I am starting to work my slow way through Omeros. I stopped to google Omeros – Derek Walcott. I found the following link. It’s him reading a very brief excerpt and then taking questions from the audience. You will have to scroll through the list of names to find Walcott. They also have episodes with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nawal El Sadaawi, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Chinua Achebe, Khaled Hosseini and Gunter Grass.
It was my First Nursing Job – Belle Waring
•December 2, 2011 • Leave a CommentFor the rest of the year, I will be posting bits and pieces from books I’ve read this year…even if they didn’t make it on my end of the year roundup. Today’s “bit” is Belle Waring’s It Was My First Nursing Job excerpted from Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
It was my First Nursing Job
and I was stupid in it. I thought a doctor would not be unkind.
One wouldn’t wait for a laboring woman to dilate to ten cm.
He’d brace one hand up his patient’s vagina,
clamp the other on her pregnant belly, and force the fetus
through an eight-centimeter cervix.
She tore, of course. Bled.
Stellate lacerations extend from the cervix
like an asterisk. The staff nurses stormed and hissed
but the head nurse shrugged, He doesn’t like to wait around.
No other doctor witnessed what he did. The man was an elder
in his church. He chattered and smiled broadly as he worked.
He wore the biggest gloves we could stock.
It was my first real job and I was scared in it.
One night a patient of his was admitted
bleeding. The charge nurse said, He won’t rip her.
You take this one.
So I took her.
She quickly delivered a dead baby boy.
Not long dead-you could tell by the skin, intact.
But long enough.
When I wrapped him in a blanket, the doctor flipped open the cover
to let the mother view the body, according to custom.
The baby lay beside her.
He lay stretched out and still.
What a pity, the doctor said.
He seized the baby’s penis between his own forefinger and thumb.
It was the first time I had ever seen a male not circumcised
and I was taken aback by the beauty of it.
Look, said the doctor, a little boy. Just what we wanted.
His hand, huge on the child, held the penis as if he’d found
a lovecharm hidden in his grandmother’s linen.
And then he dropped it.
The mother didn’t make a sound.
When the doctor left, she said to me in a far flat voice
I called and told him I was bleeding bad.
He told me not to worry.
I don’t remember what I said. Just that
when I escorted her husband from the lobby
the doctor had already gone home. The new father followed me
with a joyful strut. I thought Sweet Jesus Christ
-Did the doctor speak to you?
-No ma’am, the father said.
I said quick-as-I-could-so-I-wouldn’t-have-to-think-
The baby didn’t make it.
The man doubled over. I told him all wrong.
I would do it all over again.
Say-
Please, sir. Sit down. I’m so very sorry to tell you
No. It’s been sixteen years.
I would say, I am your witness.
No. I would never have told the whole truth.
Forgive me.
It was my first job
and I was lost in it.
Bones of Contention – Wanda Coleman
•December 2, 2011 • Leave a Commentfor Lois, deceased
he described you as a cracker battle axe
but the woman i met was thin and haint-like
i spoke to you as little as one can speak
to an in-law and get along
as did you
we never called one another by name
converse for the sake of function
biding, tolerant
whenever the three of us sat down together
he preached his gospel of civil rights
you silent, as was i
wishing he would let us be-each in her own distance
and as the social pressures of our miscegnation
ate away love
i tried to make him understand
the dangers
the whip has bitten into the back of the slave
clean through to the heart
sing dixie
wave the stars & bars
our marriage decomposed into a gangrenous animosity
no understanding-black or white
six years after divorce he called long distance
you were dying of colon cancer
your last wish
to see your grandchildren
he begged me to send the kids
i said no
and he will never understand
(excerpted from African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems
Related Links:
What the Gin Rummy Queen Taught Me (poem)
Bedtime Story (poem)
End of the Year Reading Summation
•November 30, 2011 • Leave a CommentAt the beginning of last winter, I made a reading list of books I wanted to read for 2011. Looking over the list, I see that finished two of them (Wild Seed and Half of a Yellow Sun , read partial amounts of others (Omeros and The Odyssey) and put all the others away for future reading. Now, don’t think I only read two books this year! Below is a list of books read this year:
February:
(poetry) Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol – Okot p’Bitek
March:
(poetry) Nappy Edges – Ntozake Shange
(science fiction) Wild Seed – Octavia Butler
April:
(children) Mansa Musa: The Lion of Mali – Khephra Burns
(fiction) House of Sand and Fog – Andre Dubus III
July:
(historical fiction) Someone Knows my Name – Lawrence Hill
(nonfiction)Mississippi in Africa – Alan Huffman
October:
(poetry) Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York and When Winter Comes: the Ascension of York – Frank X. Walker
(fiction) Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
November:
(poetry) Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate this Ride – Frank X. Walker
(nonfiction) Lewis & Clark Through Indian Eyes – ed. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (in progress)
I recommitted myself this year to read more poetry and I definitely have. There are poetry books I didn’t include in this list as I’m as still reading them. These books include Prophets by Kwame Dawes, African Sleeping Sickness by Wanda Coleman, Harlem Gallery by Melvin B. Tolson, Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa, Alphabet of Desire by Barbara Hamby, When Light Breaks by Melanie YeYo Carter, Dear Darkness by Kevin Young, the Collected Works of ee cummings, etc.
