Twilght
Page 16
that’s why,
I’ve never used the Bible very much before.
I used it in my closing statement.
I actually have a Bible right here.
I’ll see if I can find it for you.
I didn’t read from the Bible, I referred to it.
Gotta remember.
It was the Saturday
after Good Friday and before Easter.
It’s Matthew.
My father’s an Orthodox Jew.
My mother is a Catholic,
so I was raised a Catholic.
In my closing statement
I used the parts of the Bible
from the trial of Christ,
because, really,
Pontius Pilate
wasn’t such a bad sort.
He,
you know, he asked the right questions.
First he asked,
“What evil has this man done?”
And in Matthew,
where he focused on the individual guilts of a prisoner—
I’m referring to Christ as the prisoner
because I don’t want this to become a theological thing—
and in Matthew,
Pontius Pilate
talks about
there being rioting in the city.
It’s clear that Pontius Pilate
is trying to balance the fact that this man has done no evil
against the fact that there would be public disorder
if this man wasn’t condemned.
And he wouldn’t condemn him himself,
he had other people condemn him.
Can’t find it.
Guess I have to send it to you.
Then in John
(He is still flipping through the Bible)
Pontius Pilate jested,
he says,
“What is truth?”
And it’s a haunting question here too,
isn’t it?
Is it the truth of Koon and Powell being guilty
or is it the truth of the society
that has to find them
guilty in order to protect itself?
Swallowing the Bitterness
Mrs. Young Soon Han Former liquor store owner
(A house on Sycamore Street in Los Angeles just south of Beverly. A tree-lined street. A quiet street. It’s in an area where many Hasidic Jews live as well as yuppie types. Mrs. Young-Soon Han’s living room is impeccable. Dark pink-and-apricot rug and sofa and chairs. The sofa and chairs are made of a velour. On the back of the sofa and chairs is a Korean design. A kind of circle with lines in it, a geometric design. There is a glass coffee table in front of the sofa. There is nothing on the coffee table. There is a mantel with a bookcase, and a lot of books. The mantel has about thirty trophies. These are her nephew’s. They may be for soccer. On the wall behind the sofa area, a series of citations and awards. These are her ex-husband’s. They are civic awards. There are a couple of pictures of her husband shaking hands with official-looking people and accepting awards. In this area is also a large painting of Jesus Christ. There is another religious painting over the archway to the dining room. There are some objects hanging on the side of the archway. Long strips and oval shapes. It is very quiet. When we first came in, the television was on, but she turned it off.
(She is sitting on the floor and leaning on the coffee table. When she hits her hand on the table, it sounds very much like a drum. I am accompanied by two Korean-American graduate students from UCLA.)
Until last year
I believed America is the best.
I still believe it.
I don’t deny that now
because I’m a victim,
but
as
the year ends in ’92
and we were still in turmoil
and having all the financial problems
and mental problems.
Then a couple months ago
I really realized that
Korean immigrants were left out
from this
society and we were nothing.
What is our right?
Is it because we are Korean?
Is it because we have no politicians?
Is it because we don’t
speak good English?
Why?
Why do we have to be left out?
(She is hitting her hand on the coffee table)
We are not qualified to have medical treatment.
We are not qualified to get, uh,
food stamp
(She hits the table once),
not GR
(Hits the table once),
no welfare
(Hits the table once).
Anything.
Many Afro-Americans
(Two quick hits)
who never worked
(One hit),
they get
at least minimum amount
(One hit)
of money
(One hit)
to survive
(One hit).
We don’t get any!
(large hit with full hand spread)
Because we have a car
(One hit)
and we have a house.
(Pause six seconds)
And we are high taxpayers.
(One hit)
(Pause fourteen seconds)
Where do I finda [sic] justice?
Okay, Black people
probably
believe they won
by the trial?
Even some complains only half right?
justice was there.
But I watched the television
that Sunday morning,
early morning as they started.
I started watch it all day.
They were having party and then they celebrated,
all of South-Central,
all the churches.
They finally found that justice exists
in this society.
Then where is the victims’ rights?
They got their rights.
By destroying innocent Korean merchants …
They have a lot of respect,
as I do,
for
Dr. Martin King?
