Kirmizi_ada

California just decided to make itself into a live microphone to the rest of the world on what constitutes a legitimate public relationship, and high school students here in the Middle East don't and won't be using the term "civil unions" any time soon. The symbolic value of "marriage" is concrete and binding in this part of the world, even if the debate about nuptual terminology may seem like yet another airy culture war over there in America. On a planet where words fly from hemisphere to hemisphere faster than fighter jets, it is a rite of parochial cowardice for any state government to re-label things just because the previous label was too sacred for prime-time. If my husband or wife is a gorgeous, towering glass of pulpy-fresh juice made from orange trees that I tended, what kind of insanity would it be for me to allow them to be called Orange Drink on a government document?

What "civilunions" offend against is not one's sense of equality before the law, but rather one's perception of reality in the world and in language. (Writing it without the space demonstrates the underlying silliness.) After eight years of rhetorical violence coming out of my government, I will use the plainest, most historically accurate, and most unequivocal term for my relationship that I please until someone carts me off for it.

If queers and African Americans are going to have a sit-down about Prop 8, maybe they could start by talking about how the state has described both groups throughout the arc of their histories, how it has settled on brutal metaphors like the three-fifths compromise, how little girls grew up comparing the skin on their arm to a brown paper bag to see whether they were "dark" or "light," about how wayward sissies and farm-bred tomboys burst out of their labels only to be fed Latinate monstrosities like "domestic partnership," "civil unions", "gender dysphoria" and "sexual orientation." Maybe Black and queer people could come to some shared observations about how it feels to lie repeatedly about oneself in someone else's made-up language, just because everyone else is afraid of the words that come naturally to you and your friends.

Being precise in one's use of language has never been seen as a right, and it probably never will. It is, however, a spiritual imperative—good for the spine, shoulders, and stomach alike—one that all oppressed people deserve to insist upon. So unless California wants to be renamed Occidental Contiguity, it should get its hands off my vocabulary until death do us part.

Who will read to us at the Inauguration of President Barack H. Obama? A bold healer, an arresting critic, someone for whom words are sacred and magic creatures?

No ma'am, not yet. We want to hear—at long last and in public— from the consultant who gave us "energy exploration," "climate change," "the death tax," "the surge," "religious liberty", and "weapons of mass destruction." Using Roman Jakobsen's writings on "poetic language" and Roland Barthes on "myth," Frank Luntz has earned a great deal of money nationalizing a poetry of cynicism and emotional bankruptcy. He has used his PhD from Oxford to export the nihilism of neo-conservative think tanks into the compulsory lexicon of American public life. He has rewired the cortex of the imperial spokespersona—crafting policy language that makes poor people into greedy loafers, racism into a clerical error, crude oil into a global elixir. No wonder John McCain always had such a hard time deciphering his own tele-prompter.

Sad as it is, Frank Luntz is the poet laureate of our decade. So it's time he gets up out of that consultant's chair and read us his collected works from start to finish. For instance, he could remind us of his 2002 memo to President Bush about how "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

As these, his last words, echo across the National Mall, millions of faces will stare blankly back. Then, as Luntz walks off the stage, we can all swear in President Obama, unclench our fists and listen. To Jorie Graham or Ntozake Shange, Anne Carson or Yusef Komunyakaa. To a fearless and venerable tender of words—for a new era that is not up for sale.

[Join Facebook group: Luntz for PLOTUS]

I’ve been working on this novel—called Tending—for a while. The prose scampers out of my imagination without much protest. The characters do the things they do in other novels—lift things, apply things, wait for things. It’s all been pretty hum-drum and lovely thus far.

Just this morning, I had to notice that I was neglecting the premise of the thing, the reason I set out to write it. This negligence roughly corresponded to a much broader, holistic negligence of mine, as far as memory is concerned. I had decided to write this particular novel as a kind of mnemonic device about the 2000s—this decade distinguished by the fact that it has, even after eight years, no name, and that you can stare at “the 2000s” on paper, know what it means, but be fully unable to pronounce it aloud. What other word in current usage has that property? I wondered if, early on, there had been a tacit agreement not to name it since, by 2003, we were already hoping this wayward shuffle of years would quickly find the door.

