3.9r To Stokley Carmichael

by Eric Chaet

Stokely, you’d already been a leader for years
& frequently prisoner of your tormentors
tho only a few years older than I was
& I was more a kid than a man
& hadn’t found many whose example
or advice seemed to help in the midst
of a madhouse whose violence
was held in reserve in case anyone dared
do what was right instead of going along
with the reign of bullying
when you looked me in the eye
in Mississippi, & told me to go back
& work among the White people
“That’s where the problem is,” you said
I’m more than 3 times as old now
& have been working among the Whites ever since
tho sometimes I’m just trying to survive
& sometimes just trying to make sense of things
in so-called poems like this
& spread whatever sense I can
extract & assemble, or allow
by getting them into circulation
which turns out to be as hard as
tailoring what you say & do & how you appear
to whatever the most immediate desires are
of those most likely & able to pay you
you weren’t bothering to distinguish
you had your own problems
between Anglo-Norman conquerors
& the other Brits they ruled over
& descendants of those other Brits
along with the Indians & Blacks
& the other Whites
the scrambled industrial migrants
tho many of the descendants of those migrants
Blacks, too, & here & there an Indian
have managed to join the rulers
or their best paid & often acclaimed
advisers, tutors, sheriffs, knights, fools
tax collectors, dungeon guards, servants
with more or less individual decision-making
capacity & responsibility
but I have had to distinguish
many of the descendants of the industrial migrants
are among those who mock & block
my attempts to engage with their rulers & mine
as well as with others ready to listen & cooperate
to change what’s going on
many of the descendants of the migrants
like you, not distinguishing between White & White
are enthusiastic consumers of the worst lies
& eager to kill or support killing foreigners
& even non-Whites here
even insufficiently anglicized
insufficiently feudalized
insufficiently capitalized
insufficiently homogenized Whites
in the service of those who are also killing them
rather than face our predicament
or consider my suggesting that their efforts
might be as suicidal as they are cruel
& better re-directed
tho suggestions are rarely dared
& taken as affronts
& met with mocking courtesy, threats
or the threatened violence
by individuals or by the apparatus of discipline
in support of which nearly everyone
not in conscious & anxious rebellion
bends their efforts & thereby earns
the hypnotic toys of consolation.

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