Poem: Pas de Deux: Balletomane in Malaysia

I was nervous when we met. You were a shade of color one finds only in Africa, that continent of a thousand and one dialects, and I'd never seen anyone so slender. Sensing my shyness, you began dancing effortlessly, first ballet, then hip hop, your graceful half-twirl more expert than your elbow pumps. I understood, looking at your naked movements, all seamlessly continuous, why politicians and billionaires build grand theaters.

In the shower, my stiff, pillowy hands moving downwards, I said you were small everywhere—until I reached your feet. At 48 kilograms vs. 220 pounds, our feet were improbable fraternal twins. Feeling a one-sided splendor, I moved backwards as fluidly as possible, washing your long toe while maneuvering to a different position. I offered a plié to demonstrate—and settle—our differences. After a failed attempt to grasp my femur, you made a fist, your second punch more rigorous, more delightful than your first.

When you glissaded to dry yourself, I followed, and we stood face to face. I thought your shoulders, a taut heart shape, were your best feature, but you shook your head. Studying your eyes, I explained they resembled the Eye of Horus, and I knew now why Egyptians believed your ancestors a symbol of good health. After a quick glance upwards--as if on cue--you switched from en face, readied yourself for a finale, and left me wanting to learn a grand reverence. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)

Bonus: "There is more diversity in pigmentation variation in Africa than anywhere else in the world. And yet pigmentation, skin colour, is the key founding principle of race as a social construct." -- Adam Rutherford (2020) 

Poem: Fire Ceremony

Some women cannot be categorized. It’s the gleam in her eyes as she sits next to you, when a single sideways look tells you degrees in physiology, psychology, and even physics are worthless. It’s when she loosens a string in her blouse and glances at you, daring you to do all the things you’ve dreamed of—knowing full well you won’t be able to keep up.

That’s the problem with us college boys. We frame our lives in rectangular wooden caskets, keep track of the latest restaurant openings, maybe even attend weekly poker nights. Nowhere do we envision the woman who shimmies when she shouldn’t, discarding civilization’s rules with a three-second dance. She’s seen our kind before—too often, sadly—and her eyes still gleam.

When she goes to the balcony for a smoke, I stay inside, a glass door separating our worlds. No matter how high the story, others look down on us, drafting rules to keep us in place. My three rectangular wooden caskets hem me in, creaking in tongues I can’t use to communicate. I pay respects to the undertakers by saying nothing, hoping she’ll silence their dirge with the sound of her voice. Her phone rings while I knead her back, and she answers, making plans for hours my eyes won’t open, not even on a Friday night.

She leaves, and suddenly, I'm hungry. After I return from eating alone, the room feels cavernous and dark. Like Plato’s Cave, my eyes try to adjust but cannot. The gleam is gone, and I’ve learned fire comes in many forms; also, that sometimes, all it helps you see are empty spaces and the dancing shadows you’ll miss. 

MMR (2019) 

Poem: the Bee's Knees

Your knee. That’s what I’ll remember most, prostrate next to you, reaching backwards, circling it with my blind right hand. Your skin is white marblestone smooth, your knee the kitchen counter in a mansion I’m not sure I belong in.

You are older, classy, not quite Eastern European, not quite Middle Eastern, plump olive eyes set against a Siberian landscape. Your simple dress intends to disguise your royal provenance, but you slip out of heels and approach with a grace that requires training. Years of careful measurements take time to unwind, and I keep circling your knee to see if I can start again.

An hour ago, you placed one hand on my shoulder and one on my chest, as if you were concerned your weight would be a nuisance. When I kissed your earlobe, you moved your earring to make a path for my tongue. Each movement betrays a lifetime of dignified behavior, thinking of others, being presentable. I do the best I can to turn back the clock, remind you of when you acted out of turn.

In the shadows, we time-travel together, and I see your younger self in the contours of your face, imagining all the moments I missed, and the other selves within you, waiting to emerge. You look back, smile, and remind me the proper time is now. 

MMR (2019)

Poem: A Concerto in V Sharp

From far away, bruscamente is the word that comes to mind. The pace is quick, the shoes don’t match a standard color, and if something fierce appears on the horizon, it might be her or another Indonesian tsunami.

Getting closer, we notice perfect teeth, expertly-applied makeup, and earrings matching the blouse (ah, the shoes weren’t accidental). Even then, it’s not until my hands become baby spianato and my gait mysteriously shifts from a capriccio to sostenuto adagietto that I realize I'm listening to a concerto I’ll never forget.

