The Accidental Theologist

I was at a dinner gathering last night — twelve people gathered together with the aim of trying to figure out why we do what we do in our various fields.   Mexican-American poet/educator/activist Mark Gonzales was there, and toward the end of the evening, recited his famed spoken-word poem As With Most Men.  Given what I’ve been posting about recently, it kind of blew me away.

This video is an earlier version, performed on stage instead of in the intimacy of a dinner table, but it’ll give you some idea of the impassioned grace of both his delivery and his message:

As with most men it is easier for me to give hugs than to accept them
Lest the truth be known that men
are nothing more than emotional skyscrapers built with glass infrastructures spray-painted the color of steel and nicknamed strength.
Strange isn’t it?
what walking contradictions are we called men.
Men are taught to colonize at the age of 5 through gangs like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians
At the age of 8 we are given helmets, and told to hit each other in the head,
Bleed but do not bleed
Cut but do not cry
Be a man
Join the military
Die for your country
And if death comes to you look it in the eye and say
“bring it on motherfucker I fear nothing…but intimacy.”
When it comes to intimacy men quiver like fault lines, crumble like cities.
What walking contradictions are we called men.
Men sign peace accords while abusing their wives
Accept the Nobel Peace Prize while reducing health care
Pledge to rid the world of terrorism, while simultaneously denying government aid to any country that defends a woman’s right to choose
During the 1970s, the US government forcibly sterilized an estimated 50% of the indigenous population of America’s Midwest
Telling them the process was reversible.
Can you say ‘biological terrorism’?
And in a global war against terror maybe testosterone is the real terrorist
And if so, how many of these star-spangled-singing flag-waving citizens
Would continue to do so if terror was not racialized
But gendered?
Would the US military turns its guns on itself
For its sex crimes throughout Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas?
Would MTV be firebombed for its objectification, hypersexualization of our women of color’s bodies?
Would we stop looking towards the Muslim world for misogyny and instead turns our sights to Madrid, Montreal,
New York
Los Angeles?
And now I understand my sisters when they say “every woman has a story that’s been told a maximum of once or maybe less”
And that is why you will never hear me call a woman slut, bitch or dyke
No matter what she does
‘Cuz I do not blame her
I blame the men who have emotionally and physically raped her
I blame these corporations whose images tell her they hate her
And I put my arms on her shoulder and tell her how grateful I am to God that she created her.
Men take note this is how you give love
This is how you receive hugs
Press flesh to flesh
‘til breath crumples
Like emotional origami.

Want more Mark Gonzales?  Click here for a more recent video of his poem Made in America.

Filed under: feminism, US politics Tagged: | As With Most Men, Made in America, Mark Gonzales, spoken-word poetry