And a Happy New Year!

Well. Another year’s over and another one’s about to begin (or so they say). I’ve laid out my goals and objectives for 2011. This is not the place for the discussion of them but it is a place for discussion of my literary goals – or more precisely what will be on my reading list for 2011; considering my developing interest in reviewing books. So here it is – my haphazard, in no particular order reading list for 2011:

Omeros by Derek Walcott
The Odyssey by Homer
Ulysses in Black by Patrice Rankine

The three books listed above are a kind of trifecta of research into epics and the way in which epics can be utilized by writers in a more modern configuration.

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler – I read it years ago. Reread it again very recently. And will be reading it again since I’m going to be reviewing it.

The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent – Almost a year ago, I wrote an initial review of this book where I basically panned it. However, I said I would go back and actually finish it. That’s why it’s on this list.

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James – I’ve had this book in my possession for almost two decades now but have yet to finish it – even though history is one of my major loves. I vow to finish it this year!

The Autobiography of Leroi Jones by Amiri Baraka – I got this book a few years ago and it’s been transported from the bedroom to the bathroom to the front room until finally taking up residence on an upper book shelf. It’s time to take it down, dust it off and finish it.

So much of what I read seems to be by well-established writers so I’m happy about the following three books:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – I’ve been seeing her name everywhere and then someone on facebook posted the video of her talking about the dangers of a single story. Couple that with knowing next to nothing about Biafra and the book becomes a logical choice for someone who, sometimes, approaches history through literature first.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith – I had won this after answering a difficult quiz question over at Color Online. I started it and the humor of it reminded me of John Irving whose books I’ve found hysterical in the past.

Graceland by Chris Abani – This book has been sitting quietly on my shelf for quite a few years now. So it’s long overdue.

Aké by Wole Soyinka – I had started reading this shortly after I bought it earlier this year but notions of the Wild Christian sent me off into the deep end of laughter and I haven’t returned yet.

2011 looks to be quite a reading year.

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez – a Book Review

I was all set to give Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez a half nod when I remembered a survey type of conversation I participated in a few years back. The questions we [a bunch of writers loosely connected through an online writing board] were asked was this: if we lived as slaves in America, what type of slave would we be: the house negro or the Harriet Tubman/Nat Turner type. Most of the responses centered on being Black Moses and Turner.  The pollster said that she herself wasn’t sure. Her response made me think especially because I was one of those cleaving to the Tubman dynamic. All enslaved Africans didn’t adhere to flight/fight mode. What of those who bore the genocidal nature of chattel slavery silently? What of those whose names we don’t know because the only worthy thing they did was to survive? With this book, Wench, we find the story of four such characters – Lizzie, Rennie, Sweet and Mawu – some of whom possess the inclination to flee. The four women are brought together over a series of summers in the decade or so before the Civil War when their “owners” vacation at Tawawa House in Tawawa Springs, Ohio – a free state. [A brief history note – due to the continual presence of slaveholders and their slaves, the hotel started losing money. The hotel, the land and surrounding acreage was sold and very shortly thereafter became Wilberforce University, now the oldest African-American private university in the US]

The series of events that the four slave mistresses (and their male companions – both enslaved and free) experience during the course of a series of summers testifies to the will to survive – a will with a contrary existence in a society which thrived off negation of that selfsame will. My change of heart (from that initial half nod to one more affirming) came as I delved deeper into the book. Of particular interest was the main character, Lizzie [named Eliza but renamed Lizzie by her owner’s wife after he moved her into the big house].  She commits actions that a surface reading of would have one labeling her as a collaborator in her own oppression – not to say anything of the harm her actions inflict on other characters. However, as I read further, I realized that life under slavery wasn’t so black and white (no pun intended). It is quite effective the way in which Perkins-Valdez leads the reader into a deeper understanding of the nature of slavery to the point of saying maybe – maybe I would have been like Eliza – concerned most of all about my children – wondering what the “Master” would do to them if I broke and run. Maybe, falling into human puppy love with the person convinced he owns you and having sex with him was considered a workable exchange for learning to read – and subsequently reading stolen newspapers to those who share your bondage. Maybe. Just maybe. That maybe moves slightly in direction of potentiality when I read in the author’s note following the end of the novel that “it is believed that the children of the unions between the slave women and the slaveholders were among the early students at [Wilberforce]”.

