I have left my past life behind and my new life revolves only around here (ni futuro, ni pasado me molesta aqui). Please, if it beckons you, share with me my life in South America.

www.ecuadorianbreaths.wordpress.com

I will forever be a child artist—
immature, hopeful for progression
but juvenile and talent-less.
But at least, at the very least,
I continue to stroke through days
timid and old
because of the love of colors and
because of the love of how
strokes of green,yellow, red, and black,
come to life by my own hand.
I wish I could tell them that
I believed no one could ever do wrong,
No one could make a mistake
when painting.
I wish I could tell them that I make beautiful art
because I just paint, with one brush and
many different paints.
That I don’t understand and
I don’t follow rules.
I wasn’t raised an artist–
I was taught to draw well by
my mother’s architecture hand,
sturdy, strong, straight, but
I never did very well and
never felt the warm applause of
an audiences’ hands
against my sides
I never felt the breath of welcomed admirers
at my side or
in the minds of my dreams,
I never believed that my hand
could make anything worthwhile and
I do not.
But I wish that I could tell them that
my love for colors is the reason why
I make beauty and
I never meant to offend anyone
by disobeying centuries of rules
that govern the artist and his patron.
I never meant to insult the dedicated painter,
the skillful sculptor—
I never thought anyone
would want to brush their gentle eyelashes
against these strokes on canvas, cardboard,
the box I stole from the school.
I didn’t mean for them to appreciate the colors,
I wish I could write and say
and say again.
I never knew that they would look
upon the pages of words and then strokes,
and then some broken words
amongst too many dashes,
dashes of lines in between words and
dashes of black
like the branches that stretch,
coming from her dark hair,
hair that descends into treehood.
I thought I was a fool—
I am foolish.
and I never knew you would say,
“Wow, that is beautiful”.
I would like to be able to say,
Well it is because I did it
because I felt it and
I did it because
I never imagined that anyone in the world would say,
“Why! So Pretty!”
and touch the small of my back in salutations,
in congratulations,
in admiration.
Never did I think a creature would find my face pretty
or my hands soft and
that they would like the strokes of colors
they danced on paper,
because for brief moments
those hands felt no longer
betrayed by the pages,
and by the books,
no longer betrayed by the keyboard
that brought false senses of superiority—
academia.
Knowledge that led to no knowledge
that lead to hallow letters on
empty flashing screens of light,
dim light as the battery fades,
empty letters that I begun to hate—
For moments they felt the release of life,
that life that would crawl out of me
as I laid naked in my bed
staring at the glass of water
and the flame that seeps into it,
playing in water so swiftly
and the movement that would stir deep inside
as my eyes would weld into
large blinking, beating beings
and they would shed tears and
the immensity of life was
engulfing me in those moments,
naked with my hands
touching the soft dips of my body
wondering how to touch
how would it feel to be touched,
wondering if those last touches
on my breasts
on the blackness of the depths of my vagina—
vulva
were real,
wondering if a child could really grow
in the deepest part of my center,
wondering if two hearts could beat at once,
and wondering if I could paint those two hearts
together beating,
on a piece of paper,
that would fall underneath my bed,
to fall to that black trashcan downstairs
and to fall down into a strange landfill
in a place I never knew existed,
or could dream of,
a landfill undreamable,
yes, not in my dreams,
not in your dreams,
because how could my two hearts beat on paper,
how could they survive there,
dying in green filth,
banana peels and those strange plastics
that we use once and
throw to the ground,
we throw, we throw, we throw—
we throw my 2 beating hearts into the ground,
dissipating, decaying,
oh– how could the hands be so free
into the depths of the heart
beating at my very center,
my hands upon the soft dips of my body,
my hair descending into the blackness
of that very treehood
that stays still in nights
that I never dreamed of,
never knew existed,
will never see,
but can attempt to dream of,
the very black, bare tree,
alone— that has never been seen
except by the depths of my mind
that attempts to dream it there,
to dream that it exists
unconscious desires of my mind
the yearning of my center
I see it there as
it’s branches stretch out beyond me.

But, how long can you wait!

The first glimpse of light, awakened air
Breathes you into my lungs
Ascending into the day,
You await the travels of my mind

You wait in my dreams and,
You wait through trembling hands
Past flat, dry lands,
you wait
My face, you cannot see

But, how long till I die!

