(I typed this up on a google doc leaving Granada, Spain this summer. The poem brings together
decolonial and political theory—e.g. Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Hannah
Arendt’s “banality of evil”; the history of the Spanish Inquisition and its modern manifestations in
a racially stratified society; the media’s frequent reconstruction of violence through flattened
numbers; my own experiences praying in a mosque, meeting people with strong desires for their
worlds, being harassed in the streets, and encountering a boy whose sexuality could be read
through a colonial framework of domination. All with a bit of satire.)
Everything in numbers/a poem outta Granada
Al-Andalus
Before me are a thousand olive trees
I am on a bus with 100 strangers
On a destroyed mezquita is a catedral
In Córdoba,
the heart of a mosque carved out
pulsating the figure of santiago matamoros/“moor-slayer”
europe is infected with a profound hitlerism, says Césaire
that has turned the white man into a barbarian
“Please please coins”
I have 50€ but you won’t get it
because I am an oppressed creature too
I see nothing particular about your poverty
and history as utterly linear
20-year-old Moroccan boy
wants to be called daddy
He likes my hazel Asian eyes
“Please please 15 more minutes”
Every body wants my money and time
The cops tried to take away his guitar at 3am
Because suspicion squints in the eye of every colonizer
who prays and
fears for his own preservation
1492
A trinitarian christendom commanding submission
to a singular Daddy god
Pig legs dangle in every home to prove every converso and morisco
The first 15 seconds of “Me and Michael” plays in my head
Lina rolls a 2nd cigarette
2 vermuts y 1 zumo de piña
1am and a Spaniard threatens “correr, correr”
The entire street is yellow like piss
or Korean pickled radish
But where do we go from here?
My hands are cupped in prayer
My nose kisses the rug
With a keffiyeh wrapped around my head
I desire A///‘s Aboriginal community prosper
and M/// A// harmonizes a feminist Islam
and L/// unearths a decolonial Amazigh cosmology
and A/////// the girl of his dreams
and F///// a thousand olive trees
Blood pumps to my temples
but settles in my heart
So Granada leaves me in this way.
