Writing about haters and hatred

It takes a special poet or kind of poet to write well and convincingly about hatred, especially hatred directed toward one particular group. And yet it also must be done in a way that tells the reader that the hatred hasn't affected one's basic feelings about who one is or what one believes (about oneself and other things).

One also has to be able to laugh at the haters. Not so easy, but when learned, invaluable. This is yet another thing that the poets in Fat Poets Speak 2 do superbly. They toss the hate back into the faces of the haters and say, "Not today, thanks. Not interested. Find another group, and then another, and by that time, your kind of hate will be outlawed or outthought or outmedicated, or a combination of the three."

What makes it a bit easier is that for every hater, there seems to exist at least one lover.

What If

In the early 19th Century it became fashionable for women to look as if they were dying of consumption. Sort of the parallel to the wan cocained look that was so fashionable until very recently.

It became the view of scientists, religionists and social scientists alike that to be moving toward spiritual enlightenment, one had to be thin. Humans, they believed, would evolve into beings without bodies,lights that possessed superpowers.

I need hardly mention that the great number of scientists, religionists and social scientists in the 19th Century were men.

What if - yes, what if evolution favored fatter people instead? What if people with larger bodies were the ones developing higher/better spiritual connections? Instead of fading into lights, perhaps we are evolving growing into peaceful fatter bodies who have killer serves n tennis and volleyball and contact eternal oneness when we bake chocolate cake or fly?

What if we were aware that some bacteria, 500 years old,  had caused women to part-catch me, and then, being fool proof warm to the woman who wanted me to stay with her..

Concern Trolling on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a holiday I really love because of the memories that unfold when I think about it. Unfortunately it has a resoundingly awful subtext in the hostile ingratitude of the Pilgrims and other white people toward the helpfulness and then the very existence of the native Americans/Indians.

And yet how easy it is for fat people to identify with those feelings -that other people whom you dn't even know feel pointless hatred toward you. Thanksgiving, which is supposed to be a time of family togetherness and giving thanks, can often degenerate into a fat shaming marathon as "concern trolls" voice their supposedly concerned opinions that you "have to lose" x amount of weight or your health will be injured, or you will die..

Too bad they haven't looked at the statistics for weight loss surgery lately, in and from which a lot of people do die..

There are some excellent poems in Fat Poets Speak 2: Living and Loving Fatly on exactly this issue.

Fat poets, fat people and holidays

This is a difficult thing to do, but I would love to see some fat poets write positively about some holidays. Lesleigh Owen loves Halloween; I love Thanksgiving. I am sure that other fat poets like these and/or other holidays. (And by the way, yes, I am aware of the alternate and rather unhappy text behind Thanksgiving and the way Native Americans were trying to help the white "settlers.") I like Thanksgiving for its associations and the idea that it is secular - people of all religions, across all ethnicities, separately but somehow together serve up turkey (or a veg. alternative) and stuffing and some kind of pie and give thanks, and hope that others will not have to live in poverty or fear the coming year.

Fat people already have No Diet Day. We have "Love Your Body" week. Next step: Festivals for these holidays.

And poems!

Writing about the Fat Revolution

One of the wonderful things that the poets do in Fat Poets Speak II: Living and Loving Fatly is to write about the Fat Revolution. Of course this Revolution is not new; it started in the 1970's and has grown slowly so that more and more people, even if they do not take a no-diet pledge, see that not only is dieting anti-woman because it starves us, but also that it simply doesn't work, completely misleading statistics to the contrary. More and more people are seeing that fat people are beautiful. More and more people are seeing that fat people have the right to live without being stigmatized, harassed or oppressed, whether by teenage idiots or by Boards supposedly designed to find solutions to "obesity."

How does one write about a Revolution without sounding pedantic or unpoetic?

One writes about the souls of fat women. One writes about the beauty of fat women. One writes about fat women gathering to protest. One writes about the courage of fat women who grit their teeth and get on with living their lives even after sociopaths harass them.

One writes about fat women learning to love themselves.

Our s/heroic roots

As I was writing about FatLand and the Fat Underground Railroad today, I thought of Harriet Tubman. And the Underground Railroad.

And I then thought of the very brave people, men and women, who risked their lives helping Jewish and
other prisoners in Concentration Camps to escape. Most of the couriers were Jewish. Some were not. The ones I knew best and about which I heard the most when I was growing up belonged to an organization called the Jewish Labor Committee.

I was thinking about how Democracy is fragile and how it can turn on itself in a matter of months, as it did in Germany in 1933, although the roots of Nazism were older than that, and its uber-nationalist roots were already taking shape in the late nineteenth century.

And I also thought of the Fat Underground whose members participated in and contributed to Shadow on a Tightrope. Some wrote poems. Some wrote also in other blogs and zines.

Ragen initiated and  is very much involved in a project that will catalog and archive Fat Activists. When the proceeds of Fat Poets Speak 2 go to her, they will help in this magnificent effort.

I guess all this is to say that our poems have roots in the acts of heroes and sheros and will hopefully influence future s/hero(e)s, many of them fat.

We reach back and forward, and our days are not short, but stretch as we write. As we write, we stand up to be counted.

And our numbers are growing.

Fat Fire

A couple of nights ago I wrote about the journey many of us took to become fat poets.

Now I'd like to turn that thought on its ear.

What if there were no references to the way people looked in poems, or at least not to their weight or height? What if no one even thought of fatness or thinness or averageness and thus they disappeared as ways to describe people?

Once I thought that this might be possible. I don't think so.

At least not for a long long time.

And we have to get people to respect our rights and forms and pride as fat people before this happens. Hell, even most fat people don't respect their own rights. Yet.

The way out is the way through. Baptism/initiation by fire.

Fat fire. I like that.