La Guerre
II
earth like a tipsy
biddy with an old mop punching
underneath
conventions exposes
hidden obscenities
nudging
into neglected sentiments brings
to light dusty
heroism
and finally colliding with the most
expensive furniture upsets
a
crucifix which smashes into several
pieces and is hurriedly picked up and
thrown on the ash-heap
where
likes
what was once the discobolus of
one
Myron
I’ve never a writer who is technically proficient in my chosen form: poetry. I’ve taken a couple of poetry classes. The main thing I remember from them is my word choices for a sestina exercise. My classmates came with serious pieces. Me? My sestina was based on song titles from The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill. However, I do read a lot. I read poetry (not as much as I should considering I’m a poet), fiction, non-fiction, historical fiction, etc. These books have been my number one source of absorbing the craft of writing. That is, until I started working on my next book (#4). I realized I needed a jumpstart and after much research, decided on The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. As I work my way through the book and selected exercises, I will be sharing my thoughts and pieces here.
I weave words
like a west african market woman
selling you my vision,
my mangoes, my papayas, even
my coconuts.
My finished product
can be held up to the sun,
illuminated, made to shine.
The skins of my poems
have been submerged in mud
then laid at the bottom
of the baobab tree
to dry
like mudcloth.
The blood of my poems
can be as dry as the sahara
as wet as monsoons
as cutting as a machete
in the hands of the mau mau.
I weave blood into my words:
red blood, dried blood, youngblood.
An over-saturation of blood decorates my words,
makes them pulse red.
My words hang from trees
like the bitterest kind
of strange fruit.
My words find the peruvian revolutionaries
murdered while hogtied
and then buried in criminal secrecy.
My words were inspired
by rigoberta menchu.
I roots rock reggae with my words
have them jamming
to the heartbeat rhythm
of the warmest music.
The fabric of my words is at its lightest
when it’s in the dancehall
or the yard.
My words sweep over people
like the softest caribbean breezes.
My words will have you
dreaming of blue skies,
white sands and coral reefs
and while you’re dreaming
I weave black people
into my words and I am done.
My finished product
can be held up to the sun
illuminated, made to shine.
Excerpted from In the Whirlwind
©2004 Tichaona Chinyelu
I was on Goodreads early this morning and saw a poem by ee cummings that was absolutely lovely. Possessing as I do E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems, I went in search of it. It’s one of a 5 part poem called La Guerre. I will post one part of the poem each day for the next five days.
La Guerre
I.
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchinly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
Even though I love that the fact that it is no way, shape or form landlocked, Boston has never been my favorite place to live. I’ve never been able to put my finger on exactly why. We (the city and I) have simply been at odds. Despite that fact, I currently reside in Greater Boston; in the small city of Cambridge, aka Moscow on the Charles. The “Moscow” aspect is a Cold War reference designed to indicate Cambridge’s radicalism – as if the Cambridge Police Department is full of leftists.
But I digress.
Since I have committed to be here, it kinda behooves me to have a historical understanding of the place where I am raising my son. I came across A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 while rummaging through an actual, physical bookstore. I immediately added it to my pile and carried it to the checkout aisle.
Several days ago, I started reading it. I have to admit that I am learning things I never knew; such as the fact that the currently prestigious Back Bay section of Boston used to be known as the Receiving Basin and said Basin
[…] became polluted quickly since sewers continued to drain into the area and, because of the dam system, tides no longer washed it out twice daily. In the 1830’s two railroad lines were built across the Back Bay on low embankments and trestle bridges that extended over the mudflat. These lines further reduced water flow in the Receiving Basin, which further increased pollution.
It was the prodigious proposal to fill and populate the Receiving Basin that is most commonly referred to as the Back Bay landfill project.
