NVN Friday: RESIGNED
by Indran Amirthanayagam
Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity. —Claudine Gay, The New York Times, January 3, 2024
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Some attribution errors, not deliberate, in academic essays, and her posture of defending freedom of expression in campus rallies, for this the first black woman to head the country's most famous university resigned? For the witch-hunt of our McCarthy times, communism replaced by anti-Semitism, even if Palestinian people are also Semitic, even if murder of twenty-two thousand civilians, including eight thousand children in Gaza does not mean a holocaust, even if now on the entire earth there are about 700,000 thousand people in a state of famine, of whom 577,000 live in Gaza, four out of every five Palestinian. And at Harvard University (also at Penn), female leaders resigned.
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Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press has just published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun. (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.