Cats and Dogs

1)

Things happen in unexpected ways
Mostly mundane those billions of years
To create today


You may think your going one place
All you find are destinations
Each more miraculous than the last


Tree People chased out of their trees in Africa
I helped them get jobs in Cleveland
It was like Ethiopian colonization they said to me


The story of Somalia is mostly art. The Bantu refugees were sustained by oranges even in places they would not grow. Nobody gives refugees good land to use. Usually they are well out of town. Camp is the best description an American can have. Something distant. Only relevant at certain times of the year.


June 20th is world Refugee Day. We only let white refugees into this country again, but this is a story about another failed state:


The Somali Bantu were described as Tree People in the information I got because the forest was very important to their new year. Their work was vital to the state. They lived on good land and provided for everyone in the country. In the cities the rich looked envious on the land where their very bread came. They called it a civil war but there was nothing words can describe about what happened.


What they told me is they were all kicked off their farms and everyone began to starve. They had arrived in this barren land the called Kakuma. The Alumni from that institution is staggering. My students are often surprised anyone heard of that place. They had been there a long time. They thrived on Oranges.


At every meeting they would bring orange soda. We are a confusing people. We chase after small animals cleaning their excrement from the street. They are told not to go to the post office when you need a bank in orientation. That seems a clear message to the American: go to the place that can help you. In the rest of the world for the refugee the post office is often their best bank. They looked at each other and drank orange soda.


Community meetings always went well because the elders were there. The ones who had figured out how to grow oranges where no oranges would grow. The lemon tree did not love Kakuma or Dadaab but it could tolerate the conditions. Once established they grafted an orange tree to the roots. They thrived with oranges. When we showed up and ask to come to America they were happy to come. The lucky ones went to Canada among other places. 

No one expects the Ethiopian Colonization.

The Tree People consider the Ethiopians their worst enemy, which shows how much they understand about worst enemies. If Ethiopia wanted Somalia erased, there would be no Somalia to flee from.  The caseworker doesn't track who protected whom, who drove out whom, who could have conquered whom but didn't bother.  Just checkbox: refugee.

The Tree People understood mathematics better than geopolitics.  You graft what survives onto what endures.  Sometimes the fruit doesn't match the roots.

2)

Cats and dogs, both serving humans, but with completely different temperaments, each certain of their own superiority.  The Somali Bantu were like dogs—loyal, communal, feeding everyone, working the land together, tied to a pack that made survival possible.  The ethnic Somalis were more like cats—independent, urban, administrative, sleek in their sophistication, convinced that the city was the only true center of life.  Both necessary, both useful, but rarely seeing eye to eye.

When one begins to imagine itself above the other, the balance breaks.  Dogs without cats may lose cunning, cats without dogs may lose community, but together they remind each other that no one thrives alone.  The Tree People understood this interdependence intimately: feeding the nation, caring for the soil, keeping the whole ecosystem alive.  The city dwellers, in forgetting the weight of that invisible web, risked cutting the very net that sustained them.

To drive out the people who knew how to read the land was more than a political blunder—it was ecological suicide.  You can exile the farmer but you cannot exile the soil’s memory of who tended it.  When those bonds are severed, everyone starves.  The civil war, told as power struggle in the newspapers, was also a severing of roots from fruit, a quarrel between cats and dogs that left the house empty.

3)

The real magic of Bhutan was an old dark one.  Even with a smile still ethnic cleansing.  We only hear about the happiness.  Another far off place the refugees came from being nobody and nowhere.  The Bhutanese told them they were officially Nepali cause they were about to sign a paper.  The magic of time shifting.  The reality was they paper was a pact with the devil.  To save the skin they had in the game.  The elderly and the young.  

In Nepal they showed them their new papers.  They were told they were Bhutanese.  It is comical to imagine most things that happen everyday.  Off to camp.  The word the refugee knows best is warehousing.  It can take two years or twenty years.  Some papers in this world can take a generation to process.

Ethnic cleansing with a smile is no less the war crime.

4)

The Karen weaved

Slow and fast

Their first arrival

In the van of many countries

She giggled as I explained.

Down Clifton Boulevard  dogs walking their people

5)

 

We often talk about how long things have been around and how short we have been here.  Scientists also look at the other side of that equation.  Based on the hydrogen available in the universe there could be many options for a very long time.  We could be the first intelligent life to emerge.  That would be real magic.  It is a comforting thought.  An entire universe and and eternity just for us.

The Math also suggests intelligent life is probably dangerous to your health.  It is more than likely technological civilization can fail under many extreme situations.  The dinosaurs did not know their true enemy either.  A cosmic game of Russian roulette the house always wins.

