My Name
I have pledged allegiance to a fully mast[ed],
half flaccid flag and to the Republic which stands not,
one nation . . . indivisible . . . with liberty and justice for all. [1]
I have prayed your lord’s prayer, to your god,
made in your image . . . to deliver me from your evils,
but hollow be his name, no will for black prayers to be done [2]
on his earth nor as it is in his gated heaven.
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [3]
After all my toils, frets and fears suffered
two scores and seventeen years;
[all] my blood, sweat and tears poured
into every valley you’ve forsaken me in,
I’ve sung . . . My country tis of thee [4] . . .
when you said sing
I have, at your twilight's last gleaming,
hailed your broad stripes and bright stars
waving over land you’ve proclaimed to be free and
home of the brave not yet brave enough
to let all men be free. [5]
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [6]
I believed your claim that Columbus,
with certain navigational precision
sailed west to find India sitting in the east and
discovered a continent not lost nor looking to be found;
inhabited by men not lost nor looking to be found and
he renamed them a new name, other than their own name.
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [7]
Cause if freedom comes a calling and I have no name
to be called, how will I be freed. Leave me my name.
I believed you when you proclaimed,
Jefferson professed with loving tenderness
that ‘ her ’ rape – slave rape, plantation rape,
socioeconomic rape – was consensual.
I have believed your lie that Washington never told a lie;
that it was a civil war fought by civil men
to free uncivilized slaves that Lincoln, without fraught, presided over
so “ that this nation, could claim yet a second new birth of freedom;
a second new claim to be a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. [8]
To these yet unfinished and abandoned words and work,
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [9].
Cause when freedom comes a calling and I have no name
to be called, how will I be freed.
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [10]
1 Adaptation of the Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931), written in August 1892
2 Adaptation of Matthew 6:9-13, The Holy Bible
3 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
4 My Country Tis of Thee by Samuel Francis Smith, 1831
5 Adaptation of the U.S. National Anthem
6 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
7 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
8 Adaptation of A. Lincoln’s November 19, 1863 Gettysburg Address.
9 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
10 ibid
Lost Name -- Sohrab Crews
I have pledged allegiance to a fully mast[ed],
half flaccid flag and to the Republic which stands not,
one nation . . . indivisible . . . with liberty and justice for all. [1]
I have prayed your lord’s prayer, to your god,
made in your image . . . to deliver me from your evils,
but hollow be his name, no will for black prayers to be done [2]
on his earth nor as it is in his gated heaven.
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [3]
After all my toils, frets and fears suffered
two scores and seventeen years;
[all] my blood, sweat and tears poured
into every valley you’ve forsaken me in,
I’ve sung . . . My country tis of thee [4] . . .
when you said sing
I have, at your twilight's last gleaming,
hailed your broad stripes and bright stars
waving over land you’ve proclaimed to be free and
home of the brave not yet brave enough
to let all men be free. [5]
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [6]
I believed your claim that Columbus,
with certain navigational precision
sailed west to find India sitting in the east and
discovered a continent not lost nor looking to be found;
inhabited by men not lost nor looking to be found and
he renamed them a new name, other than their own name.
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [7]
Cause if freedom comes a calling and I have no name
to be called, how will I be freed. Leave me my name.
I believed you when you proclaimed,
Jefferson professed with loving tenderness
that ‘ her ’ rape – slave rape, plantation rape,
socioeconomic rape – was consensual.
I have believed your lie that Washington never told a lie;
that it was a civil war fought by civil men
to free uncivilized slaves that Lincoln, without fraught, presided over
so “ that this nation, could claim yet a second new birth of freedom;
a second new claim to be a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. [8]
To these yet unfinished and abandoned words and work,
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [9].
Cause when freedom comes a calling and I have no name
to be called, how will I be freed.
I have given you my soul, leave me my name. [10]
1 Adaptation of the Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931), written in August 1892
2 Adaptation of Matthew 6:9-13, The Holy Bible
3 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
4 My Country Tis of Thee by Samuel Francis Smith, 1831
5 Adaptation of the U.S. National Anthem
6 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
7 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
8 Adaptation of A. Lincoln’s November 19, 1863 Gettysburg Address.
9 A John Proctor quote from the 1996 movie The Crucible, played by the actor Daniel Day Louis.
10 ibid
Lost Name -- Sohrab Crews
Cristoforo Colombo (actually, probably Christoffa Corombo since he was from Genova) was known to his Spanish royal sponsor as Cristóbal Colón and by his Latinate version “Christopher Columbus” (ie, Christbearer Dove; in 1505 he published “El Libro de las Profecías” – The Book of Prophecies – in which he tied his own explorations to Christian eschatological beliefs ). He was one of the world’s most consequential figures BECAUSE HE HAD NO IDEA WHERE HE WAS IN THE WORLD. Grossly underestimating the size of the earth, he spent a decade trying to convince some monarch to outfit his voyage west in order to reach “the Indies.” In 1492 Fernando of Aragon enlarged the royal treasury by expropriating the property of the Muslims and Jews he expelled from Spain, thus having a surplus in the treasury which he could afford to invest in a risky venture such as the one Columbus proposed. After a 5-week voyage from the Canary Islands he fortuitously found lands that were unknown to Europeans (later called “America” in honor of another Italian, the bookkeeper Amerigo Vespucci, who publicized the notion that Columbus had actually discovered a “new world”). He hailed the people encountered as “indios” (Indians), a name they still retain among non-natives. After two days he imagined that he had been able to learn their language and that they hailed their fellows with the invocation, ““Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink.” He thought that the island Española (later Latinized as Hispaniola –Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was Ophir, the land which supplied gold and silver to the biblical kings Solomon and Jehosophat, and it became his first new colony; he reported of the native Arawaks, “They have no arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a thousand of them would not face three. And they are also fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs.” He demanded that every Arawak who was 14 or older must provide him with a certain amount of gold every quarter. In 1495 the Spaniards and their armored killer dogs rounded up 1,500 of them who had fled and shipped 500 of them to the slave markets of Sevilla. Columbus and his brothers established a tyrannical rule. He dragged the dismembered bodies of rebellious natives though their settlement to discourage unrest. He had the nose and ears of a corn thief amputated and then sold the man into slavery. When a woman accused his brother Bartolomeo of being of lowly birth, she was paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue rmoved; Columbus congratulated his sibling on “defending the family.” In 1499 the colonists forced Columbus to end the system of individual extortion and replace it with a system in which lands and people were distributed among the conquerors; the indios were converted, overworked, tortured, burned, and fed to the dogs. In response they took pains to avoid bearing children, and many killed themselves. From 100,000 or more in 1492, the Arawak population declined to 32,00 by 1514 and only 200 by 1542.
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