Abbreviated view of my balcony garden. Just as water is life, so is sticking my hands in soil. This summer, I am growing 6 chili plants, New Zealand spinach, tomatoes, borage (pictured) and red orach (a voluteer). I’ve also started seedlings for my fall garden (brassicas). Not pictured is the ginger I thought would decompose but instead took root. I am very proud of my garden as this year shows my patience has increased. Never before have my chili plants got to the point of producing peppers! For the past few years, I have been buying dried chilis to make my own chili powder. The reality that I’ll soon be able to make that powder from my own homegrown peppers is incredibly freeing…and a sustainable practive that drives me crazy with delight! The plan is to dry the chilis and grind into powder as needed. I hope to have enough to last through to next spring when I will start the process all over again but this time with allium (onions and garlic) powder.
Since I’ve been busy not paying attention to this blog, I have progressed beyond Writing the Bones, my previous segment on the writing of my 1st conceptual verse novel. The skeleton is solidly formed and now it’s time to put meat on the bones, so to speak. The next segment, in my progression, will be based on the pages upon pages of handwritten notes on the book whose title I’ve narrowed down to three choices.
One of the characters in my book is Dr. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, historian. Dr. Greene published a book called The Negro in Colonial New England. Even though I went to elementary, middle and high school in Boston, this book was never part of any curriculum I encountered; not even in my year and a half at Emerson College. I don’t remember exactly how I came across this very informative (read detailed) book. It was either in a semi-recent history class at a local university or it was in Wendy Warren’s book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. Either way, it was recent enough to be pissed that I was in my early 50’s when I found out about his scholarship, which is impeccable, btw.
But that anger is for another potential post about the state of education in this country. The purpose of this post is to discuss, somewhat, the role he plays in my novel. He is an angel to use Christian parlance. He is also a time traveler who uses his angelic abilities and his training as a historian to resolve a matter that had needled him in his professional life. In The Negro in Colonial New England, the matter that concerns him enough to affect his afterlife is nothing but a one line footnote. That disturbs him because the matter involves a rape. However, his chosen profession is limited by the tenets of histography and requires a poet to contextualize the pieces missing from the historical record. So he functions as a historian and a buffer against what he calls the poets “Africanist flights of fancy”.
It’s definitely a balancing act, navigating between the poet and the historian; especially since I like the poetic bits more!
That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll talk about a different character.
World building. It recently threw me for a loop identifying that that is what I am doing with my work in progress. It also excited me but this post is not about that aspect. It threw me for a loop because I’m usually write poems that say something about my life, experiences and/or history. The only connection between those poems is me; whereas with a verse novel, the connection has be between the characters themselves. It seems simple like “of course, the characters have to be connected in a novel, verse or not!” But, as I said, that has not been my experience. So it’s kind of intimidating but also points the way forward.
With world building, there is no actual limit except for a lack of imagination. One off lines and phrases which had long been languishing in a “place” called Google Docs found homes in pieces I had no idea that they would fit in. It is extremely fascinating watching the characters filling out rooms, speaking their experiences, etc. Even more so, when I discovered the newly incorporated bits and pieces transformed the novel and my writing of it.
Before the transformation, the writing was kind of laborious; which, for me, is a sure sign something’s not right. The language wasn’t inspiring me like it did with exploring like or Nonsense Makes Sense.
After the transformation, the writing flows; mainly because of the bits and pieces that found a home in the forming manuscript.
World building is new, exciting and inspiring. Giving thanks…that I’m still living, still learning as a writer.
The words are flowing and I’m feeling inspired. I can see the path forward. All of a sudden something I have written strikes me as wrong, flawed. I run through possible permutations before I stop myself.
Editing in the midst of writing has to be my worse characteristic as a writer. It dissipates the energy that causes the words to flow. I constantly have to tell myself to stop; just write the words down; editing is later. Because the energy dissipates, later could mean weeks or months down the line while I try to negotiate my way out of the writerly abyss the flaw put me in.
Lately, however, as I return to working on my current book, I find myself returning to past practices. I used to write on the laptop, print out the pages, edit by hand, input the changes ad infinitum. It’s a way, for me, to incorporate editing into the writing process without getting blocked by it. It’s dynamic to and for me.
I’ve been wondering, the past few days, about how to integrate my love of gardening into this blog. The other day I went to get some cabbage out the fridge to shred for tacos and found this:
I was amazed that it grew in the refrigerator so much and was actually taken aback to the degree that I did no barbering of the plant/vegetable and just popped into the soil nilly-willy, as you can see. The next day, I was calmer and tore off all the old leaves and composted them. This is what it looked like after that:
I am amazed and totally obsessed with this plant: the fact that it grew, unnoticed, in my fridge; it’s full-throttled desire to go to seed, etc. Deep as that aspect of my love of this plant is, there is an even deeper aspect and that is the color purple. Whenever, I say that phrase “the color purple”, my mind immediately goes to Alice Walker’s book, of course. I still remember the first time I laid my eyes on the words that make up that beautiful story. I was sitting at a round table in a high school classroom. One of my tablemates was discussing it and had a copy in her hands. I don’t remember what she said but I remember it was enough for me to ask to see the book and once it was in my hands, I started reading. Celie resonated with me from the start! I wanted to steal the book from my tablemate but instead, I went to a bookstore and acquired it the only way a teenager with no money could in the pre-metal detectors 80s. I read it all the way home. Then I read it again and again and again. That book changed the trajectory of my life. First of all, I had never before read a story written by a black woman centering black women. Never. It wasn’t even a part of my consciousness as a young black teenaged girl. Little Women, yes. Jane Eyre, yes. Toni Cade, no. Toni Morrison, no. The Color Purple changed all of that and I am forever grateful!
