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A talk with Lucille Clifton / "You end with a progression from having been somewhere to going somewhere; and it is all about evolving, motion, and it is, of course, about blessings ... I am the one who talks about it ... the only mercy is memory ... the only hell is regret"

2011-06-20T12:01:00.001-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

There’s a scene in the movie Lucky Number Slevin where Bruce Willis’ character, Goodkat, is explaining the Kansas City Shuffle, describing it as a moment “when everybody looks right, you go left.” The Kansas City Shuffle, you see, is about encountering the unexpected, and being awed by its impact.

By this definition, Lucille Clifton is queen of the Kansas City Shuffle. Her works deliver the unexpected by infusing meaning in both what appears and what is omitted. She doesn’t rely on punctuation or capitalization. She peregrinates along the shores of tenderness and understanding. She writes sparsely, but with a neurosurgeon’s precision. She employs words lightly, using them economically to transport hefty truths that are often rooted in her own autobiography. She gives voice to experiences -- of blackness, of woman-ness, of victim-ness -- traditionally ignored in the wider literary canon.

In this conversation with playwright and fellow poet, Grace Cavalieri, Clifton explores an array of issues as she spins from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ on the axis of life’s alphabet, tackling, along the way, abortion, abuse, beauty, blues, children, death, flow, language, mercy, music, poetry, religion, and salvation. Clifton also shares a sprinkling of her classic poems, such as “blessing the boats” and “donor.” The result is a dialogue with resonance for not only those of you who love language and use it to make sense of yourselves and your worlds, but also for those of you who love your very worlds, and who engage, willingly and unwillingly, in the perennial struggle to locate and protect the soft center of an easily charred humanity, your own and that of others.

Spend a blissful half hour, at least, eavesdropping on this conversation. You will discover, in every sentence, a new reason to exalt the complexity and tenacity of the human spirit, your own and that of others. “won’t you celebrate with me” Clifton asks. Won’t you?

The Poet and the Poem: An Interview with Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton (LC): This opening poem is called “blessing the boats.”

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Grace Cavalieri (GC): Well, we have been looking at your work for a number of years, and Blessing the Boats won the National Book Award, and maybe you will talk about the title poem.

LC: Alright. It’s interesting that “blessing the boats” was a poem that I didn’t realize was so relevant to so many things. I’ve had people say they read it at weddings. I’ve had people say they read it at funerals. I understood the relevance and it seems to have caught on.

GC: Well the poem itself is about movement. You end with a progression from having been somewhere to going somewhere; and it is all about evolving, motion, and it is, of course, about blessings.

LC: Even the negative kind. I can understand the feeling that all the boats haven’t been wonderful, but one appreciates them as part of life anyway.

GC: And that’s what your work is about, that is what all your work is about. These are “new and selected poems,” and the present poem you’re going to read.

LC: This is a poem written to my youngest daughter when I had a kidney transplant. She donated her kidney to me, and what I think is interesting is this: I had six children in six and a half years, and she was the youngest, and she was the child I tried ... I did quite a number of things to not have her ... which she knows very well; I don’t keep things like secrets from my children. And I did things that I say are still illegal. But, she was bound and determined to be born.

GC: With the ‘fierce frown of an angel.’

LC: Yes. And she said to me that if she had been able to talk, she would have said, “Give me thirty years, and you’re gonna need me!”

GC: And so you did.

LC: So I did. This is called “donor”

to lex.

When they tell me that my body
might reject
i think of thirty years ago
and the hangers i shoved inside
hard trying to not have you.
i think of the pills, the everything
i gathered against your
inconvenient bulge; and you
my stubborn baby child,
hunched there in the dark
refusing my refusal.
suppose my body does say no
to yours. again, again i feel you
buckled in despite me, lex,
fastened to life like the frown
on an angel’s brow.

GC: And she came in quite handy.

LC: And it’s interesting, because people say, well do you love her more than you do the other children now? No! Not at all. It’s not like that.