Each beat of my heart
Each touch of my lips
I wonder if you are still there
Afar, writing, but still breathing

Will we meet in my dying
or will my skin
still be alive?

Senescent child
Waiting, Wondering
She whispers on small lips,
“Old woman, old man”
Mourning the moment
senescence began.

I don’t know my eldest sister but she’s an actress. Rachel travels the world.

She’s socialist, he’s liberterian. My grand-mother—German and Christian. My father Moroccan but Jewish.

My siblings, Arabic from a Muslim father.

Mother, a Jewish atheist.  Many of them live in Israel.

I’m an anti-nationalist. I’m disappointed in the conception of “God”—deceived by politics and quite political.

My sister was a skinhead. My brother—a corporate man. I simply, mis-

placed.

Birth, pregnancy, contraception, fertility/infertility, health, sperm, eggs, surrogacy, and breastfeeding are often concepts overlooked as natural, biological, or a reality in itself but are all  highly contested sites of politics, power, and resistance.

All of these concepts are highly interconnected into to the socio-historic construction of the female and what the female role is and what her body means. Women have often been subjected to unjust politics of blame, burden, and responsibility within these sites and have suffered through physical abuses by industries (Nestles targeting of women in third world countries with infant formula that was deleterious to women’s health and killed their babies, female hygiene/contraception industries marketing of “female hygiene products” in the 1930s that did not prevent pregnancy, caused reproductive and bodily damage and killed women,  womens’ bodies as places of experimentation of various pharmaceutical drugs carelessly tested such as DES given to women in the 1970s to prevent miscarriages which created thousands of DES daughters with cervical cancer and removed uteruses and vaginas, and the high maternal death rate for the over-use of cesarean sections in hospitals), emotional and legal abuse (the incrimination of “drug-addicted mothers” for fetal abuse or murder for crack cocaine use while mens’ “life-style choices” merely affected victimized sperm and not the fetus, women disembodied from the fetus in fetal iconography and in labor portrayed as machines, women disempowered from breastfeeding because of industry marketing of formula and women as the only gender responsible for contraception and reproduction with the formulation of the female pill) and have been particularly subjected to Michel Foucaults’ concept of biopower and anatamo-politics where the body is surveyed and managed by the state (as in Romania where women were subjected to mandatory gynecological exams to make sure they maintained their pregnancy to provide workers for a pro-natalist, Communist regime).  Despite this long history of power struggles where the woman usually lost, women have shown great resistance in re-asserting their own power that has often been taken away from them or used against them.

The midwifery movements’ resistance against obstetrics and biomedical births is a great example of this resistance. The midwifery movement has attempted to assert Habermas’s lifeworld into the hospital and into the experience of giving birth, an experience that is now predominantly “colonized by an over-extended technocratic rationality” (Hird & Rashreed, 2618). Women in mainstream hospitals all over the United States are often treated like machines set on a staged time schedule.  Birth is assumed to be abnormal, a disease-state that needs to be managed and fixed by the “mechanic” or “supervisor”, ie the doctor. Women have no immediate role as decision-makers and are often subjected to the technical rationalization of medicines and technologies, often not necessary, and often damaging to mother and infant. Caesearan sections are performed for 30  percent of births in the United States whereas the World Health Organization recommends up to only an average of 15 percent. Anything that exceeds 15 percent entails higher rates of  maternal deaths. Studies show that caesarean sections are most often performed at 5 PM and 12 midnight, the hours when doctors and hospital staff consider their day over. Power and money is always at play within a privatized health system where the more babies “produced” each day, the more money made!

Klassen does an excellent job at speaking about the resistance of the home birth movement.

“Pragmatically transforming the culture of birth in which they live, home-birthing women enact strategies of resistance and reinterpret history, the body, and the process of birth itself. As part of a wider, often feminsit-led critique of twenieth-century birthing practices, home-birthing women point out the historical disjuncture of hospital birth within the span of women’s birthing history. They reclaim what one woman called the “century-old woman” within their own bodies, as an embodied birthing guide. They reinterpert the pathologized female body as a body of specifically female power and ability— a power and ability that are deemed “natural”, but with a creitical dimension. And they construct birth as a bodily process that, in addition to bringina  baby, can bring revelation, healing, and strength” (Klassen, 802).l

A far too brief discussion of the politics of reproduction, but I found it better to say something on this unspoken subject than nothing at all.

Baby in Space? Autonomous Fetus? Disembodied Mother.