They came from Krasnodar in leather jackets.  A people of the market.  Not every Meskhetian Turk claimed refugee status.  It was a long road Stalin had sent them to the far east.  Many never returned.  You can find them around the world.  Many homelands actually claim them.  none is know for sure.

The men would stand outside and talk and smoke.  American neighbors were alarmed.  The landlord complained they would kill the grass standing on it and talking.  This was not done here.  I never thought they were happy coming.  Most had worked the market stalls and life had its own pace.  The rat race it was not.  Vodka and exile often do not mix well.  Gender roles were gonna take a generation to adjust.  They lived their lives in a gendered black and white.

I was a Russian expert I thought back then fifteen years ago.  Orthodox killing Orthodox I could not even imagine on the horizon.  The best country in the world is relatively measured.   People used to arrive from everywhere.  When the engine dies we still have inertia.

6)

The Bosnian population had gone through the system mostly before my time, but I kept meeting them still working in the refugee offices across the country.  They moved right in.  Nobody welcomes a stranger with more vigor than a stranger.   

The lost boys also hanging around the offices often working.  The Sudanese I never got to talk with past the headlines.  They were all too busy working.  Another lost boys really was the Chin from Burma.  They came through Thailand.  They told me all of their stories.  Many times working in a factory one minute and then being chased across the jungle the next.

This is why they were all men.  They didn't bring their women and children because they were at a dead run all the time.  They were working to send money back to their community.  Like any community there were lost souls.  Just a percentage you find more lost among, the refugee.  They were house together four men with no family relation and often strangers newly arrived.

We didn't have any other playbook.  We were going to make families.  They had no trouble working, but they had every other trouble.  Few spoke their language and few of them spoke English.  The few who did had much to say.  They however spoke many languages.  I didn't really want to know the details of the first knife fight.  Everyone was alive.  Sheltering in place before it was cool.

7)

I live with two cats not by choice.  I am more of a Dog person.  I usually had cats when I was young, but they were all indoor outdoor cats.  One was officially mine: Salt.  The brother to Pepper from Aunt Patty in Pennsylvania.  They talked a bit different, but we understood each other.  It is her pronouncing his name I hear when I think of him.  Years later her daughter would echo the sound.  

Salt was very territorial.  He just never had territory.  You might have guessed from his name he was the brighter colored of the two.  Light skinned almost glowing yellow and white.  I imagine it was hard for him to hide. Dude never caught a break.  Came home each time licking bigger and bigger wounds until one day he never returned.  We didn't really wonder what happen. Salt lost another last fight.  It would take him months to recover between them fights.  One day to return to his rehab center: under the evergreen tree next to the garage.

Pepper was small.  I never saw a scratch on her.  She lived with us in three different states.  My Dad's career took him around Lake Erie.  She gave presents clearly concerned for us.  My mother thought she would not notice the last time we moved.  We had to return for her cause she drove the neighbors crazy.  Yeah she noticed.  Old age eventually caught up with her, but nothing else was gonna.

.

Even individuals with the closest of DNA - brothers and sisters - can be completely different living completely different lives.  The most similar are the most different often.  Rooted in biology.  There is no such thing as race.  When someone so different can be more like you than someone who is supposed to be closer to you.  My five year old daughter understood this very well when we discussed this.  She knew her name..  

My cat and I left for the west coast in June and we met this buttery guy in July.  We all ended up back here cause we are cavalier here in Cleveland.  My son decided he would get a cat before he knew his roommate was allergic.  The fix is in the works.  I live with two cats not by choice making some observations.  This is what I do.  Here we are.  My cat was also supposed to go to collage last year, but we went camping instead.  Mash Potatoes lived seven life times.  Crowded at the Grand Canyon, but did not see many cats.

I was ready I thought for a few years with a cat watching me.  With two or more cats they watch each other.  They seem to think they have responsibilities.  Butter is a kitten.  The thing I love most about human babies is they do everything they can and then they sleep most of the time.  Kitten is the same.  Kittens can do many more things than human babies.  The longer the childhood is what separates us from most other animals.  

We call them domesticated, but the best is seems we can do is distract them.  Living with them has had this sympathetic vibration with my experience.  The relationship between any individuals is unique.  I may say I don't want to be you, but the truth is I can not be anything different than my own reaction to my experiences.  This goal to continue to arrive at destination.  What is external is important.  What is wrong with capitalism.  Not a fatal fault.  Seems like the modern world is angry cause the answer is so ancient: work with the seventh generation in mind.  Fixed.

The difference between cats and dogs is small

Both will curl beside you when the house grows cold

Home is only ever what we keep alive together