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.
DB: Beautiful. Martin Espada reading the poem, "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100." Well, Martin, I want to talk to you about your former student, James Foley, in this context. Because he was a victim of this sort of all war, all control of global resources that the United States has adapted with western Europe. And I have to see him, James Foley, as a victim of that. Do you want to talk about your student, and how he sorts of fits into this?
ME: Well, it's very important for us to remember, regardless of what lessons we or our government take from this, or think we're taking from this, that Jim Foley was very much alive, that he was a real human being, that he wasn't a political symbol, he wasn't a political abstraction, he was an extraordinary individual. A lot of people loved this man. That was surely true during the time Jim Foley spent at the University of Massachusetts. He got an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where I teach.
I've taught there for more than 20 years in the English Department. I got to know Jim because he took my classes, particularly a class called Reading and Writing Poetry of the Political Imagination. Jim was very interested in serving the community, and the Latino community, in particular. This is a little-reported aspect of the story. Maybe it doesn't fit into the master narrative. I don't know.
There has been a little bit of discussion in the national press about Jim's work with Teach for America, which he did in the 1990s. He taught at a place called the Lowell Elementary School, in Phoenix, in the barrio. And he loved it. When he came to us he wanted to do more of that sort of thing. Something I haven't seen reported anywhere is the fact that Jim ended up teaching at a place called The Care Center, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is about 25 minutes from here.
Holyoke is, you may be aware, an old mill town. Like most Massachusetts mill towns, the mills are long gone, leaving high unemployment, high rates of poverty, and so forth. A substantial percentage of that population is Puerto Rican. The Care Center is an alternative educational program for adolescent mothers who have dropped out of the public school system in Holyoke. The majority are Puerto Rican, and many of them speak Spanish as a first language. This was even more true when I first associated myself with The Care Center almost 20 years ago.
Jim Foley went over to The Care Center after I referred him there, and they gave him a job. This was either 2001 or 2002. He was an anomaly in a lot of ways. He was a guy from New Hampshire, very tall, athletic, always smiling. He was also bilingual. He spoke fluent Spanish. He ended up teaching what used to be called ESL; now it's sometimes called ELL. He was teaching English to their monolingual Spanish speakers. And they loved this guy.
My connection with him was, in large part, a connection with somebody who wanted to perform a service for the Latino community, who was raised with the ideal of service to community. I had long conversations with him in my office about doing the right thing, about his future, about how he would act on principle to make his way in the world. I can tell you many times that's not the tenor of the conversation you have with a student, especially with a student who's going to graduate with an advanced degree, or whatever it might be.
But that was Jim. He was very interested in doing the right thing, speaking for those who did not have an opportunity to be heard, serving as a voice for the voiceless, performing a service. That's what he was doing in the barrio in Phoenix. That's what he was doing in the barrio in Holyoke. He went on to teach at the so-called "Boot Camp" of the Cook County Jail. That's another alternative education program. I remember we talked about teaching incarcerated people, because I had done that at the Worcester County House of Corrections, and elsewhere. That was the Jim Foley I knew. There's so much more I could say.
DB: Well, let me just jump in for a moment, Martin. You say in one article that I read, "I'm heart sick, just heart sick." And then you described Jim Foley as a born storyteller. And I remember the lines from the poet Muriel Rukeyser that says "No, we're not made of atoms, we're made of stories..." And it seemed to me as a storyteller, as a born storyteller, this would be somebody who would be the perfect person, to go abroad to tell our story, and learn the stories of the people who we don't understand, and tell their stories.
ME: Oh, absolutely. To give you some indication of the sort of storyteller Jim was, the novel he submitted for his MFA thesis at UMass was entitled The Cow Head Revelations. It's all about a young man from the Northeast named James Foley who teaches in Arizona. Clearly, it was an autobiographical tale, to whatever degree. Yet that was Jim telling stories. And think about where Arizona is today. Think of the ways in which Arizona has turned into the new Mississippi, for this generation of civil rights activists, and for those suffering under the racist regime in Arizona.
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