My Journey in Illiteracy: Knowledge is Light – Amar Al Noor

I have a doctorate, two master’s degrees, and a wealth of education and certificates, but I was until recently, illiterate: Illiterate in Arabic. Though my native language is English, I had lived and worked in the Middle East, and learned Arabic mostly by ear. I could read enough for street signs, the basics of a menu, and enough to fake it, but I could not really read or write much beyond the most basic level. While that may be impressive to a Westerner, this reluctance or laziness to sit down and thoroughly learn the basics of writing and grammar prevented me from taking my Arabic to the next level. Easy simple mistakes were overlooked because any Westerner making even the most rudimentary attempts at speaking Arabic was considered laudable, but I was faking it. In part, I had been working in a hospital and community setting, I only had to speak and teach, not really write, and though my Arabic was grammatically awkward it was enough to get by and communicate. When I lived in Morocco the language of the street was Dirja, and it gave me less impetuous to learn to read and write. I have only recently confronted the reality that for the most part I was illiterate. In Arabic they say, Knowledge is light.
Now, as I am working with primary grade books, I am forcing myself to write and study every day, and discovering the foundations of grammar that I had glided over. To my surprise, I discovered that my grammar wasn’t as bad as I thought and though solid Arabic grammar is arduous to get down, mine was fairly on target for someone who had learned mostly by ear and with only an occasional glance at a book. In English, I read and write at a University level, Spanish and French at a proficient level, but in Arabic I am the big kid in the back of the classroom slowly forming letters with the correct diacritical marks, words with the correct case ending, and learning to write clear sentences. Though it is slow going, the writing actually, well almost, look like real Arabic.
It is ironic that I have a profound admiration for Classical Arabic/ Koranic script from the time of the early Fatamid period to the inscriptions on the walls of Al Hambrah, but never had the desire to emulate it or learn to decipher the Suras (verses from the Koran) beyond a basic level. The Classical Arabic poetry is pure music, even if you don’t understand a word of it. I was listening to one recitation and I turned to a friend who was a well-educated Yemeni and asked "What does it mean?" He said, “Ï don’t know either, but it is beautiful.”
In the old city of Cairo I was studying the writing on the outside of a mosque from the 10th Century and trying to decipher the (Kuphic) script with a guide book, and it was a delight when the shop owner next to the mosque, who had never bothered really looking at the building, began to be excited as he read the inscriptions with me.
After my recent trip to Egypt, I was inspired to learn the real structure and grammar of Arabic. Though I do not speak Egyptian, my basic standard Arabic was more than enough to get by and hold a conversation. When I a man came by selling cigarettes, he looked a bit shocked when I said (in classical Arabic), “No, I don’t smoke and that stuff will give you cancer.” It is the well-chosen phrase that is sometimes most helpful, but it is far more effective to be able to write that sentence.
I am unraveling my Arabic illiteracy and though I may never get much beyond grade school level, I am enjoying the process of writing clean simple sentences. As I confront the extreme bias in the West, US and Europe, against Islam, and take pains to explain the profound achievements of the Islamic classical world, I am also realizing I needed to hold myself accountable for my own lack of education or maybe it is something as simple as laziness. But, knowledge is light, and I am enjoying the slow dawning illumination of learning to read and write.

O' New America

O’new Jerusalem, beacon of light
on the hill,
filled with the promise unspoken.

O’new awakening of the sleeping
dreams,
alive with hope again.

O’New America radiant with
possibilities
aspiring for its true soul.

Justice

Prisoners:

There are thousands of remote islands in the world, with food, water, and the basic necessities of life. Bare, harsh, vital. I was reading of a prisoner in solitary confinement for 24 years in NY state, I am glad they keep him apart from us, but $75,000 a year or more to keep this person locked up for the rest of his life is not a prudent cost. Instead, give him the choice: Death, confinement, or an island in the Pacific. On the island in the Pacific a thousand miles from civilization, he can fish, eat coconuts, and live out his life at no further cost to the state. What would he choose: The caged savage? The primitive? Or eternity? I would also like to take all the CEOs who have raped and looted their companies: Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Enron, and the War Profiteers like Halliburton,Bechtel, etc., and also place them on that same island. The prisoner and the CEO’s would make make perfect company; though I am a little concerned about the prisoners safety.

$700 Billion Pig Fest Wall Street

Strange dreams last night:

All these fat cats at
Lehman Brothers,
Goldman Sachs,
Merrill Lynch, etc..
all the corporate
gangsters who are
knee deep in the
muck of this latest
corporate debacle

are shackled together
in old fashioned
stocks in front of
Wall Street.Yes,
like in Colonial
times, don’t bother
with prison so
they can hide
away in shame.

Men and women
of Enron, CEOS of
Exxon, Haliburton
and so on all lined
up to join them in
the stocks.

