Yaşamak bir ağaç gibi tek ve hür
To live like a tree single and at liberty…
ve bir orman gibi kardeşçesine,
and brotherly like the trees of a forest,
bu hasret bizim.
this yearning is ours.
Nazım Hikmet (1902-1963)
Welcome to the newest version of the dispatch.info under construction. it has been a long road. please bear with us while we get this space ship up and running again… kaylee?!!
some pictures for your time…
I caught Suncere on the night before he left New Orleans at about 2:30 am. It was late, but he had agreed to do an interview, so we sat down on the back porch with a digital recorder. This is more of a conversation than an interview, really, and rather rough, but you might find it interesting.
We lived with Suncere Ali Shakur at the House of Excellence for several months. We were always impressed with the breadth of his analysis and his sharp wit. We don’t want to make him blush, but he had a great heart too. Suncere is what you would call a looong time organizer, it’s what he does. Organizing (particularly here) can be hard on the heart.
Sun came to new Orleans less than a week after Katrina, and landed at Malik Rahim’s house in Algiers, where the Common Ground Collective was just beginning to form. With very limited resources they began to take on the task of providing immediate relief in an area where armed white vigilantes still roamed the streets, and government troops still had a shoot to kill order form the state. Malik was an old black panther who had spent time organizing around tenant rights and had been a green party candidate for congress. In his house was an eclectic group of solidarity activists from around the country, anarchist street medics setting up the first health clinic in new orleans… so the legend goes. I am told they had to make up the rules as they went, they were the first ones to respond, just them and the military. There was so much going on at the time that it is hard to put together all the stories. But Suncere was there, and he shares some of it. After Hurricane Rita hit Louisiana, he and some of the others were the first to bring aid to Houma, a rural, mostly native american community south of New Orleans that was one of the worst hit.
So grab a cup of tea, or a smoke, if you got ‘em, and put yourself there with us on the back porch. The end of another Louisana winter, and the very last night after 18 months of relief work and grassroots organizing…
