simply streaming

•June 26, 2010 • Leave a Comment

i don’t know why but in the midst of watching planet b-boy, this poem by langston hughes crossed my mind:

Militant

Let all who will
Eat quietly the bread of shame.
I cannot,
Without complaining loud and long,
Tasting its bitterness in my throat,
And feeling to my very soul
It’s wrong.
For honest work
You proffer me poor pay,
For honest dreams
Your spit is in my face,
And so my fist is clenched
Today –
To strike your face. *

i don’t know why I thought about that poem. or why my secondary thought was that it was written in 1967 [one last poetical blast at the system known as “the” man] and was influenced by the Panthers. Wrong. It was one of many poems written between 1921 – 1930.

knowing that, it makes me want to reread a book assigned during a past history class: The Hungry Years. The opening sentence to the preface reads: “a generation of witnesses is passing”. That’s a phrase that’s becoming part of my general lexicon. The generation that witnessed the Depression is passing. The generation that witnessed the holocaust is passing. The generation that witnessed the civil rights movement will soon be passing; that is, if the death of constance baker and coretta scott king doesn’t signify that the generation has already passed.

the older i get the more i question the significance of the melancholy in that phrase. i mean, witnesses witness…and in order for their witnessing to be of relevance, there has to be a record of it. as evidenced by the remembered book , there are plenty of eyewitness recollections of the depression in print to satisfy future generations as well as historians.

i prefer the history that is unknown and/or under-valued: the history referenced in the phrase “tales of the hunt will always be weak until the lion learns to speak“.

since i’m simply streaming, i’ll end with one of my pieces that i think is fitting:

180 of 360 and still spinning

Wrapping my hair in the colors of liberation
I expose my neck while balancing on my history.
My trifecta of eyes can now absorb and reflect whatever
Needs to be repudiated or reciprocated.
I can bleed on the page as well as cauterize my own wounds.
I am an Afrikan woman.
I can ride the spectrum of my emotions
without feeling lesser or more than.
I just am

always evolving and revolving like revolutions.**

* The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

** Contraband Marriage

Posted in Uncategorized

A Rose by any Other Name

•June 26, 2010 • 1 Comment

Today, I came across a site called NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). I was immediately inspired by the suggestion for today’s blog post: How Do You Feel About the Name given to you at birth?

I do not possess the name I was given at birth. We parted ways, legally, over a decade ago. Since assuming my true name my life has changed in fundamental ways. I have gotten married and divorced. I had a child and he’ll be entering first grade in September. I have written and published three books. I have published the work of three other authors. However, the change that underlines and informs all other changes is that I am more myself.

My mother let my father name me and he named me according to naming practices which also decided his name. I was the first daughter of my mother so my name was ordained. Apparently, it wasn’t significant that my dad had two older daughters; one of whom happened to be the first daughter of her mother. Therefore she and I shared the same name. With the hindsight of 20/20, it seemed as if I was designed to fit into a construct; one which didn’t fit. As a result, I was Toby with his foot cut off, not Kunta who had a penchant for running from slavery.

When I learned about freedom, I wanted to be free and freedom meant a new name. Frederick Douglass, not Frederick Bailey. Harriet Tubman, not Araminta Ross. Assata Shakur, not JoAnne Cheismard. In other words, I wanted the freedom that comes with self-naming. However, ironies of ironies, in obtaining that freedom, I became more bound to my family, more my mother’s daughter, more decidedly African than I had been under my birth name. To quote a Bessie Head character, “I [was] just an African”.

Posted in african literature, books, literature
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Mothers of the Revolution (Saying Yes)

•May 9, 2010 • Leave a Comment

Twelve years ago, before I was a Mother myself, I gave my Mom a copy of Mothers of the Revolution. Reading the subheading of the book: The War Experiences of Zimbabwean women, she thought it was going to be the war experiences of gun-toting nappy-haired women who don’t hesitate to shoot upon seeing the white of someone’s skin. But it wasn’t. It was about the quiet, non glamorous, non-romanticized work of revolution; the work that is so quiet we don’t normally see it unless it’s not there…or unless it’s a threat to the dehumanizing status quo.

