colors // because I want to rise into today

HOLI!!!!

ah yes hampshire celebrates the hindu festival of color about 2 months late. hampshire time. hampshire time.

strange though, as much as i anticipated doing this again (did it last year), i had a little dream while sleeping in this morning...some friends of mine were in the dream and telling me how my participation would be 'exotifying' and a kind of cultural appropriation. obviously hamptheory has gotten to me. i'm even dreaming in this language. dreaming in hamptheory! but then, since i am identified as a SOURCE member/a person of color on this campus, does that make me participating in Holi ok? this didn't occur to me in the dream, but it did occur to me at the actual event, when the friends (who had been in the dream) commented on "white people's" behavior.

am i not included in "white people" because i am also of an 'underpresented culture and ethnicity" like the friends of mine who have some real connection to hindu festivals/rituals? and now that Holi, especially in hindu diaspora communities, has become somewhat secularized...what does that "real connection" mean? is it any more real in the "diaspora" as in the "homeland"? what is the use of such distinctions? who's using them?

(i think of white parents with their adopted chinese daughters, so eager to celebrate the chinese new year. more eager than my own parents. i think of white girls wearing 旗袍 to "chinese culture nights" when i've never seen anyone in my family wear one. who's more "authentically" chinese?)

context is so important. i have to remember that i'm at hampshire, and that a campus politics of white/POC exists, as foolish as that politics is sometimes (a politics so dependent on "color"). at the same time, it is not simply that i am counted as POC or at times do identify in that way...it's that i am friends with people from India and Pakistan...i have no idea how they would prefer to identify or if they even know themselves...but i know that we have shared spaces in which we shared with each other the confusions, the questions. is that "solidarity"?

i'm more comfortable calling it a working friendship. after all, i'm going to be living with some of these fellow students next semester. does that automatically make us all the closest of friends? no. but it means that we are trying to build some kind of shared understanding, shared space.

**

and...3 more poems by olena kalytiak davis (from And Her Soul Out of Nothing).

Who Cares About Aperture

She may be a lover, may not.
It's like walking into a church.
Who cares about aperture, about crawlspace?
I sat on the front steps with my arms
turned up. Such a small bird, with such a long beak.
As if that wasn't my life behind me, inside that house.
As if those logs were something other
than trees. The thing is, he kept saying, in the summer
all you want to do is fish. She may be a lover, may not.
It's like walking into a church.
I sat on the front steps with my arms
turned up. Who cares about aperture,
about crawlspace? As if that wasn't my life. Such a small bird
with a such a long beak. Behind me, inside that house.
The thing is, he kept saying, in the summer
all you want to do is fish. As if those logs
were something other than trees. She may be
a lover, may not. It's like walking
into a church. Inside that house. Who cares
about aperture, about crawlspace?
Such a small bird with such a long beak.
The thing is, he kept saying, in the summer
all you want to do is fish.

When it's this windy doesn't it seem impossible
to grow old?

*

from The Outline I Inhabit

1. Imagine What Pain Says

In the ghost-making fog the phone rings.

Sure, I'm unnerved, but I listen.
I strain for meaning. So when I hang up
everything's sore. When I hang up
I have to write down everything
that hurts.

Imagine what Pain says:
I'll keep in touch.

*

Something More Fragile Than This

Quick,
before our bodies turn themselves in,
with a reverence reserved for the dead touch me
because I want to remember how beautiful I still am.
While Spring snows around us, cracking her eggs
on our windows, in her meager dress of yellowing-white,
because I want to rise into today.

So why the urge to render something
more fragile than this?
Why, always, the soul blowing glass?
The soul, once again, filling the lungs
with smoke because a memory of regret sweats
in the plastic sleeve of a family
album. Because there's a snapshot caught
between the pages of some thick book:
my heavy 20 year old frame setting off
the 60lb weight of a dying mother. Because
somewhere, there's a negative slide
of my heart. Because and because and because
I'm sure there's a photo
in some drawer that shows me dressed in black.

But I want to devote myself to the mystery
of this afternoon. I want to honor this
falling night, worship the hour vanishing
between six and seven. This moment
where I'm standing against myself and against
you with a taste in my mouth
that's yolk.

With Bob Marley taking that one long drag
on the refrigerator door.

With the smell of spring.