Mat
Mat sat
Sam
Mat sat on Sam
The sun was hot
Sam had ten cats
Come here said Sam
In hand they went
went to the end of the land
went in wind
went in sand
went in sun
had a rag
Come back said Mat
I will have an undergraduate class, let’s say a young white male student, politically-correct, who will say: ‘I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak.’ …I say to them: ‘Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?’ Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very determinist position - since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak… From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will have earned the right to criticize, you be heard. When you take the position of not doing your homework - ‘I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident’ - that is the much more pernicious position.
You watched a word sprout up through crud and worms and take a seat on your front lawn, cross-legged in the dark. Its pillowy skin, its bald head in the moonlight. When it pushed up through solid earth you wondered then if words, like waves, could pass through every tide and change of time. It cried and cried at a pitch too high out of range. Its shape was watery like an early memory. In this culture ears get sold by the pound. A pair gets tired, grows rusty, approaches obsolescence, and you need new ones then to gather sound.