Adam Day: Five Poems from Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire

Chile example 1973—Zurita arrested and held in ship’s cargo hold; process-experience under witnessing. He tried to disappear his eyes with acid, but failed. “Instead he created a document: chapter twentieth century having disfigured its face. Might not be quite right. Then, a photo of its bandaged cheek with the text below, EGO SUM, and: ‘My name is Rachel,’ and the text, QUI SUM, introducing century’s starkly differing identities.”

A moment people halfway across the world perceive the West as they might perceive Pinochet; Diệm and Thiệu, Suharto, Putin. The Tunisian street vendor in the face of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, then anger, despair; extremists don’t seem so wildly alien, Wretched Earth, if wrongful.

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Against the disposable privilege of conversation as each side perceives the other’s ignorable concerns, perceived people when one finds one’s own life disposable whether one lived justifies difficult paradise. Martyred in a tracksuit. Turn the head into shrilly squealing when it has expanded the body, extinguished the spirit, then smoke a cigarette or sit down to breakfast … Taking life may price up self-worth. Jean Amery: sadism not in the framework of sexual pathology, but radical negation of the other, as social principle denial. World in which triumph

cannot quite exist. But sadist continues the world to nullify the world, negating specifics; wants own sovereignty: the Mind’s Limits and Realities. Paris attacks—of relative youth and diversity (19 nationalities), including sisters Houda and Halima and Saadi, of La Belle Equipe descent, avec 10 friends.

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Ironic Americans musicing, at Bataclan, or not at all, given many gun hands—enthusiastic proponents among those lost at the concert hall, merchandise manager, and interview magazine filmed shaken days in the dressing room except for one under a leather jacket.

This perspective—seems to suggest similar to mass shootings in U.S.: public health question, re-imagine social life? This terror population might housing project over a span of time, bearing mental-emotional sensibilities augmenting isolation as well as the manifestation of gendertraumaraceclass. Discrimination confuses knowing oneself with a claustrophobic thinker possessing stout sense of self who certainly knew the frustrations

of exclusion. E. Said in 1961: “Decide who you deal with, who you are and not” and Baldwin: “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” as against attacker, Abdelhamid Abaaoud on restoration of pride and dignity: “You will find this only in anything.’

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Nothing and all can justify ill-leveraged might. Sympathize with a group’s grievances between justified complaints and excessive actions taken in name. Try the phenomenon holistically, reading an excerpt of Sartre’s Fanon with allowance for contemporary context for interpreting the “he” “him” to stand for the West or terrorists, some analogue complexities of How come he not recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? Can’t seem to see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of oppressed who absorb it every pore and find no cure?

Individual, whose power fear and losing has his head, has difficulty remembering he was once. Thinks he a whip or gun. And then, this perhaps he often forgets: we sometimes become we by radically negating deep what others have done to us. 

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Though there were complaints and demands, for instance, upon U.S. to “pull out,” citizens arrested and career sidelining, and beyond, tangible spawning of leftovers, who were key to keeping military men a spark for real place. When in Hawija hundreds

peaceful forces finding zero outlet, eventually mass violence: Malaki program perpetuating a kind of Iraq, prompting autocrat different but same. Ramadi and Fallujah fully-fledged, which could not help but bring

Baldwin: “We have paid, paying, I think probably the most history, for pretending a man.”

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