The Best American Essays 2011

I admit it. I bought this book because I like Edwidge Danticat’s books and was very interested in reading her choices. So far I have read two of the essays in the book: Generation Why? by Zadie Smith and Beds by Toi Derricote.

Generation Y was devastating in its critique of the Facebook phenomenon and makes me rethink being constantly connected; especially considering I tend to reconnect with books when I disconnect.

Beds was originally published in Creative Nonfiction. A more apt named journal for this piece of writing, I cannot imagine. It reads like a piece of harrowing fiction but its placement in a book of essays dispels that delusion. With this essay, I found myself a fan of Derricote’s and will be adding her poetry to my to-be-read-this-year list; right alongside White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

Strip – Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

A think brown-haired girl pouts
high on stage. She cannot swing
her slight body round the new pole.
It runs floor to ceiling, piercing
the strip club like a shaft of light
the way the voice of God appears in movies.
Except this pole is plastic and God
would gurgle because it’s full of liquid
like a lava-lamp. The words would have to sploosh
up through bubbles
like burbs, one at a time like Jesus.

Is. Love. except the pole’s sealed
and there is no place for love to go
so the bubbles just keep on going up
and down and the girl
can’t get her hands around it.
She says she misses the jungle-gym type bar
this bubble bar replaced.
She anticipates missing the smell
of its metals on her hands after work.

Training me, she instructs
your thighs. Don’t touch your knees.
Keep both feet flat on the floor at all times.
Don’t do anything I do. She smiles
at the way everything is against some law.
I go on stage and the speakers spit
out the first lines of the song I picked:
I love myself/I want you to love me.
I dance for a man. He’s fifty, at least,
his wife beside him. But you’re beautiful,
she says like a mother comforting a taunted child,
like someone else’s mother. Mine said,
There is nothing
you can’t talk your way out of.

The bar’s dark and dollars scratch my skin.
when the next song starts I take off my bra,
my breasts covered, by Florida law,
with flesh brown tape. I wrap my arms, both legs
around the wide, bright pole,
spin slowly down to the floor.
Who else will pay for what he can’t see?
Like God, I’ve always been invisible

Excerpted from Bum Rush the Page

Africa Reading Challenge

Kinna Reads is hosting a year-long Africa Reading Challenge. The goal of the Challenge is to read

5 books. That’s it. There will be no other levels. Of course, participants are encouraged to read more than 5 books. Eligible books include those which are written by African writers, or take place in Africa, or are concerned with Africans and with historical and contemporary African issues. Note that at least 3 books must be written by African writers.

I will be participating in this Challenge. My initial list of 5 books (subject to change) is as follows:

Wives of the Leopard by Edna G. Gay

Why Are We So Blest? by Ayi Kwei Armah

Idu by Flora Nwapa

For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria by Cheryl Johnson-Odom and Nina Emma Mba

Aké by Wole Soyinka

For more information about the challenge (including reading suggestions) visit Kinna Reads

Breast Examination ~ Wanda Coleman

1.
in the shower naked
he bends to suck
milk life
urge engulfs
we tumble into stream
barely able to separate
closed in by the enamel fist

2.
before the mirror
he comes up as i look at myself
cups them and squeezes
they jump up hard
nipples in dance-ritual
he’s to my back
enters
later i have a mirror
full of hand prints

3.
laying down his arm makes a
pillow for the right one
fingers grasp flesh
he lens forward
takes the left one into
his mouth
bites gently
wakes the eagle
i take flight

Excerpted from African Sleeping Sickness

Related Links:
Wanda Coleman – Wikipedia
Wanda Coleman – Poetry Foundation

Thanks – Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper’s bullet.
I don’t know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raises his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
causing some dark bird’s love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer’s gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thank for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I’m still
falling through its silence.
I don’t know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.

Excerpted from The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry

Related Links:

Yusef Komunyakaa on Poets.org

Komunyakaa reading his poem, Facing It

The New Hieroglyphics – Les Murray

In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.

Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.

Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2SO4, for musical notes,
but mostly it’s diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure

have escaped their toilet doors. I (that is, saya,
ego, watashi wa) am two eyes without pupils;
those aren’t seen when you look out through them.

You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.

The effort is always to make the symbols obvious:
the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course
for flying doctor. Pram under fire? Soviet film industry.

Pictographs also shouldn’t be too culture-bound:
a heart circled and crossed out surely isn’t.
For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.

Black is the ace of spades. The king of spades
reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
If is the shorthand Libra sign, the scales.

Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs
and computers can draw them faster than Pharough’s scribes.
A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action,

but everywhere there’s sunflower talk, i.e.
metaphor, as we’ve seen. A figure riding a skyhook
bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace,

two animals in a book read Nature, two books
inside an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks
denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.

Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one. Sun and moon together

inside one is poetry. Sun and moon over palette,
over shoes etc. are all art forms–but above
a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that

and you’re starting to think in World, whose grammar
is Chinese-terse and fluid. Who needs the square-
equals-diamond book, the dictionary, to know figures

led by strings to their genitals mean fashion?
just as a skirt beneath a circle means demure
or a similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.

All peoples are at times cat in water with this language
but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.

