To Noam Chomsky
The Left Coast is proud to publish this letter/poem by Award Winning Poet/Author Margot Pepper. The 95-year-old Chomsky and Pepper have carried on a long correspondence through the years.
POEM TO NOAM CHOMSKY
By Margot Pepper
July 7, 2024 Dear Noam, I’m writing you after a lapse of years, not from Havana’s dilapidated Focsa during the Special Period, overlooking the gold lights of the palatial Hotel Nacional, but from the balcony of El Avenida Palace Hotel in Barcelona where the Beatles and Hemingway stayed, just over a mile from Plaça d’Espanya where George Orwell trained to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona has just tucked Sagrada Familia in at midnight leaving on the lights and traffic sounds on Passeig de Gràcia, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, verdant with sycamores and La Rambla, where Orwell once marched. Reading your books in Casa del Libro on Rambla “NOtes on Resistance” and “On Anarchy” that formed your political thought, I burst into tears thinking of you, a prisoner in your own body, like Johnny in Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun” paralyzed from a World War I mine explosion, unable to speak or move, like you from your stroke, now witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people: the erasure of generations of families; universities and hospitals buried under shattered concrete like the remains of the Nahua Pyramid of Tonatiuh and Templo Mayor toppled by the Spanish to build the Zocalo and Cathedral; Al-Shifa Hospital’s Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya’s Israeli captors at Sde Teiman Detention Center aka “the Slaughterhouse” that has upstaged Guantanamo –not to extract information but to exact revenge– breaking his fingers as Chile’s Pinochet’s soldiers splintered revolutionary folk singer Victor Jara’s, taunting him to play. Dr. Abu Salmiya was one of the lucky ones. No wounds from his shackles as excuses to amputate without anesthesia. I wonder whether his torture included witnessing that of others without the ability to act or speak; whether you feel a little like him now; whether we all do. Oh Noam, what was your silent agony as you as you listened to 6 year-old Hind pleading with the Red Crescent in Gaza, ”Come take me,” after her 15 year old cousin Layan, her uncle and all the others in the van had been killed? For six hours the worker tried to console her as the ambulance received the Israeli-sanctioned route that led not to Hind, but to their premeditated massacre; baby Hind agonizing a blood-letting death spared mass murderers. And Noam did you shed tears when you saw Ghaneyma Joma cradling her forty pound teenage son in her arms, his legs, the bones and angles of a baby deer; his skull visible like the starved prisoners in Auschwitz? “I feel that he is dying in front of my eyes,” Ghaneyma laments. “Those images are fabricated by Hamas,” an Israeli artist says when I show her screenshots from Democracy Now! If only I had a copy of your “Manufactured Consent” for her. At the Avenida Buffet breakfast that could sustain a Gazan neighborhood, I meet two Israeli women who could be supermodels like former IDF fitness trainer Gal Godot aka Wonderman. One is a commanding officer driving a tank for the IDF, the other prefers ground combat behind an automatic weapon. “Can’t you leave?” “It’s inside me. It is me. It’s what I know. What I love. If you only knew how loving the people are.” I think of the warm, generous Jewish people I love. Of my mother and grandmother who valued life above all else, Pikuach Nefesh, of you, Noam. “It was our friends who were cut, chopped,” the tank driver says. “My best friend…” her face gets puffy and teary, “he was killed last week.” It’s the other one’s birthday so all I can do is shed silent tears. They appreciate them, not realizing they are for all the inhabitants of that sacred land, for us all. My seatmate on the plane home, married to a Palestinian “randomly checked” and interrogated often when they fly, says sadly,“I know Jews who have no idea about Israeli apartheid and Palestinians who never heard of the Holocaust.” I ask, “Does your husband have family in Gaza?” “He used to.” "Why can’t anyone seem to take a wide view wherein all human suffering is worthy of empathy and understanding?” questions one of your many editors, Elaine Katzenberger, City Lights heir to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Oh Noam, who never left a letter unanswered, you too must listen to the horrors you predicted befall humanity, without the ability to speak or write, merely raising your left arm in defiance or petting your dog. What lesson are you to learn? You, prophetic professor, muse to millions, sower of seeds, humanity’s Cassandra, look inward. Bathe in all the love around you. Your turn to receive. In your letter to me in Havana you said, about Cuba through an anarcho-syndicalist lens, “The prospects don’t look very encouraging. but there is always hope.” Today at the bookstore I wanted to continue our conversation. I wanted to know how we can keep hope alive in the shadow of impending despotic fascism. And just as you have always responded to each of your correspondents, though we think you are paralyzed, you explained to David Barsamian in what I imagine as your calm, quiet, even monotone, “...The only options at our disposal are education and organizing. There’s no other choice.” “...Like the farmers in India. Or the people living in misery in Honduras. They don’t give up, So we certainly can’t. “...I’ll help ensure that the worst will happen as quickly as possible. That's one choice. The other is, I’ll try to do as best I can, what the farmers in India are doing, what poor and miserable peasants in Honduras are doing, and many others like them throughout the world. I’ll do that as best I can. And maybe we can get to a decent world in which people can feel that they can live without shame. A better world. So that's not much of a choice. We can easily make it.”
I love you, Noam With Gratitude, Margot Pepper
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Noam Chomsky holds a BA, MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His thesis was on Transformational Analysis. He is best known to the public by his book, Manufacturing Consent, which has been called the best description of the role of media in society. He is a lifelong activist who has opposed U.S. foreign wars. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute for Advanced Study since 1955.
Margot Pepper is a Bay Area poet, author and educator. In the 1950s, her father, George Pepper, was blacklisted causing the family to move to Mexico City. After his untimely death, Margot, in her childhood, was raised for several years by Dalton Trumbo and his family. Trumbo was one of the leading members of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters who were blacklisted during the 1950s. Pepper’s most popular books include a memoir about her year working in Cuba, (Through the Wall: A Year in Havana) a book of poetry, At This Very Moment, and most recently a dystopian science fiction thriller, American Day Dream.