Whirlwind Publishing

juicy from night secretions

open like an o’keefe petal

i am stymied

blocked

from light of day

enjoyment

by the fact

that mentally

and emotionally

he falls far short

of what i need

but not what i want.

I could…skulk…with him

in the middle of the night;

alarm set for some early hour

disturbing earned slumber.

I could be subterfuge

personified

but I am too much

the daughter of my mothers:

one who loved a man until he died

(but who also told me if she had known

his impact beforehand

would never have got with him);

another who will never offer

even a facsimile of an apology

because to do so

would be like breaking omertà.

i am their daughter

but i am also mother

to the future.

i model womanhood

for my son.

so i walk the line

between sacrifice

and desire.

Lord, I was twelve

A week away from thirteen

When I vowed

I’d never pray again;

Never address you

Even though

That was blasphemy.

I have kept to my sacrilege up until now.

Now I am forty-three

And down on my knees.

Unrepentant;

Yet so wretched

Hunger –

The kind that leads

To emotional destitution

Is the only thing

I feel.

One of the first tenets taught

is

Thou shall not kill.

But Lord

He killed me first;

Spread me open

Pushed inside

And killed me.

Lord, I would kill him

Again

For changing

In me

Forever

The sense

That love is home;

the space to be

Unadorned.

Lord, I don’t want to be a killer

but I do want to kill him

all over again;

I want him resurrected

Like Lazarus

So I that can

Plunge my knife

In his neck

Over and over

Until his diseased blood

Jettisons its container

In a shower

Of benediction.

I want it so bad

I am here

down on my knees

committing my form

to the sacrilege

of pleading

for the impossible.

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.

she sits in the police car
doing what she always did
after encountering an attractive man:
dissecting him feature by feature.
when she hit his nose
she knew she had seen him before
- on a wanted poster at the station.

sighing,
hands which had been still in her lap
move toward the ignition keys
as she watches him
pull out and turn left
as directed.
then her hand started moving between
the siren switch and the ignition keys.
With another sigh, she again wonders
why she became a police officer
but ever obedient to the job’s number one dictum.
flicks the siren
and sets off in pursuit.

Lately, I’ve been reading about verse novels as well as reading examples of the form as preparation for writing my own epic – as they’re also known.  I’m assuming the piece below is a reflection of that. No, it’s not a verse novel but it contains seeds of future verses. When those verses will come and what they will reveal about these two initial characters, I have no clue but in the meantime, here is the first installment.

the 1st encounter

a high plains drifter
road running, the motor perennial

just outside the epicenter
he circles and circles

does vehicular pirouettes through the concrete jungle
catches the attention of the police

glad his plates aren’t local, he takes the offensive
and asks for directions.
he doesn’t look like what he is.

the slow purr of the car
the low level, non threatening jazz
the interior plushness;
everyone knows how much black men value their cars.
he was given directions

by the black woman cop
who, quite secretly, doesn’t like the numbers
of black men behind bars
and this is the only thing
that she can do about it.

he reads her.
learns about the kids from the hips;
the cop husband from the thin blue line
threading her wedding band
and the lack of sex
by the cataloguing perusal
of her gaze.

she didn’t look like what she is either.

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]”.

You were run out of england

with your tails between your legs

and once you landed on plymouth rock

you used your tails

and other weapons of mass destruction

to whip the indigenous people

into your kind of shape.

You weren’t thankful

for maize

for turkey

for squash

for a second chance at life.

So…

You can keep thanksgiving

like you should’ve kept

the small pox infested blankets

you gave the people who kept you

from starving

that first winter

and subsequent winters

until they understood

that you are the sort

to repay your debts

with hypocrisy

and wholesale slaughter.

And…

You can keep it

cause I’m not interested in

taking it back.

Like the word nigga

it never belonged to me

and even if I was misguided enough

to believe it did

I’m not misguided enough to claim it

I’m not done yet…

Jive ass turkey, I turn the key

that unlocks all your secrets.

Your secretions smell like shit.

An excruciating stench emanates

From every single pore of this holiday.

Your parades don’t discharge your debt.

Instead, they ooze gluttonous ingratitude

which the unconscious greedily ingest

only to regurgitate americanism(s).

© 2005 Tichaona M. Chinyelu

Was she the first to have blood drain from her body? Or was it something that migrated from whomever gave birth to her? Did the ancient antecedents of today’s traditional practitioners notice that Dinqnesh’s menses coincided with the moon’s shine? I suppose no one back then, not even such worthies, could explain the pull. Did her companions even require an explanation for the blood or did they simply consider it part and parcel of the miraculous nature of the world they were discovering?

Did she, Dinqnesh, want to crawl around and act infirm – in supplication to some force unknown yet powerful enough to prevent her from prostrating. I bet she walked around almost like normal. Until the danglers came and told her that, during her unclean state, she must separate herself from them. Did she wonder – vocally – since they were telling her rather than vice versa if it wasn’t actually a case of them wanting to be separate from her. Whatever she said or didn’t say, I bet she left, walking and walking until she walked into a series of caves inhabited by women just like her – bleeders.

- No -

That was the white dream of it – a la Clan of the Cave Bear. To paraphrase Burning Spear, we’ve always known social living is the best. I’d like to think that back then we not only understood but also appreciated how lives interlocked. She and the women around her wouldn’t have called men danglers.

The size and weight of my son. She was the size and weight of my six year old son. If I had lived during her time, her arms might’ve curled around me just like his does. I can feel them. Standing here, looking at the replica of Great Small Mother and all I am left with are hugs.

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.