The whole question of motherhood, revolution and writing has been on my mind lately due to a conversation I had with a sister-friend about the sacrifices inherent in good mothering/parenting. She says that she may not be cut out for motherhood because she wants to be able to spend time writing and having mornings in bed, etc. Oh, how I can relate! What wouldn’t I give for just a week of that!! Then I look at my chocolate bundle of goodness, stubbornness and just plain 6 yr old boyness and I think no. Mornings in bed alone or with a man or a book or music or just the sunshine streaming through the window can’t compare with his scream of laughter when I tickle him in his armpits or the tightness of his arms when he comes to me for a hug after being hurt or even the endless questions that have me telling him to hush.

What’s even more ironic about her position is the fact that she had previously informed me, during one of my venting sessions, that my Son is now my revolution. I had understood that since writing

Sankara Mantra (7 Months)

Lashes like mine
Eyes like mine
even in the way
they peruse a room
Skin like mine
but darker.

A bafflement inside me
every time I hear him
referred to as black.
(how’d you get such a black baby?)

It has happened twice.
Just like my response.
(black is beautiful.)

His mouth like his father’s.
He even smirks like him
causing an almost instantaneous
transfer of affection.

Sankara
whose birth filled the holes
that were consuming my heart

Sankara
who is entranced by his reflection
in the mirror
has begun to stand.

I am in awe of his determination
and the fact that
at barely seventeen pounds
his head is already past my knees.

Sankara
who I brought into an oppressive world
clutches his walker with his pudgy fingers
and walks completely around it.

I watch with a joy that is miraculous.

Sankara
Who I brought into an oppressive world
is owed happiness and well-being
and that is a debt I will pay
like Malcolm said
by any means necessary.

 

Still even though I love my revolution too deeply to ever to ever abstain, this quiet work sometimes gets to me.  I once wanted to be louder than oppression. Now I find myself writing poems about wanting quiet! The same sister-friend mentioned earlier says it’s due to maturity but I miss immature me!  I miss the woman who wrote oppression should be shot down like john f. kennedy. I don’t quite know the woman who wants it quiet like days at ocean beach. I don’t know much of anything except there’s a richness to my life that wasn’t there before…no matter how much I gave of myself to the people and causes I believe in.

I guess I just have to unite womb and mind. The pre-mother me heard Tupac say “I’m your son” and even though he wasn’t talking to me, I said yes. And now that I’m a mother, I’m still saying yes.

 

Links:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/zimbabwe/miscauthors/mothers1.html

Louder than Oppression

My Spirit Talks

Posted in african women, black women, books, family, feminism, poetry, poets, women, writers
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napowrimo 2010

•May 1, 2010 • Leave a Comment

i didn’t make it. thirty poems in thirty days seems to be beyond me. last year i lasted about a week. this year, i did about a total of two weeks worth but it was haphazard. some days, i wouldn’t write/post anything. two days later, i’d write/post two or three poems.  the week my son was on april vacation, i didn’t write/post anything. oh well. so it goes…or so i thought until i did a mental run through.

i already knew poems have gestational periods but i learned i can hold the amniotic sac of a poem in my mind until i can tend to it. I learned i can craft the lil pieces of life released from the sac into something worthy of sharing…as well as being the seed of something greeter. i’ve also learned not to neglect what’s left behind in the sac.  basically, i learned to be a tiny bit more disciplined with the craft i call my calling.

30 days will come
and 30 days will go
with the assignment incomplete
but still
i be smithing
words
into new iron
configurations

Posted in literature, poetry, poets, Uncategorized, writers
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counting and (diss)counting

•April 9, 2010 • Leave a Comment

sinew under skin stretches as i open my eyes, look at the clock and start counting. ninety minutes until the other human being who resides with me has to be at school. as i run through the ritual, i find myself missing those days when time was an entity to enjoy, not count.

i hate counting. i hate constantly eyeballing the clock but i what i hate most is what i’m teaching my six yr old as i tell him over and over he’s wasting time.

i heard myself tell him that this morning and even after the flag went up the first time, i heard myself repeating it several more times.

how can time be wasted? i mean, literally, when time is constantly being reborn. there’s always going to be another minute coming. if not for me, then for someone. and if not for them, then for someone or something else. can something that doesn’t stop be wasted? is time the one thing that has an endless flow? how to demonstrate the endless nature of time…and still get him to school on time?