He is the only model for Black community.
I don’t care Jesse Jackson.
But
he was the model
of nonviolence.
Nonviolence?
They like to have hiseh [sic] spirits.
What about last year?
They destroyed innocent people.
(Five-second pause)
And I wonder if that is really justice
(And a very soft “uh” after “justice,” like “justicah,” hut very quick)
to get their rights
in this way.
(Thirteen-second pause)
I waseh swallowing the bitternesseh,
sitting here alone
and watching them.
They became all hilarious
(Three-second pause)
and, uh,
in a way I was happy for them
and I felt glad for them.
At leasteh they got something back, you know.
Just let’s forget Korean victims or other victims
who are destroyed by them.
They have fought
for their rights
(One hit simultaneous with the word “rights”)
over two centuries
(One hit simultaneous with “centuries”)
and I have a lot of sympathy and understanding for them.
Because of their effort and sacrificing,
other minorities, like Hispanic
or Asians,
maybe we have to suffer more
by mainstream.
You know,
that’s why I understand,
and then
I like to be part of their
&n
bsp; ’joyment.
But …
That’s why I had mixed feeling
as soon as I heard the verdict.
I wish I could
live together
with eh [sic] Blacks,
but after the riots
there were too much differences.
The fire is still there—
how do you call it?—
igni …
igniting fire.
(She says a Korean phrase phonetically: “Dashi yun gi ga nuh”)
It’s still dere.
It canuh
burst out anytime.
Lucia
Gladis Sibrian Director, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, USA
(Morning at the Mark Taper Forum in a rehearsal hall. I am videotaping her. She wears black pants and a beautiful white linen shirt. She is from El Salvador. She was a nun who became a revolutionary.)
When I was, um,
thirteen, fourteen
years old,
my, my, my uncle and my relatives would say,
“How can you change things in this country?
It’s impossible.
Sixty years of military dictatorship.
How can you change that?
And you’re thirteen years old!”
“Ha,” they will say,
“you wouldn’t change anything.”
That was the question
also in my school.
How can we young people
change things around?
And one of the things we have
was faith,
convictions.
That we have power within ourselves,
that we can change things.
People will say we are idealistic,
romantic,
part of our age.
We believe that.
Of course,
in the process
people did die.
I had a nom de guerre,
name of guerre.
My name was Lucia,
so people would refer to
light.
Luce.
Lucia.
Light.
What happened here in LA, I
call it a social explosion.
And what we call an uprising,
it’s much more organized, planned.
So what happened here was more
spontaneous.
On the one hand,
I was, I was, I was excited,
I was excited that people
didn’t just
let it pass,
let it pass by.
That, that, what happened,
declaring innocent the police,
and this spark through Rodney King
became
that,
what we call
the detonante.
There is a bomb and you pull the cord?
Detonante.
That’s why we call it a social explosion
when people can no longer take it—
the status quo.
But on the other hand, I was sad
because it was anarchical,
it was not in any way planned,
organized.
For me it was sad, the way that many people
will die
without even knowing why they die.
Every day
in this Los Angeles
so many people die
and they didn’t even know why they die.
There is no sense of future,
sense of hope
that things can be changed.
Why?
Because they don’t feel that they have the power
within themselves,
that they can change things.
Limbo/Twilight #2
Twilight Bey Organizer of gang truce
(In a Denny’s restaurant in a shopping center. Saturday morning, February 1993. He is a gang member. He is short, graceful, very dark skinned. He is soft-spoken and even in his delivery. He is very confident.)
Twilight Bey,
that’s my name.
When I was
twelve and thirteen,
I stayed out until, they say,
until the sun come up.
Every night, you know,
and that was my thing.
I was a
watchdog.
You know, I stayed up in the neighborhood,
make sure we wasn’t being rolled on and everything,
and when people
came into light
a what I knew,
a lot a people said,
“Well, Twilight, you know,
you a lot smarter and you have a lot more wisdom than those
twice your age.”
And what I did, you know,
I was
at home writing one night
and I was writing my name
and I just looked at it and it came ta me:
“twi,”
abbreviation
of the word “twice.”
