Delusions of Grandeur (Musings of a Doomed Prophetess)

I must write

2006-09-07T17:26:00.000-04:00

for the first fall of my remembered life I am not returning to school. I love school. this is hard for me.

I was reading old papers last night, poring over their various esoteric contents. the memories of deconstructing detroit poets, feminists, radical avant-gardes and old, old white men rushed through me. what, I thought, will I write now? I'm now thrown into the world of knowledge with no one to grasp hold of my hand and lead me through it.

the world around me is changing. this country is changing. I'm very afraid. I'm afraid of facism and war. I'm afraid of propoganda. I'm afraid to live in the empire. I'm afraid because I understand (her)history and I know we will fall eventually. I'm afraid when people don't believe me when I say that. I'm afraid of the fact that I'm named after a Greek prophetess who was doomed never to be believed.

but this is why I'm writing this right now. someday it will be important for the people of the future to know that there was dissent. that there was anger. and...fear.

I must write (I have to)
I must write (got to keep living)
I must write (even if it's in vain)
I must write (they have to know)
I must write (they have to know)
I must write (they have to know)
I must write (they have to know)
I must write (I tried)
I must write (I tried to warn them)

-Cassie

phallocentric hegemony rears its ugly head(s)

2006-04-26T01:26:00.000-04:00

why is it that Maxim magazine never publishes articles on the perfect cunnilingus technique and yet every issue of Cosmopolitan has at least one article and two graphics devoted to how to give the perfect blow-job?

by the way, for anyone who cares to know- to give the perfect blow-job all you have to do is show up and suck.

hate.

Piquette Market Fire- June 21st, 2005 (The Only Neighborhood Block Party We Ever Had)

2006-04-12T04:34:00.000-04:00

June 21, 2005- Piquette Market Fire

It was the only time I met my neighborhood. Not neighbors, neighborhood. My neighbors are the medical school students who live in the apartment next door to me and the rowdy northern-suburb boys below. But Sarah and I live in a tiny enclave of med schoolers and art students that shifts into a different Detroit only a block or two north or east. My neighborhood is full of people who are strangers to me.

Sarah was working at the Melting Pot in Troy at the time and I was expecting her back from her shift soon. Then I got a call. There was huge fire; she could see it driving down 75 and knew it was only a few blocks from our place. They were talking about it on the radio. She would pick me up and we would go down and gawk.

Though we could have walked, we honored the legacy we were a part of and drove the few blocks north. It was after 10:00 at night and the heat was oppressive. Sarah and I parked on Brush by identical sets of condominiums, sparkling in their manufactured splendor. I was wearing flip-flops that barely protected the soles of my feet from the intermittent shards of bluegreen glass. We could feel the heat of the spectacle drawing us like moths to it.

It was Piquette market, we realized, from the talk behind CCS where we eventually planted ourselves. Sarah saw a man taking a picture perched on top of his Jeep and asked to take a look. He hoisted her up as I waited, feet planted firmly on the cement. She gasped upon getting the whole picture. There was a wooden fence obscuring our view although the flames were still visible, still shooting forty and fifty feet into the air.

There were more people gathered closer and the fire was spreading. We decided to move out of our position in the alley and head into the open field on Piquette street. All sorts of people had come out to watch. Piquette Market was an old building- it had been the Studebaker plant in the heydey of the Studebaker, when the American auto industry seemed limitless and Detroit was en vogue. Since then it had served as a marketplace for meat and furniture and probably other things. I didn't know; I had never been inside Piquette Market. I had often passed it in my lazy summer walks, breathing in the old brick houses with hydrangea bushes overgrown and spilling over the porches and the factory buildings stretching into the sky, their smokestacks scraping the clouds, tingeing them shades of purple and amber.