The Resurrecting Writer Series: Jean Toomer

The writing prompt for this week’s participants in the Literary Blog Hop over at the Blue Bookcase website is what is the most difficult literary work you’ve ever read? What made it so difficult? The question immediately to mind the book I’m currently reading, Cane by Jean Toomer – and the problems I’m having finishing it. 

I have tried; sincerely, honestly tried. To be honest, it’s not because the book is unreadable or because I don’t like it. I do like it and it is readable. However, I’m finding it difficult to read Cane like a regular novel. There are no main characters and/or narrators. Perhaps I’m being too linear but it seems as if the only thing holding the diverse set of characters together is Sparta, the early twentieth-century rural Georgia town they all inhabit. Toomer wrote the town in such a way that it seems hell bent on being the stage on which the stories and poems are presented and he did so with a clear mastery of language. Cane is undeniably visual and therein lies the reason I find it difficult to read it continuously. The short prose pieces are so packed with imagery I think of them more as vignettes; literary vignettes I can put down, ponder over and return to.

As I end part one, I find myself putting it down to ponder some of the characters, particularly Karintha. On the surface, the two page chapter on Karintha appears to deal with what today would be called pedophilia:

Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child. Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Old men rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripe a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.

I found myself curious as to why Toomer, a Harlem Renaissance writer, would choose to start Cane with such a topic. Why have the opening gambit be a tale about how a young girl in the process of growing up became the town prostitute? In fact, the majority of the stories in the section I’ve read so far focus on women. So much so, that I found myself noticing similarities with some of Toomer’s literary descendants; particularly Alice Walker (setting) and Ntozake Shange (language).

I know Alice Walker read Toomer. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she wrote the following:

A few of us will realize that Cane was not only his finest work but that it is also in part based on the essence of stories told to Toomer by his grandmother, she of the ‘dark blood’ to whom the book is dedicated, and that many of the women in Cane are modled on the tragic indecisiveness and weakness of his mother’s life. I also wondered if he received flack for writing about the abuse some black women experience as Walker and Shange did. Cane was for Toomer a double ‘swan song.’ He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying good-bye to the ‘Negro’ he felt dying in himself. Cane then is a parting gift, and no less precious because of that. I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep its beauty, but let him go.

Well, as I said in the beginning, I am letting go of the book for now. What I term Cane’s vignette style, in my opinion, doesn’t support a straight through to the end type of reading. Nonetheless it is still highly valued literature for its written-with-love and extremely lyrical depictions of life in the town of Sparta, Georgia and I will definitely complete it.

Simply streaming day 2 (waiting on she)

Over the past few days, I’ve had several blocks of time when I was all alone. Just me by my lonesome. And I loved it, every single millisecond! It tempts  me to issue a request of the universe and ask for one week; one week when my son is somewhere safe where he can have as much fun as his 6 year old self can handle; a week where I am totally alone: no 5:30 am wake-ups by bright brown eyes which look confused when I say it’s too early to go outside. Oh a week of not having to explain daily that during summer, Ra wakes up early and goes to bed late. A week of not having to plot and plan out meals. A week of watching stubby lil fingers zero in on the meat/chicken/fish to the exclusion of everything else. A week of not having to say eat your food or explain why it’s important to eat fruits and vegetables over and over again. A week where I wonder what on earth I was doing being a mother; let alone to this child who can manifest my best and worst qualities (mule headedness, intelligence, compassion, selfishness) in the space of one hour. A week where I learn to love the sound of my voice again.

So. Yes. So consider this my request, Universe. One week; a week, I want to specify, where my son is with someone who has his best interests at heart and who understand this parent’s need to not here daily reports. A person who will just send me pictures and not call me in a panic because mule headedness won out over other emotions.

simply streaming day 1

yesterday, i blogged under a new theme: simply streaming: writing whatever comes to mind and posting. i’ve decided to set myself the challenge of simply streaming for 30 days starting today. of course  being a writer, such posts will be edited – minimally.  as someone commented on a previous blog, i rarely use capitalization when i’m blogging. in fact, as a poet, i find the whole capital – lowercase thing problematic. i never like how my poems look when i use standard grammatical rules. poems are not novels. novels are supposed to have structure…even if it’s a deconstructed structure. so to free myself of constraints in this undertaking , you will rarely see capital letters in simply streaming. let the words flow like water…undammed.