GC: Not about quantifying. And your work is, well, Faulkner says there’s no such thing as “was,” so your work is always about all time to me. It’s about the past, it’s about history, it’s about family. It’s not about chronology. It’s always about right now. And that is the thing I think people and critics are saying about your work. Whatever you used to write is relevant now.

LC: I feel that nothing is lost, that history is still here, now. And the only way to deal with history really, is to recognize that it is still part of us, which in our country we tend to not have done, as much as we might have. So much of American history is not validated, because it is seen sometimes as negative. I know there are negative things, but I think that we have to bless all the boats, as I said earlier.

GC: Where shall we go now, Lucille? I was thinking: what might be the nouns that describe Lucille?

LC: Family, very much. Woman. Uterus, in several poems. Well, I’m the Queen of Body Parts! Yes, I feel that body parts are not celebrated enough. In our culture, we like to think that, oh I’ve said this before, and I hope it’s not too risqué; it isn’t risqué, it’s human. But men have said to me, you write about body parts all the time! And I have said that if I had only one interesting one, I probably wouldn’t write about it a lot either.

I do believe the poems come to me, and I accept them. I believe that I am always available to poetry. I know people who say they write during the summertime or something, I don’t see how you can do that. When I’m writing, I’m writing. When I’m not, I’m preparing to write, really, because I’m taking in. But I know how to answer a poem, and poems know that I am available, and so they come to me. I really do feel it’s that way.

GC: And you’ve never said, “No Thank You” to one.

LC: Not yet. Even though it’s difficult sometimes. In a new collection, I have a poem that was hard for me to write. It’s a poem about abuse. And I know that abuse is a subject that is not talked about in our country, and yet it’s rampant, and I wanted to write this poem, though it was difficult, but I did.

GC: You have actually written many poems that are shockers. That hit you right in the chest, and we will hear some of them today. Because, after all, that is your canon of work.

LC: And it’s about being human. And being human doesn’t mean that it’s always wonderful, and you’ve done all the really swell things. It’s sort of about recognizing all of the elements of human-ness.

GC: Well ... you say what you mean.

LC: And that’s all I mean! I, for instance, I have a poem called “the lost baby poem,” and when it is taught, it is taught oftentimes in schools, as if it were about miscarriages... and it’s about abortions. And the only reason it is taught as about miscarriages, I think, is because teachers wish their students, and wish themselves to think I’m a nice person. And obviously if you’ve had an abortion, you can’t be a nice person. I disagree completely with that, you know. And I’ve had students come up to me and say, you know, “Isn’t that about an abortion?” And I say, “yes”, and they say, “my teacher says it’s about a miscarriage.” And I always say don’t, you know, they’d prefer to believe that, and it’s okay.

GC: This is true. Beneath every poem, there is another poem.

LC: Another poem is about my sister -- I had a sister who was a prostitute. And she was wonderful, and, look, I wasn’t the only sister who had a sister who was a prostitute, I am the one who talks about it.

GC: And writes poems about it.

LC: Yes. So that poem is called “here rests.”. My sister died, oh, years back, years back. She was quite something.

GC: What an elegy that poem must be. What was the pimp like?

LC: Oh, he was nice. They once visited when I was going to come to Howard University. I went to Howard in the fifties and they took me to lunch once. I was sixteen, and I had never been away from home. And they sat me down, and had a list of places in D.C. that if they heard I appeared there, they would be pretty angry, and they would get me about it. And so I never went to any of those places, because I was pretty sure they’d know.

GC: Watching out for you.

LC: Yes. Well, we were family, you know.

GC: Tell us about Mama. Your Mama stories are well known.

LC: Of course everybody’s mother was a saint, except mine really was. I should say that my mother dropped dead when she was forty four years old, a month before my oldest daughter was born. But when I went to Howard, I had never been away from home. I won a full scholarship. Oh, they were very proud, though they had no idea where Howard was. And when I went there, we were so poor, I had taken my grandmother’s chest, her trunk, and I was embarrassed by it. It was tied with ropes. So I had it put in the basement at Howard, and then I would unpack at night, so people wouldn’t see this trunk. And when we got off the train, several of us from the neighborhood, a gentleman, I think he was a sophomore - you were met at the train station by people, by upper class people - and he came to my friend, her name was Betty Dixon, (Betty if you’re listening, you might remember this), and he said to her “Oh, you’re so cute, you’ll really last here, you’ll have a good time.” And he looked at me and said, “And you must be her mother.” And I thought, I hate this place, and as soon as I eat, I’m going home. But I insisted on lunch first. And then when I got on campus, I saw wealthy African Americans. I had never seen them before. And I called home, and I said, “Mama! They got matching robes and slippers!” and she said, “Baby, it’s the good life.” And that’s what she wanted for me, the good life.

