Poetry
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Originally posted on Marxist Marginalia: I apologize for the rather meager fare which has been on offer here of late. A post is coming soon, I promise, on Richard Wright, communism, and the blues. Until then, here’s a passage from James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1978), in which he addresses the subject…
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My bed is full of ashes ghosts and fingers that creep like vines. I, limbless perambulate the contours of a dream that approaches a nightmare. I am home and horizontal.
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LIVE closes the Fall 2013 season with a conversation between 2013 Library Lion Junot Díaz and the writer who most influenced him, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison.
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Originally posted on Real Colored Girls: In Pimp Theory, a “bottom bitch” is the one in the whores’ hierarchy who rides hardest for her man. She’s the rock of every hustler economy and her primary occupation is keeping other ho’s in check and gettin’ that money. She isn’t trying to elevate the status of her…
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Amandla Awethu I It was 1976. A fine time to be alive in soweto: for a change. (just to be alive is a fine time) We whispered about it on the way home from the school where we were told. (we hated afrikaans too) We uttered the word amongst ourselves. Amandla passed from matchbox house…
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Originally posted on Tichaona Chinyelu: 1. The Cane Fields There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp, the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,…
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forty-six years of diaspora living and finally, i see myself again. forty-six years of living and i refuse to apologize anymore unless i am wrong and wrongness always has a personal and a political component so goodbye, good riddance and good luck. i loved you once. honestly. as freely as i could i loved you…
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The funkiness of fun absolution from writing what seems to be yesteryear. thoughts and memories, the heart and science mingling, interbreeding casting aspersions on the culture somehow still deemed sacrosanct ii echoes of theory resonating in the inner ear and the third eye three hundred and sixty degrees of consciousness includes ascension to humanity still,…
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“Literature is the honey of a nation’s soul, preserved for her children to taste forever, a little at a time! Gikuyu said that he who has put something aside never goes hungry. Do you think Gikuyu was a fool when he said that? A nation that has cast away its literature is a nation that…
Tichaona Chinyelu 