September, 2001 – June, 2002

New York,

you are a woman standing in the wind’s archways,

a figure remote as an atom,

a mere dot in the numbered sky,

one thigh in the clouds, the other in water.

Tell me the name of your star.

A battle between grass and computers is coming.

The whole century is hemorrhaging.

Its head adds disaster to disaster.

Its waist is Asia .

Its legs belong to nothing . . .

I know you, O body, swimming in the musk of poppies.

You bare one nipple (Sunny’s voice stumbled) and its twin (she coughed) to me.

I look at you and dream of snow.

I look at you and wait for autumn.

Judy read after Sunny:

Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones

in Long Island

Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and

my own as hers

caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand

in Angel

Lord Lord great Eye (Judy glanced at Marwa’s patch) that stares on All and moves in a black

cloud

caw caw strange cry of Beings flung up into sky over the waving

trees

Lord Lord O Grinder of giant Beyonds my voice in a boundless

field in Sheol

Caw caw the call of Time rent out of foot and wing an instant

in the universe (Judy stopped)

Lord Lord (took a breath) an echo in the sky the wind through ragged leaves

(it was hard) the roar of memory

caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus

the broken shoe (looked up, can’t, teacher’s nod) the vast highschool caw caw all Visions

of the Lord

Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw

Lord

After Judy read from Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Marcus recited some of the prayer for the dead that Marwa had heard at the Jewish cemetery. She recognized the Middle Eastern sounds. “Yis’ga’dal v’yis kadash sh’may ra’bbo…v’imru Omein.”

Several classmates intoned “Omein,” and an angry boy protested that they didn’t constitute a minyan because girls couldn’t count in the essential 10, before they all realized Marcus was reading his own poem. He waited out their reactions (the Jewish girls were furious with the Orthodox boy), then continued.

“Blessed are those that mourn, for they will be comforted./Jets in the sky– /I force myself to look up at them./ 226 years ago, NYC fell/ to the British/at the start of the Revolutionary War;/ this was taken as a sign that democracy couldn’t win./ We’ll tell our kids/,” Marcus paused, “they said then there/ wasn’t much more to NYC in 1776 beyond Vesey Street,/ Greenwich Village seemed far away in the country,/but Washington returned here in triumph as the first President/ of the R’pub-lic./New York’s the heart/ systole-diasystole/of America. History has many atrocities to tell us./ New York New York / lub dub free dom”

“Of THE R’pub-LICK?”

“Lub dub,” a boy imitated, then “free dumb?”

A classmate snapped, “You’re dumb. Free DOM. Marcus is serious.”

“I hoped someone could laugh,” Marcus said.

“Yeah, that’s what you were going for, Silbercoff,” the scolded boy said.

But Marwa thought he was. She remembered Biren as going last a few days later, but she wasn’t sure she had put together the images correctly. Biren intoned lulling repetitions:

Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame;

we went into a strange state as Biren in a monotone chanted:

Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs;

she remembered thinking as her attention to Biren’s voice focused and unfocused (like the eye exercises she had to do, the patch was removed that week) how all words were all imprecise generalizations of reality, but words were also a lens through which reality became clearer, too — she couldn’t grasp — Biren’s reading was hypnotic:

Seeing thus, the instructed noble disciple grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted;

she remembered being impressed by Biren for the first time. As if he read her thoughts, he paused for breath and looked directly at her. Marwa looked away.

Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is depleted, the holy life is fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’

Before September ended, Liza Minelli sang her signature song at a Mets-Braves baseball game. She “cheered the Shea Stadium throng by belting out New York, New York in a way that made it defiant. ‘It became a fight song,’ Liza said, ‘It became a call.’” It took nerve to enter the bull’s eye that was NYC. Marcus went with his father, a lifelong fan, when the Yankees made it to the World Series. The Bronx Bombers lost, but everyone felt like they’d won because people could even begin to think about New York City again as not only the gray grave at Ground Zero but also the green diamond in Yankee Stadium.

