1188: In Jerusalem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah, with special guest adrienne maree brown

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

Arts, Performing Arts

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is In Jerusalem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah, with special guest adrienne maree brown. Through her writing, which includes short- and long-form fiction, nonfiction, spells, tarot decks and poetry; her music, which includes songwriting, singing and immersive musical rituals; and her podcasts, including How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and The Emergent Strategy Podcast, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas, frameworks, networks and practices for transformation. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation primarily supporting Black liberation, her path of teaching somatics, her love of Octavia E. Butler and visionary fiction, and her work as a doula.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, adrienne shares… “For me, poetry is how I get to be my whole human self in a given moment, and really, connect to that river — I always talk about [how] there's this river of love and justice that's flowing from the beginning of time to the end and it flows through us to different degrees. We're supposed to do that kind of work, but it has to be able to hold the whole complexity of a given moment. It has to be able to hold life and death — really life and death — over and over again in a variety of ways.”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Transcript

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0:15.0	Hey, it's Slowdown producer Micah Kielbahn. We all need to take a moment to pause. Here at the show, we realized we know some pretty amazing poetry lovers who have their own slowdown moments to share with you, chefs, musicians, journalists, and more. These late summer Wednesdays, we're bringing you their
0:19.6	selections. We hope you enjoy. I'm Aiger Marie Brown and this is the slowdown.
0:29.0	I'm Aager Marie Brown and this is the slowdown.
0:33.0	I think there's a slowdown.
0:34.0	I think there's something around balance that I have figured out is like, oh, this is what life, this is one of the things that life is all about.
0:51.0	One of the things that life is all about is home versus journey.
0:55.8	One of the things that life is all about is the energy that you pour out versus the energy that you pour in.
1:02.3	When I'm on the road, especially when I'm on the road
1:05.6	to talk about things I love, to talk about work that I've done,
1:09.2	there's this sweet expansion feeling, so it's like each stop my body gets to be in the room
1:16.2	with all these other bodies I think the best way I can describe it is it feels like
1:19.8	oh we're all the ones who try We haven't given up and we care.
1:24.1	I'm also a home body, so I have this sense of tether.
1:27.6	I can feel tether pulling me home at all times,
1:30.0	and it's something that I'm in a constant balance with.
1:33.7	Like, how can I take care of myself on the road
1:36.7	so that my body still feels a home feeling?
1:41.0	And also, how do I continuously like go be with all the people that are love who are trying and also keep rooting as deeply as I can?
1:49.0	I think a lot about the freedom I have in my life now and how fresh of an experience that is in my ancestral lenient and especially driving around the south with the book that I'm touring which is love and corrections.
2:02.0	The book is a set of essays that are each meant to course correct
2:06.5	us in some way to help us get ourselves back on a right path towards each other and towards earth. I think that people misunderstand the South a lot and
2:15.4	people think that the South is like the furthest off course in the US or something. I see it a different way,
	...

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