[WCUSP] Joan Nestle's latest blog entry: Don't You Ever Stop Talking

[yvonne simmons]

----- 
> From: Shebar Windstone 
> 
> 
> Please feel free to add your comments/responses to
> her blog page.
> 
>
http://joannestle.blogspot.com/2007/10/so-long-has-passed-since-my-last-entry.html
> 
> 
> Wednesday, October 31, 2007
> So long has passed since my last entry that I forgot
> how to get into my own blog--issues of memory are
> all around me--the death of dear friends, the
> dislocation of distance, a changing self in body and
> habits of thinking, moving.
> 
> What has been haunting me through so much of these
> times is the suffering of ill people behind these
> walls and checkpoints and in war-torn towns. I have
> had colon and breast cancer--I have been able to
> take two Manhattan buses to get to my chemo center,
> to my radiation laboratory, to my surgeons. I am
> haunted by the image of a 14 year old Iraqi girl,
> thin as the pallet on which she lay, outside the
> gates of her family home in one of the most
> destroyed neighborhoods of Baghdad--her older
> brothers stood around her--she has cancer, she has
> not eaten but she can't go to the hospital, the arms
> of the girl waving, the translator saying she wants
> to go to the doctor, bare human suffering--the
> reporters convince one of her brothers to help them
> put her into their car and come with them as they
> try to find help for their sister. The car drives
> away into shadows. I do not know what happened to
> that young woman, but I read of the ill people in
> Gaza, of cancer-stricken Palestinians stopped at
> closed gates or restricted in their travel, of
> treatment appointments missed or never made. Fine
> Israeli hospitals just moments away but not for
> these people--they are part of a population that
> must be punished, that must be exhausted as the head
> of Shin Bet said recently--we must make them too
> exhausted to engage in struggle against us. So many
> of us have endured life with cancer, we know how we
> accept poison into our bodies because that is all
> the doctors can offer now, we know the exhaustion of
> the body trying to absorb chemicals that want to
> kill it, and we know the exhaustion of the illness
> itself--if even a small number of us joined
> together, we who had to ask no one for permission to
> cross a road, who were never turned away from a
> departure point when we had used every bit of our
> energy to arrive there, if we used our human bond,
> stricken body with stricken body, we could break the
> walls that imprison all of us--those who suffer
> their lack of power and those of us who inflict our
> power down to the very cells of those we deem the
> enemy.
> 
> In America, politicians argue whether "illegal"
> immigrants should be allowed to get treatment for
> their cancer -- how can we who have survived because
> we "passed" the human requirements be silent in the
> face of this?
> 
> I live in Melbourne, Australia now--Australia is in
> the midst of an election--Liberal leader John Howard
> has been Prime Minister for 11 years, a devoted
> follower of George Bush and all things Right--today
> he said the most astounding thing--he answered
> critics of his meeting with the leader of an extreme
> right wing Christian group, League of Rights, by
> saying, "well, they are a bit anti-semitic" but
> refused to cut his ties to the group. The group's
> leader has gone on record questioning whether the
> Holocaust ever really happened. A bit antisemitic, a
> bit pregnant. I have written here of my sadnesses,
> angers, rejection of the actions of Israel as a
> nation state and its treatment of the Palestinians.
> That is one discourse and the other--the growing
> Christian fascism of the extreme right. Power, God,
> nationalism--and the human body, naked in its need
> for care.
> 
> Posted by Joan Nestle 
> 
> 
>
=======================================================
> What's the difference between cannibalism &
> capitalism?
> -- Capitalism doesn't leave the bones.
> Shebar Windstone <shebar at e271.net>
> CHMOD www.e271.net/~shebar/chmod/
> www.JoanNestle.com
> 

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