SVEIG
In 1976, I dreamed that a matron who had worked in one of the Nazi concentration camps, Dachau, I believe, came into a torture room in Chile to apply electric probes to my genitals. I recognized her as I was dreaming because she had been arrested and filmed when the camp was liberated and now through the gift of documentary footage that Alan Renais used in his film, Night and Fog, she walked determinedly to the gurney to which I was strapped and whispered, “Sveig. Don’t speak.”
When dreaming, I understood that I was going to be tortured so I would speak, that is, would give names and information, anything the police wanted. And also, I was being tortured so the community, out of fear of similar treatment, would remain silent no matter what heinous crimes were enacted by those in power.
In 1976, the dream also informed me precisely about the presence of cancer and the way that particular illness was developing in young women who were systematically silenced in the culture. I hadn’t thought of myself as especially reticent. However, I had been fired in 1969 from a tenured teaching position after I taught a poem I had written in a carefully designed class based upon a textbook unit on censorship and pornography. I had learned what it meant to be a pariah and the toll it took on a woman and a single mother of two young boys. You would have thought it would be enough to silence me but it didn’t. The event was like a karate move; I used the energy of the attack to move, skillfully, I hoped, in a long thrust against censorship that continues to this day.
If silence kills, what needs to be said?
The wily Judge in Superior Court had had a sense of humor. My attorney had prepared me for the case, Deena Metzger vs The Los Angeles Community College Board, by training me to say as many of the “four letter words” in the poem as casually but quickly as possible in order to neutralize the atmosphere. However, the Judge, who had been a lawyer for the Longshoreman Union in another life and was no stranger to sailor talk, opened the proceedings by claiming to be “confused by four letter words,” and accordingly displayed a chart with the poem written upon it and a number over each word. We were to say the numbers, never the words: “What did you mean by 6, 7 and 8?”
The trial proceeded in this prissy manner until finally it was over and the Judge found in my favor. As did, ultimately, the California Supreme Court, and I was reinstated to the classroom three years later, in 1972. When the Superior Court case was over, the poem appeared and reappeared in various forms but particularly, for its humor, by the numbers. Even, I am told, on Saturday Night Live which I didn’t see because I didn’t have or watch TV and still don’t to this day.
The court case and cancer had been ordeals. You would have thought they would have been enough to silence me. To silence anyone. But it was the opposite. I continued to interview the many, too many, young women I kept encountering who had cancer and who one way or another reiterated that cancer was the body’s response to being silenced, to living in a culture that diminished and dismissed them. Something was breaking out of the restraints; it was the cancer. As it turned out, the medicine was the act of speaking out.
The dream comes back to me now because it is about Nazism and being silenced. We thought it could not happen here and we were wrong
PEN America, the writer’s organization committed to the freedom to write, published the above list of 250 banned words. As you know, the original restriction was to words that concerned diversity, equity and inclusion but quickly increased to include a range from vaccine, climate change, cultural heritage, to ethnicity, ideology, multicultural, from Native American, tribal, underprivileged to women. The intent is to neutralize the language as a way of eliminating any opportunities to undermine or challenge the bullying mind in power which is committed to White supremacy, privilege, money and power consolidated in a few hands.
Protest in Florida each carrying a banned word! Organized by Susan Cerulean and Norine Cardea
My first response to this list, to the fact of such a list, was that we should say the words and write them as often as possible, to see how to honor them and what they truly indicate, to find ways to support and sustain what the administration is refusing. The more I said the words the more power they gathered to them. The words create a world.
I remember a ‘rosary’ I said of the names of those I knew who had been imprisoned under the terror of Pinochet, the ‘trusted’ general who had, with Kissinger and the US, engineered a coup in Chile in 1973, overthrowing and killing the beloved President Allende. I said the names again and again and, in response, they gathered love and energy to them. I don’t assume it resulted from my chants and prayers, but still all the names I said were alive eight years later when I was writing about this in my book Tree.
Words being prohibited; people being silenced. The administration is revealing itself each day more bluntly and brutally for what it is. The energy of the words we are being denied in our public lives can retain their intensity and significance. Clearly, what is denied is what is truly important. The words interact with each other to create a vibrant field of consciousness as happens also when people formerly unaware of each other gather in community, when a crowd transforms into a congregation.
Those, then, who are targeted may be revealed as conscious, as concerned for others, as courageous and members of our common-wealth.
I regret that I didn’t keep a list of all those who have been deported for academic and political reasons.1 That I haven’t acted upon our common interests and concerns. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, estimated that he had signed perhaps more than 300 letters revoking the visas of students, visitors and others to force their expulsion from the United States . “It’s a combination of visas. They’re visitors to the country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.” Rubio is also expelling permanent U.S residents by stripping them of their green cards.2
Short of that complete list, here are a few who are being targeted now. These are persons who may also carry our own deepest held values and ethics, particularly, but not limited to the right, the necessity for freedom of speech for which they have come to stand. The freedom to disagree. Even if we disagree with them -- the necessity to have disagreement, to challenge and critique. To have that diversity. Oh dear, diversity, Ssh.
