An Arab in Brooklyn

Yesterday, I rewrote section 2, a task that proved far easier than I ever could have guessed. The community here is everything I could have hoped it would be: good conversation, plenty of options for walking and swimming and dancing, etc. I'm posting the next section in its entirety because it mostly consists of two sprawling prose poems and then a couple tiny dialogue sections that hold them together. My task is to shorten the two poems dramatically today, while still maintaining the argument that they were meant to put forth.


James burst like John the Baptist through his father's studydoor, yelling his head off in proclamations from his first day of kindergarten.
"Babba! Babba! Guess what, Babba! Babba, there's another bwack tid in my tindergarten twass!"
Startled, Professor Rostau looked up from a cluttered desk on which lay buckling bound folders coffeesplashed and torn, ragged upturned books by W.E.B. DuBois, bell hooks, and Frantz Fanon, a plate crusted over with tortilla shards and dried hummus, and a cold mug of stale coffee, the culprit of the aforementioned splashings some seventeen hours earlier. He ran a disconcerted collection of fingers across his bare chin, where a fierce beard had once reigned tyrannical, but, now, sabotaged, was only a muted ghost. He stared at the boy, trying to reassemble the words that had just been hurled so freely in his direction.
A black kid? Hell, has the boy learned to discriminate already? How? From whom? Another black kid? Who was the first? Was it that girl, the daughter of what was his name, the designer from Atlanta, who came to talk to Tara about their clothing lines last year, who they introduced to Virginia while the boy was - where was he at the time? - but there was so much space between them, something keeping them apart, until booming paternal voices forced them together to shake hands and the first thing out of Virginia's tactless mouth was 'why are you black?' like a gunshot at the starting line (though he supposed it was only natural for a six year old), the beginning of a Race, and he'd seen immediately after, the look of death across the trenchlines or call them picket lines of suspicion, but the four year old handled it well enough, shrugging back, 'because my daddy is' she'd said with a pout on her lips and a hand on her shoulder, the reassurance of divine old daddy, support in your time, need, when your back's against a wall, who Rostau could have sworn was gay, what with the fashion but there she was, a daughter, southern angel of coal, Georgia plum, and Khalil looking into his eyes thinking all along god damn, brother, why'd you move her to Colorado, the continental divide, amidst pasty faced hillbillies and spaced out mountainman yuppies, milk pastured, naïve, only color ever seen round here's the Mexicans cleaning their floors or token Chinese and Indian flares behind counters at restaurants though he supposed there was the Shambhala center and all of those Nepalese souvenir shops, and the designer returned his eyes to his eyes with a look that held back a four hundred year deluge, pleading 'I'm fucking trying here' with his mouth closed and the muscles of his clenched jaw silently throbbing the word, History. But in a moment those eyes of that other, that artist, shifted, and held a growling bristle of accusation, the angry look of a heart betrayed because of course they had been standing out front of the house, four stories of excess rising up behind them, obscene, and they didn't ask but demanded 'no! what are you doing here, this city on a hill, looking down over the trailers on the plains, licking your lips, eating steak in your white job mastah professah-man, you ain't foolin me, I see through you, within your fortress you're still a fucking towelhead, and you know what justice means, I know you know, and all we've struggled, all the pain and the violence, cocktails of fire, what language did you learn, trading in your tongue to the first buyer, hope you got a good fucking price to afford you protection against this-' Nightmare. And Khalil couldn't take it anymore and had looked away, looked down, where he'd studied the dusty red rocks imported to form his driveway, curving elegantly over rocks that were also red, thinking sadly, if you knew if you only knew my brother, my lover: Amma giving birth in blood and infected filth on the ship to Brooklyn, and Babba, cut down on the docks, and that year, 1948, when all we'd wanted was, all they'd asked for from it all was simply to be, to let us live, from out of all the death and the violence, all we'd wanted was refuge, simply, to Wake. He returned his eyes to the man, now armed with a determined squint, mustered compassion, trying to balm the fire of hatred beginning to flicker in his eyes, but the man's previous look of pleading recognition was now completely lost without a trace and, knowing not what else to do, Khalil had looked, impotently, back at the ground.

