From: "Clifford Duffy" <cliffordduffy-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: An Iraqi woman writes from Baghdad --rather Manly
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 05:40:13 +0000



--" rather manly"
Dear Mona, in the west there is this big trip called P.C. or correct politics. it is a monstrosity induced by an obligation sensed by a certain class of people who feel the need to censor and entrap their ownspeech and not let themselves express what is obvious to the majority of men and women in the earth, to wit, that maniliness exists and is no crime; to these p.c. readers when a person says manly as you did, they "interpret" in some paranoid way what a text might allude to; note that I say allude, not refer; that my dear Mona, is the beauty of text, it is allusive and not collusive in paranoid readers' consciousness. Of course, I being your only believer believe and know this because I am something that no longer exists, at least according to certain French theoretical authors; I am indeed an author. No matter how bad or good, I am an author. For instance, I write these heavy laden sentences knowing full well some will be angered and or indifferent to them. In any event, I enjoy yer cool comments about how Iraquis speak English. I wish I heard moreof them in my own country. Clearly we have deserted them, as we did back in 1991 and so the West has done it again. Last winter while walking in a  grand march against this "war" against Iraq I believed for a moment that something would come of it.... Some thing perhaps has come of it/the despair of nations/the despair of the movement ofthe People on the earth. not the Multitude so called of Negri and Hardt, whose conceptions seem a little naive to me-- not to say I do not think them lovely and wonderful and hopeful, and even perhaps right.- but still naive, say in a way that Kathy Acker's characters are not naive. One thing is for sure, it is true that life is not naive, but just cruel, like love and everything else about life. The sad thing about life is that there are no inborn rights to it, we are born and the rest is it seems a bonus, a grab-you all, some semiconscious failure to seize the moment. I remember once I had an sort of l
iason sexual with an Iraqui woman, this was in the mid 90's; Iraq seemed far and the desert further, and the horror the West had committed against Iraq was not what it is now// I remember mys heer joy atthe intensity of my encounter with this Iraqui woman and her boldness and my awe at just the fact she was Iraqui.It was like a whisper to me across the world. I still believed in love back then, andin things. Now I do believe in love, but nothe  world ofthings. Perhaps that is what writing is, believing in words and not things. What it must be to be there, in that terrible city of Baghdad where all this injury, death and injustice happens is a nightmare beyond any of the rest of the world, and especially the Western world.
Not to be an essentialist in the face of the onslaught of slaughter and history is tricky. How does one become an historian or remain a poet in the face of hell? one does not, one flees and becomes something else. What one becomes I am not so sure.

I like prosopopoeia.



>

> 

> 

> 

>Iraqi are usually very good in English. But, you brought a good 

>point that I have not noticed before. It is true the "Girl"'s 

>English and esp. American slang is very good. In these few textes, 

>there is no Arabic interference, not even in the images she gives. 

>Also, the text's voice seems to be rather manly. What do you think? 

> 

>>

>> 

>>http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_riverbendblog_archive.html 

>> 






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