GC: The title poem of your book. “Mercy.” Mercy on all of us that do anything to anyone. I think women poets have done so much, talking about their beginnings, Maya Angelou too. And everyone who has the courage to push back the border one more inch, so we can say one more thing, so one more child can know eventually she’s not alone.

LC: That seems important. I think we have a tendency to believe that bad things happen to people who are in a pathologic situation, something like that. But I’ve read poems about abuse -- I remember some years back -- to a group of faculty wives at Princeton. And they were furious, they did not like me particularly because I seemed to not hate my father. And, you know, it’s a very complicated thing, very complicated. But hate doesn’t solve anything. And this does not mean that I think that everything’s okay. I do not. I do not.

GC: Or you would not have written that poem. Because that is the act of salvation.

LC: Because a bad thing happened. And a bad thing happens a lot, and we must go on realizing that the world is full of bad things, quite often.

GC: It sounds terrific -- “for Mercy.” How did that word come to you? The simplest words, like Richard Wilbur said, work best. Sometimes love is the best word you can say. And sometimes I-love-you, is the most important thing you could say. So, how did Mercy visit you?

LC: Well, first of all, it’s based on the -- I never know whether it’s epigram or epigraph, and I don’t care so much. But it was based on something -- this book is based on my daughter who died, and there was something -- a line I had in different poem in a different book, called ‘the only mercy is memory.’ And this book is something about memory. And so ‘mercy’ seemed right, and once I could say it to myself, it did seem to be the name of the book.

GC and LC: The only mercy is memory.

LC: The only hell is regret. (source/full text)

Mambu Badu, number one: Memory

2011-06-15T12:01:00.002-04:00

This was an experiment of sorts. Three photographers, two coasts, one dream.

Three photographers: myself, Allison McDaniel, and Danielle Scruggs.

Two coasts: Bay Area, CA and the DMV.

One dream: Mambu Badu, a photography collective that seeks to find, expose and nurture emerging female photographers of African descent.

The numbers are important. 3 ... 2 ... 1 and now we blast off.

The inaugural issue of Mambu Badu focuses on memory -- ephemeral and at times inarticulable. Photographers rephotographed photographs as a homage to the reverberating and circular nature of memory while others documented moments of family history and personal narrative. In whole, the images interspersed with text speak to memory as a deeply layered and unpredictable terrain.

"Cosmic Zora": Three, never-before-reprinted, Hurston short stories

2011-01-07T12:01:00.006-05:00

Two professors of English and African and African American Studies, have come across three apparently never-before-reprinted stories from Zora Neale Hurston that help to flesh out her canonical persona: "The three stories are important because they provide fuller insight into Hurston's engagement with urban black life. They show us that Harlem was of more than just passing interest to the author, and ask us to dig deeper into the phase of her life before she became so identified with Eatonville [Florida].”

The concept of observing the observer has always been an intriguing, if ironic, concept to me. But it is an important one that promotes both understanding and the standing on top of boxes (and canons?). Ever the observer, Zora’s proclivity for playing literary hide-and-seek with her characters fascinates me and lends itself to a certain cosmology that smokes out the absurdity of attempts to divorce the story teller from the story. But we know these things. And we know it cuts both ways. Afterall, it’s all connection, we’re just dealing with degrees. In the same way an invested observer can enrich a narrative, a disengaged (intentional or otherwise) one can pervert it. I’d argue that the same can be said of the inverse. Maybe Zora would too. Either way, I appreciate the footnotes she has left behind not nearly as much for the insight they provide into her varied contexts, as I do for the insight they provide about her and the intricacies of her complexities (her complexity being a given).

