Whirlwind Publishing

I don’t think Aomuse’s position and mine are that far apart although I don’t support the ‘concept of “No Wedding, No Womb” (NWNW) on the basis of the principle that it advocates’. I’m not against couples raising children together. Neither am I against single women raising children ‘by themselves’- although I don’t know one single mother who is doing it “by herself’’ given the extended family structures prevalent in the black community. I am, however, against the notion that children shouldn’t be conceived unless certain qualifications are met. I am against using the statistic of 72% of black children being born out of wedlock to frighten people into getting organized against a woman’s right to have a child whether married or not. Therefore, my response to the question in his blog title: No Wedding, No Womb: Too Simplistic for its own Good? is a resounding yes.

The NWNW website’s FAQ’s states the qualification for “a couple” bringing a child into the world as being “emotionally, physically and financially able to care for them”. Where is it written that “a couple” has to be married in order to be emotionally, physically and financially able to care for their children? In the bible? As he stated, he and his child’s mother are not married and are not a couple but they are definitely committed to do the work required to “fashion a conscious and committed young African daughter”.

In a perfect Cosby world, that would be the norm. Parents wouldn’t have to worry about paying for their children’s after school program, for example, because well, mom’s a lawyer and dad’s a doctor. However the Cosby ideal of parenting isn’t the norm. It’s TV.

That is in essence my problem with NWNW. It takes a complex problem and boils it down to the simple arithmetic that marriage = being “emotionally, physically and financially able to care” for children. As the founder of the “movement” herself said:

I would say again, like the professor, that there are a host of reasons why it’s happening. And that’s the reason why I got people together from various backgrounds – conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, Christian, Muslim, Jewish – together because I cannot as one person go through all of the reasons why we’re here.

But I will say I don’t care why we’re here. I don’t care how we got here. All I care is that we need to do something.

I don’t understand how  a problem can be solved without looking at the factors that created the problem. Actually, I do understand. Not caring about “how we got here” allows NWNW to zero in on women as breeders as the essence of the problem instead of a symptom of a bigger problem – the lack of a supportive culture that allows a woman who gives birth to a child without the “benefit” marriage to not feel as if she has to go out and buy a wedding ring, put it on her finger and pretend she is now sanctioned to have a child.

Morning is not my talking time. For one, I’m disgruntled over having to be mommy right off the bat. Before my eyes are properly unclotted from sleep, I’m running lists through my mind. No peanut butter. No jam. Very little honey. No cheese. Damn! That means lunchables – which means a 7am run to the grocery store.

So when I have to talk, I’m brief: “Sankara – get up!”

Then I begin my morning perambulations round the apartment for the things to go into his backpack: towel, swimming trunks, flip flops, lunch bag, damnit!

“Sankara, get up!”

On my next rotation, I hear voices from the Cosby show. I slow down long enough to hear mention of church. ‘Please god, no’ is my next thought.

He comes when I’m in the kitchen. Having found a jar of peanut butter on a top shelf, I’m smearing it on the bread –relieved I don’t have to drive to the store.

“’What is church?”

“A place people go to pray.”

“I know – we don’t go to church. Why don’t we go to church?”

“Because I don’t think you have to go to church to pray”. Actually, I say “because when I was a child, my mother told me she wanted me to be free to make up my own mind and when I was an adult, it didn’t make sense to me to go to church. So I didn’t. “ Halfway through my resentfully muttered diatribe, I realize he doesn’t understand.

I just want to continue dripping the honey on the peanut butter but I know we’ll be having this conversation again – the way we’ve had it before. In the midst of castigating myself for having a child as well as congratulating myself for having just one, the solution comes to me.

“You know why we don’t have to go to church? Because god is inside of you – and that god is good and positive – like you were when your friend fell at the park and you were worried. You don’t need to go outside to pray to something that’s inside.”

“Is there a bad god?”

(goddamnit, tichaona, don’t you ever learn?)

Sighing, I answer, yes of course there’s a bad god, everything comes in twos: up/down, in/out, male/female. People call the bad god the devil.