Source

The Sea-Turtle and the Shark – Melvin B. Tolson

Strange but true is the story
of the sea-turtle and the shark-
the instinctive drive of the weak to survive
in the oceanic dark.
Driven,
riven
by hunger
from abyss to shoal,
sometimes the shark swallows
the sea-turtle whole.

The sly reptilian marine
withdraws,
into the shell
of his undersea craft,
his leathery head and the rapacious claws
that can rip
a rhinoceros’ hide
or strip
a crocodile to fare-thee-well;
now,
inside the shark,
the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaws
of his descent into pelagic hell;
then…then,
with ravenous jaws
that can cut sheet steel scrap,
the sea-turtle gnaws
…and gnaws…and gnaws
his way in a way that appalls-
his way to freedom,
beyond the vomiting dark
beyond the stomach walls
of the shark.

excerpted from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry

Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (Excerpt)

The below quote is taken from the chapter, Framing the Panther – Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency by Joy James

[Assata Shakur’s] eulogy for Safiya Bukhari, given in Havana on August 29, 2003, is haunting. Bukhari collapsed hours after she buried her own mother-the grandmother who raised Safiya Bukhari’s young daughter the day her own daughter became a BLA fighter and fugitive, going underground only to surface for an eight-year prison term. Bukhari survived the maiming medical practices of prison doctors (although her uterus did not) only to succumb to the “typical” black women diseases of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and heart failure in 2002. The eulogy could be read as Assata Shakur’s – and that of all revolutionary black women who refused to circumscribe their rebellion, and paid the costs for that decision:

It is with much sadness that I say last goodbye to Safiya Bukhari. She was my sister, my comrade and my friend. We met nearly thirty-five years ago, when we were bothe members of the Black Panther Party in Harlem. Even then, I was impressed by her sincerity, her commitment, and her burning energy. She was a descendant of slaves and she inherited the legacy of neo-slavery. She believed that struggle was the only way that African people in America could rid themselves of oppression. As a black woman struggling to live in America she experienced the most vicious forms of racism, sexism, cruelty and indifference. As a political activist she was targeted, persecuted, hounded and harassed. Because of her political activities she became a political prisoner and spent many years in prison. But she continued to struggle. She gave the best that she had to give to our people. She devoted her life, her love and her best energies to fighting for the liberation of oppressed people. She struggled selflessly, she could be trusted, she was consistent, and she could always be counted on to do what needed to be done. She was a soldier, a warrior-woman who did everything she could to free her people and to free political prisoners.”

For Assata Shakur, the weight of isolation, alienation, and vilification are scars that are borne. Redemption does not occur on this plane or in this life. Betrayal by nonblacks and black, by men and wome, to part of the liberation narrative. There will be no gratitude, no appreciation, no recognition equal to the insults and assaults. So, Assata Shakur, in true revolutionary fashion, must conclude her testimonial embracing a community that radiates beyond our immediate boundaries and limitations:

“I have faith that the Ancestors will welcome her, cherish her, and treat her with more love and more kindness than she ever received here on this earth.”

Framing the Panther

Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

Bones of Contention – Wanda Coleman

for Lois, deceased

he described you as a cracker battle axe
but the woman i met was thin and haint-like

i spoke to you as little as one can speak
to an in-law and get along
as did you
we never called one another by name
converse for the sake of function
biding, tolerant

whenever the three of us sat down together
he preached his gospel of civil rights
you silent, as was i
wishing he would let us be-each in her own distance

and as the social pressures of our miscegnation
ate away love
i tried to make him understand
the dangers

the whip has bitten into the back of the slave
clean through to the heart

sing dixie
wave the stars & bars

our marriage decomposed into a gangrenous animosity
no understanding-black or white

six years after divorce he called long distance
you were dying of colon cancer
your last wish
to see your grandchildren

he begged me to send the kids

i said no

and he will never understand

(excerpted from African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems

End of the Year Reading Summation

At the beginning of last winter, I made a reading list of books I wanted to read for 2011. Looking over the list, I see that finished two of them (Wild Seed and Half of a Yellow Sun , read partial amounts of others (Omeros and The Odyssey) and put all the others away for future reading. Now, don’t think I only read two books this year! Below is a list of books read this year:

February:

(poetry) Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol – Okot p’Bitek

March:

(poetry) Nappy Edges – Ntozake Shange

(science fiction) Wild Seed – Octavia Butler

April:

(children) Mansa Musa: The Lion of Mali – Khephra Burns

(fiction) House of Sand and Fog – Andre Dubus III

July:

(historical fiction) Someone Knows my Name – Lawrence Hill

(nonfiction)Mississippi in Africa – Alan Huffman

October:

(poetry) Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York and When Winter Comes: the Ascension of York – Frank X. Walker

(fiction) Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

November:

(poetry) Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate this Ride – Frank X. Walker

(nonfiction) Lewis & Clark Through Indian Eyes – ed. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (in progress)

I recommitted myself this year to read more poetry and I definitely have. There are poetry books I didn’t include in this list as I’m as still reading them. These books include Prophets by Kwame Dawes, African Sleeping Sickness by Wanda Coleman, Harlem Gallery by Melvin B. Tolson, Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa, Alphabet of Desire by Barbara Hamby, When Light Breaks by Melanie YeYo Carter, Dear Darkness by Kevin Young, the Collected Works of ee cummings, etc.

Tichaona Chinyelu

I weave words like a West African market woman…

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