shitty dreams. shitty dreamers. that’s just want floated through my mind at this moment in time. it’s a kinda harsh juxtaposition: shit and dreams. maybe that’s why i don’t like either kind. who knows. i do know that a decision i made about five years ago was the right one. i also begin to understand that why i entered this year thinking it’s gonna be my year. i thought whatever it was about this year that made it “mine”, was going to involve writing but now i realize it’s all about independence and declaring it. i am free now. the die is cast and it spells out amandla tichaona.

freedom, of course, is scary. scary and humbling. but every person in the world, i repeat, every person in the world deserves freedom simply by being born and as i so aptly wrote in my younger years: i wasn’t born to die.

the things children say

my child asked me the other day if someone we’re familiar with "thinks well"? i laughed and laughed. what a question from a six yr old! after i finished laughing (and calling everyone i know) i asked him "do you want the truth or a child appropriate answer?

he’s my child: he wanted the truth.

"some people just have ‘boo-boos’ in their head but don’t think they have boo=boos in their head. they think you have the boo-boo”. my son looked at my like i was crazy. i started laughing. “it’s true!” 

of course, being a child, he still wants to talk to this person. the innocence of children. such innocence is admirable but in the real world such innocence is at a premium. i can’t have my lil black star be a sitting duck for the irresponsible people {aka boo-boo heads”} of the world but what i’m realizing and accepting [with sincere thanks to the universe] is that it’s not my battle. it’s his.

my psyche will not be the landscape on which this “battle” will be fought; his will. my only duty to him in this matter is to make sure he comes through without a boo-boo of his own in his precious head.

simply streaming

i don’t know why but in the midst of watching planet b-boy, this poem by langston hughes crossed my mind:

Militant

Let all who will
Eat quietly the bread of shame.
I cannot,
Without complaining loud and long,
Tasting its bitterness in my throat,
And feeling to my very soul
It’s wrong.
For honest work
You proffer me poor pay,
For honest dreams
Your spit is in my face,
And so my fist is clenched
Today –
To strike your face. *

i don’t know why I thought about that poem. or why my secondary thought was that it was written in 1967 [one last poetical blast at the system known as “the” man] and was influenced by the Panthers. Wrong. It was one of many poems written between 1921 – 1930.

knowing that, it makes me want to reread a book assigned during a past history class: The Hungry Years. The opening sentence to the preface reads: “a generation of witnesses is passing”. That’s a phrase that’s becoming part of my general lexicon. The generation that witnessed the Depression is passing. The generation that witnessed the holocaust is passing. The generation that witnessed the civil rights movement will soon be passing; that is, if the death of constance baker and coretta scott king doesn’t signify that the generation has already passed.

the older i get the more i question the significance of the melancholy in that phrase. i mean, witnesses witness…and in order for their witnessing to be of relevance, there has to be a record of it. as evidenced by the remembered book , there are plenty of eyewitness recollections of the depression in print to satisfy future generations as well as historians.

i prefer the history that is unknown and/or under-valued: the history referenced in the phrase “tales of the hunt will always be weak until the lion learns to speak“.

since i’m simply streaming, i’ll end with one of my pieces that i think is fitting:

180 of 360 and still spinning

Wrapping my hair in the colors of liberation
I expose my neck while balancing on my history.
My trifecta of eyes can now absorb and reflect whatever
Needs to be repudiated or reciprocated.
I can bleed on the page as well as cauterize my own wounds.
I am an Afrikan woman.
I can ride the spectrum of my emotions
without feeling lesser or more than.
I just am

always evolving and revolving like revolutions.**

* The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

** Contraband Marriage

A Rose by any Other Name

Today, I came across a site called NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). I was immediately inspired by the suggestion for today’s blog post: How Do You Feel About the Name given to you at birth?

I do not possess the name I was given at birth. We parted ways, legally, over a decade ago. Since assuming my true name my life has changed in fundamental ways. I have gotten married and divorced. I had a child and he’ll be entering first grade in September. I have written and published three books. I have published the work of three other authors. However, the change that underlines and informs all other changes is that I am more myself.

My mother let my father name me and he named me according to naming practices which also decided his name. I was the first daughter of my mother so my name was ordained. Apparently, it wasn’t significant that my dad had two older daughters; one of whom happened to be the first daughter of her mother. Therefore she and I shared the same name. With the hindsight of 20/20, it seemed as if I was designed to fit into a construct; one which didn’t fit. As a result, I was Toby with his foot cut off, not Kunta who had a penchant for running from slavery.