If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll manage to get even closer, but by then, it’ll be too late: you’re in an orbit that will ground satellites with a mere smile, bring you into her gravitational pull and, if you’re even luckier, never let you go.

© Matthew Rafat (August 2018) 

Poem: I Told You

I couldn’t sleep. Past 12AM, not ready to check out at 12PM. 
Too much energy from today, seeping through me like the soft red stains on my thigh from where you were sitting after sex. 
And I just wanted to touch your hair, that curly mess that bounces happily even when you don't smile. 

You're smart, of course, talking about politics like an old hand one moment, the next minute about making your niche in sweet potato tortillas in Mexico City, casually dropping names like Costco and Bimbo. 
You're the last person I'd expect to say she went on a diet at the age of 11, pre-puberty, pre-blood stains, but women, they see themselves in a light harsher than any sun the Mayans, Aztecs, or Mexicas ever measured. 
They worry about the water being wasted while I lather my hands with hotel soap, about not having a steady job post-university, about not finding love, or other things the universe measured by any calendar must see as small as the beautiful mole on your breast. 
(And that hair, it would make Samson jealous.) 

I find out later you were part of an all-women, American-style football team in a country where football is a different sport. 
In another photo, you are upside down, demonstrating a twisting maneuver only a contortionist would approve of. 
Little about you is congruent or straight, and as you walk beside me, in front of me, behind me, I see the black hair before I see you, and I enter your morena maze without a guide, map, or ticket. 
You kiss my eyelids and finally, I fall asleep. 

© Matthew Rafat

Travel Lessons: History and Relationships

People ask what I've learned in my travels. Two areas stand out: history and personal relationships. 

In Santo Domingo, I learned Christopher Columbus was an Italian whose voyages were funded by Spain to promote economic trade, including the slave trade. Colombus aka Colombo aka Cristobal Colon was buried in the Dominican Republic but his remains were later moved to Spain. 

His voyages helped Catholic Spain map shipping routes that would allow the Spanish to take gold, silver, and other commodities back to Europe and establish European influence—including the horrific transatlantic slave trade—in the Americas. From what I gather, Catholic Spain exported African slaves to the Caribbean initially to mine gold and silver. Later, governments, even when independent from European influence, could not wean their economies away from manual labor intensive industries and adapted the slave trade to cocoa/cacao, coffee, sugar, and tobacco. The American South was, in effect, colonized by Catholic Spain, who gave the Americas the Spanish word "Negro," thus reducing an entire group of people into a color. 

Colon Park, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

In Mexico City, I learned about artist Diego Rivera, featured on Mexico's 500 peso note, and his antipathy towards the Catholic Church and Hernan Cortes, who wiped out or subjugated much of Mexico's indigenous population. Columbus's voyages created new shipping routes and seafaring maps allowing Cortes to go further, and he succeeded, extending the European slave trade to Mexico to exploit Mexico's vast natural resources, especially gold and silver. I gather no one in Cortes' military thought of themselves as exploiting anything or anyone--they were paid to discover new lands and new resources to spread Spain's influence worldwide, and if they didn't do it, surely someone else eventually would. 

Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts

The collision between Spain's military values and Mexico's farming values--explained well in Mexico City's Museum of Anthropology--generated much bloodshed and conflict. Pre-Cortes, the indigenous population depended on corn/maize to survive. Without advanced farming equipment, they were often dependent on Nature's vicissitudes, which explains much of their culture (human sacrifices, animals as gods, etc.). 

Growing up in California, I had assumed Mexicans always spoke Spanish, but of course the language is not indigenous to Mexico. The similarities between English, Spanish, and French--all European languages--as well as their differences once exported to faraway countries make sense once history is taken into account. So, too, does modern Mexico City, where many of the residents in upper-class neighborhoods look/are white. 

All over the world, once a foreign language is imported into a country by a militarily-advanced opponent, the language usually becomes the official language of the government, which then promotes civilian employment--and export of natural resources--favoring the militarily-advanced country. Lawyers and diplomats operating in the host country's language are also able to draft contracts with trade terms favoring their employer, such as the "most favored nation status" clause, which assisted the growth of the U.S. economy post-WWII. We now understand why educated people in Tunisia speak French, not Arabic; why educated Filipinos speak English, not Spanish; and so on. 

