Month: April 2012

Poetry: Letter to an Archaeologist ~ Joseph Brodsky

Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiled water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn’t love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of the pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it’s gentler than what we’ve been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move careffuly though our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don’t reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won’t resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.

 

 

Excerpted from Joseph Brodsky: Collected Poems in English

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Loving Black Masculinity – Salvation – bell hooks

All the single mothers, black and nonblack, who raise healthy sons who later become mature, responsible men capable of giving and receiving love know that it is a lie that only men can raise sons. Patriarchal culture currently seeks to devalue single mothers by insisting they cannot raise healthy sons, even though there is no documentation to show this truth. All the data we have available  documents the fact that loving single mothers can and do parent sons who are as healthy as those in two-parent households. Dysfunctional households rarely produce psychologically healthy boys whether they are single- or two-parent households. When the focus is on black life and the parenting of boys, mainstream culture likes to insist that only black men can raise healthy boys. Underlying this insistence is the assumption that these boys need coercive discipline which only a black male authority figure can give. All these assumptions about the needs of black boys are informed by racist and sexist stereotypes which identify these children as dangerous threats to the safety of everyone else, whose spirits must be tamed or broken early in life. Tragically, more and more black people endorse and support this line of thought. No public leaders talk about  black boys needing healthy love, which necessarily includes teaching children how to be disciplined along with other life-enhancing skills.

Whose interest does it really serve to instill in the public’s imagination that only black men can raise a healthy black male child in a society where so many black males refuse to engage in parenting. Following this logic would lead to the assumption that all black males raised in female-headed houses are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Certainly such thinking does not serve the interests of black boys or the women who provide them with parental care. While it is clear that black boys, and all children, need positive connections with adult men, those men do not have to be fathers. It is also clear that a woman alone can raise a healthy boy child.  For too long, single mothers of all races have been made to feel that the lack of male parental influence is their fault. No one has prevented black males or any group of males from parenting their children. There is no evidence to support the notion that healthy mothers try to keep healthy fathers away from sons or daughters. The hard truth that this nation does not want to face is that most patriarchal men, irrespective of their racial identity do not wish to be loving, parental caretakers.

bell hooks, salvation

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Poetry: Power by Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in blood
and a voice that said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the color.” And
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10” Black Woman’s frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

Excerpted from The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry

Related Links

Audre Lorde‘s Poets.org page

Modern American Poetry

Audre Lorde’s Amazon page

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Nadine Gordimer’s The Burger’s Daughter

Nadine Gordimer is an effective writer. So effective, in fact that I have found myself, over the past few days, researching Afrikaner resistance to Afrikaner Nationalism. One of the first books I read that dealt with the subject was 117 days by Ruth First. On the strength of the literature, I found myself questioning whether it was actually possible to have a multi-racial liberation organization in an apartheid type of environment. I thought about the Lovings family of Virginia. I thought of SNCC’s expulsion of the white students and finally, I thought of Steve Biko because in my reading of  Gordimer’s The Burger’s Daughter, something fundamental had changed from her parent’s generation of anti-apartheid activism to hers.

Excerpt ~ Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique

Elsewhere on the African continent, mission-educated men took power as Africa emerged from direct European colonial rule. The list is long. Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, now a member of the Academie Francaise, is a former seminarian and a leading Catholic intellectual. The late Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivorian president who constructed the world’s largest Catholic basilica in the country’s interior, was obviously another devout Catholic. Others have similar backgrounds: Julius Nyerere was Catholic, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia was Presbyterian and General Ignatius Acheampong of Ghana had been born into a Catholic family. With the possible exception of the king of Swaziland, the head of one of the few African states that predate colonialism, to my knowledge there is no African leader who openly professes traditional religions.

Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique
Makau W. Mutua