Sarah and I settled at the edge of the field furthest from the fire. It had started at the corner of Piquette and Brush but was spreading to the outer reaches of the block. People trimmed the edges of the block like lace on a heavy brocade tapestry. Black and Chaldean mothers scooped their gape-faced children close to them, sheltering their faces unnecessarily from the flames, holding them too tightly. Students from Wayne State and CCS milled about in vintage tee-shirts and slick polos, taking pictures with their cell phones. Construction workers from local developments working late into the night came from the bars to watch, their meaty arms crossed commandingly in front of them. Youths on low-rider bikes divided their time between watching girls and watching the brick walls of the market tumble into nothingness, the flames ripping them from existence.

The charge of the place was undeniable. These hundreds of humming people, their bodies electric with fervor. The firemen were like flies buzzing uselessly around, unable to find the heart of the fire and pluck it out. Reflections of flames made every pair of eyes glow a glassy orange, uniting our gazes into a fire unto itself. We were transfixed; Piquette Market had entered into the existences of us strangers and our complicated diaspora had somehow converged to watch it be destroyed. Strange, I thought, to be watching this piece of Detroit be lost. Strange, always, to be existing innocently and suddenly find yourself in moment of history.

Eventually the fire started to push a dangerous point. Walls made by the hands of union Masons in the 1900's were crumbling into powder as though made of sugar. The fire was threating to jump buildings into a warehouse full of forklifts and tanks of propane. Sarah and I had passed from June 21st into the early hours of June 22nd when we decided to leave. Men and women all around us chatted excitedly with one another, the thrill of voyeurism shining red on their cheeks. These were the people who lived on all sides of me. Their lives pressing into my own, my life fluttering in their periphery.

Sarah and I could see Piquette Market burn well into the morning from our third-floor apartment. Its red glow lulled the city to sleep that night, throbbing gently into the skies, warming our eyelids as we slept.

The Language of the Oppressor (The Constant Tension of My Words)

2006-04-06T02:16:00.000-04:00

I have decided to begin with a brief introduction.

Hello, my name is Cassandra and I'll be flooding your mind with nerve-wracking thoughts today.

Glad we got that out of the way. On to the ranting...

Much of my formal education has been surrounding the problems of language. Specifically, the way language wields a very special power over our ('us' being collective humanity) value-judgements, perceptions, identities and 'truths.' English especially. When I listen to rap music- the nuanced vernacular, with purposeful breaks from canonized English- I think about breaking away from the language of the oppressor. This is not an unfamiliar concept. James Joyce deals with it in "The Dead," when the main character of the story is confronted with the conflict of his Irish heritage and his English language (and lack of Gaelic). I just finished reading Seamus Heany's Seeing Things and Brian Friel's "Translations." These are two other Irish works that point out the tension that exists when one culture forces its language upon another; when dominant, wealthy culture erradicates the problem of "other-ness" by force. English is still forcing itself into every culture in the world. In Germany students spend nine years learning English. That number is higher in other cultures. The demand for English teachers is so great that if you were to visit http://www.goabroad.com and search for a job as one, you would most certainly find a listing in every country that website makes available.

In feminism the problem of language manifests itself in the gender binary and the appropriation of the universal "I" to the masculine identity. The need for plurality, ambiguity and questioning. This argument is not exclusive to English- it is in fact most prominent in French feminism. However, for feminists, there is no alternate. There is no "female language" to return back to. We (yes, I count myself a feminist) are in a constant tension with language(s) dominated by male hierarchy and female sublimation.

And here I am. Anti-racist, feminist, socialist, doomed prophetess, grandiose deludinoid, rap aficionado using the ultimate language of the oppressor. English. It is heavy with the weight of its slaughters. Thick and muddy. But here I am.

I thought you all should know this before embarking on trying to parce apart my sentences or make meaning from my fragments. There is a constant tension. An oscillation between a love of words that drip like sugary sweets from my mouth and a bitter, alkaline hatred of the legacy of oppression that comes from this (borrowing from Faruq Z. Bey) 'Indo-Aryan syntax.' I have no hope of reconciling it here, I'm afraid.

I just thought you should be aware.