Whirlwind Publishing

Roaming the blogosphere as I am wont to do, I came across a challenge on calyx press’ blog. Of course, at 43, I do not qualify as a “young feminist” (if I ever did) but still it set me to thinking about my intentions to write a review of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.

To a young woman unanchored, on the verge of being culturally divorced from self, the anthology was one of a series of buoys clung to and devoured like I was a member of the Donner party – not the daughter of Salma. Comprising both poetry and prose, the book represents discussions black women were having with other black women – and society in general – about what it means to be a black woman. The scope of the conversation is wide-ranging. It includes the Combahee River Collective Statement which includes articulations such as

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

I’m not entirely clear on the concept of identity politics. However, it does strike me as the essence of self-determination to push your own cause. In the case of black women, the cause should be black women. Home Girls is one of the spots along my literary read trail where I realized it was acceptable, revolutionary even, to come out from the background, open my mouth and express my full self.

Home Girls is also where I first encountered the work of poet Kate Rushin. Her poem, the Black Back-ups,

is dedicated to Merry Clayton, Cissy Houston, Vonetta Washington, Dawn, Carrietta McClellen, Rosie Farmer, Marsha Jenkins and Carolyn Williams. This is for all of the Black women who sang back-up for Elvis Presley, John Denver, James Taylor, Lou Reed, Etc, Etc, Etc.

…

This is for Hattie McDaniels, Butterfly McQueen, Ethel Waters
Saphire
Saphronia
Ruby Begonia
Aunt Jemima
Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box
Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box?
AuntJemimaonthepancakebox?
auntjemimaonthepancakebox?
Ainchamamaonthepancakebox?
Aint chure Mama on the pancake box?

Mama Mama
Get offa that damn box
And come home to me

And my Mama leaps offa that box
She swoops down in her nurse’s cape
Which she wears on Sunday
And on Wednesday night prayer meeting
And she wipes my forehead
And she fans my face for me
And she makes me a cup o’ tea
And it don’t do a thing for my real pain
Except she is my Mama
Mama Mommy Mommy Mammy Mammy
Mam-mee Mam-mee
I’d Walk a mill-yon miles
For one o’ your smiles

This is for the Black Back-ups
This is for my mama and your mama
My grandma and your grandma
This is for the thousand thousand Black Back-ups

And the colored girls say*

After reading this poem, I couldn’t hear Lou Reed’s Walk on the Side as just a song. Instead, it now expressed a relationship where the talent and artistic skill of black women is used to enrich other artists – musically as well as economically. It’s Big Mama Thornton and Elvis played out all over the cultural landscape. Or would be – except that Big Mama’s daughter wants her mother and wrote a poem about it; a poem which changes the dynamic landscape of understanding.

* © 1983 Donna Kate Rushin

Her name was Irish. Diasporan Irish but for the sake of privacy, I’ll call her RK. RK lived in a part of Massachusetts I’ve never been back to: Millis – a place where farms were common and the majority of the faces were white like her own. Yet she believed what she had was worthy of being shared with her class of mainly black students – whose ranks represented the African Diaspora. She, RK, had shoulder length, almost fully gray hair and left me alone to work on the blue scholastic math books. It was she who introduced me to John Lennon; that December when I walked into her classroom and watched as her finger repeatedly pressed rewind and play – unleashing my first classroom experience with music – and grief. The only thing I remember of her land was her horse. As an adult, I’m barely 5’2. As a child, of course, I was even shorter and the horse seemed humongous. Its belly was higher than my head – so, like the rest of the kids, I stayed out of its range.

The memory stayed with me although it had been dormant for years by the time I discovered a book of poetry called Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. I thought ‘hmmm’ and therein begin my association with the written words of Alice Walker. Written in 1985, a year away from my high school graduation, I probably wouldn’t have even known about Walker if it wasn’t for a classmate who brought The Color Purple to school. Hell, I’m not even sure if I knew I was a reader before I snagged the book from her after reading a few chapters of Celie telling her tale. But after I devoured it, I was touched for life.