Then he starts to tell me how he “knows all about it”. He saw a show on TV where there was a guy “in a gown with an oval above his head” and “a guy all in red with a tail and a pitchfork”.

Yes, the guy all in red is the devil, the bad god. When you don’t want to do things that are good for you, that’s the bad god in you leading the way.

And then I hit on a piece of brilliance to tie it all together!

“You know why your mind is your greatest weapon?”

“No.”

“Because it allows you to choose – to decide whether your good god or bad god is going to be in charge; whether you’re going to care about your friends or have a fit because you don’t get to avoid something that’s good for you.

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].

my child asked me the other day if someone we’re familiar with "thinks well"? i laughed and laughed. what a question from a six yr old! after i finished laughing (and calling everyone i know) i asked him "do you want the truth or a child appropriate answer?

he’s my child: he wanted the truth.

"some people just have ‘boo-boos’ in their head but don’t think they have boo=boos in their head. they think you have the boo-boo”. my son looked at my like i was crazy. i started laughing. “it’s true!” 

of course, being a child, he still wants to talk to this person. the innocence of children. such innocence is admirable but in the real world such innocence is at a premium. i can’t have my lil black star be a sitting duck for the irresponsible people {aka boo-boo heads”} of the world but what i’m realizing and accepting [with sincere thanks to the universe] is that it’s not my battle. it’s his.

my psyche will not be the landscape on which this “battle” will be fought; his will. my only duty to him in this matter is to make sure he comes through without a boo-boo of his own in his precious head.

Simply streaming on streaming. I want to write about something gentler. The past few days I’ve dealt with race riots, a country being asinine and my brain feels tired. I think how the past few streams have been written and rewritten to the point where the original intent was lost. The point is not to edit and re-edit. The point is not to diatribe. The point is to stream.

So what’s on my mind right now? Discontinuity and immigration. How both have influenced my decision to stay here in Boston. This is the longest I’ve stayed here since I lived here as a child. In a way, it’s good because it has allowed me to confront the ghosts that made me leave in the first place. However, I been confronted them and still want to leave. But discontinuity, the legacy of immigration, stops me.

I never knew my grandmothers or my grandfathers – not a single one out of the set. My mother’s mother died in Africa and her father in Lebanon. Daddy was a subject of a poem. So when I had my child, knowing that between his dad and I, my mother was it in terms of grandparents, I decided to move back to Boston. I’ve been here ever since; going on 5 years now.

It is not my kind of city. It’s just blah. I don’t know where in the US wouldn’t be blah. Prior to Katrina, I had planned to move to New Orleans. I had planned it originally while I still lived in Oakland but then marriage, divorce, motherhood and Katrina happened.  So here I am – watching the wheels and my own beautiful boy – and simply streaming.

Doing the things I do late at night, when mommy has a chance to be tichaona again (sipping summer ale slowly, watching tv shows with curse words and werewolves and vampires eating nihilistic pole dancers),  my mind travels to sylvia plath. The only person to whom I would even mention the name sylvia plath  would wonder if something is wrong with me. I can hear her accented concern in my head right now. I’ve been known to have disdain not only for Sylvia Plath but for what I call the Sylvia Plath school of poetry. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against those inclined toward suicide. Obviously, they need help from mental health professionals because [real talk] even a roach will fight to defend its life.

[caveat - I am referring here to adults in “full possession” of their faculties, not victimized children who feel that’s the only option out of the hell their life has become. When children become occluded with reality to the point  they can‘t hear their inner voices telling them stop, that‘s partly because they are, in fact, children. It is our responsibility to be in tune with our children. The fact that children are killing themselves is an indictment of adults as far as I‘m concerned - not other children; regardless of how many lawsuits the parents of the dead children file.]

I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the phenomenon. I remember times, in my late teens/early twenties when I would spend time looking at my wrist. But I never picked up the knife or even made much of a move toward it. Thankfully. Nowadays, I couldn’t imagine not living…or wanting to be without life.  And the fact that I can bring it forth is even more miraculous. I love being alive and I love being a woman.