Fat white cats shivering
naked in the autumn
air, arrayed in a circle
around Wall Street,
while the cold wind
blows off the Hudson.
Everyone who lost
money in the stock
market could drop
garbage on their heads
or simple piss on
them.
At feeding time,
long pig troughs so that
the fat cat CEOs
would be cheek and
jowl to munch the slop.

I hope the pigs don’t
get sick from the
contagion.

Some Outrage for the Genocide in Palestine?

It is strange all of this rancor against President of Iran Ahmadinejad, which may be deserved, but at the same breath do we talk about the genocide of the Palestinians, their imprisonment in the walled ghettos of the West Bank, and their isolation in Gaza? As reported on the BBC on 24 September, international communities have condemned Israeli Settlers who illegally have and now continue to take the land of Palestinians. Last night videos of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians homes while the IDF (Israel Army) stood by.
I would hope that people save some of their outrage against the President of Iran for the genocide against the Palestinians. I really do not see much difference between the Israeli government actions against the people of Gaza and West Bank, and the actions imposed on my Jewish ancestors during and before WWII. For thousands of years, we Jews were persecuted, driven out of our homes, and ironically, thrived in the Islamic countries. We were welcomed. While in Europe to Be a Jew was cause for murder. The holocaust in Palestine is happening before our eyes
Perhaps, when there is a true independent state for Palestinians and the means to genuinely survive, we will then remove any rationale for someone like Ahmadinejad. Iran had a democratically elected President in l954 who was overthrown by the US. The Shah, a puppet leader, created a surrogate US colony, it was a police state that ruled for decades that persecuted and killed its own people. It is sad that when a reformist government was in power before Ahmadinejad, the United States refused to recognize and make rapprochement. When this last invasion of Iraq took place, the Iran government made a public statement that all US fliers if they landed in Iran would be repatriated to the US. Within a week Bush declared Iran as an "axis of evil." This eventually lead to a more hard line regime.
The US Government who is one of the worst propagators of state sponsored terrorism is condemning Iran? The US? Guantanamo? Abu Ghraib? Renditions? The deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, responsible for the $4 billion dollars in military aid to Israel that supports the genocide of Palestinians, and people wonder someone like Ahmadinejad has any legitimacy?
One can understand why Iran might be disappointed in the West. Hey, maybe if we get rid of our own version of Ahmadinejad, GW BUSH, and replace it with someone who is reasonably intelligent, Obama, then maybe we can have genuine progress with Iran.
Let's save some outrage for the genocide against the Palestinians.

Walking the Black Line: The N Thing and Obama

Walking the Black Line: That N thing and Obama

In the movie Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks lays the racist arguments right on the line. The Black sheriff is riding into save a town that is being threatened by outlaws. The people are excited and then they find the “The Sheriff is a N…” Bells ring and no one can hear it. When he finally does arrive, they want to shoot him! Though it appears he is the only one who can save the town, they are more concerned that he is a, N… .

The NY Times recently wrote of Obama’s debating style as, “Cool, detached, and intellectual.” After eight years of a president who can barely speak a cogent sentence; an articulate and intelligent person should be a welcome change, but this is America in 2008: The sound byte reigns supreme, and the Republican convention, like the Nuremberg rally, is filled with obeisant patriotic chants, in this case, USA, USA. As Einstein said about blind patriotism, any one who marches in a parade denies the necessity of the development of the cerebral cortex. In this election, it is imperative, though unlikely; we will get to a substantive debate about the future of the USA. In the meantime, Russian warships are challenging the Monroe doctrine, and the US like Rome in the late 2nd century is watching its world power shrink. Welcome to the 21st Century.

People are primitive pools of emotions, passions, and tribalism. Most of humanity’s march over some 4 million years since we bid farewell to our primate first cousins, has been a brutal struggle for survival, us versus them, tribe against tribe. Despite some rudimentary signs of progress, humans have not really evolved in the fundamental way that will ensure long term survival. Wars, tribalism, us versus them, ideologically driven… Nigger, spic, honkie, redneck, fascist, and so on. We define: other and like us: Friend or foe.

Barrack Obama blows the conventional paradigms out of the water and yet through the lens of red, white, and blue – and too many, we are stuck on the N thing. Yes, the sheriff may be black, but the question is: Does he have the energy, commitment, the intelligence, integrity, and character to lead the nation? The answer is yes. If we can get past the subtext about race and look at the man, we will not see a color blind or white washed version; we will see the full spectrum of the man. A man who is white, black, African, mid western, urban, grew up poor and middle-class, earned his way through college, who forsook a very lucrative law career to be a community organizer, and though he didn’t fight in the trenches, he fought in a more dangerous place, the Illinois Statehouse.

Yes, the Sheriff may be black, but he’s our only choice.

Namaya@vermontpoet.com

JaZ in O positive:

Murder in the Cathedral of Love

“The music business will kill ya’!” said Jack.

“And how!” Said I.

In the cathedral of jazz the cacophony of sounds rolled into the void. A shiftless dreaming F minor flat, boozy, flabby with cirrhosis and sclerotic eyes, peering down the long tunnel where sounds disappeared into a melodic introspection, was lying in a nest of music manuscripts tossed out from the publisher.