Maybe it’s the multi-layered meaning of touched that led to my next encounter with horses. I mean, I’d have to be a little touched, as a black woman, to like Patti Smith, right?. But then again, maybe Patti herself is a little touched because who would could imagined, the woman known as the godmother of punk, a disheveled looking white woman with horse mane hair, would one day interview a man with a penchant for playing a rum-sodden, make-up wearing pirate of the Caribbean in Vanity Fair magazine no less.

However, it is not the present that concerns me regarding Patti Smith. It is the past and specifically, Horses.

Unpolished energy. For someone who appreciates the rawness of early hip hop (even while understanding that such rawness isn’t capable of sustaining itself for extended periods of time) it still stirs.

Let 2011 be the year your horses ride free.

I was all set to give Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez a half nod when I remembered a survey type of conversation I participated in a few years back. The questions we [a bunch of writers loosely connected through an online writing board] were asked was this: if we lived as slaves in America, what type of slave would we be: the house negro or the Harriet Tubman/Nat Turner type. Most of the responses centered on being Black Moses and Turner.  The pollster said that she herself wasn’t sure. Her response made me think especially because I was one of those cleaving to the Tubman dynamic. All enslaved Africans didn’t adhere to flight/fight mode. What of those who bore the genocidal nature of chattel slavery silently? What of those whose names we don’t know because the only worthy thing they did was to survive? With this book, Wench, we find the story of four such characters – Lizzie, Rennie, Sweet and Mawu – some of whom possess the inclination to flee. The four women are brought together over a series of summers in the decade or so before the Civil War when their “owners” vacation at Tawawa House in Tawawa Springs, Ohio – a free state. [A brief history note – due to the continual presence of slaveholders and their slaves, the hotel started losing money. The hotel, the land and surrounding acreage was sold and very shortly thereafter became Wilberforce University, now the oldest African-American private university in the US]

The series of events that the four slave mistresses (and their male companions – both enslaved and free) experience during the course of a series of summers testifies to the will to survive – a will with a contrary existence in a society which thrived off negation of that selfsame will. My change of heart (from that initial half nod to one more affirming) came as I delved deeper into the book. Of particular interest was the main character, Lizzie [named Eliza but renamed Lizzie by her owner’s wife after he moved her into the big house].  She commits actions that a surface reading of would have one labeling her as a collaborator in her own oppression – not to say anything of the harm her actions inflict on other characters. However, as I read further, I realized that life under slavery wasn’t so black and white (no pun intended). It is quite effective the way in which Perkins-Valdez leads the reader into a deeper understanding of the nature of slavery to the point of saying maybe – maybe I would have been like Eliza – concerned most of all about my children – wondering what the “Master” would do to them if I broke and run. Maybe, falling into human puppy love with the person convinced he owns you and having sex with him was considered a workable exchange for learning to read – and subsequently reading stolen newspapers to those who share your bondage. Maybe. Just maybe. That maybe moves slightly in direction of potentiality when I read in the author’s note following the end of the novel that “it is believed that the children of the unions between the slave women and the slaveholders were among the early students at [Wilberforce]”.

The writing prompt for this week’s participants in the Literary Blog Hop over at the Blue Bookcase website is what is the most difficult literary work you’ve ever read? What made it so difficult? The question immediately to mind the book I’m currently reading, Cane by Jean Toomer – and the problems I’m having finishing it. 

I have tried; sincerely, honestly tried. To be honest, it’s not because the book is unreadable or because I don’t like it. I do like it and it is readable. However, I’m finding it difficult to read Cane like a regular novel. There are no main characters and/or narrators. Perhaps I’m being too linear but it seems as if the only thing holding the diverse set of characters together is Sparta, the early twentieth-century rural Georgia town they all inhabit. Toomer wrote the town in such a way that it seems hell bent on being the stage on which the stories and poems are presented and he did so with a clear mastery of language. Cane is undeniably visual and therein lies the reason I find it difficult to read it continuously. The short prose pieces are so packed with imagery I think of them more as vignettes; literary vignettes I can put down, ponder over and return to.

