Category: Art as Resistance

Selma: The Wait Ain’t Over

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selma-bridgeBy Tommy Airey

Who murdered Jimmie Lee Jackson? Every white lawman who abuses the law to terrorize. Every white politician who feeds on prejudice and hatred. Every white preacher who preaches the bible and stays silent before his white congregation.
Martin Luther King in Selma (1965…2015)

There’s a chilling scene in the just-released Selma where Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) peppers George Wallace (Tim Roth) over why he won’t ensure that black Americans have full protection to vote in his state. The notorious governor of Alabama assures the President that he doesn’t really have the power to do anything even if he wanted to: that’s up to counties and cities. And besides, if black folks get the full power of the vote (as enshrined in the Constitution a century earlier), then they will move on to more “demands:” for jobs, housing, health care and more.
Continue reading “Selma: The Wait Ain’t Over” →

Against Silence

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JessFrom Tyehimba Jess, whose first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Wave Books will publish his next book, Olio, in 2016. He is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

My name is Tyehimba Jess. I am a black poet. I have a silence to be rightened. I have a silence after each shooting. I remain a nation unsilenced. I am a poet murdering silence. My name is Eric. My name is Bell. My name is Eleanor. My name is nation. My rights fit any murder description. My remains remained on the asphalt for
Continue reading “Against Silence” →

A Dedication to the Children of Palestine

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palestinePoetry by Shahin Shabanian
Artwork by Ibrahim Ozdabak

I know you, child
I have seen your face full of fears
And your eyes full of tears.

Your fears are real as they were then:
When you were abused in ghettos of Europe,
And in the concentration camps, without a hope.
Gassed and burned in the ovens: a damned consternation,
The instigating brutes called it the “Final Solution.”
Continue reading “A Dedication to the Children of Palestine” →

Yield

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kate foranWritten by Kate Foran. Kate Foran appreciates her three season CSA share and thinks it’s worth noting how the liturgical calendar builds in a lean time during the last weeks of winter and first weeks of spring.

“That Wilderness should turn a mart”
quoted in  Changes in the Land by William Cronon

In this troubled area of the world known as
my shoulders, my roving fingers dig for what
must be buried there—gold doubloons
or taut and humming harpsichord strings
and I wonder about all that stored energy,
the tension I’m saving, always vigilant
for some fight or flight that never comes, Continue reading “Yield” →

O Holy Nightmare: Incarnation and Apocalypse

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nativityBy Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Fritz Eichenberg, the artist so long associated with the Catholic Worker, published a wonderful and disturbing depiction of the Nativity. In the center foreground lies the babe on hay and in swaddling clothes. Nestled round are an adoring donkey and a cow. Through the crossbeams above, a star points down from the heavens. Hallmark, you would think, would snatch up the print for a comforting and conventional Christmas card. Continue reading “O Holy Nightmare: Incarnation and Apocalypse” →

Art As Resistance: The Die-In

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Die InIn recent weeks, organized die-ins have spread through cities all over the world, in protest of the decades long epidemic of police brutalities and fatalities. On Friday, over 100 Legal Aid attorneys walked out of Brooklyn Criminal Court Tuesday morning to protest the grand jury outcome in Eric Garner’s case.

“Mr. Garner was our client and we wanted to show solidarity with our clients,” said attorney Rebecca Kavanagh.

Bina Ahmed is a public defender on Staten Island.

“We see a lot of police brutality,” she explained. “We see a lot of charges of resisting arrest when people are beaten to a pulp by the NYPD, to justify the brutality”
Continue reading “Art As Resistance: The Die-In” →

A Feature of the Unjust System

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Molly CrabappleArt as Resistance from Molly Crabapple:

In America, the justice system is anything but just. Courts are conduits for the caging of (mostly black or brown) humans. The police feed people into the courts, and if they sometimes kill those they are arresting it’s regarded as a cost barely worth mentioning. And though they kill a lot of people—in Utah, police shootings are the second most common type of h​omicide—they are rarely punished. From the fellow officers who write reports and testify on the behalf of killers to the prosecutors who seem determined to let murderers get away, the very system that claims to monitor the police protects them. Police kill. They get away with it. They kill again. Eventually, you realize that this process is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.

Advent Longing

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light-in-the-darknessFrom author and activist Ken Sehested, a resident of the French Broad watershed of the Southern Appalachian Mountains in Asheville, NC. Ken just launched a subversively informative site called Prayer & Politiks:

Oh Wondrous One, Who rides the skies and consorts with the earth— haunting the heavens, hounding mere mortals with the expectation of ecstasy—come and rouse hungry hearts with the aroma of your Presence.

Let the song of angels sound again, announcing glory to God and peace for the earth.

Give your people wombs of welcome to the news of reversal: the annulment of enmity and the Advent of promise.

Let every lip echo the jubilant manifesto of creation’s destiny with justice and with joy.

Set our hearts on the edge of our seats, shivering in hope, longing, longing for the age when bitter memory dissolves into Magnificat.

Holy One of heaven, mark these dark nights with the brilliance of your star to guide emissaries of exclaiming grace.

The grace of contradiction and scandal to the insolent innkeepers of this age.

The grace of blessing and bounty to the indigent, and to all who find no lasting home save in the age to come.

Positioning by Rose Berger

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

oakRose Berger is an award-winning religion journalist, author, public speaker, poet, and Catholic who specializes in writing about spirituality and art, social justice, war and peace.

Positioning

I didn’t count the rings
on the oak we took down

—crane and all—but think
there must have been a hundred

or more. I’d rather,
I’m sure, count the hairs

on your head
or finger the span

of your spine, my hand
on your smooth skin,

until we are old enough
to have limbs

that can no longer bear
the weight of a high wind

or surprise snow. Continue reading “Positioning by Rose Berger” →