys
They will take charge of their posts
They will indeed claim their turf and it will be theirs forever
Not for a moment in the night
But in the day and in the tomorrows
And the war will be over
No more sorrow no more blood and bones
No more shrines on the corner with liquor bottles teddy bears and candles.
--Marvin X
25 May 2007
Brooklyn NY

Psycho-linguistics and the Black Arts Movement

University of California, Merced students with Marvin X after a lecture/discussion/reading of his BAM classic Flowers for the Trashman in Kim Macmillan's class. Kim says, "My students love Marvin X and his writings, yes, my White, Asian and Latino students!"  The language in Trashman caused a revolution in the psyche of youth seeking liberation in the 1960s. Even though the drama department at San Francisco State University produced the play while he was an undergrad, the director wanted him to tone it down, which he refused and later dropped out to establish Black Arts West Theatre in the Fillmore. There, the San Francisco Police Department attempted to  shut down the theatre  when they heard the language in his play and the works of Baraka, Ed Bullins, Jimmy Garett, Ben Caldwell, Sonia Sanchez, et al.



This document is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture,
Smithsonian, Wash. D.C.


Multi-cultural students perform his BAM classic Flowers the Trashman at UC Merced.

One cannot begin to comprehend the role psycho-linguistics played in the Black Arts Movement, sister of the Black Power Movement (Larry Neal), mother of the Black Power Movement (Marvin X), until one understand's the power of language that was critical in the mental liberation of brothers and sisters during the 60s and 70s. Language usage in the plays and poetry nullified any notion of obscenity and profanity. Instead, audiences were euphoric to hear such terms as motherfucker, bitch, nigguh, honky, devil and other words that ignited audiences and finally liberated them from the puritan speech of the petit-bourgeoisie. The BAM poets and playwrights took Black language to a new level of freedom. Amiri Baraka, aka LeRoi Jones set the tone with his play The Dutchman. Marvin X's poem Burn, Baby, Burn on the Watts Riot, 1965, was recited by Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale from Oakland to Harlem. Even before the BPP was born, a choice line from Marvin's poem said, "Motherfuck the police/and Parker's (Chief of the LAPD) sister too!" Because of the language in Marvin's play Flowers for the Trashman and Ed Bullin's It Has No Choice, their Black Arts West Theatre was invaded by the San Francisco Police Dept. When Flowers for the Trashman was performed at Oakland's Laney College, the OPD threatened to arrest the entire cast. Meanwhile, the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement was in full swing but had no connection with the BAM.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement had no connection whatsoever with the BAM psycho-linguistic revolution. Dr. Nathan Hare would call their revolution "How to Recover from White Supremacy Type I." He called ours Type II Recovery from White Supremacy. See Marvin X's manual How to Recovery, foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Berkeley. Ironically, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement has morphed into a pseudo liberal Stalinist political correctness censorship of free speech that would have horrified Mario Savio.

Merritt College student Bobby Seale performed the lead role  in Marvin's second play Come Next Summer, 1965, about a young black man finding himself then joining the revolution and recited his poem Burn, Baby Burn from Oakland to Harlem. Marvin X has never told Bobby he was in the audience in Harlem outside the Theresa Hotel at 7th Ave. and 125th, in 1968, when Bobby recited his poem.
Burn, Baby, Burn

Tired.
Sick an' tired
Tired of being
sick an' tired.

ST-race1408056001.jpg

Lost.
Lost in the wilderness
of white america
are the masses asses?
cool.
said the master to the slave,
"No problem, don't rob an' steal,
I'll be your drivin wheel."