Omeros by Derek Walcott (excerpt)
•November 30, 2011 • Leave a CommentI’ve been flirting with this book on and off throughout the year. However, as the year nears its completion, I find the very first poem of the Nobel prize-winning book by Derek Walcott haunting me. Take a look.
Book 1: Chapter 1 – Section 1 (Excerpt)
"This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes."
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. "Once wind bring the news
to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
they could see the axes in our own eyes.
Wind lift the ferns. They sound like the sea that feed us
fisherman all our life, and the ferns nodded ‘Yes,
the trees have to die.’ So, fists jam into our jacket,
cause the heights was cold and our breath making feathers
like the mist, we pass the rum. When it came back, it
give us the spirit to turn into murderers.
I lift up the axe and pray for strength in my hands
to wound the first cedar. Dew was filling my eyes,
but I fire one more white rum. The we advance."
For some extra silver, under a sea-almond,
he shows them a scar made by a rusted anchor,
rolling one trouser-leg up with the rising moan
of a conch. It has puckered like the corolla
of a sea-urchin. He does not explain its cure.
“It have some things" – he smiles – "worth more than a dollar."
He has left it to a garrulous waterfall
to pour out his secret down La Sorcière, since
the tall laurels fell, for the ground-dove’s mating call
to pass on its note to the blue, tacit mountains
whose talkative brooks, carrying it to the sea,
turn into idle pools where the clear minnows shoot
and an egret stalks the reeds with one rusted cry
as it stabs and stabs the mud with one lifting foot.
Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the clear bottom-sand,
when the sunrise brightens the river’s memory
and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea’s sound.
Although smoke forgets the earth from which it ascends
and nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed,
an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
"Iounalao," "Where the iguana is found."
But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail
moving with the island. The split pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs’ smoke till a new race
unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before.
The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackerel over water
into trembling weeds. Now they cut off the saw,
still hot and shaking, to examine the wound it
had made. They scraped off its gangrenous moss, then ripped
the wound clear of the net of vines that still bound it
to this earth, and nodded. The generator whipped
back to its work, and the chips flew much faster as
the shark’s teeth gnawed evenly. They covered their eyes
from the splintering nest. Now, over the pastures
of bananas, the island lifted its horns. Sunrise
trickled down its valleys, blood splashed on the cedars,
and the grove flooded with the light of sacrifice.
A gommier was cracking. Its leaves an enormous
tarpaulin with the ridgepole gone. The creaking sound
made the fishermen leap back as the angling mast
leant slowly towards the troughs of ferns; then the ground
shuddered under the feet in waves, then the waves passed.
Related articles
- Black Nobel Prize Winners (rogueclassicism.com)
- "Endings" by Derek Walcott (gnayharas.wordpress.com)
Review: Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes
•November 30, 2011 • Leave a Comment
Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.
My rating: 0 of 5 stars
A quote:
“Recent scholarship on the Doctrine of Discovery by Robert Miller, Eastern Shawnee, Lewis and Clark Law School professor, and member of the Bicentennial Circle of Tribal Advisors […] dispels the popular belief that the Louisiana Purchase was a remarkable land deal because the United States did not buy the land in that transaction. If the United States had bought the land, the next century would not have spent executing treaties and buying land for tribes to acquire that territory. Instead, what the United States purchased were Napoleon’s so-called discoverer’s rights.”