Rostau, disoriented, cleared his throat and asked his son, "What do you mean by another black kid?"
James looked surprised. "Another one! I'm not the onwy one!"
Khalil coughed a short, nervous laugh, which having cleared his lungs of their strain, gave way to a fluid rush of giggling. Stupid little genius.
"So you're black are you?"
"Of tourse! Just wike you, Babba!"
Just like him: an Arab: a Palestinian: an immigrant: a raghead: a black man at whose expense this country built itself into the self it had always dreamt of becoming: the expendable proletariat or worse even: An American. Maybe so. Maybe not. Rostau wondered: off the boat and straight to work, Amma and Babba (no maternity leave for political refugees), their new life urging forward, unceasingly toilous, forming endlessness, endlessly forming and working and waiting for ever, for evermore, forever more behind in the name of God, the most beneficent, sustainer of the worlds, they pledged allegiance to the flag and the Untied Statements of American history, 101, lightlifelove: down Atlantic Avenue, the great cultural corridor, boulevard of Brooklyn, a botanical garden of culinary samples, every homeland pollinating the air with smells of their essential spices: all they'd left behind yet also carried with them, and their clashes of times, sweeping street skirmishes, entrenched turf warfare, where the muffled cry of a transplanted muezzin interlaced the prepubescent whistles of newsboys and hoarse hawks of fishmongers and restaurateurs: survival of the loudest in a polytonic chorus of upstart possibilities, forging the air breathed in and out, sewing through his neighborhood and scissored in ribbons by keen menacing eyes furrows fucking sand nigger demon worshippers spat pollution in bloody toxic contamination fed roundly by a boundwall of tradition: kissing the book with stony faces of fuck-off determination, stoking fires out of greasepits of whathaveyou survival, backstrung, for the whispers and the looks didn't carry rifles titles and badges like back home had they stayed . They laid down their hopes and holds and hearth in smoketide, reinforced the door, and cooked eggplant like Amma as a girl crossing in and out of Lebanon: old stories injecting fresh contours and Babba got work down at the dockyards where the white people still spat at a Muslim, yet clasped hands into hands when the work needed doing, melt to build, but none too long at all then the strikes came and with them the rioting; course no one could afford it, especially not with children, but it was rights, human dignity, the words had been professed: it was everything they'd fled forming Israel so recently to find, so he'd stood fast to the frontlines, stood fast, an American, bloody-faced but present so his family could eat another month, and it was there that they'd shot him through the head, and he fell, hands still clasped with a Paki and an Italian on either side, in-line . The funeral'd been nothing to write in the papers with no money even to eat and Amma howling on her knees, making living and crying one in the same, kissing al-Qur'an, praying God the Merciful, believe, just believe and He will protect, while tears wearing through Babba's old rug, air getting too hot to breathe as all eyes turned to him, little Khalil, heir apparently, the boy of the times, to carry on like his father, rise up in madrasah, to fight, ulema, for jurisprudence, pride, and year after year of breaking his back, how he disappointed her, such a smart boy, but a shame, his head in Jahannam like a Jew, watching the sun set from the East River, skyline of the Financial District, hiding on Fridays, performing prayers, but whispering instead in his head to his hero, Benjamin Franklin, and kneeling west, until she slapped him across the face, kharah, and he'd crept out of the wroughtiron furnace, wafted up the through the vents like a puff of smoke and ran to Manhattan, home of the Jews, with the sky forming limits to new views, filling lungs and lunging, breathing in the oxygen . A steelglass explosion with more stories than the Arabian Nights, with more and less walls and ceilings, in all counts, a boundless surge of discordant chords slamming out the music of the future: a totality, so large and so loud that he himself ceased to be, and he bounced along, a depository outside of control, his own, a dirty ball of mudsweatspitsmoke, vaguely brown, vaguely black, exchanged, walking hot across the frying pan of civilization, breathing free of abandoned bigotries, boiled down to stock in the indifferent sludge of meltingpot bigotries, warlike in thrift, a mug to an ocean, dishelmed, dissolved, mo.le.cu.les d ta ch ng, ed-dying, swallowing, carrying time with space and history's fictions away with those never mastered until a hook - caught! - yanked his protean mass out of the sound, downed roundly bound sink, and plattered him out - ca-shing! - the boy with the Words, thoughts watched through golden eyes, down encreased the seaport, regenerated, flesh cut from fish, seeing in his mind's I, engaged, educated, reading and washing, convincing through presence, workwordworld: conception through black, what it says is everything to be.