As I end part one, I find myself putting it down to ponder some of the characters, particularly Karintha. On the surface, the two page chapter on Karintha appears to deal with what today would be called pedophilia:

Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child. Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Old men rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripe a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.

I found myself curious as to why Toomer, a Harlem Renaissance writer, would choose to start Cane with such a topic. Why have the opening gambit be a tale about how a young girl in the process of growing up became the town prostitute? In fact, the majority of the stories in the section I’ve read so far focus on women. So much so, that I found myself noticing similarities with some of Toomer’s literary descendants; particularly Alice Walker (setting) and Ntozake Shange (language).

I know Alice Walker read Toomer. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she wrote the following:

A few of us will realize that Cane was not only his finest work but that it is also in part based on the essence of stories told to Toomer by his grandmother, she of the ‘dark blood’ to whom the book is dedicated, and that many of the women in Cane are modled on the tragic indecisiveness and weakness of his mother’s life. I also wondered if he received flack for writing about the abuse some black women experience as Walker and Shange did. Cane was for Toomer a double ‘swan song.’ He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying good-bye to the ‘Negro’ he felt dying in himself. Cane then is a parting gift, and no less precious because of that. I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep its beauty, but let him go.

Well, as I said in the beginning, I am letting go of the book for now. What I term Cane’s vignette style, in my opinion, doesn’t support a straight through to the end type of reading. Nonetheless it is still highly valued literature for its written-with-love and extremely lyrical depictions of life in the town of Sparta, Georgia and I will definitely complete it.

Drawing from the 1993 killing of Amy Biehl in apartheid-era South Africa, Mother to Mother, a novel by Sindiwe Magona, shares with us a different perspective.  Literature about murders of white people by black people tend to avoid the women in the killer’s life – unless it’s framed in terms of pathology. In Native Sun, for instance, the women were silent [as well as the first to be killed]. It is very rare for such women to be allowed to narrate their own life stories. With her quietly powerful novel, Magona has changed that dynamic.

From the author’s preface (abbreviated):

Fulbright scholar Amy Elizabeth Biehl was set upon and killed by a mob of black youth in Guguletu, South Africa in August 1993. The outpouring of grief, outrage and support for the Biehl family was unprecedented in the history of the country.

[---]

In my novel, there is only one killer. Through his mother’s memories, we get a glimpse of human callousness of the kind that made the murder of Amy Biehl possible. And here I am back in the legacy of apartheid – a system repressive and brutal, that bred senseless inter- and intra-racial violence as well as other nefarious happenings; a system that promoted a twisted sense of right and wrong, with everything seen through the warped prism of the overarching crime against humanity, as the international community labelled it.

The mother, Mandisa, had her oldest child, Mxolisi – the one who, through his actions, catapults her into narration – when she was a 15 year old school girl. It has to be noted that, at the time of her pregnancy. Mandisa was a virgin.  The inclusion of an African immaculate conception raises immediate questions concerning Magona’s intent. Was it by design – the correlation between Mary and Mandisa and Jesus and Mxolisi. Or was it simply happenstance – a byproduct of the story line? Considering that Mother to Mother is Magona’s first novel (although not her first book), the latter might be more legitimate. 

The legitimacy of the questions, however. is overshadowed by the undeniable fact that both Mxolisi and Jesus were instrumental in bringing about changes in their respective status quos. As a result of the crucifixion of Jesus, Christianity became a potent force in the world. Subsequent to the killing of Amy Biehl, the death knoll for apartheid – which had been slowly but steadily ringing for decades – increased in volume to the point that it no longer was a “knoll” but a toyi toyi, the martial dance which symbolized the determination of South Africa’s majority black population to never again live as a disenfranchised minority.