The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston

(SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education)

Last spring began with no hint of any but the usual excitement of a new class. We were team-teaching a course on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, writers who represent opposing literary and political tendencies, intellectuals who disliked each other's work and said so in print. Wright found Hurston's prose in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) cloaked in "facile sensuality" and complained that she "voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh.'" Hurston mocked Wright's collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938) as "a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work." She was especially troubled by his language. "Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf."

It was Wright, the Mississippi-born political critic of the Jim Crow South speaking from his homes in Chicago, New York, and, finally, Paris, versus Hurston, who preferred Southern rural settings in her work, most especially her beloved Eatonville, Fla., which, although she was Alabama-born, she regarded as her native home. Wright, the most popular African-American literary ancestor of the radicals of the 1960s, and Hurston, reclaimed as feminist foremother in the 1970s, yet pronounced by John H. McWhorter in 2009 as "America's favorite black conservative."

The opposition promised to make for good drama in class. But we also wanted our undergraduate and graduate students to challenge the calcified visions of the authors that have become standard. Hurston (1891-1960) embraced her Southern roots, but she also spent considerable time in New York, where she lived on and off from 1925 through 1940, and abroad (the Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras), a fact that is often obfuscated by the locations in most of her fiction. After attending Howard University, she trained as an anthropologist and folklorist at Barnard College, where she was admitted in 1925, and then at Columbia University, where she studied under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, as well as with a fellow student, Margaret Mead.

While Hurston published four novels and more than 50 short stories, essays, and plays, she is often discussed only in the context of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel attacked for its humor and use of dialect but praised for its central focus on a black woman's voice in the context of her small town in early-20th-century Florida.

Wright (1908-1960) is best known for his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), although he produced 10 novels (A Father's Law was published posthumously in 2008), a collection of haiku, several books of essays, and other nonfiction works (on subjects including the black urban migration of the early 20th century, African decolonization, his travels in Spain, and transnational communism). As an expatriate in Paris, he wrote (among other works) his novel The Outsider (1953), and Black Power (1954), an account of his travels to the Gold Coast of Africa before it became independent Ghana. Like Hurston, Wright lived a rich and varied life and produced an equally rich and varied body of work. Yet critical attention has focused almost exclusively on the sociological and psychological insights that his fiction offers on racial strife in America, at the expense of exploring his sophisticated modernist aesthetics and his prescient views of political modernity.

We were working with the two-volume Library of America editions of both authors, augmented by many additional texts, including manuscripts. We read their early and best-known works as well as their least-studied novels (Seraph on the Suwanee, written by Hurston in 1948, and Savage Holiday, written by Wright in 1954). We encouraged students to do original research -- some went to the Beinecke Library, at Yale University, and examined Wright's papers; others read through Hurston's letters in the edition by Carla Kaplan. And we poked around on our own, browsing through old newspapers, looking for previously unnoticed references to the authors.

Searching for traces of Hurston on microfilm, we found her, for example, as a dinner party guest with A'Lelia Walker—a businesswoman who was an important patron of African-American artists—at a table set for 10 at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. And then one afternoon we were burrowing through what felt like the umpteenth reel of microfilm from the 1920s and early 1930s, a time when Hurston had already published stories but before her first novel came out. Anyone who has used microfilm of newspapers knows how tedious scanning its often blurry print can be. Then Werner stopped. He had come upon a short story by Hurston that neither of us knew about. We kept looking. The next day, we found two more, all from 1927. As we looked into them, we discovered that not one was listed in the bibliography in Robert Hemenway's biography of Hurston, or included in any collections of {CONTINUED}

Toyin Odutola [visual art]

2010-03-01T12:32:00.000-05:00

Toyin Odutola creates intricate, pain-stakingly detailed pen-and-ink illustrations that reduces her subjects to their very essence--all thew and sinew. She's wrestling with the idea of what it means to be The Other and from that process comes the moving, haunting images seen here. I came across Odutola through Afrolicious and I haven't had such a visceral reaction to artwork in quite some time. You can see more of her work at her website. Her artist statement below is also well worth the read for more context.

