A poem inspired by the sight a red and black kuffiyahs hanging underneath a "10 minute Cellphone Charge Service" in a tourist's haven on 6th avenue in between 15th and 14th street:
What is the power in a cultural symbol?
Do I honor what it was
What it became
Or what it is becoming?
I said: what is the power in a cultural symbol?
Function, freedom, or freemarket
Function
Asr jahiliyahBedouins roaming South Arabia
covered head in kuffiyah in deserts
to protect from blazing heat
and air replete with sand grains
Freedom
1930s
With the threat of land stolen,
nationalism emboldened
by the wearing of the hatta
Palis try to put a halt on British forces
and divorce from European cultural imperialism
Freemarket
2000sviva la revolicion to co-option and sometime cold weather solution
On the necks of olsen twins cheney's daughter
That soho boho making urban outfitters Richer
ignorant of a time when the same scarf belonged to a resistor
Riviera scarf, anti-war woven cloth,
U changed its name:
Kuffiyah, hatta, shemagh
Added fluorescent colors
Magenta, sunburst, lime green
Pounded your foot on it to stomp out its Arabness to make it more saleable to Americans
What happens when your promise of (and inspiration for) freedom turns into a cultural capitalist commodity?
Would i buy a Che shirt
Cause jay rapped about it?
Parade red, black green
To go with my Jordans, baggy jean, and a gangsta lean?
Tie a red string on wrist
to add Kabalah to my spiritual list?
Buy a gold and diamond Jesus piece
To demonstrate how i walk with his pauper swagger
People do u understand?
How offended do u feel?
When people co-opt for cool your cultural symbols of freedom?
Even more extreme than what it seem
u love our scarves and hate my peopleI'm sorry but u cant have both.
Next time u stroll on canal, chop it up with vendors on 14th street, peruse urban,
Ask them if know the aboutwhite miraculously unsullied in sandstorm
the black pain tattooed on a white landscapeAsk them if they know
that woman who wrapped it over her face to conceal her identity from the IDF's terror squad,that Bedouin man who braved the Levant wind and desert storms
The Iraqi refugee who sells red pistachio on damascene sidewalks
The fellayeen covering their heads with red-checkered shades while doing fieldwork,the Pali man proudly wearing and asserting his Arab nationalism in the face of a duplictious, abhorrent British imperialist army.
Ask them if they know what this fucking scarf means!
Tell me, What is the power in a cultural symbol?
What is the power in a cultural symbol co-opted to commodify for consumption?
Oh, you don't know what Hot Topic is? It's that really hip anti-hipster store in all the major malls that commercializes Goth to the point where high school freaks have begun wearing ordinary people clothes just to stand out.