i hate counting. i hate to be counted even more; which is why the census form is still in its envelope. is statistical data really a requirement for fixing neighborhoods across the country? i would’ve thought having the desire to fix neighborhoods across the country would be the main ingredient for success. plus, when i think of how the government’s little counting games can end up in gerrymandering, i’m even more reluctant. 

in addition to the other reasons are the fact that it brings to the mind the plantation when africans were counted as things…and sometimes not even fully things but 3/5ths of a thing.

and if that isn’t enough….

it also reminds me of when i used to visit my ex-husband in prison and if i went at shift change time, i’d have to wait almost ninety minutes while they counted every single inmate in the place. they did this several times a day – even w/o a single report of a prison break or any other possibly legitimate reason other than capitalism’s insane love of counting.

i hate counting. i hate being counted but certain people can count on me.

Posted in black women, family, motherhood, politics
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Reading is Evolutionary

•March 18, 2010 • Leave a Comment

Two years ago a blogger for Circle of Seven Productions posted a blog/rant on my space in favor of reading and literacy. As part of it, she issued a challenge: “I challenge anyone reading this blog to write one blog…just one…encouraging people to read. Encourage them to encourage others to read. READ ANYTHING!”

As I find myself getting almost orgasmically excited by my latest read (The Book of Night Women by Marlon James), my mind traveled to my response to the challenge.

 

Reading is Evolutionary

It was the diary of a young girl living in an era I could never go back because time moves forward.

Just like time, my eyes moved forward through each page growing more and more enamored of the first book that touched me in my black girlness. It was beyond affirming.

That book, The Color Purple by Alice Walker set me on the path to being a writer because it enabled me to see how our life stories can contribute to literature.

It also helped me to redefine the definition of fiction. I have heard a lot of people (black men in particular) say that they don’t read fiction because they’re tired of “lies” or some statement to that effect. I believe however that those statements miss the point of black “fiction”.

It is (or should be) indisputable that prior to the mid to late 20th century our voices were censored. What better way for a people to get in where they fit in that to position their works under the banner of fiction. Is Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man total fiction? Or does it resonate with the experience of black men, regardless of their generation? Toni Morrison’s Beloved was based on the life of Margaret Garner. Margaret Garner’s story isn’t fiction. Is Sethe’s? My favorite James Baldwin novel is If Beale Street Could Talk. I recognized the main character, Tish, in the faces, lives and pride of my sisters. Black fiction is not automatically fictional.

Read.

Even though I am an advocate and a believer in well-written, reality-based “fiction”, that is not the only thing I read. As someone who intimately understands the saying “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”, I also read history. In high school, a teacher slipped me the Autobiography of Malcolm X on the sly. It was a thick paperback that I had to rubber band together in order not to lose any of the pages. Reading that book led me on the path to researching the Black Revolution of the Sixties. My research deepened my awareness of black resistance. At no point were we passive.

Regardless of the danger, we struggled to learn to read when it was dangerous to the point of death. Frederick Douglass described in his autobiography of the poor white boy who showed him how to read. The Free African School movement is an indication of our desire to reclaim what was stolen from us and learn.

Read.

Reading is Evolutionary.

Posted in african literature, black women, books, feminism, literature, reading, womanist, women
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Contraband Marriage

•March 17, 2010 • Leave a Comment

We make it work by inches.

Our hands extended above our heads

pushing at the concrete

understanding that

even if it’s turned into a wall

that wall will one day crack and then break

under the pressure of our hands

and we will breathe free

Contraband Marriage book cover

In prison, a place where emotions based on affection are just about non-existent, love becomes the rarest of commodities; and as such is both highly prized and legislated.

By falling in love with a man who was incarcerated, I was participating in an activity considered contrary to the status quo on a variety of levels. Black people aren’t supposed to love one another. Black women aren’t supposed to love Black men. And no one is supposed to love the prisoners. But it happens and such love becomes contraband; something to be smuggled in and experienced on the sly.

Contraband Marriage covers those oppressive times and travels along the hemline of loving after incarceration, digging deep into its affects on that love, my walk into motherhood and how simple the decision to disentangle became when a child was involved. In multi-color, it paints the pains of the personal being political, the bumpy terrain of healing and the beautiful difficulty that can be forgiveness. It is a love story written in lyric and free form, set in reality with a different ever after.