Mahmoud Khalil
Alireza Doroudi
Yunseo Chung
Rasha Alweih, MD
Badar Khan Suri
Momodou Taal
Rumeysa Ozturk
A colleague of mine asked me if I am afraid. Fear is a primary instrument of fascism and I have found that I am energized by camaraderie and grateful for the companionship of those brave enough to engage in the struggle and by the beauty and intensity of many of the words on the banned list. The more I recognize my responsibility as an elder to walk an ethical path as devotedly and consistently as I can, to guide a community to follow their values, the less I am unnerved by fear and distress.
Here is the beautiful contradiction: PEN America found 10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles. We could spend a lifetime reading all of them. Similarly, the 381 books just removed from the library of the Naval Academy, include as I browsed them, books about Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Anais Nin, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. We now have a reading list of a minimum of 10,046 + 381 books. The banned words create a field of awareness and intelligence that guide us in ethical behavior and toward developing a future for all beings. Many of those whom the administration want to ban may well be soul companions in these difficult times.
At the time of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the underworld, Hades, that the mystes (seekers) entered was known as Pluto in Rome, which means treasure. This did not mean gold or jewels, except metaphorically, the gold, jewels, treasures of the spiritual life, of the sacred. In this manner, as we may have to go underground, we enter the underworld for the treasures revealed to us and the instructions to follow the ethical life and the sacred.
***
RETURN
When you go
to the dark place,
you must come back
singing,the note inscribed
on your palm,the song written
on your hand,
the way trees
grow about the
shape of wind.3
**************************************************************************************
NY Times, April 7th, 2025, “At least 147 international students were abruptly stripped of their ability to stay in the United States in recent days, according to universities and media reports.
From The Guarddian April 10, 2025, “More than 600 international students and recent graduates in the US have had their visas revoked or their legal status changed by the state department, according to data aggregated from around the country….Some of these cases were related to their activism and participation in student-led protests against the war in Gaza, and others were for “minor crimes”. Inside Higher Ed says that the majority of college officials say they’re unsure why the foreign-born students had their visas revoked or have yet to receive formal notification of the changes. Most have still not received any communications from immigration authorities.”
4/10/2025 The Guardian, “More than 600 international students and recent graduates in the US have had their visas revoked or their legal status changed by the state department, according to data aggregated from around the country….
From The Hill:
Mahmoud Khalil The first and so far most prominent target was Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampment. Arrested and transferred to Louisiana. His lawyers find it difficult to contact him. His hearing is scheduled for April 11, 2025.
Alireza Doroudi University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has a student visa, was arrested March 25. It is not clear where the Iranian student is being held or what he is charged with.
Yunseo Chung originally from South Korea, a green card holder has been in the U.S. since she was seven. She is a third-year student at Columbia University. She preemptively got a judge to agree to temporarily stop deportation efforts by the Trump administration when she found out authorities had a warrant for her arrest. She had previously been arrested by NYPD during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College.
Rasha Alawieh, MD kidney translplant specialist, assistant professor, Brown University Medical School, deported to Lebanon.
Badar Khan Suri an Indian national and postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University, was arrested by ICE in Arlington, Va., on March 17 and was told his visa was revoked. His attorney is arguing Suri is a target due to the Palestinian heritage of his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, as well as his critical views of Israel.
Momodou Taal a Ph.D. student from Cornell University, was asked to surrender to ICE and had his student visa taken away.Taal has been very active in the pro-Palestinian movement and was suspended from the university last year over his activities. The school ended up reinstating him. Taal filed a lawsuit against the government March 15, a day after his visa was revoked, challenging the executive orders the Trump administration is using to justify the crackdown on foreign students. “Given how they went after Mahmoud, who has a similar fact pattern, I didn’t want to be a sitting duck for eventually myself or other international students.”
Rumeysa Ozturk Tufts University Ph.D. candidate Rumeysa Ozturk, a green card holder, was also detained March 25 by ICE, with footage of her plainclothes arrest quickly going viral on social media.
A judge ruled Ozturk, a Turkish national, is to stay in the country for now, and her lawyers say she was taken to Louisiana. Action is being taken to return her to Vermont to a hearing in federal court. Ozturk was a co-author in an article run by the school newspaper that said Tufts needed to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was among those who spoke out on the case after footage of it was widely shared. The video showed half a dozen masked agents surround Ozturk on the street, take her phone away as she screamed, handcuff her and usher her into a van. “The video is really chilling, and this should matter to every single American,” Murphy said. The Author’s Guild and PEN America are supporting Ozturk.
Deena Metzger, Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems, Red Hen Press, 2009
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I never realized now prescient this poem by Jane Hirshfield is:
On the Fifth Day
Jane Hirshfield -
On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.
The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.
Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,
while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.
The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking
of rivers, of boulders and air.
Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.
Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.
They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.
Today May 21, from Drop Site: Microsoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group.
Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli military and government amid the ongoing assault on Gaza. The company has faced disruptions to its events, including protests from employees over its provision of cloud services and other critical infrastructure used by the Israeli military.