Whirlwind Publishing

When I got pregnant, my ex-husband, who I had divorced the previous year, asked me to marry him. I said no. A year into my son’s life, I packed him and most of my belongings in my small Toyota and drove/moved halfway across the country. My ex-husband was not invited along for the trip. Almost six years later, I still have no regrets about that decision.

Maybe my lack of remorse or bad feelings or guilt about that decision is due to the fact that my mother wasn’t married to my father. Having known my father, I must say I am completely comfortable with my mother’s decision. It could not have been easy to be African, an immigrant and an unwed mother in 1967 England but she did it. When we moved to the US in 1974, she faced more censure in her decision to undertake a relationship with the man who I consider my stepfather – even though they never married. The censure this time came from her sister’s husband (a Black Muslim) who didn’t approve of her having a "unconsecrated" relationship. Her response – to move us to our own apartment and shortly after that our own house – yes, with my stepdad.

And that’s I grew up, in a house with my unmarried mother and my stepfather. I never wanted for anything. I didn’t grow up to become a juvenile or an adult "delinquent". However, when I entered college (which I haven’t completed to this date), I found myself being very vocally anti-marriage. And I maintained that stance until well, I got married. Of course my marriage was non-traditional because my ex-husband was a prisoner. Now there might be people who read that and say aha! that’s why she’s anti-marriage – because it wasn’t a "real" marriage. I don’t know if it’s more my psychological landscape or my revolutionary training but I felt more married to him before we stood in front of the preacher than I did afterward. Honestly, I feel that the piece of paper which legitimatized our relationship in the eyes of the world corrupted our relationship more than it aided it.

In addition there was the fact that despite the fact that he was now my legal husband and I, his legal wife, our marriage was considered negligible by the same state that legitimatized it. A guard could (and did) walk up to us in the visiting room and order him to stop caressing my cheek. The various pressures of trying to maintain a marriage to a prisoner eventually led me to think of divorcing him but my conscience wouldn’t have been at peace with divorcing him while he was still incarcerated.

When he got out, we discovered that we weren’t really suited and a year later, I divorced him but our relationship still continued. Yet another year later, I was 34 and pregnant (see the beginning of this post).  For the sake of honesty, I should state that that was not the first time I was pregnant. To paraphrase Nan, a character in Beloved, the others I “threw away”. My ex-husband, a man I consider a survivor still searching for his North Star, had qualities I wanted for my child.

Yesterday, I saw a blog title by Khadijah Ali-Coleman which caught my interest – "No Wedding, No Womb!" is Not and Can Not Be My Mantra. I hadn’t even heard about the “movement” called No Wedding, No Womb but something about the idea that not having a father in the house (for whatever reason) automatically means a child is set up for failure; that not having a father in the house equals immediate degradation (poverty, prison and/or pregnancy) strikes me as incredibly simplistic.

I have witnessed  many sister-mothers struggling to provide their child(ren) with tools to survive in what is still an incredibly hostile environment. And there is the indisputable fact that despite the fact there might not be a steady man in their/our houses, their/our children have access to extended families structures which include men of all generations (brothers, cousins, uncles, community workers, etc). The lack of a father in the physical home does not mean an absence of men.  In fact the founder of the No Wedding, No Womb action is married so her child(ren) have a father figure.

More significant, however, is the fact that in the language of some NWNW supporters, they are setting up a hierarchy of children. In fact, some have even made an acronym out of it (OOW – out of wedlock). Other use language such as “bastard children.” I don’t even consider such language. I can’t even imagine going to my mother and saying “I’m a bastard”. That is so beyond the pale and so incredibly disrespectful it would be unbelievable if I hadn’t seen it on my own eyes.

Who does that? Who sets up a hierarchy of children? Why is it tolerated? Why is NWNW not condemned instantly as representative of an anti-children ideology which says children who aren’t born into a nuclear family configuration don’t have the right to be born, let alone conceived?

I represent the oppressed black womb
Penetrated too early in my development.
No one takes the time to explain abortion to me
Before I am strapped in the clinic gurney
To have the baby he planted scrapped out.
One day, I was watching Dora and the next day
My teacher said I was a statistic. I don’t know.
I just know I’m not a little girl any more.

I represent the oppressed black vagina
Smothered under an endless stream of men
Who push and push but never take the time
To differentiate me from girl 6, 5, 4, 3, 2,
Or even the one they call the bottom.
You only see me to call me names:
Whore, trick, bitch.
One day I’ll be free of this stroll
And will remember the name my mother gave me.

I represent the oppressed black woman
Former stripper, former whore, former convict
Who came through hell and back
yet still exudes sulfur.
Five children but crack obliterated
The memories and names of their fathers.
They look at me when I come home
Smelling of a hundred billion sold
And say they’re hungry.
My response, before I close my bedroom door is
So am I, babies, so am I.

I represent the oppressed conscious black woman
Who has all of her eyes open to see the world
But yet only inhabits 6 square blocks of the concrete jungle.
She sits at night with her seeds reworking homework lessons
Of Christmas, Columbus and colonization.
She transforms the three R’s into righteous revolutionary rebellion.

Sometimes, I am allowed to sit in and participate in all of their lives.
Sometimes, the door is shut either angrily or in the silence of defeat.
Either way, I am still a poet and my pen represents the oppressed.

This past weekend I took my child to the Children’s Museum. While there, we walked through the Boston Black exhibit. And lo and behold, I found Amilcar Cabral! It reminded me of his speech, National Liberation and Culture.

When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis, who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination–even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination.

 

Whatever may be the ideological or idealistic characteristics of cultural expression, culture is an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance  and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.

A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if, without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.

On the basis of what has just been said, we may consider the national liberation movement as the organized political expression of the culture of the people who are undertaking the struggle. For this reason, those who lead the movement must have a clear idea of the value of the culture in the framework of the struggle and must have  a thorough knowledge of the people’s culture, whatever may be their level of economic development.

In our time it is common to affirm that all peoples have a culture. The time is past when, in an effort to perpetuate the domination of a people, culture was considered an attribute of privileged peoples or nations, and when, out of either ignorance or malice, culture was confused with technical power, if not with skin color or the shape of one’s eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever may be the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and creator of culture. The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture–which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.