And then this:
[… ] A City Council-commissioned report described the dire condition of the Back Bay. ‘(It is) one of nuisance, offensive and injurious to the large and increasing population residing upon it…The Back Bay at this hour is nothing less than a great cesspool, into which is daily deposited all the filth of a large and constantly increasing population.’ Trash and refuse were thrown into the bay from the Mill Dam, and wharf rats scurried in, out, and across the seawall. ‘Every west wind sends its (the Back Bay’s) pestilential exhalations across the entire city… (and) a greenish scum, many yards wide, stretches along the shores of the basin…while the surface of the water beyond is seen bubbling like a cauldron, with the noxious gases that are exploding from the corrupting mass below.’
Back Bay Boston, 1850’s (aka then)
Back Bay from Prudential Center, Boston MA
Stephen Puleo does an effective job of describing some of the blood girding the transformation of the Back Bay. However, having almost reached the halfway mark, I have to say it is, effectively, an Eurocentric take the history. The struggle the Irish had in Boston is mentioned enough to be described as significant (if there wasn’t a population of work-hungry Irish, drunken roustabout Irish and children of Irish women with stalwart Catholic beliefs) there would’ve been no workers to fill in the Back Bay to make it the exclusive neighborhood it is today.
Now I understand that the Irish built the Back Bay of Boston in the same way I understand that the Chinese built the railroads. However, while the Irish were doing that, what were the black people of Boston doing? If it is truly a history of ‘the rise of an american metropolis’, then it has to include all members of that metropolis who contributed to its rise. Did Black people not contribute to the rise of Boston? According to this book, Black people didn’t, not even as footnotes. Of course, I am barely at the halfway mark but still, the absence is obvious enough to be mentioned.
I can, and do, appreciate the irony (appropriateness?) of a currently exclusive neighborhood being built on pestilence. However, the lack of inclusiveness is such that it renders such appreciation pale and anemic.
I have been deficient. The deficiency is particularly sad because I, an African woman, should be further along in meeting the African reading challenge than I am. To be honest, most of my current reading is research for my next book but still…
Therefore, after I finish the book I”m currently reading, A City So Grand, The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850 – 1900, I will restart and finish Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga; start and finish Griots and Griottes by Thomas Hale. After that, I’m not sure although I know it will be fiction.
I am no athlete. I have not won an individual sports competition since maybe the second grade. I recall Usaining all comers in the 40-yard dash but, as Kasi Lemmons learned us, “memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others indelibly imprinted on the brain” and I might have photoshopped that one.
My middle school basketball team dominated the Seattle Catholic Youth Organization league but that was due to the AAU players on my team: Megan, petite with Chris Paul’s smarts and speed; and June, a Russell Westbrook-esque scorer.
With high school came the freshman basketball team, aka junior varsity cuts. Public school competition and talent defections resulted in us losing every game of the season. Each timeout we, headstrong and skill-poor, loudly militated against the directives of our sweet coach Leo. My dad, a brief overseas basketball pro and former international basketball coach, spent most of…
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I am a mad reader, no doubt. Over the 30 days, I have added about 10 books to my to-be-read pile. I routinely adjust my Goodreads currently reading list. Recently, I attempted to put a bit more discipline to my reading list by deciding to finish one book before I start another. I wish I could bring such orderliness to my writing process. I have become a haphazard writer – especially during this current summer. Of course, I have legitimate reasons for that state of affairs. I had surgery in June. I am the mother to an 8-year-old boy who likes to do things with me just when I sit down to type. I no longer have hours upon hours to wrangle feeling inspired into the poems at the base of said inspiration. Despite my belief in, and acceptance of, Toni Morrison’s statement about writer’s block, I sometimes worry about not writing as regularly as I used to. Can I still call myself a writer if several weeks and/or months go by without putting down a single satisfactory word? Earlier today, a right-on-time blog entry by writer Kiini Iburi Salaam came across my Facebook wall and helped chill me out in that regard. Here’s her lead-in remarks:
”People who haven’t published always say “I’m not really a writer.” But a writer is a writer–to the bone. You can hear it when they speak, it spills out of their emails and their thoughts, it is in their be-ingness and whether they share it with the world or not, whether the world buys into their vision or not, that writer-ness is not going anywhere! Whether it was born in the bones or later took up residence in the writer’s flesh, once it is settled in your body, it is there to stay!
