With That Moon Language

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,

"Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull in us

To connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon

Language,

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to

Hear. --Hafiz

Love after Love

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life. --Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes

Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes of cultural imperialism as “part and parcel of the thorough system of economic exploitation and political oppression of the colonized peoples.” Cultural works, specifically literary texts, are the most “subtle weapon” of colonial and neo-colonial interventions. In his words: “Literature works through influencing emotions, the imagiantion, the consciousness of a people in a certain way; to make the colonized see the world as seen, analyzed, and defined by the artists and the intellectuals of the western ruling classes.” Ngugi, Writers in Politics as cited in Professing Culture: Anthropology Among Anthropologists (Sarah Williams)_

Students often find it very difficult to assume freedom; when you give them freedom they experience it as chaos. It is very hard for many of them to accept that we can be confused together and because of that strain of being confused together, we can move somewhere else, with and beyond the place in which we have been confined. The difficulty lies in accepting this moment of so-called confusion, the moment of blankness and of emptiness through which one necessarily passes in order to have insight. –Trinh T. Minh-ha, Women’s Studies Journal of New Zealand 1994: 10(1)