Democracy is in harm’s way, they say,
at the edge of a steep cliff
or open to possibilities that only
dreamers like MLK could marvel.¹

Just yesterday a Trump return
was a given at RNC celebrations,²
today JD Vance claims the spotlight
for debasing all “childless cat ladies”
who vowed to remember come November.³

The two rival conventions came
and went in their grandiose ways
displaying pageantry and illusion,
the Pretender ready to take power again.
In a miracle of political dexterity
and bio-politics at its best,
the serving President, tired by Nature’s
implacable process of finitude,
under unrelenting pressure
from depressed Dems seeking a way out
of the Grand Doom looming on their horizon,
finally decided to pass on to his VP the mantle.

He now made it his mission,
having swallowed his pride
to save the country from the uncertainty
of hubris and gratuitous malfeasance,
from pure animality of hate and exclusion.

The new turn has produced a new wind,
new contagious energy from a coalition
of good will converging, the ethnic
tapestry illuminating a kaleidoscope
of beauty engaged for something other than
pleonexia, facticity and the pursuit of power
for the sake of oppression and domination.⁴

In full circle surges happiness,
the Dems now exulting with new vigor
for the sudden change of fortune
and circumstance now quite joyful.

Would they blow it all up
in brotherhood bloodshed
along the line of abstraction
and egocentric madness?
Or would they seize the moment?

The Woman from Indiaribbean,
newly proclaimed holder of the lore,
told the nation why she is the chosen one;
perhaps for now the best hope for a land
so menaced by the Pretender’s dangling fear,
repression—and retribution.

The Indiaribbean Woman said with a tonic
voice evoking certitude and definitude:
“In the enduring struggle between democracy
and tyranny, I know where I stand,
and I know where the United States belongs.”
Where? many downtrodden countries may ask.

Still nothing new or revelatory regarding
the on-going genocide in the Gaza Strip,
in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Yemen;
no words on the suffering in other lands,
certainly not a sign tyranny is on the run.

Still unfazed on my part,
and asking why after a year of daily,
serial massacres and horrors
the world let this colossal mayhem
endure openly for so long;
I joined the rallies at Boston’s Copley Square
crying out against such calamity brought
upon the lives of the Palestinian people.

Young and old cry out loud
in comradely eloquence “Silence is complicity!”
I envision young Haiti joining hands
of solidarity and human empathy
with Bolivar and the continental enslaved,
and even with the most Hellenic Greece,
joining in their demand to be free;
free from slave masters,
Spanish conquistadors,
and the wrath of many Empires.

Conscience and solidarity
are such boosters of hope,
and of enduring resistance,
universal concepts of redeemed value
that we shall endlessly keep
from being sullied in contempt.

Then, again this was just a dream
and my gaze now must return
to the normality of evil
and the wickedness of the process.

The abused immigrants have not missed
the direct lineage between nostalgia for power
and for a bygone mythical era,
and lynchings of centuries past,
vigilante patrols paid by the masters
to hunt the fugitive enslaved, and cops
laying low profiling all non-Whites.

Candidates to high and respected
public offices professing resentment
and contempt for others, invitation
to the madness of white supremacy.
—they never disappeared from this earth
they became more entrenched
apartheid avant la lettre.

“Resistance is justified,”
so goes the rally’s chant
“when people are occupied.”
The coalition of conscience
the whole life’s mission of Jesse.⁵

It’s still hard to envision
under the Great Democratic Tent
there’s no place for Palestinians!
Nor for anti-hegemony thinkers.

Passing through the Harvard campus
I lament how memory can fade within
the absence and erasure of experience.
Seeing the procession of smiling
families pacing on the grass
in front of the John Harvard statue
on this first-day visit of the new students,
I can’t help thinking of the profanation
of encampment protesters for Israeli divestment.
Do they know they are on holy ground?

Would the Grand Mediatic Show
be enough to dispel the threat
from the Grand Slayer of Fear
who created fear in the first place?
Arsonist turned false heroic firefighter!
Would the charm and the joy exhibited
by the newly anointed from the shadow
be enough to circumvent her complicity
in the politics of oppression in the Levant?

Fight! Fight! Fight to save democracy!
The Dems chant, rarely Fight for what is right!
Fight to see again the radiant, happy grin,
the smile of good news on the patient’s face;
the chat with a neighbor under a sunny sky,
the friendly dog coming for the scraps of chicken
with great expectation and joyful patience.

Fight! Fight! Fight for what is right!
For a world where Marie LaGone can enjoy
Manuel’s songs in Harvard Square while
society would afford her a nurturing space
to flourish, perhaps regaining her strength.

We often miss the real fight, the one
we can all win, the grand carnival of hearts,
sharing the delight of the instant.

