Momtaza Mehri

Bad Diaspora Poems

Marion

July marks the ooth anniversary. The poet is the antagonist of linearity.

You begin where you were told the story started.

The Year of Return. The child catches sight of the homeland.

The poet glorifies what the local dreams of escaping.

How many graves will you disturb with your longing?

This reminded me of Dionne Brandie’s note on the pronoun “We” from readings from the wreck:

This pronoun "we" that we invoke is, at base, a we of constant, detailed and expanding consumption, refracting in geopolitical and historical ways. All of us are recruited into this

"we," whether we have the means, or whether we are the means

"We" and "us" are always in flux. The meanings disaggregate with self-consciousness. "We" is an aggregate already disaggre-gated. And even in that partiality there is disaggregation

We are together for better & for worse. Fanon's cavernous We, the We of the Alge-rian, the Martinican, the exiled South African mother, the Sahrawi guerrilla, the Somali teenager in the Libyan prison camp. Fanon's We had the capacity to contain them. His colleagues believed in a We too shrunken for reciprocity.

Politics is a parsing of the We, the maintenance of its enclosure/s, the engulfment of all who attempt to defy its confines. Territory as terror. The plural personal is the evidence of murderous affinity. It is always an absence. Who is betrayed by every assumed We?

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