In mid-October, classes resumed at Stuy. Marwa commuted from Brooklyn back to southern Manhattan for two weeks before her family could return to their apartment in Battery Park City for Joey’s birthday, the first week of November. Then Joey went back to his elementary school. The only thing Marwa missed about being a refugee in Brooklyn was the split schoolday schedule that had allowed her to sleep until awakened naturally by light, instead of by alarm clock in the dark at 6:15 . But her father still had to work in Brooklyn . Everyone was relieved about Sharif being in Alexandria because it was a scary time in NYC for young men recognized as Muslims.

Her senior classmates had geared up for the big Early Admission college application push due in November 1st for review, and approval before the November 15th deadline. Ramadan started the 16th. Her guidance counselor was impatient with Marwa’s disinterest, reminding her if she didn’t apply to where? who cared? such-and-such classmate would, and would take Marwa’s place. In silent reply, Marwa remembered fragments of two other poems she’d heard in class, Once out of nature I shall never take/ my bodily form from any natural thing… I was neither/Living nor dead, and I knew nothing… I had not thought death had undone so many. All she had replied to her guidance counselor was, “Some place my father doesn’t have to pay for.” She couldn’t remember if she said thank you. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

The old clique of about forty juniors and seniors (Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Jain, mostly Hindu and Moslem) met again behind the 4th floor escalator that the custodial staff had restored to first-day-of-school shine. Observing the extreme cleanliness, a junior said, “We breathed in people, we breathed in jet planes, we breathed in buildings.” At that moment, Marwa recognized, her clique-within-the-clique had disbanded and never again went up to the 23rd St. halal diner where they used to go for lunch.

“Despite shuffled athletic schedules,” The Spectator (the school newspaper) chronicled, “the Stuyvesant Peglegs were prevailing in boys’ soccer” (less so in football, but “New York Giants wide receiver Amani Toomer had spoken and instructed at the October 23rd practice”); in another gesture of goodwill and good sportsmanship, a chief rival girls’cross-country team gave the Stuy team cupcakes before a meet on October 10th; Vivian Cheng returned to school and “led the fencing team to a ‘pointed’ saber victory against a junior who up until then had been ‘her nemesis from Long Island.’”

Vivian applied Early to Stamford ; Marcus, to Harvard; Judy, to Columbia ; Sunny, to NYU, and Biren, to Berkeley . Although clinically, Marwa’s eye was back to normal, classmates who asked her about Princeton or Yale said behind her back that she seemed to look right past or through them. Her guidance counselor said that Fordham was likely to offer a full scholarship, she could make a call, and the harried woman took Marwa’s shrug as a yes. To the extent that anything received Marwa’s attention, scattered as it was (sparagmos, Mr. Haddam had taught them from Frye the year before, like the explosive scattering of spores, the characteristic of Irony — Biren had exemplified with a Bronx cheer, a raspberry, Mr. Haddam’s laugh had sounded like sandpaper, raspy), it was her independent Social Studies project.

Marwa returned to the Rose Cleveland book that Desiree had given her in August, to Rose Cleveland’s lover Evangeline Whipple, to Evangeline’s husband The Right Reverend Henry Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota, Straight Tongue, “who gave clear warning of the Indian massacre that occurred in 1862.” Marwa’s brain was busy, but she was somewhere else. She observed the 1862 Minnesota massacre from many distances; apparently the intersection of Cartesian coordinates no longer located her. But doing research got her out of a classroom and gave her time alone.

In 1862 the Sioux Nation stretched from the Big Woods of Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains . There were seven Sioux tribes, including three western tribes, collectively called the Lakota, and four eastern tribes living in Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas called the Dakota. About 7,000 members of the four Dakota tribes lived on a reservation bordering what was in 1862 the frontier, the Minnesota River in southwestern Minnesota . The Dakota Conflict (or Dakota War or Sioux Uprising) involved primarily the two southernmost Dakota tribes, the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes.