It was strange, she said, that the scale disappeared into an alley that was marked with the blood hand print of a C flat minor on a white basement wall next to the Cathedral of love.

Footstep echoed like lilac fragranced notes faltering in an arpeggio. It is always the top of the note that contains the essence of the fragrance, in the middle is the melody, and along the river by the muddy shores is the bass walking line. Bones ossified peer upwards dreaming of the memory of their lives.

Along the river banks in the thick estuaries that lead from the Thames towards Kent are the bones of the martyrs who dream of redemption.

Marlow was on the case, a private dick on a public recollection.

Fragments of lies littered the sidewalk and when the janitor sprayed them with the hose, the small particles of blood tenaciously clung to the calcified particulate exoskeletons. How many corpses of bivalves make up a city block?

Ghosts, permeate every pore of memory? said Mister Jones bojangle jingling a jig of jonesed blues.

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

He took a swig from the corn liquor jug and with the sun burning across the sky in an orange vengeance he drew up a glass syringe and spiked himself.

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

Christ that old offay boy died only once, I die every day for you! Said Jones as the blood rolled down his arm and coagulated every so slowly. It looked like a map of the Upper Nile.

Jack wiped off the trumpet and declared, Jazz in a key of O positive. Jazz is a universal donor. Ain’t it? Or is it huffing and puffing, flaunting itself in drag, willing to provide fellatio to the string section while the jealous cuckold is simmering in the bar trolling for young beauties. It is j A Z after all. Inflagrante! Heroin addicts, pimps, whores, and saints of the mortal coil.
Saints?

Yes, you wouldn’t expect knowing redemption from a satyr posing as a monk. That is why there is Murder in the Cathedral of Love. I said

Mister Jones nodded off and drooled while humming on his Jew’s harp.

A fat sax man in a dipsomaniac roll kept spinning b flat minor rifts up the tube of the drainpipe and fell on the ear of the widow Rosalita an old prostitute whose eyes were devoured by syphilis. She sat by the window with her rosary beads and prayed for the souls of her lovers while serenaded by the bourbon soaked blues.

Sonnets are weavings of time, fourteen lines of ecstasy cut with vitamin K, strands of indigo woven into the coarse lilac of memory as the song of a grey thrush on a June morning in Vermont thrills to the instigation of love. A window to the meadow is thrown wide open. Each memory of love, sex, indiscretion and redemption cherished.

How many memories does a syphilitic spirochete devour before it explodes? How many memories are stored in its cells and fibers before it explodes in a rapturous orgasm?

To be quaint: Is there a price for love?

The quick running steps of memory disappear into the vault of time, as seconds vanish in a fugue of notes, violet burning into indigo, a flame tinged incandescent thrilling blue that inspires love to simply burn and devour itself.

Marlow with the quick white glove whipped the counter faintly and smelled the arsenic, but couldn’t find a reason for Murder in the Cathedral of Love. Four blocks down on St.Vincent’s, a quick jog down an alley where the filtering blues flittered and fluttered with a moaning effervescences of unrequited desire, and goddess Desdemona played the harmonica in a baroque D minor that hummed.

Mister Jone’s did the St.Vitus dance for the homies, a premonition of desire, and the angels on 12th Avenue sauntered down to the water front waiting for the Argonauts to return

“And is love enough?” she asked.

Ibbbidy bibby I bop dice Salve Minore of an E Flat Minor Opus by the punk poet Namaya.

Him? Mad as two melted brain cells under a Sahara sun, said his ex Philomena.

What he think he be? Like Alfred appearing in his movies?

To the Narrative Again:

She was in improvisation artist, willing to do anything for the purity of Art. An arabesque, burlesque where the words dropped to the floor, long winding Isadora Duncan scarves that sailed behind her and threatened to decapitate her. In the final proceeding, the hand painted scarves contained ideograms from lovers, sonnets from sentries who guarded her virginity with the zealotry of Sappho and the pleasing teasing love by the Satyr in the guise of a Nubian eunuch.

Not a tortuous trail, not a cosmic comic adventure, nor a salutation to the mind bending Master Calvino, but a love missive to memory and murder which was the original journey.

J a Z in O positive where the ovulation of vowels makes for the ungulations and utterances poets seem intelligible, but the dah dah dah of darhma ohm ovations defies the resistance of imagination.

Then there is finally, murder in the cathedral of love. While the widow may be seduced by the fat man’s blues, the window may look out to the meadow, in the night club there was a murder.

A saxophonist, pianist and bassist, upright at their posts, bound to their instrument. Redemption in the cathedral of love.

Ghosts, permeate every pore of memory. Said Mister Jones bojangle jingling a jig of jonesed blues.

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

Jazz in O Positive spiked for transfusion.

Murder in the Cathedral of Love an F minor ovation to the round resonant G descending to O positive in a minor diatonic scale of desire.