Sitting down to write, and expecting the history of this decade to present itself to me like so many bottles of acrylic paint, I was stunned to realize that it would not do so. That I could not remember in what year and in what season I first heard the names Lindy Ingram, Natalie Maines, John Walker Lindh, Benazir Butto, and Frank Luntz—these unredeemed captives of a KKK frat party gone planetary. Like a stoic teenager, I could only remember the most recent impact; the shame of the one that struck four or five episodes prior no longer registered. I stopped remembering to ask why this all was happening.

When the word came of the Nazis defeat on the Eastern front, neighbors of the philologist Viktor Klemperer began talking to one another differently—trying on tones, syntax, and lines of articulation that had been kept under the floorboards for ten years. Going through the brackish ritual of remembering, they traced how they had become subsistence subjects—cyclical, timid, robbed even of their hunger. I hope the characters in this novel can do the same for me, to tell me what condition of body and mind I was living in from age 24 to 32.

Maybe they will also be able to figure out how to pronounce “the 2000s,” and let me know.

For once, I’m through with taunting Congress for its addle meekness.

Okay, it was a bad bill, and fortitude would have called for something more cataclysmic: a bonfire of vanities ending in at least two years of 18% unemployment, festering gaslines, miles of shut storefronts, deserted gated communities, and a chilling, raw opportunity to rediscover what about being American is really worth the karmic hassle.

But the gentlemen and women of the various States bowed and began manufacturing money instead. Second-grade math students of the world, cover your ears!

I think this is my fault, actually, and not that of our 435 round-shouldered worker-bees under the cupola. Anyone who has behaved as permissively as I have for the last eight years is the sole and cardinal bearer of blame for the baroque state of monetary value and civic confidence in twenty-first century America. I knew exactly what kind of corrosion was afoot. I could smell it every time I bought a two dollar scull-cap at the Walgreens, transfered balances to a glistening new credit card to avoid the annual fee on the old one, or listened to my bridge partner talk about “flipping” houses in the Vegas suburbs. But instead of startling to my feet, I kept reaching for the Terra chips.

Since way back during the Contract with America, my own nodding attention-deficit in matters of federal policy has been fueled by a kind of insulating cynicism about public affairs, a studied divestment from everything my activist elders in the 1960s and 1980s hoped that I might remember in precisely these kinds of dark times. To their dismay, I privatized myself instead.

How many smoke signals does a citizen need?: a joint resolution on the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” (Sept. 18, 2001); HR 3162 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001); extraordinary rendition, warrentless wire-tapping, shock-and-awe, David Iglesias, Valerie Plame, Alito, Roberts, FEMA, the Dixie Chicks? So many canaries fleeing the beltway you can hardly see the sky.

So where was I? Happy to have survived Y2K and needing a break from vigilance, I wanted to enjoy the consoling company of the like-minded I had traveled so far to find. And Cheney-Bush’s dry-drunken joyride through the amber waves of grain gave me the perfect alibi to check out, to opt for what was once called, in 1930s Germany, “an inner emigration."

Seven years later, the blame for the bailout is at my feet, in my pocket, on my ATM screen—where it belongs. The question is: where's an American to put his queer shoulder, now?

Hello friends! On Tuesday, September 9th, at 3:05 a.m. Kirmizi Ada will begin broadcasting from Ankara, Turkey, after a lengthy North American hiatus!

You're most encouraged to send edible and/or legible snail mail to:

D. Gramling
Bilkent Üniversitesi
Orta Kampus Lojmanlari No: 105/7
06800 BILKENT - ANKARA
TURKEY

Before morning—
to watch and will.

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We became the lines we cross.
--Salman Rushdie

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This letter has not been censored.
--Danilo Kis

(Yesterday's photo was from the girls' bathroom at the Ernst-Reuter-Oberschule in Berlin's Wedding district.)

3
, fastened in yellows,
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Sweet the wood
—Litany of the Holy Cross


4
Home re-olded the new.
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A monstrous, unnamed baby
--Lucille Clifton, "I am Accused of Tending to History"


5
Today there are no specials.
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Delicate little boxes of dust
—James Wright, "The Undermining of the Defence Economy"
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A curious gladness shook me.
—Stanley Kunitz, "The Round"