Watts riot, 1965
Cool.
And he wheeled us into 350 years
of black madness

1965 Watts riots photo gallery

to hog guts, conked hair, qovadis
bleaching cream and uncle thomas
to Watts.
To the streets.
To the kill.
Boommm...2 honkeys gone.
Motherfuck the police
Parker's sista too.
Black people.
Tired.
sick an' tired.
tired of being
sick an' tired.
Burn, baby burn...
Don't leave dem boss rags
C'mon, child, don't mind da tags.
Git all dat motherfuckin pluck,
Git dem guns too, we 'on't give a fuck!
Burn baby burn
Cook outta sight

watts riots, watts riot, 1965 watts riots

Fineburgs
whitefront
wineburgs
blackfront
burn, baby, burn
in time
he
will learn.
--Marvin X, 1965, Soulbook Magazine, Oakland


In 1966, Flowers for the Trashman was performed at Oakland's Merritt College, invited by the Soul Students Advisory Council, aka BSU, Bobby Seale says, "After Marvin's play was performed, the student movement at Merritt College took off giving birth the Black Panther Party." It was the language that liberated students and inspired them to join the revolution. People realized they were indeed free to say anything and no longer proscribed by black bourgeoisie linguistics. The bourgeoisie was horrified but the black masses were liberated psycho-linguistically by the BAM languange.

As per the psycho-linguistics of  Marvin X, Master Black literary critic James G. Spady says, "When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express Black male urban experiences in a lyrical way."

Of course let us not fail to mention the female poet/playwrights such as Sonia Sanchez with her choice line, "What a white woman got cept her white pussy...."


Ancestor Amiri Baraka and Marvin X enjoyed a 47 year friendship. He literally grew up as part of the Baraka family. Amina says when Marvin X came to stay with us, we knew we were going laugh and be happy!
v
Mrs. Amina Baraka. Marvin X has read her poetry and says it is similar to the vibration of Winnie Mandela and Nelson. You don't really want to hear what Amina got to say,but you shall! Amina is one of the greatest revolutionary women in my life. If I could tell her story, I would, but let women tell it. You don't want to hear my version! As Sun Ra taught, you don't want to hear the low down dirty truth!

Artist Emory Douglas came into the Black House as a poet reciting his poem Revolutionary Things.
Marvin X welcomed Emory along with Samuel Napier and others who became members of the BPP.
Marvin took Eldridge Cleaver to Bobby Seale's house in North Oakland, after which Eldridge joined the BPP as Minister of Information.

The  counter part of the BAM linguistic revolution was Cleaver's use of similar speech in the Black Liberation Movement, although we must understand the BAM and BLM were one fist in the devil's eye!


Marvin X is one of the few still true to the BAM linguistic tradition. Riding home from NYC to Newark with Amiri and Amina Baraka, Marvin recited a poem in the car until Amiri told him to shut up in the presence of Amina. Marvin was shocked to be censored by the man who helped teach him how to say motherfucker, although he did learn how to say motherfucker growing up on the streets of West Oakland. Listen to a line from a Baraka poem, "Back against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick up...." In Dutchman, he said, "Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay! Up your ass...."


Marvin's chapbook Fly to Allah established him as the father of the literary genre known as Muslim America literature, according to Dr. Mohja Kahf, Professor of English and Islamic Literature at the University Arkansas, Fayetteville.
 Poet/novelist/professor Dr. Mohja Kahf

Fly to Allah was written during his days in Harlem, 1968-69, while under the influence of the Nation of Islam and contained no "bad words," i.e., profanity. Sonia Sanchez cleaned up her mouth while she was in the Nation of Islam.

 
Sonia Sanchez, Queen of the Black Arts Movement


 Angela Davis, Marvin and Sonia Sanchez





On a few occasions, Marvin X tried to accommodate the Muslim puritans, revolutionary puritans and the black bourgeoisie. In TDR, The Drama Review, Marvin X published a B version of Flowers for the Trashman called Take Care of Business, later made into a musical arranged by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. In his puritan Muslim madness, Marvin took out a sex scene in TCB. When Sun Ra learned of this, he scolded Marvin for taking out the best scene in the play. "Marvin, you want to be so right you're wrong! The people don't want the truth, they want the low down dirty truth!"


Marvin X and Sun Ra, two of the most advanced minds of the Black Arts Movement. They lived on the other side of time, Sun Ra would say. Gemini twins: Sun Ra, May 22, Marvin X, May 29.

