Notes on Our Connected Crusades for Liberation

As I compose this note, we are four months into the 250^th year since the United States declared its independence. Two months in, our government had already kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation and commandeered oil tankers in the Caribbean (after months of bombing civilian boats). One more month in, we had littoral combat ships, several destroyers and two aircraft carriers stationed in the Arabian and Mediterranean Seas, facilitating (ongoing) strikes on Iran. One of the aircraft carriers is named for President Abraham Lincoln, who presided over this country’s ripping itself in two — I just find that interesting. The second aircraft carrier is named for President Gerald Ford, who pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, setting the precedent of no accountability for lawless American presidents — again, I just find that interesting. 

The poems presented here live in my new collection, It’s Important I Remember. It navigates the anxieties stirred by rising white nationalist autocracy within the United States by turning to the archives for narratives of Black American resistance and resilience that provide instruction for our current struggle. The larger book is born out of domestic disturbances, and yet these selected poems explicitly look beyond American borders. Why? Because American belligerence as we know it at home is precisely how it’s known abroad; the same pathologies that maintain racial caste and further the extraction of wealth from the margins of society to redirect it toward the top are the same beliefs that enact imperialist violence in our names. These three poems acknowledge and remind us that nowhere in the world are crusades for liberation disconnected from one another. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, especially for a person with my positionality: The disproportionate geopolitical, military and economic power of my country makes it imperative that I and other Americans work to disabuse it of its delusion of exceptionalism and, consequently, its habit of extinguishing or consuming Black and brown lives on either side of an imaginary line.

It's important to remember that Harry S. Truman was presented with four options—

Rather than the big bomb, the president could’ve chosen to land the troops on shore and sweep from city to city, town to town, fighting trained soldiers and civilians armed with crude weapons and will.

Rather than the big bomb, the president could’ve chosen— the big bomb, but steered it to an island without any settlements to scare Japan into surrender as their brass took in the mushroom cloud through binoculars a safe distance away.

The president, with his advisors, reviewed the maps and marked the targets — Hiroshima, Nagasaki— for their military relevance and for the fact their buildings hadn’t been toppled yet, meaning the bomb’s might would be without doubt.

The day Nagasaki disappeared, three days after Hiroshima dissolved into dust, President Truman returned correspondence to Reverend Samuel McCrea Cavert, who had pleaded for the bombing to cease: When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.

The Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs for the United States, cost 2.2 billion dollars to bring to its expected conclusion. Two bombs leveled two cities and brought the largest armed conflict in history to a close.

IT’S IMPORTANT I REMEMBER THAT NELSON MANDELA WASN’T NONVIOLENT—

IT’S IMPORTANT I REMEMBER THAT PALESTINIANS KNOW OUR POLICE BETTER THAN WE DO—

know who many of us, at times, refer to as po-po or five-o or twelve. Palestinians refer to them as voyeurs, as trainees come to the Holy Land to learn the arts of surveillance, crowd control, and use of force from deputies graded out as savants.

Heaven has a ghetto in Gaza; Jesus of Nazareth was executed by the authorities in the West Bank once upon a Gospel, after Judas Iscariot snitched about his whereabouts for silver. Where the natives live, boys become men if they’re lucky — otherwise they

grow up to be ghosts their siblings wish would rise again in flesh, as Deja and them did when Mike Brown was put down by the cop like a gorilla that discovered the delight of smiling. The city rose up from the concrete in a bloom of boom, fires everywhere,

little ballads of rage riffing on Baldwin’s prescient writings. 911 dialed 9/11 and tactical units swarmed peopled streets as though an army meeting foreign adversaries at the border of the idea of a nation, building fences with their bodies—

shields up, helmets on, masks readied — not sparing property our anger as action so much as putting a safe space between themselves and what they deserved from those they swear at rather than protect. They served us the gas of grief and wailing,

cannister after cannister, that only folks half a world from Ferguson could teach us how to cope with as our bodies tried coughing up our very souls and American lies scorched the linings of our lungs. They tweeted advice to us from a prison with a view of a teasing sea

that many of our countryfolk, on this side of the same cruel coin, pay a pretty penny to vacation unaware of the poems we’re passing to one another that would be contraband in hell, as Assata attests— what we wrote with quills plucked from pigeons because the doves

fell dead from the sky darkened by ash and bad intentions, packed to the horizon with helicopters turning circles to stay above us, keeping watch as well as station close to the throne of God, the creator we share with our adversaries like lands those of us engaged in struggle know nothing beyond.