Here are a couple of Alice Walker quotes related to purple-related quotes :
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”
In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
I wanted to bless my eyes this morning with flora and fauna so I came in from the cold of a dream full of unrelenting rain and opened my eyes to what is customarily my second sighting of the day:
My ideological father shot down in the Audubon ballroom where the only bird observed in motion was the misappropriated eagle
until the phoenix rose from the ash of a murderous minstrel show and transformed into a panther
which prowled oakland to wounded knee philadelphia to palestine roaring revolution until every generation generated an evolution of the message
thought to be dead forever by those who are as white as the bones of the myriad numbers of people whose deaths they are accountable for.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder And I be holding beauty
When I glance upon them
Theoretically shaping The future into an afro
Concentric sharpness
That shook The white power structure
Into confronting A black consciousness Organized with a mandate And a mission
To dismiss
That old time religion That said Everything in its place Especially the black race. A new paradigm of blackness Rooted in a community soliloquy. Ghetto equals colony And racism is the bastard child Of fascist economies. Fanon, Malcolm and James Became antidotes For antiquated theologies And anti-social pathologies.
In the belly of the imperialistic beast, In the microcosm of prisons And the macrocosm of the streets A new paradigm for blackness, A paradise of struggle Was created by young soldiers High school students, Whores and pimps, Drug dealers and NASA employees, Doctors and number runners Heady Ready And willing With Fuck that shit. Far too many fires lit From Watts to the Congo
Whitey gotta go
Burn baby burn No ashes in the urn Time for the tide to turn And put an end to the yearn.
Discern
Panther power was here Turned the police into pigs And nigs into blacks
Figuratively burning effigies With tactics and strategies That earned them freedom's mind.
I was all set to start publishing the next chapters in Goree Island Ghosts; was typing it out on actual WordPress when the muse came calling. Gotta go where it takes you so those chapters are now in editing mode.
Also, every single article screams at me YOU MUST PROMOTE! (Yes, they do scream because I can be very hardheaded and tend not to listen when it comes to putting myself out there.) But lately, I’ve been telling myself, you’re not exactly putting yourself out there, you’re putting your words out there. As an introvert, this is a compromise I can work with. After all, if folks don’t know about the words I write, how are they going to find out unless I tell them? So I’m working on editing some pieces not designed for Goree Island Ghost (as of now) and submitting them to online poetry publications. Wish me luck!
don’t ask me how i like it
cause i like it like that
like lauren velez
sticky sweet like honey
amped like espresso
diaphanous like weed smoke
rock solid like
ashford and simpson
phosphorous like venus
everlasting like ever-ready
comical like cedric
digging dogs like dmx
diggedy diggedy like das efx
between the sheets like isley
my hip bone connected
to my erogenous zone
quiet storm like mobb deep
number 1 like nelly
soul on a train like don cornelius
ton of reggae like don omar
dirty like reggie
boss like beanie
eat the apple like eve
lady like fela dem song
me wan piece of meat fore anybody
african woman go dance
me go dance the fire dance
yin like yang
contra like contradiction
change up like chance
generous like kikuyu
split the bean three ways
ballistic like missile
brave like heart
war like zulu
righteous like malcolm
love like assata
write like ngugi
warm like fire
fiery like habanero
love you like bess
dangerous like tosh
murder like she wrote
look for me like marcus
don’t kill me like osama
end like this
formulate my thoughts like philosophy
I.
that sensation again
the magnetic pull of ocean sediment
settling on forming my skeleton
the ghosts of those thrown overboard
collecting melanin deposits from the atlantic's floor
sending it to me in waves
giving my skeleton the skin it lacks
monetaria moneta yielding up its protective shells
giving me eyes of cowrie, the whites like porcelain
II.
I light gardenia incense
for the flower in Lady Day's hair.
Talk to plants sensitive to the vibrations
that accompany her visitation.
Open my windows to untethered wind
to roam as is its wont.
I can breathe.
Oxygen is an angel in my personal pantheon.
III.
The door of no return is a fallacy
I think
as she forms in my mind
small, bathed in indigo
eyes gleaming like the shells
adoring my wrist.
The river niger flows from her tongue
shards of spanish slashing the surface
the closer to the atlantic
her body was borne.
I offer her my smile, my name
and lineage
situating myself at the end
of her continuum.
What you have just read are the introductory poems of my currently unnamed verse novel. I plan on serializing it here, online, sort of like what was done with Charles Dickens’ novels in the 19th century. New chapters will be uploaded biweekly.
Tichaona Chinyelu 
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