Going the Jesus route, however, in explaining the murder of Biehl sidesteps the question Mandisa herself asks, over and over again.

What was she doing, vagabonding all over Gugulethu, of all places; taking her foot where she had no business? Where did she think she was going? Was she blind not to see there were no white people in this place?

Or does it? Did Amy Biehl demonstrate a god complex by treading where no white person went?  Did she think her presence in South Africa as a well meaning white person assisting with the transition to a democratically elected government would protect her from repercussions of apartheid? Was she so divorced from the harsh reality that produced slogans like one settler, one bullet that she thought it perfectly logically to drive her black companions to Gugulethu? 

There will probably never be a definitive answer to such questions. However, Mandisa herself provides a perspective – one that both reinforces the primacy of her life as well as highlights of the consequences of disconnectedness.

Now, your daughter has paid for the sins of the fathers and mothers who did not do their share of seeing that my son had a life worth living.

Days of wine and roses

Were never a part of my twenty-four

Except once.

Understanding my need to sip and sniff,

He brought me Ethiopian honey wine

And Somali Rose incense.

Understanding his need to not return

to breaking his mother’s back,

I stood on oak-peopled corners

And entreated first wonders

To catch the aroma of Afrika.

One hundred and thirty two moons

Beyond my winter after the summer of love birth,

He was my alpha.

Joyfully submitting, I laid under him

Matching him movement for movement.

My lips curved in a half moon when he said,

Sis, they told you wrong, you can dance.

I loved him so much I kissed him to the point

I was able to laughingly two-step embarrassment

When my sister, known as Semi-Love, said

I heard you two smacking lips in the kitchen.

He was the beginning of my womanhood

But I didn’t know I was the end of his manhood

Until my allegiance to my then prison-bound husband

Made me say good-bye.

Several copper-wire conversations later,

There was so much sorrow in his voice

When he said, if I knew you wanted to be

A married woman, I would’ve married you.

Devoid of my essence, he took a header off

Off a rickety staircase. I didn’t believe anything

Anybody told me, thinking it was a ploy

to get me to focus on my husband

Until I called his long-time sister friend.

She heard me say my name and went silent

And I knew…my alpha was dead.

Grief is perennial. It walks with me daily.

A blackberry bush. It crept its way up a wooden fence that separated the house I was looking to rent a portion of from its neighbor. It’s what made me take the living space that, in a previous incarnation, had to be a closet or, at best, a pantry. I was ready to go in, close the door and start looking at the woman in the mirror after the mess I made of my life in San Francisco.

Not yet knowing a single soul in Oakland, however, I was soon going back to SF for favored activities: getting high and drinking. But I knew it had to end the day I distanced myself enough to see the her that was I on the phone with “my” married man – crying; and to also see/hear my friends whispering about me. I couldn’t stand the vision and couldn’t envision any other way of being – in SF. So I relocated – across the Bay to Oaktown – where I grew up – where I became a woman.

Oakland, where I saw black people everywhere; unlike in San Francisco where, unbeknownst to me, we were being gentrified out of the city; unlike Boston where we were corralled into certain areas of the city. Oakland, panther country, blackberry bushes, a rose bush-laden walkway hidden in the middle of the city and schools with Katrina-like trailers on the grounds for the “overflow” of students. Oakland, where I decided I would never again straight my hair – not that big of a decision for me because I could count on one hand the number of times I had “processed” my hair; where the question of my identity (African) was settled once and for all. Oakland which I loved yet still had to kill.

The Death of California

Flash back to the time
when death row was a death sentence
and not a record label
featuring the hottest gangsta rappers.
Turn the clock back fourteen years
and revisit the streets of San Francisco.

A city split up into districts
and I found myself living in the one
called the tenderloin
although there was nothing tender
about the loins found there.
Laotians as dark as puerto ricans
pimps as murderously greedy as leopold
and refugees from pretty san francisco
were some of what I found there.

