Poetry

Hercules

The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

–  George Washington

 

 

Hercules (possibly) Slave prettily pretending
on the promenade.
A plethora of coins
pushing a false narrative
But then

he was sent from the city
of brotherly love
to break rocks
and dig in the mud
for material
to shore up a house
he can only enter from the back.

Hands that used to craft meals
which earned him accolades appropriate
for the free
are now stiff, swollen
and seditious.

Back on the plantation
the enslaved called low vermin
his six year old daughter was asked
if she missed seeing her father.

“He is free now.”

 

For more information about Hercules, check out the following links:

http://www.npr.org/2008/02/19/18950467/hercules-and-hemings-presidents-slave-chefs

Recollections and Private Memoirs of George Washington

http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/hercules/#note4

Homeschooling Journey #2

It’s been two years since I posted about homeschooling. Yes, we are still doing it. When it comes to my son’s education, I claim unschooler more than any other identity in the homeschooling universe. I admit that when we first embarked on this journey, I was still in the grasp of traditional schooling and therefore, printed out copious amount of worksheets, bought books that contained things I assumed he needed to know, etc, etc. We, my son and I, both struggled with the workload I wanted to assign him. Eventually, as we got into the groove, I let go of a lot of traditional education thinking that was, truthfully, handicapping the process. That was year one.

Year two, my ideas were still muddied about the whole thing but I had to consistently remind myself why I pulled him out of school and what I wanted to accomplish with this new process. I wanted him to be a free-thinker. As I said, over and over, to family and friends and acquaintances, I’m not raising a slave. If unschooling was something that required a mission statement, that would be it: I’m not raising a slave. Of course that means he is free to disagree with me and frequently does; which sometimes raises my parental ire. As I tell him “sometimes, it’s just best to say yes, mom” and leave the “battle” for another day when I’m more open to his entreaties.

Heading into year three, I have to say that I am simply amazed by how much my son learns if I step outside the process! As a result of him sharing what he’s researched, I’ve learned things I had no interest in learning but still…I am amazed and proud. Not only is my son intelligent but he has a sense of self I didn’t have at his age (12) and he feels free to share his growth (although he doesn’t yet see it as such) with me.

Of course, I can’t totally let go of things I think he should know; especially as high school creeps up on the horizon. At this point, I am thinking he should go to the local high school and experience what that is all about. But I am not sure. I don’t want arbitrary standardized testing to negatively impact on his educational growth. I also am firmly opposed to some educational bureaucrat trying to track him. When he was still in traditional school, a teacher called me to advocate for that and I shut that down. Quick, fast and in a hurry.

I was tracked as a kid. My mother, an immigrant, assumed that the educational professionals knew something she didn’t know about her troublesome girl child and let them put me into “special” ed. As painful and contradictory as that decision was, I don’t blame her. I understand, now,  that she didn’t understand the context in which such decisions are made. The minute, figuratively speaking, I graduated from high school, I started reading about education. As “troublesome” as I was, I was never anti-education. I was, simply, anti-school.

One of the books I still remember was authored by Jonathan Kozol. Savage Inequalities changed my educational life but still, I couldn’t totally repudiate my mother’s sensibility because I was raised to respect and honor the elders in my family. The fact that their reality  didn’t correspond to my reality was neither here nor there. It is only now, as I approach 50, that I have the ovaries to say a respectful  yet direct no. I refuse to put my son through what I went through. I will not sacrifice him as I feel as I was sacrificed.

So here we are, approaching the third year of unschooling. I find myself starting to think about the high school on the horizon: whether I actually want him to attend in this current environment and what I need to do to prepare him if the mutual (yet parental-directed) decision is for high school  or to go straight to community college as a readying environment for a 4 year college.

 

 

 

Harmonizing Black Voices through Historical Poetry-Frank X Walker | Free Black Space

“Those familiar with my work already know that I champion Historical Poetry. They also likely know that no other group of poets has done more to define, establish, and make an argument for what clearly is a new genre than contemporary African American poets. No other cohort seems as committed to historical truth, arts activism, and paying tribute to our ancestors. Marilyn Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, and Adrian Matejka, are just a few who continue to pave the way and establish a standard of excellence in this area.”

 

Source: Harmonizing Black Voices through Historical Poetry-Frank X Walker | Free Black Space

My Writing Productivity Pipeline – The Chronicle of Higher Education

A few year ago, lamenting the challenges of this juggling act, senior scholars in my department advised me to start thinking about my manuscripts as occupying different places in a pipeline, with proposals on one end and published articles at the other. The goal: Keep your papers distributed along that pipeline, and flowing through.

Source: My Writing Productivity Pipeline – The Chronicle of Higher Education

I Represent

I Represent

I represent the oppressed black womb
penetrated too early in its development.
No one takes the time to explain abortion
before I am strapped in the clinic gurney
to have the baby he planted scraped out.
One day, I was watching Dora and the next day
my teacher said I was a statistic. I don’t know.
I just know I’m not a little girl any more.

