Poetry is Dangerous

by Kazim Ali

On April 19, 07 after a day of teaching classes at

Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and

grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front

seat of my little white beetle and carried it across

the street and put it next to the trashcan outside

Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had

been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously

left my recycling boxes there and they were always

picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my

car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car

which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires

strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark

skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who

look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my

committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a

threat by my very existence, a threat just living in

the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police

department and told them a man of Middle Eastern

descent driving a heavily decaled white beetle with

out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had

just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has

NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two

stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty

parking sticker and the other, which I just don't have

the heart to take off these days, says "Kerry/Edwards:

For a Stronger America."

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state

police came. Because of my recycling buildings were

evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed.

No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark

body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his

fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the

culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that

is carefully cultivated in the media, by the

government, by people who claim to want to keep us

'safe.'

These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs,

and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for

it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most

innocuous of places?a professor wanting to hurry home,

hefting his box of discarded poetry?we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn't even see me. He saw

my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic

because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am

Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for

a Middle Eastern man by anyone who'd ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd,

trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my

description?a Middle Eastern man driving a white

beetle with out of state plates?and knew immediately

they were talking about me and realized that the box

must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She

approached them and told them I was a professor on the

faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer

said, "What country is he from?"

"What country is he from?!" she yelled, indignant.

"Ma'am, you are associated with the suspect. You need

to step away and lower your voice," he told her.

At some length several of my faculty colleagues were

able to get through to the police and get me on a cell

phone where I explained to the university president

and then to the state police that the box contained

old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The

police officer told me that in the current climate I

needed to be more careful about how I behaved. "When I

recycle?" I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about

the situation but denied that the call had anything to

do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson

of the university called it an "honest mistake," not

referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his

worst instincts and calling the police but referring

to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and

putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university's bizarrely minimal statement lets

everyone know that the "suspicious package" beside the

trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to

say, "We appreciate your cooperation during the

incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint

effort by all members of the campus community."

What does that community mean to me, a person who has

to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my

own office just down the hall?who was watched, noted,

and reported, all in a day's work? Today we gave in

willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and

blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly

appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police

one another and report on one another. Such behaviors

exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and

fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause

of the alarm. That package became "suspicious" because

of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove

away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman

who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I

was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent.

For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving

away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after

a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on

the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had

never met looked straight through me and saw the

violence in his own heart.

--

Edil Torres Rivera, Ph.D., LPC, NCC, ACS

Associate Professor

Department of Counselor Education

1215 Norman Hall

P. O. Box 117046

Gainesville, FL 32611-7046

President: Counselors for Social Justice

http://www.coe.ufl.edu/Counselor/MeetingUs/Torres.php

Phone: 352-392-0731 ext. 233

Fax: 352-846-2697