The Brooklyn Rail

As I write from Minneapolis, surveillance helicopters circle over my neighborhood. They’ve been here since December of last year. “Ghost cars” haunt our streets, hastily pulled to the shoulder, doors often left open, windows either rolled down or smashed out, sometimes left running with hazard lights flashing, but nobody is there. A clear sign Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers (ICE) have taken another person by force. ICE agents continue to roam the streets of the Twin Cities brutalizing concerned citizens who watch them, who film them, who dare to speak up against them. They profile non-white people, detain them, and disappear. They coordinate mass arrests of “protesters” and spread lies and propaganda about alleged actions to justify detainment. Groups of armed, masked ICE agents follow school buses and wave menacingly at the children as they try to get to and from school. They violate our civil rights with tear gas and pepper sprays, LRAD’s (Long Range Acoustic Devices) that damage the hearing of young children and pets, mobish gang beat down’s of citizens, and lethal force. 

On January 7^th of this year Renee Nicole Good, a poet and mother of three children, was murdered by I.C.E. agents in a grotesque and unjustified display of violence that was recorded by several onlookers. Within moments the world once again witnessed the brutal murder of a U.S. citizen in our city. 17 days later on January 24^th in broad daylight on a busy Minneapolis street Alex Jeffery Pretti, a 37-year-old American intensive care nurse for the United States Department of Veterans affairs, was pepper sprayed, wrestled to the ground, held down and murdered by I.C.E. agents who shot him several times in the back. Again, all captured by bystander video for the world to witness. I live 3.5 miles from the spot where, on May 25^th 2020 George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight by a white police officer who swore an oath to protect and serve him. On July 6, 2016 Philando Castile, a 32 year-old school nutrition supervisor, was pulled over for a broken tail light and shot to death in his car by a Minnesota police officer as Castile’s partner and her four-year-old daughter sat in the car with him and watched in horror. On November 15, 2015 outside his friend’s birthday party Jamar Clark was handcuffed and shot dead by Minneapolis police. The normalcy of such incidents is like a cancer in the heart of America, a cancer that’s been growing for over 400 years. It’s time to cut it out. Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Hattie Carroll, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Victor Manuel Díaz, Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Samuel DuBose, Medgar Evers, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Akai Gurly, Martin Luther King, Jr., Parady La, Trevon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor, Emmett Till…how many names will it take for us to wake up? 

Have you noticed that plans are being made for Art Basel Miami beach, and the ice cap is melting? What’s the use of being an adult and having no voice? Will you cry out now, or are you hiding in your jug of silence? A persistent cloud of fear and paranoia hangs over the city. The activity began long before it was begun. A slow grinding rotation bathed in darkness, fermenting the rain and blood. It swims through the streets and shadows, swarming, alive. It surrounds and detains. Doubts arise like mist; a thousand shades of uncertainty scatter sorrows in the night. The poet rose up to defend the broken flower of mercy and she was cut down. Her face splashed red in the sky. The delicate flower petals, broken, fall on the bloodstained snow. Will anyone collect her tears or speak the ancient rites of passing? Have you forgotten those words? Mourning sank into black and rested in its muffled sadness. You withdrew into your hollow jug of silence, pulled back your hands and were safe. You passed through that dark abyss to find yourself turning and turning like the cosmos itself, buried under the weight of a darkness requiring endless numbers of eyes to see. You were lost in the mirrored prison of reflection. The psyche burns as some great shadow moves across open water a thousand miles from shore. It is here now plodding its way through, so heavy and wet, chewing the mirrors to dust, immense black dog breathing above frantic actions, hot breath so close to the jugular. The ancient hand reaches. The fields of the soul now plowed in the geometry of its influence.

Something has happened to me lately: every time I turn on the television, the radio, the smart phone, I can hear a menacing whisper just beneath the surface din of media personalities and influencers. It’s a depraved voice of single vision speaking of a paranoid ignorance that has snaked its tendrils through space and time. It whispers, keep silent and sleep for the black mask will dance between columns of numbers and blood. Its movement turns virgins into merchandise. Many important people follow its insidious influence. It corrupts. It consolidates, swallows the innocent and belches toxic plumes into the atmosphere of gentleness. It burns the eyes and throat. It sickens the heart. It calls for the humiliation and degradation of the disenfranchised. Its vibration is presented on television talk shows as a voice of reason recommending genocide as a prudent political policy, requiring sacrifices, determination and strength, calling for law and order, and the counting of tiny bodies. Let your children drink bleach is its insidious cadence that rides across ocean currents to reach the ears of walruses that haven’t stopped listening. It occludes their minds with grief as they throw themselves off ocean side cliffs, their great walrus bodies exploding on the rocks below: a suicidal sacrifice to data mining and information technologies. Do their broken bodies assuage your afflictions? Or consume them in cruel pangs? Will it be enough? Please tell me, friend, have you heard the whisper too?

But I’ve heard another voice, a different voice. It was sweet like a bird and floated like pollen on the wind. It belonged to a man who wasn’t from here. In one hand he held a green leaf, in the other a flame. No one knew where he was from or what language he spoke. He was an immigrant. He was a stranger. They say he startled many people with the things he said, causing intelligent men of reason to shut their mouths and contemplate his words; for that which had never been told to them they now saw, and that which they had not heard they were made to imagine. And though he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth, he angered them with his passion. He was the kind of man that people turned their faces from. There was nothing in his appearance that was desirable to those he encountered so strange was his presence; he was despised and rejected. He was a man of sorrows, a man of suffering. He was familiar with pain. In his eyes, they say, one could see his punishment and affliction, and it was there that he carried the grief of his ancestors. His body was scarred and wounded through oppression and hardship, in the end marring his appearance beyond human semblance. Arrest and judgment killed him, yet who of his generation protested? Surely, he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases. By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, wounded and stricken for our transgressions, crushed for our inequities, and left to die in the street. Through his bruises we are healed, and we shall find solace in his knowledge. Listen now to the sweet birdsong that is his voice, the righteous one, the immigrant.

There is distant thunder in every window, and a mother weeps for her lost child. A thousand silver fish turn together in the deep ocean, their white bellies flashing as they go. Who will warn them of what is yet to come? The loon cries echoing through the forest, as the great moose raises his head from the swamp, immense antlers dripping with wet mud and grass. He breathes in, he breathes out. The storm subsides. The sky clears. The poet rises up to defend the broken flower of mercy, her face a luminous reflection of the sky. She holds the delicate petals in her hand and she cries: Hello! Pretty yellow flowers of the sun! Behold Mother Nature’s grand design! There is a festival of colors blazing in the morning sunshine! The sight that brings me so much joy is the golden petal of the flower of mercy, watch as it crowns this sacred space! Behold! Something so beautiful begins as a simple seed, and the very thing designed to make it grow reflects the thing that it would be! To wake each day and bath within the solar flower’s golden reigns as creation sets before your very eyes — this flower sees the sun along its way! Hurry, rise up born on solar winds and follow the golden flower of mercy as the day begins!

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If you would like to find ways to help the citizens an immigrant communities of the Twin Cities please flow this link for a list of resources: https://minnesotanonprofits.org/