for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
(poem by Martín Espada, copy-pasted from poetryfoundation.org used here non-commercially for academic purposes and in memoriam of the 2,997 fatalities of 9/11; photo by Ezra Stoller rightclicked from nymag.com “The Windows on the World dining room, on the 107th floor of the North Tower” of the World Trade Center, used here non-commercially for academic purposes, in memoriam, song by Beyoncé used here non-commercially for academic purposes, in memoriam)
An audio-reading of the iconic “Who Elected the Press”, editorial written by Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc, July 10, 1981, the editorial was banned by the Panorama publisher.
(pls click the audio pod below to play; image rightclicked from Inquirer, used here non-commercially for academic purposes. Apologies for the quality of the audio and the first-cut reading —
flubbed some words, throat getting parched )
♥ ♥ ♥
Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc inspired an entire generation of teenagers and pre-teens – gaggling highschoolers and college freshmen and sophomores – to join the campus press and push the boundaries of a restricted news media under authoritarian rule.
During those tumultuous and dangerous times, her mastery of the craft and selflessness in risking her career to do her job sparked martial law babies to organize their own newspapers in campuses nationwide.
It was during this time that organizations like the College Editors Guild of the Philippines rose to unimaginable heights, restoring all regional chapters nationwide and soaring to about 200 member-publications across the land, no doubt animated by writers and journalists like LJM, and moved by the surge of people’s organizations.
When the timid and the uninvolved read her columns and editorials in Panorama magazine and Bulletin wittily rapping the dictatorship for its excesses, they saw the rhythm and the truth behind her words.
When, after a series of critical articles, she was forced to resign by the Panorama publisher due to pressure from the Marcos dictatorship, the hesitant and the timorous saw that there was no place for reasonable men and women under the repressive regime — that it was time to set aside personal ambitions and join the growing movement to put an end to the tyrannical rule of the Marcos regime.
Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc ignited the imagination of a nation during its most perilous hour with her flair and fearlessness.
Many of the young people who were encouraged by LJM’s voice, stepped out of their confines and went on to journalism school or journalism practice, or to advocacy, or organizing work; some went on to law school, and became public interest lawyers — all covered the world in the inimitable way that only LJM could inspire.
Her legacy and contribution to a free and independent press, the right of access to information on matters of public concern, and the free flow of ideas in an open society, is clearly imaginable, certainly immeasurable.