Miss Lou (Louise Bennett) on the Jamaican Language
•November 20, 2011 • 1 CommentLouise Bennett on the Jamaican Language
Jamaica’s Dr. Louise Bennett Coverley, Miss Lou as she was affectionately called, was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 7th September, 1919. A cultural icon locally, regionally and internationally, Miss Lou was one of Jamaica’s leading comediennes and the ‘only poet who . . .really hit the truth about her society through its own language.’ (Source)
Gwendolyn Brooks on Langston Hughes
•November 16, 2011 • 1 CommentGwendolyn Brooks on Langston Hughes:
“I met Langston Hughes when I was sixteen. When I went to Metropolitan Community Church to show him some of my poems at the behest of my mother who accompanied me and saw to it that I did this. He was most kind and read the poems right there after his reading and told me that I had talent and that I should keep writing. Later I met him again because he came to a poetry workshop that a reader on the staff of Poetry Magazine had started at the Southside Community Center. Her name was Inez Cunningham Stark. And he attended one of the meetings. People who belonged to this group were Bill Couch, Margaret Burroughs, Fern Gayden, Margaret Cunningham, who is now Margaret Danner and Edward Bland. Langston Hughes was mostly excited about the work that we were reading and he predicted a beautiful future for all of us. Later on still I gave a party for him when I lived at 623 Sixty-third Street and there were about seventy-five people or so crowded into our little two room kitchenette, and nobody had a better time than Langston Hughes who was real “folk”. Never any airs or pomposities from him. And as you say, he has helped a great many young people. Showing interest in their work and encouraging them.”
Excerpted from Conversations With Gwendolyn Brooks
Voices from Haiti: Storm by Kwame Dawes
•November 8, 2011 • Leave a CommentVoices from Haiti: Storm (English Version) by Kwame Dawes
English version of the visual poem Storm with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by Andre Lambertson.
For Malia Jean
From here the mountains around
Port-au-Prince are green; too
far to see the denuded hillside,
too far to see the brown wounds,
too far to see the layered
city of sand bags, wooden
reinforcements, heavy plastic
tents, the gravel, the dust,
the narrow lanes, the gutters,
the stolen power lines,
the makeshift clubs, the cinema,
the internet café, the phalanx
of shower booths, the admonitions
to keep the place clean, as if
someone hopes to restore
this stripped down hillside
to its glory as a golf course
for expatriates, the moneyed,
the diplomats, too far
to see the constant cloud
from wood fires and coal
factories tucked into
this city of improvisation; too far
though from here you can smell
the rain gathering at dusk.
Tonight the deluge will heal
all sores, clear the air of dust
from the crushed stones;
tonight the alabaster ruins
will gleam through the tender
mist of rain; and this body
that has grown weary with living,
will hope for a flame of prophesy;
for even the smallest ember
must keep the heat from slipping
away. This is my world,
these days; this and the ritual
of pills, the cycle of nausea,
the relief at three in the afternoon,
that hour when I feel as normal
as I was before all of this.
The blackness at the edge
of my eyes returns by five o’clock;
and here is where my prayers
are stripped of all ostentation,
here faith is tasteless
as unleavened bread; here
hope is a whisper from a dried
mouth, and I know what
the presence of God is. The cool
silence of a cemetery at twilight
is my comfort; the resignation,
the calm presence of mountains,
like these dumb tombstones.
I long to make deals with God.
The transaction the weary
and heavy laden make: Take
this body, it is used up now,
let it rest, dear God, let it
rest. Take this body, it is
yours now, let it rest, Lord,
let it rest. The storm covers
the earth. I stand in the rain.
It comes like the sound of grace,
soaking me to the bone—first
the taste of salt, then the clean
flow of healing slipping in my mouth.
Reading may differ slightly from text
This video is part of a multi-media series "Voices from Haiti" (http://bit.ly/rdk0fp) exploring life after the quake, focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS.
Kendel Hippolyte on Reggae & Writing
•November 8, 2011 • Leave a CommentReggae for me is very much associated with the ’70’s, with a time of a lot of self-questioning, nationally, individually. And not just self-questioning, because also I think it was very much a time when people were open to ideas about what I will just loosely call the spiritual world, you know, the inner world. And there was a sense that both things were important – that is, making things right in the world of the here and now, the social world, kind of building a New Jerusalem impulse; and also the other important thing was attending to what was going on inside of you and becoming right, becoming what the rastaman referred to as the higher man, or the Iya-man. So yes, I think reggae was important in terms of keeping the significance of those two strands of living very alive and real and accepted and normal for a lot of us.
Excerpted from Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets, editor: Kwame Dawes
Diary of a mad reader 