In his recovery classic One Day in the Life, critic Wanda Sabir said the language was so strong it would knock the socks off old ladies!' FYI, hearing of Wanda's comment, some "old ladies" said they wanted their socks knocked off! The play became a cult classic in the Bay Area recovery community. Well, the language and situations were so raw, some recovering addicts cried like they were at their mama's funeral. When Marvin confronted the lady in the lobby of San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, she told him she was crying because she saw her life on stage and it was overwhelming.
Quentin Easter and Stanley Williams RIP

 But the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre director's Stanley Williams and Quentin Easter, told Marvin the Black bourgeoisie wanted to support his recovery drama but the language was too strong for them. Indeed, after hearing his language, there were wives who marched their husbands out of the theatre. Again, Marvin wrote a B script to accommodate the bourgeoisie negroes, but they still did not support his drama seen by recovering addicts of every stripe, including gays, lesbians, prostitutes, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, et al. Alas, when the recovering audience came again to see One Day in the Life, they were horrified to learn he had accommodated the bourgeoisie with a Miller Lite version and consequently walked out in disgust. For sure, Marvin X found the recovery audience the most down to earth audience of all and they knew the script and refused to accept his B version to satisfy the linguistic proclivities of the bourgeoisie negroes.




n





BAM co-founder Askia Toure' and Marvin X, NYU memorial for Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez.




The Journal of Black Poetry, Bible of the BAM revolution. The psycho-linguistic revolution was advanced by poetry published in the Journal, published and edited by Jose Gonclaves, aka Digane.






Marvin and Danny Glover, comrades since their student days at San Francisco State University and later at Black Arts West Theatre in the Fillmore.


Umar ben Hasan and Abiodun of the Last Poets, comrades of Marvin X since their Harlem days, 1968-69. The Last Poets extended the psycho-linguistic revolution into Rap although the rappers made the BAM language reactionary at the behest of record producers representing the oppressors in their attempt to crush Black Liberation. First, crush the psyche, flip the language into non-sense and the ass will follow! In the pic below, Marvin and Felipe Luciano of The Last Poets. At the NYU memorial for Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez, Felipe told the audience, "Marvin X is a motherfucker!"





Black Panthers Arrested For Reading Poetry


In Bobby Seale’s 1968 book Seize The Time he relates how in 1966 whilst at Merritt College he and fellow Black Panther Huey P Newton were arrested because Bobby Seale had read poems. This is prior to the formation of the Black Panther Party.
… Huey and I and Weasel, one of the brothers on the campus, were all sitting in the car one night. We decided we wanted to buy some records by T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Howlin’ Wolf, those downhome brothers. I suggested we go up the Cal campus because up around there they have more LP’s of T-Bone Walker, Howlin’ Wolf and all the brothers, than they have in the regular black record shop.
We started walking down the street on Telegraph toward the Forum, when the brothers asked me to recite one of them poems I always liked. One of them was named, “Burn, Baby, Burn.” The other was “Uncle Sammy Call Me Fulla Lucifer.” I was walking down the street reciting “Burn, Baby, Burn,” all the way down till we got to the next block, and then Huey and Weasel asked me to recite that other poem, “Uncle Sammy Call Me Fulla Lucifer.”
So I got to reciting that poem. I said two or three words when we got in front of the Forum, across the street, one of the brothers, Weasel, got over and picked a chair up. (It’s kind of a sidewalk restaurant.) He said, “Here, Bobby, stand on this”. So we set the chair up by the curb there, and I got on the chair and hollered, “Uncle Sammy Call Me Fulla Lucifer.” When I said that, I went on to recite the rest of the poem. Then someone said, “Do it again. Run it down again, man.” So I got to the part of the poem where it said, “You school my naïve heart to sing red-white-and-blue-stars-and=stripes-songs.” Some uniformed pig cop walked up. He stood around ten or twelve feet away. I said, “You school my naïve heart to sing red-white-and-blue-stars-and=stripes-songs and to pledge eternal allegiance to all things blue, true, blue-eyed blond, blond-haired, white chalk white skin with U.S.A. tattooed all over.”
Man, when I said that, this cop walks up and says, “You’re under arrest.” I got down off the chair, said “What are you talking about, ‘You’re under arrest?’ Under arrest for what? What reason do you have for saying I’m under arrest?” And he says, “You’re blocking the sidewalk.” And I say, “What do you mean I’m blocking the sidewalk? I’m standing over here.” I noticed Huey, standing to my left. Next thing I know, some people started grabbing on me. “You under arrest, you under arrest.” I started snatching away from them, man. Next thing I know, Huey was battling up there, and three paddies had me down, tied down onto the ground. One of them paddies that had hold of me, Huey knocked him in the head a couple of times, and a couple of brothers stomped on the paddies. I got loose. A big fight was going on. But boy, they say Huey whipped up some motherfuckers up there. They say Huey was throwing hands.
bobby-and-huey
Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton
Both Seale and Newton were arrested and charged with assault on police officers. They were bailed out of jail by Seale’s wife Artie Seale and by mid October, 1966 the court put them on one year probation each, after their no-contest pleas.
Burn, Baby Burn is a poem by Marvin X (Marvin Jackmon, also known as Nazzam Al Fitnah) who was also at Merritt College.
Uncle Sammy Call Me Fulla Lucifer is an anti-draft poem by Ronald Stone.
Uncle Sammy don’t shuck and jive me,
I’m hip the popcorn jazz changes you blow,
You know damn well what I mean,
You school my naive heart to sing
red-white-and-blue-stars-and-stripes songs and to pledge eternal allegiance to all things blue, true, blue-eyed blond, blond-haired, white chalk white skin with U.S.A. tattooed all over,
When my soul trusted Uncle Sammy,
Loved Uncle Sammy,
I died in dreams for you Uncle Sammy,
Died in dreams playing war for you Uncle Sammy,
No, I don’t want to hear that crap,
You jam your emasculate manhood symbol, puff with Gonorrhea,
Gonorrhea of corrupt un-realty myths into my ungreased, nigger ghetto, black-ass, my Jewish-Cappy-Hindu-Islamic-Sioux-sure, free public health penicillin cured me,
But Uncle Sammy if you want to stay a freak-show strongman god,
Fuck your motherfucking self,
I will not serve.

