Giannina Braschi - United States of Banana

— You save my head from one guillotine. But you serve my head up to another guillotine.

This is a vicious circle. This is the fishmarket. This is working for survival. This is survival of the fastest. This is the Darwinist capital of the capitalist world. A head afraid is a head haunted. A head haunted is a headhunted. Run for your life. Run from the guillotine to a headhunter who saves your head and raises your salary — so you’ll be caught in the red of the fishmarket buying gadgets to distract your fragile imagination that is cut in the red market of blood — running and escaping — running again — changing your résumé to update the fear you feel of being unemployed tomorrow — in the streets — and from there to welfare — and from there to begging. You’re so abused by your boss that you have no time to think about the government. And that’s exactly what the government wants — because the government does to other countries what your boss does to you at work. The government of this country is the boss of other countries — and it treats other countries like employees with deadlines. Obey your boss — you have an assignment — it is your responsibility to comply with the deadline — otherwise — we’ll cut your head off or bomb the hell out of your country. No government or employee should last long — especially if you are a dissident or unless you are a dictator — then you can last long — because then you can be a boss — and do what bosses do — decapitate heads in the name of the freedom of the free markets. It’s bureaucracy terrorism — not different from the other terrorism that marches rampant in the streets — oh, bureaucracy terrorists name the other terrorists cowards, but what are they — sinister cowards — because they cripple your resources. They take away your office, your computer, and your friends.

You’re always struggling with the powers that be. You don’t want power above you nor below you, and yet you obey out of fear of disappointing them. You’re a stabilizing presence. They depend on your need to please — on your rage to prove them wrong. And yet, I don’t see you as a destroyer of the power structure. You want to be what your boss is.

— I want to be where he is, not what he is: an abuser.

But when you’re in his position — to abuse — you should abuse — because that’s why they put you in that position. You turn your back on the powers that put you in power. Even the abused become confused and ask themselves:

— Where is the boss?

They were so used to the abuse that they miss the boss that you are not — and they resent you more than they resent the abuser. Their anger against the oppressor was energizing them, and you left them without an enemy — without a struggle to overcome — and still with a lousy job to be done — and no desire to do it. They want to feel the perils of evil — that not everything is peachy keen — that life is wicked. By cleaning up the act — you take out of them a big part of themselves — and they don’t like it. That’s why they chatter behind your back — that you’re worse than a boss — because they don’t fear you — and that’s why they don’t respect your guts.

And then, after you are fired, you can spend your life fighting the system, which will get you nowhere. Unemployment, degradation of the soul, one step lower than before, but higher in spirituality because you will identify with the guy you and your boss called with laughter a loser. And you’ll exclaim:

— That guy is me, arrogant bastard!

And you’ll realize that in that workplace, where you were a winner who laughed at the losers who did the job of the winners, none of them were your friends. Once you are out of work, you’re out of friends. Unless you win the lottery. Nobody can save you this time. Why bother filing a grievance that grays your hair, wastes your batteries, and dumps your body into the garbage can.

What is long overdue in this country — and it’s accepted that it misses its deadline — and never accomplishes its duty — and the bosses and the government — working in cahoots — say— bravo! bravo! — when it never arrives, and it continues failing to comply with the deadline. Long overdue is a revolution — a revolution against bosses who control your food, your allowance, and your nightmares. It would be so easy to step into one of those executive conference rooms — at the end of the long hallway where the corner office overlooks the Verrazano Bridge — and gun down the corporate board of directors — just shoot them in the head — it would be a crime for humanity and a cry for justice.

I have realized, living in this country, that in this country human beings display their arrogance, their might, their insomnia, their preoccupations, their ambitions, their fears — in the workplace — the war zone — the terrorist target — where bosses have loaded guns. Who better to personify the country than a serial killer — the Psycho Sniper in Washington who shoots random people dead in their tracks and demands a ransom in order for the bloodshed to stop. This nation, as the big boss of other nations, acts in the same way. It guns down other nations in the name of money markets. This is a serial killer nation. A nation of killers. Of bosses — not of philosophers, not of poets. This is a country of abusers and abused, of exploiters and exploited — and in between there is no music, no love, no beauty. The beauty is found in the decapitation, in the horror, in the bloodmass, bloodbath. This country likes the smell of blood — and it’s attracted to blood like bloodhounds sniffing for dead bodies — and it doesn’t know its limits — it stretches its limits to more dangerous limits until the killer becomes a suicide bomber. The killer in its urge for blood money kills himself when he finds no more blood or money to nourish his entrails. I say this with love in my entrails for a country where firemen were looking for survivors after 9/11/2001. My thoughts are survivors of this terrorist attack — they were found in an air pocket where a bird laid an egg.

The suicide bomber is an explosion of a contradiction in its paradox, victim and victimizer, yin and yang, two sides of the coin, fire bomb and fire extinguisher, prosecutor and defendant, hangman and hanged. Heautontimorou-menos. A full cycle in himself. An orange, an apple, a world — round. Not part, but whole. To be one and the other, annihilating both. To be and not to be. Sed and Suida without the synthesis. No middle ground. No Wishy-Washy. One is Washy — the other Wishy — each affirming its being — neither integrating into the other. The water never quenching the thirst of the fire — the fire always wanting to be higher — never coming to terms with its own thirsty fire of desire — that means the time to hesitate is through — no time to wallow in the mire — try now we can only lose — and our love will be a funeral pyre — of the suicidal instinct — to repress one’s emotions, to kill one’s desires — to not be — and the desire to be more — not to hesitate, to go forward, to express oneself, to fan the flames of life — not to let go of one contradiction without exhausting the other contradiction. The bomber quenching his own thirst — the thirst for fire, for explosion, noise, attention — craves the media, the spectacle, the crowds. The suicider wants the final word, the Amen of silence after the explosion of fire, to extinguish himself in the funeral pyre. What the suicide bomber kills is the author of the crime, leaving the act behind. He can’t be tried or fried in the electric chair because he kills the judge as he kills himself by judging himself guilty and condemning himself to death. When the killer kills himself there is nobody left to blame. Blame must always find a body. Somebody, anybody. So everybody starts looking around in suspicion of each other. Fuenteovejuna did it. The crime against society becomes the crime of society. So involved is the public that it no longer finds guilt in the other, but in itself. This guilt is the power of the suicider.