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.

Brotherhood II

  More Ugly Memories That Won’t Go Away

Before I terminated social interaction between us

more than two decades ago,

my sibling frequently

displayed huge enjoyment in flaunting

his bigotries,

his fascist ideologies,

his shittier values,

and his schadenfreude –

rejoicing in the anguish of people

he’d never met

and who’d done him no wrong –

aggressively in my face.

He could have had no healthy, brotherly

reason for doing this,

could he?

     Operant & Respondent Conditioning

I could be wrong about this,

but in regard to the difference

between operant and respondent conditioning,

I think this is about a bit of both.

Decades of being the recipient

of almost relentless

and joyfully malicious tormenting by way of

taunting, disparagement, ridicule,

mockery, derision, humiliation,

sneering, jeering,

belittling, bullying,

condescension, patronisation,

and general put-downs

by my elder sibling

at his every opportunity,

delivered as if each were hilariously funny,

not to mention his frequent and aggressively

smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous, pompous

projections of chauvinism and bigotry into my face,

did indeed condition me

by my early forties

to feel physically sick to my stomach

by the sound of his voice,

the sight of his face,

or the memory of either of them.

             A Different League

Displaying a predictable delight

in vexing and frustrating my attempt

to establish some semblance of fraternity,

my sibling obstructed all my efforts

to describe the differences between rugby and league

with inane interruptions and digressions

and prideful expressions of ignorance,

thereby refusing to allow me to experience

the bonding others feel with brotherhood,

and making my life-long hatred of him

discolour my enjoyment

of every league match I’ve seen on the telly

in the decades since.

Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching

rugby more than league, anyway.

                      Not Learning To Kick

I didn’t learn sport skills as a boy.

My daddy was always busy, and then died,

and my older brother preferred

to ridicule me for not already having them,

to gloat about his superiority over me in them,

or both,

so I made it into adolescence without many basic skills.

I grew up with American football

in an age when people kicked with their toes.

Then, when I was in my mid-teens,

all the big teams began to use

what was then called soccer-style kickers.

I thought that was real cool, and decided,

since I did have strong legs,

to teach myself how to do it.

The idea of asking anybody to teach me never occurred to me.

That would’ve left me open to ridicule

over and above what I’d received all my life from my family.

The major problem with teaching myself, though,

was that all I knew was what I’d seen on TV,

and I’d misunderstood that completely.

I knew that they struck it with their instep,

but I didn’t know what an instep is,

and since I’d watched them approach the ball from the side,

I thought that an instep was the inside of the foot,

rather than the top of it.

Never having had a coach tell me

to put my laces through it,

I spent many hours out in a field

alone

kicking a ball incorrectly,

and making no progress at all.

                        Busty Rusty

Barely keeping his sniggering under control,

Paul told me that he’d been to a strip joint in Boston

where the feature act had been called

Busty Rusty and Her Fabulous Fifties,

the “fabulous fifties” referring

to her bosom being 50 inches in circumference.

Fifty inches is 127 centimetres.

Giggling maniacally, he told me,

“She took her right tit,

wrapped it around her left shoulder,

and then kissed it over her right shoulder.”

Although I was only sixteen,

I really didn’t think that was either funny or sexy,

and I certainly don’t think so now.

I suppose they called her Rusty

because she had red hair.

                               Singing

In the back seat of my elder sibling’s ostentatious car,

my then-five-year-old daughter

began singing something somewhat tunelessly,

as five-year-olds are wont to do.

Sitting next to her, my early-stages-of-dementia mother

made complimentary grandmotherly noises,

and my sister-in-law, also in the back,

also made sounds of approval.

My sibling, behind the wheel,

asserted in a nastily ridiculing tone that she certainly hadn’t

inherited her singing ability from her father,

then glanced over toward me on the other front seat

with a stomach-churning smirk on his face.

My mother, changing the subject,

or maybe just wandering off at a tangent,

made some comment about my father’s musical talent.

My sibling, his smirk more pronounced

and his voice dripping with gleeful malice,

ploughed on as if she hadn’t spoken,

with something about my singing being

the most ugly sound possible.

Then my sister-in-law pointedly changed the subject

with a remark about the meal we’d just eaten, or something,

but without a pause my sibling, smirking and sneering,

claimed that hearing me sing made strong men vomit

and others leave the room to avoid doing so.

He bore relentlessly on in this manner,

enjoying himself enormously and

ignoring the back-seat efforts to change the topic,

for at least five minutes.

Thirteen years later I performed

in a musical production.

The audiences appreciated my vocal solo,

delivered in a strong blues growl,

and my bass harmonies

in the ensemble numbers

received praise from others in the cast.

  Oppressive Imaginary Conversations

For years they came up on me involuntarily,

imaginary conversations with my sibling

in which I always began,

“You know what I think, Paul?”,

followed by my describing him to his face

as the scummy lump of evil shit that he is.

Then, after my world fell apart and I shifted into neutral

in order to survive,

I became free of these for several months.

Too bad they started coming back.

Maybe I can make them go away again;

replace them with some variation, at least.

                    Fiduciary Responsibility

I should be,

as my Aunt Goldie put it a year or two before she died,

on Easy Street,

because my stepfather

had his own civil-engineering company

and a genius

for fitting the maximum number of units into a subdivision

whilst at the same time respecting

the contours of the land.

He therefore did all the subdivision design work

for the county’s two biggest developers

and heaps of others

at a time when it was

the third-fastest-developing county

in the United States.

He left most of it to my mother.

When she died I received an audited account,

and about half the estate

was in the confiscatory tax bracket.

In the three or four months after she died

my sibling,

as executor of the estate,

gambled away well over half of it

on the New York Stock Exchange –

he’d always fancied himself a whiz with the market –

and didn’t tell me about it.

I, meanwhile, made financial commitments

based on that audited statement from the lawyers.

When he finally told me about it

ten months later,

he just explained in a cavalier tone of voice,

that the kick in my guts wasn’t his responsibility.

It was the market.

Unprovoked Nastiness … For Pleasure?

I could only conclude

that granting each person

the minimal amount of basic respect

to which every decent human is entitled,

unless and until that person demonstrates

being unworthy of it,

was an approach

that he considered to be

deserving of his ridicule,

or had never truly considered at all.