mohja kahf: she carries weapons; they are called words


Photo
The writer Mohja Kahf, right, at a reading in San Francisco CreditHeidi Schumann for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO, May 11 — Mohja Kahf, an Arab-American writer, draws sharp, funny, earthy portraits of the fault line separating Muslim women from their Western counterparts. At times she captures the breach in a single title, like her poem built around respecting prayer rituals, called “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears.”
Occasionally it just takes a few lines, as in “Hijab Scene #2,” a poem that reads in its entirety: “ ‘You people have such restrictive dress for women,’ she said, hobbling away in three inch heels and panty hose to finish out another pink-collar temp pool day.”
Sometimes it’s a whole book, particularly her novel published last year, “The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf,” a coming-of-age tale set in Indiana, where Ms. Kahf spent much of her own childhood. The novel turned Ms. Kahf into something of an idol among Muslim American women, especially younger ones, struggling to reconcile their faith with a country often hostile toward it.
“As a Muslim living in the U.S., you run into these little slices of life that are on every page of the book,” said Dina Ibrahim, a 31-year-old broadcasting professor, after Ms. Kahf read recently at the Arab Cultural and Community Center here.
Continue reading the main story
For example, Ms. Ibrahim, whose parents are Egyptian, recently experienced the angst of trying to explain to a salesman at Home Depot that she wanted to install a hose in her toilet. Water hoses are ubiquitous in the Arab world, where such ablutions are considered far more sanitary than toilet paper.
Ms. Kahf, 39, is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She believes that the growing body of Muslim American literature has reached the critical mass where it might be considered its own genre, including works like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Khaled Hosseini’s novel “The Kite Runner” and a current best seller, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid.
The books evoke the mixture of pride and shame involved in being an “other,” with characters living the tug of war between assimilating and maintaining the habits of a good Muslim. “Islam makes you this other race,” Ms. Kahf told a literature class at Stanford University, noting that the genre should appeal to both American Muslims and outsiders seeking a better understanding of the minority. “I can’t not write ethnically, because my characters don’t eat pork and they do use incense.”
The knowledge that her work might be one window that outsiders use to view Muslim Americans sometimes shapes her choices as a writer, she explained. In an early draft of her novel, for example, its heroine, Khadra Shamy, changed from being a devout teenager wearing black head scarves to taking the veil off entirely as an adult. In later drafts Ms. Kahf changed her mind.
“People would have read it as ‘We won! She is an escaped Muslim woman!’ ” the author said. “People think that all Arab women are dying to uncover.”
She ultimately decided that Khadra would remain veiled, at least along the lines that Ms. Kahf is herself — she covers her hair for public appearances, but lets it slip off in restaurants and is less than scrupulous about it on hot days.
The book is rife with the lurking dangers that Muslims encounter in America. It details the fear and horror of a kindergarten girl discovering that candy cane contains “pig,” or Khadra’s frustration in middle school when the bullies tear off her head scarf repeatedly, and her teachers pretend not to notice.
Ms. Kahf came to this country in 1971 from Damascus, Syria, before her fourth birthday, and like her, many immigrant Muslim children find themselves caught between hostile worlds at school and parents who are basically clueless. Several young women at the San Francisco reading said that in growing up as the only Muslim girls in their communities, they wish they had had Ms. Kahf’s book to read so they knew that they were not alone.
