Nationality

                   A Tale of a Pogrom

My Aunt Alice once told me

when visiting me in the seventies

that her grandparents made the decision

to send their children,

including her father, who was my grandfather,

and who was then only nine or ten,

away from the Russian Empire

after a particularly nasty pogrom,

during which the Cossacks

had done much harm to Kiev’s Jews.

It didn’t matter if they were proud atheists,

as were the Selyenkioffs.

What sealed the decision was that

the father of the kindly Ukrainian family

that had hidden and protected them

during the pogrom – their friends –

had indicated that they should show their gratitude

by sending their adolescent daughter

up to his room.

                          Egypt

I can’t do much about Egypt.

The clique in charge there doesn‘t give a shit

about how many petitions and emails they receive

from everyday people on the other side of the world,

as long as they have access to internet porn.

For one thing, the primary market for Egypt’s textiles is Europe,

not the South Pacific,

so any boycotting here would be futile,

as would declaring that I’d choose

to spend my money on a holiday

in some way other than by gawking

at the pyramids and the sphinx and such.

Shit, I can’t even afford to take a bus

to one of the nearby beaches for the weekend,

and also sleeping somewhere

that won’t make my aged back hurt for a week

is out of the question,

and, besides, my passport’s expired.

Sorry, Egyptians oppressed by your government,

but I just can’t help you,

although I’d like to.

          A Linguistic Oddity?

I wonder whether the hard G sound

that features prominently

in the externyms so many languages use

to denote someone who is not one of us –

gringo, goy, gadje, gweilo, gaijin, gâvur,

farang and related words,

wog, taig, kawagah, zugereister and so on –

is just a linguistic oddity

or has some psychological or historical

or some other reason for being there.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out for sure.

       World Cup Nationalism

I don’t know what

all the displays of national pride

and unity

performed by the fans at the FIFA world cup

display more:

superficial, naïve charm

or underlying chauvinistic ugliness.

I’m sure that this is due to my personal shit

rather than to any objective assessment,

but the flag-waving US displays

are definitely more hideous

than all the rest,

to me at least.

                Cultural Assimilation

On a frigidly frost-covered morning,

when a damp, fresh southeasterly

cut through my layers

and made my face feel as if jabbed with icicles,

I encountered an elderly Somali refugee

crossing the park on his way home

from morning prayers at the mosque.

He was wearing a traditional khameez robe,

as befits the respect due to the mosque,

but he also wore a patterned knitted jumper over it,

and instead of an embroidered skull cap

he’d covered his head with a knitted beanie

pulled down over his ears.

Most of Hamilton’s Somali refugees

had arrived about 20 to 25 years earlier.

I guess that given that much time,

even the most devout traditionalists

can allow a bit of cultural assimilation into their lives

when it makes sense.

                        Fat Lot of Good

Iranian women struggle for the freedom

to choose whether to wear a hijab.

Greek people and others struggle with being punished

for other people’s thievery and fear.

Increasingly determined popular movements struggle

against greedhead corporation plutocrats’ stiffened resolve.

Powerful dickhead systems delay their struggles

against inevitable self-destruction by environmental deterioration.

Science struggles for our species’ soul

against dogmatic religions and flighty superstitions.

Refugees the world over struggle to survive.

I suspect that I’ll be dead before any of these scenarios,

all of which I follow almost daily,

work themselves out to any kind of conclusion.

Fat lot of good my compulsive curiosity does me.

                  A Classless Society

Sebastian Newbold Coe, Baron Coe, CH KBE,

won four Olympic gold medals

for middle-distance running

in the early eighties,

then became a Tory politician

and a sports administrator.

I was watching a TV sporting news report

about some dismal complex of scandals

in the International Association of Athletics Federations

(it just sounds redolent of bureaucratic organic fertiliser)

involving doping in Russia and elsewhere,

plus bribery, kickbacks, blackmail, hush money,

and all the usual corruption

we’ve come to expect

from big-money international sporting organisations,

and about the Federation bringing in Coe,

supposedly as clean as a surgeon’s fingertips,

to clean up the mess.

All the British notables interviewed called him ‘Seb’:

Seb Coe this and Seb Coe that.

All the Europeans referred to him as ‘Mr Coe’.

It was only the Americans who spoke of ‘Lord Coe’ –

every single one of them.

               China and History

It seems to me

that English-speaking people

in twenty-first-century

developed-world cultures

tend to go through life

with an ahistorical perspective,

as if, except for the continual prospect

of ever-more-amazing toys

from the world’s Silicone Valleys and sweatshops,

nothing ever really changes,

and that the world’s maps and systems

are immutable –

things are the way they are

because that’s the way they are,

and the idea of such things changing

is just a mind-game for brainboxes to play with,

too perplexing to contemplate

even when it’s happening right there on their

live-streaming screens.

The Chinese – at least those with any education at all –

know better.

                      Imperial Flight

My grandparents were all refugees

from the evil Russian Empire.

Although not technically accurate,

I consider myself to be a refugee of sorts

from the evil American Empire.

For one thing, I know I’ll never go there again.

It may, furthermore, be unjustified,

but deep inside I wouldn’t feel safe

from the self-righteous wrath

of its authorities.

                         Indigenous

I’m as far from indigenous as a person can get,

or am I?

The progeny of refugee grandparents,

I was born in a colonial outpost

of an imperialist colonial-settler nation

seeded with immigrants and refugees,

an empire that I fearfully fled to become

an immigrant in another colonial-settler society.

I am ascriptively a member of an ethnic group

(my DNA undoubtedly being spiced up

across the centuries by an outsider rapist or two)

that now has its own colonial-settler nation

in one of its former homelands,

and with which I feel no affinitive identity.

I have therefore worked for migrants’ rights,

in a practical political way,

but I also respect and support indigenous rights profoundly.

I feel that the indigenous-American

water protectors at Standing Rock are my people,

although the particulars of our cosmologies differ,

more than the chauvinist bullies of the IDF are.

The heroes of Standing Rock make me feel

that I, too, am indigenous:

indigenous to the world we share,

indigenous to our Earth.