Join me on my sojourn down memory lane.
Avoid the cracks in the sidewalks
and the crack held in hands
closed tighter than fists
until the money is handed over.
Hear the soft refrain of coca, coca
whispered with south of the border accents
because this part of memory lane
has diverged to the mission district.
Oldest part of the city, first home of the spanish
who gave the area its "I’m a conquistador
but I still love Christ" name
and now home to members of
every spanish-speaking population
in the western hemisphere
crowded together on numbered streets:
undocumented scarfaces
peruvian flutists making music out of air
ecuadorians I mistake for asians
followers of che and pancho villa
girls living la vida loca
la migra, la policia
and cinco de mayo street festivals
where all the bars open early
and offer discounts on shots of tequila
and one year, I got drunker than drunk
and stumbled and fell
for coco and her flame.

Street hustlers of the lowest order
they bypassed the soft allure of coca, coca
and went straight for the hard sounding stuff.
Crack itself wasn’t enough however.
Crack had an addiction to itself in liquid form
a liquid form known as cisco.
Crack, cisco, coco
and her flame who had the same name
as a version of the bible
became my roommates
who never made their rent
because their addictions left them too dysfunctional
to do more than dig through garbage
and exchange their food stamps for crack
since that was the only thing they hungered for.

I blame eek-a-mouse
for transporting me back to the apartment
where his music was the soundtrack
to homemade sangria parties
and weed dazed days
laced every now and then
with the purest variety of acid
sold in golden gate park
where food not bombs
ladled out free bowls of soup
where girls didn’t wear flowers in their hair
but instead cursed me out for ruining the vibe
of santana’s annual free concert in the park
when my bottle of vodka fell and splashed all over
their wannabe hippie gear.

Striding the streets of aztlan
in the grip of a california dream
which I awoke from when I turned my back
on the go west young woman mentality
and accepted that california
wasn’t the la-la land portrayed by hollywood.
California was the land that gave birth to the panthers
and the panthers gave birth to a sense of purpose
which I inherited when I relocated to oakland
after two years in san francisco.
I stopped looking at my wrist
and started looking at the woman in the mirror
and what I saw
led me to the understanding
that refusing to die is a form of rebellion.

I stopped living in california
and started living in occupied aztlan.
I developed a mentality described as relentless
because I was on don’t stop, get it, get it kick
which had me flipping pages nonstop
while my feet stepped and my heart beat
to the drums of uhuru.
My soul united with the will of the revolution
and out of my barrel of my pen came slogans like
the contract with america was signed 500 years ago
with the blood of indigenous and african people.

And when I left occupied atzlan
and moved back to looted eastern shores
alongside assata’s knowledge:
that the revolution gave me more than I could ever give it
I carried with me the butterfly’s effect.

excerpted from still living on my feet

the other day i was exploring wordpress.com’s poetry blogs. scrolling through the pages, i came across this poem. i liked the way it tied the planting season (april) and the harvesting season (august) to the mental state and facial expressions of someone who lives in the New Orleans/Gulf Coast area.

i was interested in the challenge zouxzoux referenced over at big tent poetry. so i went over there and found this week’s challenge:

What is your favorite poem? What about it makes it your favorite? Does it contain an image that rocks your poetry world? Does it provide a realization that changes you? Do you admire its poetic devices (metaphor, alliteration, repetition, form, etc.)?

Whatever it is you like about your favorite poem, try to use that in a poem of your own.