I represent the oppressed black vagina
smothered under an endless stream of men
who push and push but never take the time
to differentiate me from girl 6, 5, 4, 3, 2,
or even the one they call the bottom.
You only see me to call me names:
whore, trick, bitch.
One day I’ll be free of this stroll
and will only respond
to the name my mother gave me.

I represent the oppressed black woman
former stripper, former whore, former convict
who came through hell and back
yet still exudes sulfur.
Five children but crack obliterated
the memories and names of their fathers.
They look at me when I come home
smelling of a hundred billion sold
and say they’re hungry.
My response, before I close the bedroom door is
so am I, babies, so am I.

I represent the oppressed conscious black woman
who has all of her eyes open to see the world
but yet only inhabits 6 square blocks of the concrete jungle.
She sits at night with her seeds reworking homework lessons
of Christmas, Columbus and colonization.
She transforms the three R’s into righteous revolutionary rebellion.

Sometimes, I am allowed to sit in and participate in all of their lives.
Sometimes, the door is shut either angrily or in the silence of defeat.
Either way, I am still a poet and my pen represents the oppressed.

Spectacle Island Reflections

20160627_122507_E 6th St

 

Here, I eat the chips
of childhood;
salt in the air
and salt and vinegar
in my mouth.

Salivating stillness
after the turtle-like triumph
of treading to the top
we put a period
on the promenade.

Proudly private people
we prostrate ourselves
in lounge chairs
designed for that express
purpose.

This is one of the views
that reduces reaction
to irrelevancy.

 

© 2016 Tichaona Munhamo Chinyelu (photo and text)

BOMB Magazine — Four Poems by Kwame Dawes

Lesson
Touring the Penn Center, St. Helena’s, SC

I am wading through the dark morass of history,
Beaufort at dusk fills with humid air from the swamps
and the mangrove of stagnant sea water’s calm
rice ponds, and the muttering old spirits,
the sharp lament of crickets and the trees close in
on us. The ground gives, stretches of white
sand, fresh earth that will not hold bodies.
Everything shifts here and the apocalypse of bodies
given up on holy nights is a common ritual.
I am teaching them about the bloody rituals
of human chattel, shattering all myths, all excuses—
the doctrine that it was ignorance, sheer prehistoric
stupidity that allowed such brute disregard
for the black soul. I am aware of how callous
these students grow to ward off the piss fear
of having no recourse but to weep or shed blood—
truth is the smashing of old comforts. I am telling
Carlos, Jerry, Uniqua to look into the past
of these South lands to find the squalid
histories of their blood; and why must I
offer them such heavy truths, these black
boys and girls who seem desperate for a language
of survival? Oh, that it was not anger, this lesson
of memory I now teach, but how can we touch
such gummy memory without ire? We must all learn
why we tear to hear a blue lament, a flat-toned
spiritual or see the stiff dangling image of a man,
a backdrop for a picnic? This room with its bland
track lighting—this modern orderly space—
grows dense with earth and trees, the stench
of death. In the photo gallery, the faces stare back
at us: country, African, crude images of ourselves—
the students point and laugh as if afraid to admit
the truth staring back shyly in black and white.
Before anger comes the shame or something mocking
like inexplicable laughter. I offer them love—
what I think is the narrative of survival,
then we listen to Mos Def as we drive through
the swamp, the blackening Atlantic at our backs.

 

Source: BOMB Magazine — Four Poems by Kwame Dawes

MEMO TO POETS – kwamedawes.com

#7: If the poem came from God don’t ask me to edit God.

#28: At their best our poems have taught us things we never knew we knew. We just have to let them.

#29: Here is a tricky one: the poem is not so much in the image itself but in the moment that demands the image. Consider it.

#30: Call it subconscious, call it art, but a poem wants to go where it wants to go. If you let it, aahh, bright wings!

#36: You can write about anything you want, but some subjects come with greater responsibility than you may want to take on.

#47: At the very least find out why they say the “greats” are great before you dismiss them for being dead and not like you.

 

Source: MEMO TO POETS – kwamedawes.com

Ross Gay’s Unabashed Gratitude: A Review

I am usually one who avoids reading, let alone reviewing, books until hype had died down. I didn’t change that protocol for Ross Gay and his absolutely sublime Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude even though I had read a poem by him that I absolutely loved in Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Even though I am a poet, it is very rare for me to say that I love a poet’s work because more often than not, I don’t. A poet has to have very special qualities for me to add them to my “love to read” column. I’m sure that they are more academically-educated poets who will wax enthusiastic about Mr. Gay utilizing all the academic terminology at their disposal. This is not that type of review for the simple reason that his poetry makes me happy and yes, grateful.

My feeling (not thought) is dual: he is loved…and he loves those who love him and perhaps fundamentally, loves our planet, Earth. When he writes in “to the mulberry bush” of gobbling berries that a bird has shit on, I feel his joy, his temporal disgust, his delight, his journey from bird to bush to his relationship, I feel the “unabashed gratitude”. As I wrote earlier, he is loved and loves those who love him and our planet and it comes across so clearly, so delightedly, I feel my own unabashed gratitude for his poetry.

That is, essentially, what I wanted to express about this physically slim yet spiritually huge book of poetry: unabashed gratitude.