leem-buh means
tongue in my native language
the word for language 
is the word for tongue
there is no border
between the vehicle
and wine it carries
the spoken 
is not separate
from the speakable
the speaking
is not severed
from the mouth
which is the limbă 
which is a feminine noun
a mothertongue is a muscle 
inside a mother's language
which limbi is the plural of 
tongue or what most  
un-americans have 
multiples of 
plus limbă vecină 
means neighboring tongue 
or yes language
or yes a fern known as Scolopendrium vulgare
in science's language
which is universal 
which is different from
my own tongue
my rugged individualist
my closet romanian 
which comes from mothers 
but also Latin
the vulgar of

Kapka Kassabova: An actively policed border is always aggressive: it is where power suddenly acquires a body, if not a human face, and an ideology.

I love Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. Permission to consider the rise in toxic nationalisms as it intersects across the borders of my own body, the one my parents fled and the New South they adopted.

Context: I spent the summer of 2000 (after my senior year of college) in Romania, collecting research for a comparison of postcommunist transition economies. To my chagrin, the economics only told a portion of the story--a portion popularized by the infamous World Bank Development Reportment that led to catastrophic fast-track capitalism in struggling states.

No surprise: I met toxic nationalism in the form of an aging, pot-bellied man with snow-white hair and elegant suit. The ghosts of communism were alive and well on the faces of Bucharest babas who sat in hallway chairs and took note of human interactions. They were not ashamed to lay their unflinching stares on strangers--the entitlement of their gaze is only comparable to that of fraternity brothers on US college campuses.

My cousin explained that the babas had served as building monitors, Securitate informants paid to peer into the private lives of every Romanian body, feted for offering the most intimate details to secret police. 

[On a side note, one of my current essays aims to reclaim the maligned baba, shadow of all we fear and hate, image of what happens to a woman when she “lets herself go…”]

The Odious Poet: A Warning

Those who expressed shock and outrage that Trump—a raging, nativist white nationalist—had followers who loved him for his promise to do God's work, well, all shocked-and-awed liberals should maybe read a little Corneliu Vadim Tudor….. Maybe exit the echo-chamber of sad Western media and study a little Nicolae Ceausescu to glean how the sacralization of political myths and national greatness always require a commitment to eschatological redemption: the dictator does God's work for the nation. (And yes, some people we know love him for this.)

But let’s no pretend the poet isn’t involved. Poets have been supporting dictators and serving as mouth-pieces for oppression since time began. The poet’s ode can be a measure of his odiousness, especially in modern examples where the court poet compliments his coats to get close to power; it is the poet who writes the myths of national innocence. It is the poet who creates an absolutely pure victim worthy of heroism, self-sacrifice, and death.

In the US, where the poet’s role has been replaced by talking-head, it’s easy to forget how many poets created the myths that sentence fellow humans to death. Corneliu Vadim Tudor served as editor of Romania Mare, a nationalist newspaper, and leader of Romania Mare (“Great/Big Romania”) the political party. Like many former communist functionaries, the post-1989 period left him wealthy enough to pursue social entrepreneurship. And to bankroll those interests. An apostle of rabid xenophobic nationalism, Tudor first rose to fame as, yes, a poet.

Here’s a sampling of the nationalists’ sacralization of language, something the Romanian Communist Party used to punish minority languages, to erase Hungarian from schools, to make Romania great, of course, implying absolute control over word and text. I translated this trash heap poem by Tudor to give you a taste…

MARGE PIERCY: "It is as absurd...to reduce poems to political statements as it is to deny they have a political dimension." 

Poetry is not reducible to one thing. A poet enthralled by a dandelion is actually a human telling a complicated story about plants and longing and ardor and love. A girl fascinated by nationalists is actually a student of how men invent new reasons to kill us. 

When I say politics fascinates me, I mean that reading news lights my brain, hounds my thoughts, riles me up. Headlines and bylines and stock phrases hide a pulse, the old electricity. I scan crowd behavior and surges in ideology the way an internist tracks blood pressure.

I’m obsessed by the ideologization of the ode by the for-profit industry of homage. See also: heritage, inheritance, entitlement, things we believe we deserve, and how this gets marketed to us. The homage industry thrived under Ceausescu. As it thrived under Trump with Fox and his loyal cadres.

Ceausescu modeled his cult of personality after the dynastic communism he saw in the PRC and North Korea. The problem with homage is its fan club, the fans who invest personal identity in the defence of their idol. That sort of relationship is rooted in a do-no-wrong dynamic that encourages and nourishes abuse of power. The opposite of free thought is worship. 

Consider the rise in clapbacks and gym cults. Consider lifestyle brands, or what we make of a writer whom we expect to advise us on every personal, moral, social, aesthetic, and spiritual issue.

I'm drawing an unsubtle line between Ceausescu's rage when watching a TV report in which he looked older and more bloated than the Bulgarian President, and his subsequent coercion of Romanian television to carry alternate footage than the Bulgarian news reel that made him look old and (in his opinion) unattractive.

I'm saying that making the dictator look bad is a crime against the nation when a leader and nation are not separate. Fox News is complicit in the airbrush that if offered our national presidential disgrace.

Per complex, please include the entire publishing industry, its hallowed institutions, its reality-television sprees, the subdivision of the wellness industry, self-help, colonialism, appropriation.

Insofar as Ivanka Trump represents the New Woman--and Melania symbolizes the sexy, silent, available immigrant--Elena Ceausescu represented the national mother whose importance increased after 1973 when demand for labor rose. The mythology of the Ceausescus was rooted in their promise and power to make Romania Great Again. 

I feel the mindlessness of the homage industry when I see a stadium and recall the recipe for Ceausescu's media broadcasts relied on the idiocy of crowds, the presence of massed humans paying homage and waving flags and singing.

On Fridays, Romanians could watch a program titled "Copii canta patria si partidul," or "Children Singing the Homeland and Party."

Misogyny and nationalism often suckle from the same tired teat. What I mean to say is reformed Communist Party apparatchiks in Romania blamed Elena Ceausescu for everything Ceausescu did, including the personality cult.  

When I interviewed Corneliu Vadim Tudor (Ceausescu's former court poet) in the late 90's, he told me I should stop reading books & return to birth Romanian babies. He headed the Greater Romania Party, an anti-Semitic nationalist right-wing nightmare. Like all court poets, he lifted his finger to the wind and tacked wherever the extremist airs were shifting.

The dickator’s tool is always the dickator’s tool—and in my home state, he gets elected to Senate and stays very rich. Keep your eyes on the words men use to pedestal women right now. Dictators exist in every party where men still run the world. What they ask of female-indentifying bodies is the key to the castle.