Suzanne Shah, a 21-year-old premed student at the University of California, Berkeley, uses Ms. Kahf’s poetry book, “E-mails from Scheherazad,” in a class she helps tutor.
“It was refreshing for me to find that there is a poet out there who speaks the same language that I speak and thinks the same way I do,” Ms. Shah said.
Ms. Shah, who is unveiled, said she particularly likes a poem castigating those trying to make a battleground out of Muslim women’s hair, with Muslims treating the veil as far too sacred and Westerners misconstruing taking off the veil as liberation.
“It’s not war, it’s not freedom, it’s just hair,” said Ms. Shah, who points out to her students how Ms. Kahf is more observer than judge. In the poem about American women seeing her grandmother washing her feet before prayers, for example, Ms. Kahf writes, “They fluster about and flutter their hands, and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom.”
Not that Ms. Kahf entirely avoids choosing sides; her political poems can be searing. In “We Will Not Deny the Holocaust,” she lays out the common Arab perspective that Israel literally gets away with murder, using the Holocaust as a canopy to deflect criticism of widespread human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
Her father went into exile because he was a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, and her husband, Najib Ghadbian, a political science professor, is involved in Syrian exile politics. During a radio interview here, Ms. Kahf called on the Syrian government to release Anwar al-Bounni, a scrappy human rights lawyer just sentenced to five years in jail.
She believes the emphasis on tradition in the Arab world long ago warped the open spirit of Islam. Although Ms. Kahf grew up in a devout household, she finds the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of Islam too narrow, calling it an anticolonial political movement that is just not spiritual enough to incorporate all facets of Islam.
That would include sex, and Ms. Kahf writes a rather graphic online sex column that has drawn ire, even a death threat, from the orthodox. One column described a dream in which a revered medieval Islamic scholar is described in flagrante delicto, while another depicts a Syrian village where the local imam has declared that women too can take more than one spouse.
Relations between the sexes is a subject she said she often used when asked to do readings to church groups around Arkansas. The women cannot always relate to stories about Muslim immigrant anxieties, she said, but she finds common ground with poetry talking about a man’s chest as “that forested mountain with the bluffs and crags where a woman likes to hide.”
In one poem about the holy fasting month of Ramadan, she laments that after abstaining from food and sex all day, then gorging at night, nobody is ever in the mood for lovemaking. “Ramadan is not a time for thongs” was a huge laugh line for her San Francisco audience.
Her readings are rather un-self-conscious. She waves her hands. She sings, she dances. In fact, she can sometimes seem almost oblivious to her surroundings. Driving across the Stanford campus, she stopped right in the middle of an intersection to light a clove cigarette.
Her audiences say Ms. Kahf embodies what they strive for, in that she is someone who both respects her own faith and yet uses the advantages offered by being an American, like free speech, to explore its every corner.
“It is just so refreshing for someone to put a lighter spin on being a Muslim in America,” said Ms. Ibrahim, the San Francisco professor. “Are we only going to talk about the war, are we only going to talk about how our faith is so misunderstood? It gets really old.”