Denuded by the Prosecutor of Amazonian
and regal allure, the Pretender was unveiled
in his true, natural, hateful state, dehumanizing
folks like his own who come to this land of refuge,
the land of thousands of sins and virtues,
the land of escape imagined by the world,
the safe harbor—the Pretender
was made the little, unimportant Napoléon
that Hugo so un-majestuously despised!⁶

May the fury of the people’s wrath
who, like zombies tasting salt,
have seen the road toward
be made a conduit to a better, elevated way.⁷

If after you’ve seen the Pretender’s rallies,
right in his element, dirt, gutter, the bait
as to who is the most hateful human being
that Mother Earth has ever produced.

If after the Pretender blemished the temple
of the Republic’s three centennials of trials;
the great myth of the Cowboy with big heart,
Reagan calling “morning in America.”

When so piously you kneel in front
of an aspirant who calls humans vermin,
glorifying his program of mass deportation,
separation of families, abandoned children
crying for their parents’ return and warmth.

That person that you adore who blocks
all ways for women to take charge
of their own lives and reproductive rights,
creating unnecessary harm and suffering.

If after he claims women as prey
duly given to him by patriarchal right
you are still happy with your choice,
even after he shows his true colors?

If after the Great Debate Empire so fancies
you have seen for yourself the contrast,
you still have nostalgia for slavery time,
the time America was great, shabby and cruel?⁸

If you still promise to defend a Pretender
who would sell country, friends and family
just to satisfy his little ego and baseness.

If you would tell your own children
this person is the best of the bunch,
he who advocates for half of the country
to shame and massacre the other half,
vowing openly to wipe out all non-Whites
from this land of us all, conspiring
against humanity’s safety and fate?
If you are in for all of that, perhaps
perhaps, this candidate is you.

History will certify that Black Lives Matter
was once made a cry of freedom
and for equity for all.

History will certify that the Pretender
was a real choice in a presidential contest
risking the country’s destiny and image
with candidates demeaning immigrants,
the old antics of the ethnic cleansers.
This prospect is as scary as the reality
of the Pretender being the choice
of at least half of the country
—deep USA of the deep South and West
where cops and lynchers dine
inside their own bubble.

If after such a display of sympathy
for chaos and for debasement
of the whole society you would still
consent to settle on the Pretender,
welcoming him to the highest
of our institutions and aspirations,
perhaps this abominable person is you.

The Pretender and his teammate
called Haitian immigrants pet-eaters;⁹
their peers of the past would call them
blood-sucking vampires;
even William Seabrook although¹⁰
a great admirer of the Vodou lore
suggested Vodouists were also cannibals.
“It’s an old playbook” as VP would say,
—the one inspired by US Neo-Nazis
inherited from their German brethren
who had, after all, learned it first
from their precursors the Ku Klux Klan.

May the country that comes after,
after the trials and History’s wind
become the one to which we all aspire
when crossing the oceans,
along the abyssal ravines,
and climbing the steep mountains.

This is not a poem, it’s a pilgrimage
along the sacred memories
from my insertion in this country.
As I mourn in this instant my departed friends
and families, they seem so meteoric,
I think of the instant that gives meaning
to the everyday formulation of life;
I think of what enlivens the psyche.

May destiny bless the United States
and Haiti too as Danticat would say.¹¹
Blessed will be the people
who continue to fight
for the eclosion of new dawns
across our firmament.

At the end it wouldn’t even matter
who won so coveted an election,
the whole prospect and the specter
of such a malevolent intent
hanging over humanity’s head
as a Damocles sword for our time
is already here; so too is the battle
for justice and for a better world.

The people will not succumb to the abyss
of darkness for too long; faced
with depravity they refuse the binary choice,
and like birds in search of the vast unknown
they will pursue the elevation of being;
the early morning sun spreads its brilliance,
it is a beautiful day, indeed.

—Tontongi, October 12, 2024

Footnotes

1. MLK: Allusion to Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington.
    
2. RNC: Republican National Convention (held in July 2024).
    
3. Month of the US presidential election (November, 5 2024). J.D. Vance is the Republican candidate for vice-president.
    
4. Pleonexia: extreme craving for greed, wealth or material possessions; avarice.
    
5. Allusion to Jesse Jackson, the great civil rights leader. Usual slogans and chants at anti-occupation and pro-Palestinian rallies in Boston.
    
6. In allusion to Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, calling Napoléon III in his collection of poems Les Châtiments(1853), “Napoléon le petit.”
    
7. Vodouists believe if (and when) a zombie tastes salt, he/she would regain consciousness and agency.
    
8. Parody of the slogan of candidate Donald Trump’s movement “Make America Great Again” (MAGA).
    
9. William Seabrook, author of The Magic Island, 1929. The book is a presentation of Haitian Vodou and suggests a cannibalistic scene that was denounced as fabricated, this religion being one of the most humanist in the world.
    
10. VP: current Vice-President Kamala Harris. It’s interesting to see how the migrants eating pets story inspired by the Neo-Nazis has quietly replaced JD Vance’s anti-cat ladies story.
     
11. Referring to the great Haitian–American novelist Edwidge Danticat who expressed that feeling in her book Create Dangerously, The Immigrant Artist at Work (2011), when on a plane departing from Haiti.

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 Viré monté