ISBN:  978-0-9789355-5-9

For previews and ordering info, please visit my storefront.

Posted in african literature, african women, black women, books, family, feminism, literature, motherhood, poetry, reading, tichaona chinyelu, women
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nothingness, cross-racial adoption, rick james and christianity

•March 3, 2010 • Leave a Comment

when I was in high school, an english teacher told me if i have nothing to write, write about nothing. so because i really have nothing to say right about now, here goes my exploration into nothingness….and into your sufferation for reading! ha!

randomness is hard. i always thought so since i first understand the term stream of consciousness. i mean, when robin williams was on his coke-fueled comic stream of consciousness was he really saying whatever came to mind? was faulkner, with his run-0n sentences, really writing [and keeping] whatever came to his pen?

who knows. who cares? randomness is hard.

because now my mind is traveling to what j thought was an attempt to have a conversation about race but which turned out to be a soliloquy.  [imagine that] where is the logic in saying that mainstream media needs to go more in depth into international cross-racial adoption, that the media needs to address race in a more meaningful way and then turning around and ignoring someone who does go more in depth about international cross-racial adoption? even the act of ignoring says volumes about motivations behind such international cross-racial adoptions.

but anyway. randomness is hard. why is that every time i say that rick james saying "cocaine is a helluva drug” flashes in my mind? clear as day. maybe it’s because religion is the opiate of the masses. not many things make me fearful but seeing folks in the grip of a religious fervor qualifies. it has to do with the god those worship, i think  [always male, always harsh and judging].

i’m sorry but i just don’t understand the concept of a male god and only a male god. why would such a god create a world where nothing procreates [continues itself throughout time] without the male-female dynamic. i mean, you may find a fish way down deep in the darkest part of the atlantic ocean that can procreate by itself or some such weirdness but that fish is an anomaly, rare.

randomness is hard. i’m off to free associate titles on book shelf titles.

Posted in Uncategorized

All Aboard the Poop Float

•January 22, 2010 • Leave a Comment

This Mad Reader not only reads book, I also read blogs. One in particular inspired me today to blog a response:

Just a few minutes ago, I read a blog called Sometimes Economies Float. I found it very interesting how the consensus (among the writer and readers) was to support Royal Caribbean International’s (RCI) decision to continue to bring tourists to Labadee, RCI’s private* resort on the undamaged north side of the island.

Considering the author works in the industry as RCI, it isn’t surprising she comes to the conclusion she does.  After all, it is predicted that packaged travel will increase this year by about 18%. In this time of economic woes, who wouldn’t want a piece of that 18%? Certainly someone in the travel/tourist industry would! So, apparently, would Royal Caribbean.

Of course asking Royal Caribbean to desist its morally bankrupt business practices would be the equivalent of asking lawyers to fight for the repeal of the Crime Bill:  an action that affects their  bottom line and let’s be honest… it’s standard for corporations to consider their bottom line as the bottom line. Pesky notions of corporate social responsibility are avoided with face-saving gestures (such as the million dollars RCI will donate as opposed to has donated).

But that aside, what exactly are people who take a cruise ship to a country that has just suffered a devastating natural disaster going to do at a private resort 85 miles from the disaster?

labadee

Labadee2
 
 
LabadeePalmShip 
 

RCI’s website also suggests other activities:

  • Paddle along the gorgeous coastline of Labadee on a relaxing kayaking tour.
  • Become a pirate for a day
  • Soak up the sun while you float on the waves on a beach mat.
  • Grab a bird’s-eye view as you soar 400 feet above the beautiful peninsula of Labadee on a thrilling parasailing ride

I wonder if  these tourists can catch sight of Port-au-Prince while they’re soaring 400 feet above the beautifula peninsula of Labadee.

407561000

earthquake2-main_Full

    

47099680_008531301-1

    

* The designation private means that it’s guarded by a private security force, fenced off from the surrounding areas and passengers are not allowed to leave the property.

Posted in haiti, natural disasters, tichaona chinyelu

Haiti earthquake: US stops deporting Haitians / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com

•January 13, 2010 • Leave a Comment

Haiti earthquake: US stops deporting Haitians / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com

It appears as if some Haitians, at least, will get a degree of relief. It’s just sad that it takes a natural disaster of devastating proportions for such humanity to manifest itself.

Posted in caribbean, natural disasters

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