WEBVTT

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There's a couple of devotional
figurines in these poems

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that my mother kept.

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One of them is--

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her name is translated
as Guanshiyin,

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is a feminine deity
incarnation in Buddhism.

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Many cheap sculptures
get made of her.

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They are about this large, and
the little hand is detachable.

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And my mother believed,
as many people do,

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that if you take away
her hand and make a wish,

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your wish will be
granted and then you

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can give back her hand.

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There's also-- my
mother's Syrian, Peruvian.

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Syrian.

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Syrian woman.

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Two Syrian parents born
in Peru, so she's light.

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She's fair-skinned and there's a
long history of representations

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of lighter-skinned folks,
lighter-skinned women

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put up against ethnic
and racial others,

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to heighten their own whiteness.

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And so trigger
warning, there's a lot

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of thinking about
whiteness in this book,

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and about how
whiteness might get

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replicated in my own daughter,
and in my own choices.

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"Henry's Fields Give the Lie."

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To a tribe somewhere
saying fear because it

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feeds, the gold by night,
wheels round its technology

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for falling.

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Such a handling stuns the thing.

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Is it gentle to its otherness?

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Be that gentle to your animal.

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Our finest sculptors charged
with shaping a woman,

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Guanshiyin in her deified
name means observing

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the sounds of the world.

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Glaze her hand and leave it
loose, to turn or withhold,

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and call it a fight
for compassion.

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The sun comes up through the
planted trees, a thing waste,

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not want.

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What will you, in your time
do, with a white enough woman's

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form?

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Will its light make
a word in the room

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so un-American in its humors
and hugging near death

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that we'll try to say, it's
not a real word either.

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So our anger, you might inherit.

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A civilian in yours.

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Trying to outpace likenesses,
who sells the shadow?

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