A Poet’s Letter
To Yitzhak Eizenberg Shalom Fifth International Poetry Festival in Jerusalem
Thank you for your invitation to participate in the international poetry festival in Jerusalem in 2006 and the details. I would like to take my name out of the list of participants. I read these days on the barbarism in the Qalandia checkpoint. I oppose an international poetry festival in a city in which the Arab inhabitants are oppressed systematically and cruelly imprisoned between walls, deprived of their rights and living spaces, humiliated in checkpoints and the international laws are violated. I think that even poets were not allowed in the past, and not in the present, to ignore persecutions and discriminations on a racial or national basis.
Yours,
Aharon Shabati
On Counterpunch, today.
Thank you for your invitation to participate in the international poetry festival in Jerusalem in 2006 and the details. I would like to take my name out of the list of participants. I read these days on the barbarism in the Qalandia checkpoint. I oppose an international poetry festival in a city in which the Arab inhabitants are oppressed systematically and cruelly imprisoned between walls, deprived of their rights and living spaces, humiliated in checkpoints and the international laws are violated. I think that even poets were not allowed in the past, and not in the present, to ignore persecutions and discriminations on a racial or national basis.
Yours,
Aharon Shabati
On Counterpunch, today.
posted by BN-B at 1:27 PM
4 Comments:
chris,
thank you for this,
i've learned some things from it that i did not know or envision, and that are dismaying to the point of tears, and that made me wish and hope i can be a part of something that makes for all of us a better world (what a simple thing that notion truly is, yet is a notion continuously masked behind so many historical rigidities and things that have nothing to do with it, eh?).
well, ah, my friend, you rock as always with your fine insights here and in all your hard work, & loving endeavors. please keep on.
happiness,
chris murray
hi, chris - so good to hear from you! i'll email soon, to find out how everything's going
yours always,
chris
chris, i was really moved by your comment - thank you
i'm haunted by the the absolute necessity for a society fully devoted to providing for the needs of all people while at trhe same time repsecting the planet we live upon and all its inhabitants - it's one of the only things i care to think about with any regularity
yours always,
chris
chris, hey--
forgive my intermittent-ness!
you've elucidated a crucial contradiction there--no surprise to me: you always find and refine the essences in any given rhetorical situation, it seems to me--that community and material issues of *use value* are continually running head-to-head, unfortunately yet without much human intelligent oversight. alas. we must continue to think, rally, and teach people to look into this essential, most difficult contemporary paradox between humanity, other anima, and ecosystems as variables of 'environment'.
keep on!
chris
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