A decade before the Dakota Conflict, the Minnesota Territory , stretching from the upper Mississippi to the Missouri River , was still mostly Indian country… In 1851, however, the Dakota by treaty agreed to give up most of southern Minnesota . The land was ceded to the United States in return for two twenty -mile wide by seventy-mile long reservations along the Minnesota River and annuity payments totaling $1.4 million dollars over a fifty-year period. Seven years later, in exchange for increased annuity payments, the Dakota ceded about half of their reservation land.

The treaties of 1851 and 1858 contributed to tensions undermining the Dakota culture and the power of the chieftains, concentrating malcontents, and leading to a corrupt system of Indian agents and traders… Annuity payments for the Dakota were late in the summer of 1862… At an August 15, 1862 meeting attended by Dakota representatives, Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith, and representatives of the traders, the traders resisted pleas to distribute provisions held in agency warehouses to starving Dakota until the annuity payments finally arrived.

Trader Andrew Myrick summarized his position in the bluntest possible manner: “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass.” …On August 16, a keg with $71,000 worth of gold coins reached St. Paul . The next day the keg was sent to Fort Ridgely for distribution to the Dakota. It arrived a few hours too late to prevent an unprecedented outbreak of violence. Big Eagle, a Dakota Chief, recounted what happened after the young men reached Chief Shakopee’s camp late on the night of August 17:

The tale told by the young men created the greatest excitement. Everybody was waked up and heard it. Shakopee took the young men to Little Crow’s house (two miles above the agency), and he sat up in bed and listened to their story. He said war was now declared. Blood had been shed, the payment would be stopped, and the whites would take a dreadful vengeance because women had been killed…

At this time my village was up on Crow creek, near Little Crow’s. I did not have a very large band — not more than thirty or forty fighting men. Most of them were not for the war at first, but nearly all got into it at last. A great many members of the other bands were like my men; they took no part in the first movements, but afterward did. The next morning, when the force started down to attack the agency, I went along…. The killing was nearly all done when I got there.

Little Crow was on the ground directing operations. I saw all the dead bodies at the agency. Mr. Andrew Myrick, a trader, with an Indian wife, had refused some hungry Indians credit a short time before when they asked him for provisions. He said to them; “Go and eat grass.” Now he was lying on the ground dead, with his mouth stuffed full of grass, and the Indians were saying tauntingly: “Myrick is eating grass himself.”

Events moved quickly. Forty-four Americans were killed and another ten captured in the first full day of fighting in and around the Lower Agency at Redwood. Nearly two hundred additional whites died over the next few days as Dakota massacred farm families and attacked Fort Ridgely and the town of New Ulm … On August 23, a second Dakota attack on New Ulm left most of the town burned to the ground, and 2,000 refugees, mostly women, children, and wounded men, set off in wagons and on foot for Mankato, thirty miles away.

On August 26, three days after Governor Alexander Ramsey appointed Colonel Henry Sibley, a former governor, to command American forces that would attempt to suppress the uprising, Sibley advanced from the east with 1,400 soldiers toward Fort Ridgely . The next day, Sibley and his men succeeded in lifting the Dakota siege at Fort Ridgely , and the second phase of the Dakota Conflict– an organized American military effort to defeat and punish the Sioux– began.

The execution of thirty-eight Sioux on December 26, 1862 , following trials which condemned over three hundred participants in the 1862 Dakota Conflict, stands as the largest mass execution in American history. Only the unpopular intervention of President Lincoln saved 265 other Dakota and mixed-bloods from the fate met by the less fortunate thirty-eight.

The mass hanging was the concluding scene in the opening chapter of a story of the American-Sioux conflict that would not end until the Seventh Calvary completed its massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.

