The Science Fiction of Racism feat. Si Fixion (April, 2012)

This poem was written specifically for a Gil Scott Heron Tribute night held on April 1 2012 at Kulcha Jam in Byron Bay, NSW (Australia) – http://www.kulchajam.org/.

Organised to mark Gil Scott Heron’s birthday, the event was a fundraiser for the refugee rights campaign and featured poets such as Farid Faird (Sydney), Darkwing Dubs (Brisbane), Doubting Thomas (Brisbane), Daevid Allen (Ocean Shores) and Stefanie Petrik (Lismore).

A big thankyou to Si Fixion (Byron Bay) for making the backing track and to James Lyall aka 3rdeye (Byron Bay) for recording the voice!! http://www.facebook.com/si.fixion – http://www.facebook.com/3rdeyedubstep

To listen, click on title below.

The Science Fiction of Racism

The constellations formed,

a sailors puppeteer

and the slave ships were shackled to the shores

with red raw muscle and tears falling.

The ocean reared with rough waves

like a bellowing body bruised,

swollen and sliced open

by the blade of a whip

as stolen lungs, gasping for air,

choked on darkness, death and despair under the deck.

And above,

coated in plush velvet,

were white plated golden hands tracing maps with blood,

lynching borders with their sordid flags

as they price-tagged non-human humans

who became the crystal ball of history.

A particular kind of racism was given birth, questioning who is human enough, who is a slave, worthless unpaid, denied, as heathens not even breathing… and the breathless empire saught only to trade, the exchange of muscle and land and with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other, the massacres were laid bare, smothered in murdered mothers…

And the rulers used hanus ruling devices

to measure the cranium size of lives

and the twisted lies of a science fiction misplaced the rising friction

to carve deep façades of competition

between us and them, now and then,

tidal scapegoats on hated boats that dissolve in oceans of crazed campaigns for votes, the threat floats on the croak of hypocrisy to distract the masses with a cracking coated lack of democracy, an un- fair go with tapped eyes closed to the rising tides of out of sight out of mind, race based intervention segregation lines or the secret suicides of real refugees crying behind bars or child removal rates higher now than at the peak of the stolen generation, still stolen by assimilation and the disproportionate apartheid rates of incarceration where the young black and deadly end up dead under the fists of unpatrolled pigs. Terrance Briscoe, 28 years old, murdered in an Alice Springs police cell on January 5^th 2012, after being arrested for drinking.

And what are you thinking now?

How the past is present as the present is passing and we keep asking why colour and not class, the correlation creeps up clear in the cryptic forest of fear campaigns, “in a wilderness of heart break and a desert of despair” where violence is blamed on the other, while childless mothers scream in the night between gun shots as they fight to get out of the ghetto blues and crimes climb like vines toward the neck of the confusion. The tactic is simple. Divide and rule. Ruling over the divide of tools, the distribution of wealth is the distribution of health and collective wellbeing is slaughtered on the alter of capitalism.

Did you hear what they said?

Another brother is dead and he can’t be buried behind the barrage of broken hearts, the cracks in the footpaths, the black night, falling like an axe on quiet prayers for everybody to be free,

And overhead,

the vulture empire circles obscene,

screaming the anthems of its borders

while a distant comet in the corner of the cosmos combusts

and then the vulture utters a contradiction

–       human rights –

while dark skin rots in forgotten plantation rows

and in the tainted corridors as factory fodder still chained to the imposed

or in the ghost cells of detention centres where human rights don’t apply to humans

or in hospital beds in Indigenous communities where deliberate government neglect amounts to systemic genocide.

And lest we forget… that nationalism is the gun and racism is the bullet

And lest we forget… that the trigger finger is a golden corpse while the one hit is alive with his famine.

True justice. The justice of truth, the truth of justice because the truth is that there is just us and just truth for us to use.

I am Troy Davis.

You are Troy Davis.

And the haze of hopeless hope haunted us to make haste as Obama presided over a state sanctioned lynching where there was no evidence, no legitimate testimony at all. Executed on 21^st September 2011 at 11:08pm.

The mask falls.

I am Troy Davis. You are Troy Davis. And just before the breath was stolen  from his body, he asked us “to seek true justice”.

The justice of truth,

the truth of justice

because the truth is

that there is just us

and just truth for us to use.