(SOURCE: Toyin Odutola's website) As a Nigerian-American and a Black woman, I am involved in two very distinct and diverse cultures which together create a personal and cultural dissonance in me. Though the experiences expressed from a Black, American woman are not at all singular and have been dialogued by a multi-platform assortment of artists in the Art World, varying degrees of said experiences and representation socially, economically, politically, even spiritually tend to be lumped together under a singular definition. I do not have a problem with this interpretation, I choose to investigate it. The hyphenated identity is my reality, yet I find I identify more conceptually with the fundamentality of Blackness. Thus, I do figurative portraits which explore the dynamics of being both engaged and disengaged with definitions of skin as an all-encompassing and singular entity.

My work deals with interaction; employing "contrast" as a distinguishing method, I explore that interaction--hence the inclusion of Whiteness as motif into the dialogue of my work. Subjectively, the Otherness of Black is my representation of "Inclusiveness," while the common Inclusiveness of White is my inverted "Otherness." Essentially, the relationship between "Otherness and Inclusiveness" manifests in Black being the positive mark imprinted into the neutral space of the foreign White picture plane. The overall effect is meant to be stark, minimal, and streamlined: the Black figure as the molded silhouette punctuating the White which seems to engulf it. With mainly rudimentary tools, such as pen-ink, I seek to reflect the rudimentary tools used socially in formulating representations of one's identity. Creating meticulously detailed hatch marks, I aim to portray the most visceral debasement of tonal Blackness. Indenting these marks into the White surface, I explore Blackness as skin akin to landscapes and/or plates -- each component comprising the Black figure and molding its presence.

Though the White surface/space is left alone (emptied), its ground varies from wood panel to paper/board. Regardless of the ground, the effect is to render, or engrave, the Black mark-making prominently, to leave an impression on the surface, forcing the viewer to focus solely on the flesh and interpret the intricacies which make up the figure. Primarily, my aim is to investigate what comprises skin, what I divulge is tonal gradations of individual moments in Blackness and Whiteness, of Otherness and Inclusiveness. In sum, the hyphenated reality manifests in Black and White interjecting while existing in conjunction, to reflect internalized representations of selfhood.

Currently, I mean to investigate a more engaging and all-encompassing interpretation of the hyphenated identity of all Americans, besides my own subjective Black experience. (source)
(emphases mine)

On Beauty: Dawn Okoro [visual art]

2010-01-23T15:39:00.002-05:00

{"Saturday's Best" © Dawn Okoro}

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

While the next few issues of The Liberator are cooking, we'll be sharing snippets of our Visual Arts interviews and articles. For the full versions, be sure to subscribe to the magazine for $10 a year. (Less than the cover charge at most clubs!)

As the readers of this here blog have gathered, I'm big on artists (and anyone else for that matter) who explore and challenge notions of beauty and identity. So it was a pure delight to come across the work of painter Dawn Okoro, who has been creating bold, sensual, and bright, color-saturated portraits of Black women for the past few years. Okoro, who holds a law degree and is currently based New York, was kind enough to talk with the Liberator a bit about her work.

To see more artwork from Okoro, visit dawnokoro.com, If you're in New York, she will be showing work next Friday at RFA Gallery for "Urban Pulse", described as "an exploration into identity, class and culture set against the ever evolving back drop of New York City, featuring the paintings and sculptural works of Dawn Okoro, Jordan!™ and Justin West."

(Note: This interview was co-edited by our winter intern, Angus McLinn, a student at Macalester College in St. Paul.)

LM: Who and what inspires your paintings?

DO: I grew up flipping through fashion magazines and imagining myself as part the fantasy world they presented. That is the foundation of a lot of my art concepts. I am inspired by fashion, television, advertising, and people.

LM: Also, would you mind talking a bit about your technique? What is it like working with models and taking the photos that become the blueprints for your paintings? Also, would you ever consider having your photos be the end product as opposed to a reference point for your paintings?