I started thinking about it. Do I have a favorite poem? Is it possible to pick out one and say this is it, this is the poem that, for me, stands head and shoulders above all others?

the one name that stands out as having such a way with words is ntozake shange. lines from her poetry and choreopoems move through my head randomly. even typing this just now, i can easily remember various lines and stories contained with in for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.

speaking of for colored girls, it’s been announced that tyler perry will be directing the film version of the tony-award winning play. why do i think perry as director does not bode well for the adaptation? in fact, i’m actually scared of the whole idea. i think it’ll end in the same annals as jonathan demme-directed beloved, definitely one of my favorite novels ever; although not my favorite toni morrison novel. that honor is reserved for tar baby.

so it will be a poem from for colored girls. next stream i’ll try and answer some of the questions. the poem is due friday/the weekend.

i haven’t streamed in a few days. i’ve felt a resurgence of my muse and now that my late spring computer woes are over, i’m returning to my first love, poetry. i remember the time when i avoided the word poet. i preferred “writer”. still do but now, i’m okay with poet. it’s what i do – what i write. during my early years in oakland, i would try to take the poetic snippets that came to me and try to make them a short story or the beginnings of a novel; anything but poetry. this, though, i was a poetry reader and listened to poetry every day (in the form of hip hop). in a way, i felt stifled (a word forever my favorite because of archie bunker – yeah yeah yeah, he was a product of his age – and he grew out of his age – and honestly, edith would’ve gotten on my nerves too…although my word choice would’ve been “shut it” and i wouldn’t have called her dingbat – out loud. that’s rude. lmao)

anyway, poetry. my first love. the first poetry book that made an impression on me (outside of high school, which is when i began to get into it) was alice walker’s horses make a landscape look more beautiful. the poem that stands out in my memory is first, they said.

i went looking online to find the poem. as i expected it was hard. not only was it hard but upon reaching alice walker’s official website, i read the following:

“My friend and spirit helper, the magical artist, Shiloh Sophia McCloud, who is co-creating this website, had originally planned to offer dozens of my published poems, already available, though often in mutilated form, on the Internet. Because of complicated copyright rules and laws, meant originally for my protection, I cannot protect my poems that
are already on the Internet, nor can I offer them in the body of my present work.  Therefore, wherever a poem would have been, I have simply left its title.  These poems can be found in one of my six volumes of poetry, available in the library or from the website bookstore.”

huh? because of complicated copyright laws she can not offer her own poems on her own website; poems which happen to be already available on the internet – albeit “in a mutilated form”. why didn’t these complicated copyright laws stop those people from posting her work? methinks “alice shenanigans”. why not just say “i want you to buy my books”. i can respect that. a technologically proficient, magical artist/spiritual helper and complicated copyright laws just sounds strange and bizarre.

i’d like people to buy my books too but what i’m realizing is that i’m not going to be able to go out and hawk my books in the way that i’d like. my primary responsibility is to be a mother, a good mother. I tailor my writing around his schedule and am thankful he is in camp during the weekdays so i can focus fully on my words. it’s times like these when i’m glad that i started reading alice walker at such a young age. essays such as one child’s of one’s own. it grounds me nowadays and considering that my child has started to drop not so subtle hints (you spend more time with the computer than with me. i think you like the computer more than you like me) about my time spent writing and reading. all i can think is “hot damn ho here we go again” [one of my favorite rap sayings ever]. this coming from a child who no matter how many times i return him to his bed in the middle of the night always, ALWAYS wakes up right beside me!

for instance [yes, this is about to turn into a venting session], i wrote most of a personal pantheon overnight but it wasn’t finished by the time my lil black star woke. so i set him up with the x-box and said “i’m going to finish writing so you can play games or watch saturday morning cartoons”. now it should be clear that virginia woolf’s room of her own isn’t a reality for me. i write on the couch in the front room – no separate, isolated aesthetic for me. so star found what he wanted and “hot damn ho here we go again”: mommy, look at this, mommy let me pause it so you can look at this, mommy did you see? mommy mommy mommy, like this commercial:

STAR if you don’t STOP, i’ll turn the x-box OFF and you’ll be sent to your ROOM. [SHIT – this word said in my head. i don’t [consciously] swear in front of children.

speaking of star, this stream has just been dammed [aka he’s awake].

Still Living on My Feet

© 2007 Tichaona Chinyelu