Hearing the same talks (disinterest/anger, etc./isolation/change in habits) that roving psychologists and social workers were giving to all Stuy students, Marwa minimized her ‘at risk’ behavior by paying attention to Vivian Cheng when they crossed paths. She dutifully listened to Vivian blather about the Protestant Reformation, “It sure wasn’t what paved the way for the Age of Enlightenment and the birth of modern democracy. It was a fundamentalist reactionary spasm. Enlightenment started in Roman Catholic and Jewish centers, like France and Flanders and Austria , Italy , Spain . The Renaissance and Scientific Revolution are contrasts to jihad now, not America ’s Protestants who are our rabid fundamentalists. The pendulum is swinging reactionary globally…”

“Reactionar-ily?” Marwa said.

“What?”

“How it’s swinging. The pendulum. So it’s an adverb. Ily.”

“Where it’s swinging. Like north or south…”

All the while Vivian went on talking, Marwa was wondering idly if Vivian saw the same dull look mirrored back from her own eyes, thinking Methinks I see your father, something about a bunghole, the noble dust of Alexander stopping a bunghole, Mr. Haddam said, “like a beerbarrel cork.”

Judy and Marcus paid a lot of attention to Marwa. Judy acted like the expert on mourning because her mother was dead. Marcus continued writing poems and insisting Marwa read them. He asked her if she was emailing Desiree, and when Marwa said no, he even encouraged her to. Marcus said his mother asked how she was. How was she? Fine. Handing in all her work, retaking the SAT’s (finally got her perfect Verbal four years after Vivian), respirating, defecating, menstruating. Prix had been so good in word & deed, so much better, in fact, that the rest was silence. There was plenty of blood, but no Denim Prix anywhere in the world. It was a massacre, a mass grave.

In December, it snowed. Marwa went to Ground Zero for the first time to watch it fill up with snow. Whiteness fell out of a cold grey swirling sky, contrasting with the debris that had blown down in warm blue September. But the snowfall once again softened the sharp edges of things into curves like shoulders, hips, knees. She thought: All my graves are not in Egypt anymore. Even in the cold wind, the snow falling heavily, cleanup crews and giant machinery worked, men and engines both with steamy breaths, not slowed by darkness (they routinely worked in shifts, at night under Kleig lights) as much as by this blizzard that would send them briefly home. Marwa, too, left the site, shaking and teeth-chattering because she was alive.

Marcus talked to her on the phone about the snow. “The Eskimos do not have hundreds of words for snow,” Marcus said.

“Whoever said they did?” Marwa asked.

“You sound so interested.”

“All of us have not been accepted early by the college of our choice.”

“As if you care about that, either.”

“Like the universe, I am going through the motions. So who said the Eskimos?”

“ Indiana passed a law legislating the value of pi to be 3. House Bill 246 in 1897.”

“This is what your Social Studies topic has devolved to?”

Marcus had warmed to his subject; any talk of numbers excited him. “No, no, listen, it’s too good, what some amateur had managed to do, was give some lawmaker an angle trisection, a cube duplication, and a circle quadrature, and convince the ignoramus it would matter. They actually passed the bill in their House, but the Indiana State Senate, at least, figured it wasn’t a matter for the law. They postponed 246, and it’s been postponed ever since. What I’m researching, Madam Cosmos, Princess Going-Through-the-Motions — what would that be in Dakota language, in your neck of the history woods? — is the way history works, how legislating pi persevered in the face of all facts.”

“Eskimos, Marcus?”

“The factoid was that since snow plays such an important role for Eskimos, they had lots of ways to describe it. It started in 1911 with the founder of American linguistics — which is my topic, by the way, because there are interesting things to do there, mathematically — he said the Eskimos had four words for snow. Four. Then in 1940, MIT published Whorf’s upping the number to seven. By 1984, the Times says 100. Totally debunked now, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the Principle of Linguistic Relativity. It turns out, we and the Eskimos have about the same number, about a dozen words for snow. Blizzard, for one.”

