“We live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”, wrote James Baldwin in his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis”. The year was 1970. I wonder if there has ever been a time when silence was neither criminal nor suicidal. I would like to live there and then, for sure.

In his poem “A leaf, treeless, for Bertolt Brecht” [“Ein Blatt, baumlos, für Berlolt Brecht”] (published posthumously en 1971 in the book Schneepart [Snowpart]), Paul Celan contended that crime lay in any conversation, not only in conversations about trees, as Brecht suggested in his famous “An die Nachgeborenen“. Without trees, every conversation merely repeats what has already been said. (I have a verse from this poem and the tittle of Celan’s answer to it tattooed in my left forearm). [click to continue…]