I Am Ashamed Of Myself (Post-Katrina New Orleans - 2007) I woke up this morning. I was ashamed. I couldn't remember what I was doing in 1994. In April. The rainy season. Even if my life depended on it, I could not recall any specifics. I just couldn't remember. Over 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered then. I don't remember what I did but not having anything that I remember tells me that I did nothing memorable. I don't even have a poem specifically about the genocide. Did I write a letter, a petition, an article? Did I do anything? It is depressingly banal how often the reality registers: when the good do nothing, the bad do everything. Why is goodness always cast as a coward? The truth is, if we do nothing, we can not be good. Doing nothing is a collaboration with the worst of ourselves. Less than four hours earlier at three-something in the morning when I should have been sleeping I had just finished watching Sometimes In April, Raoul Peck's movie about genocide in Rwanda a dozen years ago. I staggered to bed emotionally drained. I assume while I was asleep my subconscious was taking inventory. When I awoke, a terrible truth appeared: if I did nothing during Rwanda, I had no high ground from which to expect others to do something for New Orleans. All of the tasks I should be doing but for whatever reasons I have not done, each of them stood at my bedside and took turns whacking at my conscience. My discomfort was not just Rwanda. Kysha, Robin and I are working on a poetry anthology appropriately entitled The End of Forever. Over the last couple of weeks I have come up missing in action. I am mired in a swamp of inaction, emotionally overwhelmed at times. The book is in the last stages, just a little more effort and it would be finished, but I lay in bed, dilly-dallying for no good reason-I don't know what I'm waiting for and I'm not sleepy, it's just . . . But the book is not the only thing. More and more people are calling me about LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE. If I push harder I could make more happen, faster. We should have been up and online by now. There are specifics I can not do, technical matters others have to address, but I could put my shoulder to the wheel and make things turn faster. I could, but . . . My wife is patient with me, never once complaining as I leave the house every evening and don't come back until round midnight, going to spend hours with Doug who is battling cancer and dueling with the after-affects of chemotherapy. Nia and I have not gone to the movies at all this year, and it has been some months since we have gone out to dinner together. There have been days when I freely gave my full attention to visitors needing assistance with this, that or the other. On more than one occasion I have spent more time with someone I may never see again than I have with my wife whom I see almost every day-you see, I can not even say I see my wife everyday because some days . . . Do you understand why I am ashamed? Yes, I know that I do so many good things for the cause, but I do not remember what I did in April of that killing season occurring in a ten-thousand-square-mile country of around eight million souls. Count off eight people you know, if they had been Rwandan, most likely at least one of them would be dead-and not just dead, but smashed like an insect. Thus the marauders crowed, explaining why they used machetes: we do not waste bullets on cockroaches. I have not completed the book we planned to have ready by the end of August. Our LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE website is not fully operational yet. My wife and I eat separately. Do you understand how it feels to see yourself like that? I tell myself to get up. Get moving. It is another day. We're alive. There's so much we can do. But . . . it's raining outside, just like April in that breathtakingly beautiful land of a thousand hills. Most of us never know when our end will arrive. I stared at my computer screen as actors under Peck's direction portrayed people who knew they were about to die. At one point I hit the space bar to pause the action. I reached up, wiped my eyes, and then continued watching. If I had been there, what would I have done? Lying on my side, face to the wall, a hard answer severs my sense of self half-in-two: Had I been in Kigali, I may have done nothing but watch, that is, if I were lucky enough not to be a Hutu hacking a Tutsi, or a Tutsi being hacked, I probably would have been a so-called innocent onlooker... after all, that is what I was as I sat in Houston in my brother-in-law's living room watching on CNN as the Tutsis of my city were abandoned at the Ernest Morial Convention Center. When we evacuated, our car was full but I left a working automobile behind. I can say: I did not expect the levees to break, I thought I would be back in a few days. I can say if I had stayed I would have been one of the locals, like Malik and Jerome, rescuing people before outside help arrived. But regardless of what I say or want to believe I might have done, the hard question remains. What did I do? When the deal went down, there I sat, just watching. Now, I realize: every day is April. Whether it's Rwanda or New Orleans, the same question wakes me: what am I doing about it today? A dozen years from now will I have done anything worth remembering? —kalamu ya salaam