“Whorf was a Kligon raised by humans,” Marwa said.

“The Klingons are not my favorites. Might makes right. The honor of violence. Primate pecking order gentrified by human language. Jihad. Bullies with a book.”

“Your book’s got an eye for an eye, too. Do unto others as they do unto you.”

“Nope, that’s Hammurabi’s eye-poking. It’s as you would have them do unto you, Marwa. Big diff.”

“Turn the other cheek? Forgive your enemies? Blessed are the meek? All is illusion, maya, the gospel according to Hindu Biren?”

Marcus didn’t say how relieved he was that Marwa sounded like herself, in the fight again. He did say, “It’s the multitudes versus the beatitudes wherever you go.”

Then, on Friday, December 14th, as her counselor had predicted, Fordham accepted Marwa. Marcus had been pestering her about Muslim “winter solstice holidays, when do you give and get presents?” Ramadan ended that year nine days before Christmas. In 2001, December had the exact same calendar as September except that December had a 31st day, Monday, New Year’s Eve. Then, Id al-Fitr, the first day of the tenth month, the end of Ramadan, came on Sunday, December 16th, so Marwa’s family was celebrating doubly, her father actually taking her aside to express as much gratitude as pride relative to her financial and academic accomplishment. He brought to her first the special gilt-edged family plate her mother prized from her mother (etc.) heaped with dates (iftar) and said the familiar, “Atyab at-tihani bi-munasabat hulul shahru Ramadan al-Mubarak,” with special emphasis on ‘The most precious congratulations on the occasion…’

Their home was decorated with silvered holiday banners; they ate and drank off brightly colored paper plates. Marwa’s mother had ordered them from a new Muslim online site. She chattered happily as she set out more and more food — for her, Id al-Fitr was their real Thanksgiving — that it was a hopeful sign, wasn’t it, that such a Muslim business should be growing? Joey wasn’t interested in talking; he was all about opening presents, but he observed the proprieties of handing out gifts to his mother and sister first. Everyone except her father was surprised when Marwa opened a cd disk from Marcus.

“The Silbercoff boy?” her mother said.

Marwa looked at her father.

“Marwa has received many interesting envelopes, it seems,” he said, clearly enjoying himself. He handed Marwa a business envelope which he had also opened. In the upper-left hand corner of the rich stationery, raised black letters said, “Hook, James & Waxman,” and under that, “Counselors at Law,” at an uptown Fifth Avenue address.

When Marwa read the letter, she froze. Then her heart thudded and she felt hot and dizzy and ran to her room. The letter said she had been named in the will of Denim Prix. “…a key,” it read, “safety deposit box…” She felt half-blind again. The cd from Marcus was in her hand. She put it clumsily into her Walkman and adjusted the ear phones. She lay down on her bed and shut her eyes. Marwa recognized the 1960’s sound of the Beatles. Marcus had been ranting about George Harrison’s death in November and how he’d never get to own some ukulele song. Marcus said he might take up the ukulele in college as less cliche than a guitar. Biren had commented on the sexual message of small instruments. People also celebrated Christmas that year. The day after Christmas, Marwa mentioned to no one that it was the 139th anniversary of December 26, 1862 , the largest mass execution in American history.

The following June, the Stuy orchestra played a Beatles song at the graduation of the Class of 2002. By then, George Harrison’s son Dhani had produced Brainwashed, which Marwa and Marcus exchanged as graduation gifts. After many comments about great minds thinking alike, Marwa explained that she’d gotten it for Marcus for the ukulele cut, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea . It was unnecessary for Marcus to mention the disk’s instrumental, Marwa Blues.

After graduation, Stuy art students got together again to paint a mural for the wall leading to the high school. Its theme was the ability to dream of peace in the face of violence. Neither Marcus nor Marwa took part. He was back at Brookhaven for the summer, and Marwa went to Alexandria before beginning her freshman year at college in New York .