In any case, the aforementioned linguistic policy/practice tends to create internal social strife by generating inequality between government employees and their allies--buffeted by new money and often new currency--and groups outside their orbit. This economic shift also creates cultural and therefore communication gaps between the blue collar workforce and a new intellectual elite where only one of the aforementioned groups is immediately exposed to Shakespeare, the Bible, or whichever conduit is used to promote the values of the now entrenched country. As one might suspect from studying Diego Rivera, the blue collar workforce often feels excluded from the capitalist or white collar sector, which dominates military and banking decision-making. From this lesson, we can begin to understand the catalysts behind Mao's Revolution in China, formally called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We can also see how governments that promulgate certain values lose credibility if such values are applied inconsistently to all residing groups. 

One of my gaps in understanding history is trying to figure out from where Spain bought and/or captured slaves. A European Africa Company modeled on the East India Companies in Holland and Britain failed. If Arab merchants were trading slaves in ways that knowingly led to their exploitation rather than integration into the more affluent employers’ families (such as a nanny taking care of her employer’s children and a de facto part of the family), they were violating the Prophet Muhammad’s express and clear edicts. And indeed, the Saharan slave trade occurred primarily from the 16th century onward--after the Portuguese took over the Strait of Malacca from the Arabs, signaling Islam's decline in SE Asia and the world. Even now, the Strait of Malacca is vital to world trade, as evidenced by tiny Singapore's trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund. 

As for the Swahili coast slave trade, "Because of the lack of explicit evidence, [some experts] even question the existence of the slave trade on the Swahili coast before the Omani settlement on the coast in the eighteenth century... Nevertheless, most of the historians of the Swahili world have generally adopted a prudent position, admitting the existence of the slave trade, but maintaining that before the end of the eighteenth century, it remained a minor part of the coastal trade compared to the trade in ivory or gold." (Interestingly, Dibba, Oman was the site of one of the great battles of the Ridda Wars, where Adz troops refused to swear allegiance to the descendants of the prophet Mohammad (PBUH); today, most Omanis practice Ibadi Islam, aka Ibāḍiyya, a unique version of Islam.) 

History rarely provides clarity, but in this case, we know after Malacca fell to the Portuguese in 1511, Islamic influence waned worldwide. Thus, it is not coincidental if greater European influence in Africa post-1511 led to a higher--and more brutal--slave trade where chattel slavery flourished, whereas Islam mitigated the practice and never based it on color. (See, for example, Tippu Tip aka Tippu Tib aka  Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi aka  حمد بن محمد بن جمعة بن رجب بن محمد بن سعيد المرجبي‎, an Afro-Arab slave trader, ivory trader, plantation owner, and governor.) African Muslims were not allowed to be enslaved, and as Islam spread in Africa from 600 AD, it slowly replaced tribal practices, which included slavery and slave trading. 

"If you read... there's stuff in there about genocide, about slavery, about the breeding of human beings which, if you're of African descent in this [Western] hemisphere, that's your legacy, you were bred into existence. Usually raped, but it was a breeding project of form." -- Junot Diaz (2012)

And so, the slave trade and the reasons for its transatlantic expansion help us to understand Islam, its conflict with Christian Europe, and why Arab merchants and their successors despised Prophet Muhammad and his deliberate regulations against slavery, going so far as to attempt to assassinate him numerous times. (This Islamic conflict between slaveholders and anti-slavery advocates occurred much earlier--over a thousand years before America's Civil War--showing that history does indeed repeat itself.) 

Virginia has a long history to confront. Our nation's experience with slavery began there... in Jamestown in 1619... It was the unfreedom of 40% of Virginia's population that made the liberty of the rest imaginable as well as materially possible. The economic viability of both the colony and the new nation depended on slave labor. -- Drew Gilpin Faust (The Atlantic, "Carry Me Back," August 2019) 

The attempts on the Prophet Muhammad's life forced him to flee from his birthplace, Mecca, to Medina, where he realized the Arab Establishment and their hired mercenaries would not stop trying to kill him, forcing him to take defensive measures. Even after Prophet Muhammad’s death, Arab rulers killed one of his grandsons, Husayn aka Hussein, indicating continuing power struggles within the Arab community. From this lesson, we can begin to understand the reasons for the modern-day power struggle in the Middle East between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. 

Until I traveled, I disliked history immensely. I suppose I intuitively realized the way it was taught was a waste of time. I earned top marks in my history classes, but the more I travel, the more I'm angered at America's governmental-academic complex, which seems to teach nothing well--while charging exorbitant tuition or taking state funding from other community-building projects. 

As for personal relationships, that's a story for another time... 

[To be continued?] 

© Matthew Rafat (2018)