You take a way the “ce.”
You have the last word,
“light.”
“Light” is a word that symbolizes knowledge, knowing,
wisdom,
within the Koran and the Holy Bible.
Twilight.
I have twice the knowledge of those my age,
twice the understanding of those my age.
So twilight
is
that time
between day and night.
Limbo,
I call it limbo.
So a lot of times when I’ve brought up ideas to my homeboys,
they say,
“Twilight,
that’s before your time,
that’s something you can’t do now.”
When I talked about the truce back in 1988,
that was something they considered before its time,
yet
in 1992
we made it
realistic.
So to me it’s like I’m stuck in limbo,
like the sun is stuck between night and day
in the twilight hours.
You know,
I’m in an area not many people exist.
Nighttime to me
is like a lack of sun,
and I don’t affiliate
darkness with anything negative.
I affiliate
darkness with what was first,
because it was first,
and then relative to my complexion.
I am a dark individual,
and with me stuck in limbo,
I see darkness as myself.
I see the light as knowledge and the wisdom of the world and
understanding others,
and in order for me to be a, to be a true human being,
I can’t forever dwell in darkness,
I can’t forever dwell in the idea,
of just identifying with people like me and understanding me and mine.
So I’m up twenty-four hours, it feels like,
and, you know,
what I see at nighttime
is,
like,
little kids
between the ages of
eight and eleven
out at three in the morning.
They beatin’ up a old man on the bus stop,
a homeless old man.
You know,
I see these things.
I tell ’em, “Hey, man, what ya all doin’?
Whyn’t ya go on home?
What ya doin’ out this time of night?”
You know,
and then when I’m in my own neighborhood, I’m driving through and I
see the living dead, as we call them,
the base heads,
the people who are so addicted on crack,
if they need a hit they be up all night doin’
whatever they have to do
to make the money to get the hit.
It’s like gettin’ a total dose
of what goes on in the daytime creates at night.
Time Line March 1991–October 1993
1991
March 3: Los Angeles Police officers beat, subdue, and arrest Rodney G. King. George Holliday, a resident of a nearby apartment, captures the beating on videotape and distributes it to CNN and other stations; it is soon seen around the world.
March 6: Police Chief Daryl F. Gates calls beating an “aberration.” Community leaders call for Gates’s resignation.
March 7: King is released after the district attorney’s office announces there is not enough evidence to file criminal charges.
March 15: Four Los Angeles police officers—Sergeant Stacey C. Koon and officers Laurence M. Powell, Timothy E. Wind, and Theodore J. Briseno—are arraigned on felony charges stemming from the King beating.
March 16: A store security camera records the fatal shooting of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins, an African-American girl, by Korean-American Soon Ja Du in a South Los Angeles liquor store.
March 26: The four police officers charged in the King beating plead not guilty. Soon Ja Du is arraigned on one count of murder.
March 28: Records show that $11.3 million was paid to victims of police brutality by the city of Los Angeles in 1990 to resolve police abuse cases.
April 1: In response to the King beating, Mayor Tom Bradley appoints a commission, headed by former deputy secretary of state Warren Christopher, to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department.
April 4: The Los Angeles Police Commission places Gates on sixty-day leave.
April 5: The city council orders the reinstatement of Gates.
April 7: Gates takes disciplinary action against the four criminally charged officers. He fires probationary officer Timothy Wind and suspends the other three without pay.
May 10: A grand jury decides not to indict any of the nineteen officers who were bystanders at the beating. The police department later disciplines ten of them.
July 9: The Christopher Commission report is released; it suggests Gates and the entire Police Commission step down.
July 10: Gates strips Assistant Chief David D. Dotson of his command after he complained openly of the chief’s record in disciplining officers.
July 16: The Police Commission orders Gates to reinstate Dotson.
July 22: Gates announces he will retire in 1992.
July 23: The State Second District Court of Appeal orders the trial of the four LAPD officers moved out of Los Angeles County.
September 30: The prosecution in the Soon Ja Du-Latasha Harlins trial begins its case.
October 1: The police commission approves the vast majority of the 129 reform recommendations issued by the Christopher Commission.