Professor Rostau looked from the blank of his mind to the works splayed on his desk to the anxious eyes of his five-year old son and perhaps betraying, accidentally, a deep conviction, asked, "What does that mean? What, in your eyes, does it mean to be black like me?"
James squinted while his eyes settled intensely at a point in space somewhere over his father's shoulder until a thin smile caressed his face, then all at once his expression lit livid. "Fun and adventure, wike Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Not wike Ginny and her Barbies, they are boring wike the other tids in my twass."
The professor looked deeply into the eyes of his five-year-old, a sense of seeing what the other is seeing, like Van Gogh reinventing the sky, he's learning how to read already, so young, prolific, knew the alphabet before he was two, he could see it and he could know it, signifiers, signification, everything, now strapped into bourgeois private country day school, learn to shelter self against the sheltered, or acclimate, but they'll teach him French and Latin, how to teach himself, but still, the damage to his self, already feeling the looks on the first day, sensitive heart, symptomatic rearings, violent and consumptive, hypocrites, trains of them dressing pet projects in tiny Polos with rich lapels. He'll have to stand in silence, alone perhaps, an exile in the only world he knows, but transcending rules the great mind forges, an artist, as an infant in puzzles and songs, tales of how he wants to, growing fly by the time he…has eyes let him see, if even only two sticks he held, immediately, to feel, to see, to stand up and sing.
"But Jean and me pwayed Twistofher Towombus today at wecess! And we distovered Amerita and Hatey too betause Jean says his pawents are fwom Hatey and then we were bugs battwing giant spiders and supermans tilling bank wobbers and megaman and mitwoman tilling all the bad guys and he knew all the things we could be and when he said we were somewhere I saw it just wike it. Anything! anywhere! And I said we were fighting Spwinter and Jean was Weonardo and I was Waphael and we fought off all the foot twan."

"Why did you encourage Jamie, tonight, in believing that he's black?" Tara, incubated in warm silken sheets, draped by a mostly see-through nightie, demanded of her husband. Her auburn hair hung suspended, loosely lit in the electric glow of a cantaloupe nightlamp balanced neatly on her bedside's nightstand.
Khalil looked slowly up from the book he was reading, then turned darkly to her.
"First tell me why it matters to you."
"Why it matters? It matters because the reality of how people will-"
"People will what?" Khalil stabbed in, voice pitched, piqued.
Tara paused, surprised, a look of distrust in her eyes, then, twisting her hair into a bun as she spoke, continued, "Oh people will nothing. It's a question of the reality of how he looks at himself, what he learns now will shape who he grows into. He's not black, he's Arab, half Arab and it's important that he knows that. Important that he takes pride in it! And as far as I'm concerned, the sooner he learns to embrace his cultural heritage the less fucked up this world will leave him in the long run."
She could see a slight bulge in his cheeks has he clenched his teeth behind tightly sealed lips. Finally, slowly, he spoke. "I never encouraged the boy to think himself black. I never discouraged him either. As far as I'm concerned a five year old child needs as little discouragement in his life as he can get. God knows he's going to face plenty of that as soon as those spoiled peers of his grow old enough to think like their parents." He paused, staring through her, coldly.
Then he blinked and shook his head and his eyes softened noticeably. "And anyways, Tara, these days, who is to say who counts as black and who doesn't anymore? I see enough white kids every day, down at CU, trying desperately to dress and talk and move like they've got soul."
A sharp laugh popped from his lips and he kissed his wife's forehead, petting her little red bun, then pinched one of her nipples and turned back to his book.