When I learned about freedom, I wanted to be free and freedom meant a new name. Frederick Douglass, not Frederick Bailey. Harriet Tubman, not Araminta Ross. Assata Shakur, not JoAnne Cheismard. In other words, I wanted the freedom that comes with self-naming. However, ironies of ironies, in obtaining that freedom, I became more bound to my family, more my mother’s daughter, more decidedly African than I had been under my birth name. To quote a Bessie Head character, “I [was] just an African”.

Mothers of the Revolution (Saying Yes)

Twelve years ago, before I was a Mother myself, I gave my Mom a copy of Mothers of the Revolution. Reading the subheading of the book: The War Experiences of Zimbabwean women, she thought it was going to be the war experiences of gun-toting nappy-haired women who don’t hesitate to shoot upon seeing the white of someone’s skin. But it wasn’t. It was about the quiet, non glamorous, non-romanticized work of revolution; the work that is so quiet we don’t normally see it unless it’s not there…or unless it’s a threat to the dehumanizing status quo.

The whole question of motherhood, revolution and writing has been on my mind lately due to a conversation I had with a sister-friend about the sacrifices inherent in good mothering/parenting. She says that she may not be cut out for motherhood because she wants to be able to spend time writing and having mornings in bed, etc. Oh, how I can relate! What wouldn’t I give for just a week of that!! Then I look at my chocolate bundle of goodness, stubbornness and just plain 6 yr old boyness and I think no. Mornings in bed alone or with a man or a book or music or just the sunshine streaming through the window can’t compare with his scream of laughter when I tickle him in his armpits or the tightness of his arms when he comes to me for a hug after being hurt or even the endless questions that have me telling him to hush.

What’s even more ironic about her position is the fact that she had previously informed me, during one of my venting sessions, that my Son is now my revolution. I had understood that since writing

Sankara Mantra (7 Months)

Lashes like mine
Eyes like mine
even in the way
they peruse a room
Skin like mine
but darker.

A bafflement inside me
every time I hear him
referred to as black.
(how’d you get such a black baby?)

It has happened twice.
Just like my response.
(black is beautiful.)

His mouth like his father’s.
He even smirks like him
causing an almost instantaneous
transfer of affection.

Sankara
whose birth filled the holes
that were consuming my heart

Sankara
who is entranced by his reflection
in the mirror
has begun to stand.

I am in awe of his determination
and the fact that
at barely seventeen pounds
his head is already past my knees.

Sankara
who I brought into an oppressive world
clutches his walker with his pudgy fingers
and walks completely around it.

I watch with a joy that is miraculous.

Sankara
Who I brought into an oppressive world
is owed happiness and well-being
and that is a debt I will pay
like Malcolm said
by any means necessary.

 

Still even though I love my revolution too deeply to ever to ever abstain, this quiet work sometimes gets to me.  I once wanted to be louder than oppression. Now I find myself writing poems about wanting quiet! The same sister-friend mentioned earlier says it’s due to maturity but I miss immature me!  I miss the woman who wrote oppression should be shot down like john f. kennedy. I don’t quite know the woman who wants it quiet like days at ocean beach. I don’t know much of anything except there’s a richness to my life that wasn’t there before…no matter how much I gave of myself to the people and causes I believe in.

I guess I just have to unite womb and mind. The pre-mother me heard Tupac say “I’m your son” and even though he wasn’t talking to me, I said yes. And now that I’m a mother, I’m still saying yes.

 

Links:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/zimbabwe/miscauthors/mothers1.html

Louder than Oppression

My Spirit Talks

napowrimo 2010

i didn’t make it. thirty poems in thirty days seems to be beyond me. last year i lasted about a week. this year, i did about a total of two weeks worth but it was haphazard. some days, i wouldn’t write/post anything. two days later, i’d write/post two or three poems.  the week my son was on april vacation, i didn’t write/post anything. oh well. so it goes…or so i thought until i did a mental run through.

i already knew poems have gestational periods but i learned i can hold the amniotic sac of a poem in my mind until i can tend to it. I learned i can craft the lil pieces of life released from the sac into something worthy of sharing…as well as being the seed of something greeter. i’ve also learned not to neglect what’s left behind in the sac.  basically, i learned to be a tiny bit more disciplined with the craft i call my calling.

30 days will come
and 30 days will go
with the assignment incomplete
but still
i be smithing
words
into new iron
configurations