Similarly, once you have been a writer, that is always a part of your identity, even if you never write again. In the below link, I come to peace with being a writer, not writing, and what I was making writing mean.”
When I became pregnant, I made the conscious decision to a full-time stay-at-home mother. Eight years later, I have come to the conclusion that what I thought was a personal decision is more than that. It is political. It has been made abundantly clear to me that such a decision is supposed to be only the purview of married women whose husbands work at jobs where they earn a wage that makes the lack of two incomes a non-issue. It is not a decision that society permits low income, not-completely college-educated women-such as myself. My status as a mother is, apparently, qualified by the pejorative “single” as if the way I mother my son is somehow qualitatively different than the way I would mother him if his father and I hadn’t divorced before he was conceived…and also by the fact that I turned down his father’s remarriage request after our son was conceived.
The links below provided today discuss this “situation” in terms that define the saying “the personal is political”.
http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/23/single-mother-myth:
As long as our society is organized around the existence of the nuclear family, no matter how mythical that ideal has become, those who live outside it will be punished. In our society, the entire cost of raising the next generation of workers is pushed onto the private family. This represents a massive savings for those who run this society. Women’s unpaid labor in the home–in the U.S. alone–represents more than $1.4 trillion each year, according to the estimate of United Nations researchers in 1995.
Rather than opining on whether [Marissa] Mayer will be a good mommy, what we really ought to be talking about is why the workplace remains so incompatible with motherhood in the first place – and why we assume that fixing that incompatibility is women’s work.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS INTO my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.
Reflecting on the absence of work within the frame of U.S. environmentalism, Richard White explains, “Environmentalists so often seem self-righteous, privileged, and arrogant because they so readily consent to identifying nature with play and making it by definition a place where leisured humans come only to visit and not to work, stay, or live” (173). In White’s view, American environmentalism has been foolishly ignoring work as a useful context for progressive change. Seeing work as something that we stop doing to enjoy the leisurely experience of nature has not been enough to advance environmentalists’ causes; it merely supports the notion that “the original human relation with nature was one of leisure and that the first white men in North America glimpsed and briefly shared that relation” (White 175). In shifting our attention to the ecological frame I set forth in the introduction, I am inspired by White’s assertion that a focus on work can better inform discourse about the natural world.’ One benefit of thinking in this direction may be a clearer appreciation of human beings as part of a larger natural workforce that includes nonhuman nature. In her book The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us, Yvonne Baskin points out that “ethical and moral pleas for saving species still predominate” in American environmental efforts and that “human societies have a sad history of setting moral burdens aside while acquiring more comfortable or prosperous lifestyles.” She concludes that “stewardship” and “moral commitment ha[ve] proven a slippery foundation for conservation” (13-14). Baskin suggests that appealing to human interests in self-preservation may encourage greater advocacy for the “life-support services” of nonhuman nature, such as oxygen and food supply. She writes, “Self-preservation is no substitute for ethics, but it’s a strong companion, less easily brushed aside in the hubbub of business as usual” (223). Indeed, identifying ourselves as natural workers can move us toward greater compatibility with the work that nonhuman nature is doing. In other words, seeing ourselves as one type of natural worker may encourage us to better appreciate the ecological consequences of all our actions, whether they are related to our jobs or our recreation.
An ecocritical focus on work also has the benefit of more accurately representing the lives of Americans in the past. This could give us a better sense of the daily lived ecological experiences of African Americans during enslavement and other working Americans. As Al Young writes, “Most Americans [in the nineteenth century] … who knew anything about nature, knew it through work. They hunted and trapped or fished for food; they farmed and preserved” (Deming and Savoy 117). What does it mean when work, rather than leisure, is your central ecological experience? What does it mean when work is compounded by the inconvenient history of enslavement? What happens when work and enslavement influence our discussions about ecology in contemporary America?
Kimberly N. Ruffin. Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (pp. 26-28). Kindle Edition.
Tichaona Chinyelu 
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