DO: I start out with a mood that I want to convey. I may browse photos from various sources to see examples of how I could have models pose in order to convey that mood. The models are sometimes friends or referrals. Other times they are models that I find online through a model networking site. The models usually wear their own clothes and makeup and we just experiment with different poses that I think fit the concept.

When I shoot the models, I try to imagine how the painting would look and then frame them accordingly. I use the resulting photos as inspiration and as a guide to keep the figures proportionate in my paintings. I change colors and other elements, depending on how I want the end product to look. I am very open to the idea of having some of the actual photos as the end product in the near future, although this will involve building settings for the models to pose in.

LM: I noticed that many of the women in your paintings tend to be dark-skinned and have amazing, perfectly coiffed afros. Is this a conscious decision to address our notions of "traditional" beauty and take on the perennial debates about complexion and hair texture? Also, I was wondering how you felt about Andrea Pippins' recently launched I Love My Hair project. It seems like you two are on the same wavelength visually and conceptually. (www.ilovemyhair.com)

DO: One of the reasons that I have painted the afros is simply because I find them aesthetically pleasing. In some of my paintings, I have taken an image that I saw in a mainstream fashion magazine reformed it. As I continue to create work like this, I do hope to incite conversation about this unconventional beauty that is missing from most of these magazines. My practice does overlap with Andrea's because we’re both putting a spotlight on beauty that hasn't gotten much shine in mainstream culture.

Open Mic: Sheena Steward

2009-09-02T17:49:00.003-04:00

{via Flickr}

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

We get a lot of great submissions for our Open Mic poetry section in the magazine; so many that we need to expand it. This online section will allow us to give more poets an opportunity to share their work with The Liberator community. Be sure to catch pieces we publish in print, by [subscribing to the magazine].

Ode to the One I Love | by Sheena Steward
It’s midnight, and I lie in bed awaiting your arrival. I girlishly blush when thoughts of our erotic moments strut through my mind. Nothing makes me feel the way you do, and the incoherent expression on my face is proof of our exhausting affair. A quick glimpse of light hits my face, and I know it’s finally you! Your words gently caress my body while the tone of your voice engulfs me, and I lose all self-control. My girlishly blush converts to passion, and I anticipate the events that are about to unfold.

When you speak to me I’m intoxicated by your deep content. My ears are a playground to your sentences, and the words bounce off my eardrums like a kid hyped up on chocolate. I love the way they sound, the way they make me feel, and how they set the mood. Forget candles, sweet smells, and sexy lighting. All I need is your sensual sounds in my ear stimulating my soul. The same soul that is automatically unlocked when the mood reaches an intensity level that is unbearable.

No sleazy inclinations are allowed within these four walls. There are only innocent actions that lead to us swimming in the timeless currents of pure bliss. Even on the nights when you tell me the same things over and over, I can’t help but fall madly in love with the truth within your spirit. There’s no touching. I just lie down with my eyes closed listening to the similes, metaphors, and onomatopoeia floating peacefully through the air. The way you describe love exalts it to a degree of sweet sensitivity. This quiet assertion only leaves me yearning for more. Along with my yearning comes bedtime. As the Sandman lightly sprinkles dust over my eyes, I faintly hear your voice drifting away into the darkness.

Morning arrives and you whisper sweet nothings in my ear to jump start my day. The thought of not having you around while I’m in class drives me insane. I constantly count down the seconds until our next blissful encounter. You are there on the car ride to work putting encouraging thoughts into my mind. Always there to tell me I’ll make it through the rest of the day and into the enchanting words of pleasure we’ll share later that night. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to tell others about the way you make me feel. It doesn’t matter whether they understand or not, because when I hear you the rest of the world disappears.

Later that night, I’m anticipating your voice and thought provoking words once again. The sensual hedonism never gets old to me. Although the lines you speak are the same as the previous night, I still find myself loving ever nanosecond. I continue to fall deeper and deeper in love with the thought of your thoughts. Love becomes me, and at this point I’m floating on cloud nine. Night in and night out you send me on a whirlwind adventure tailor-made for my desires.

Although your possess certain qualities of a person, deep down I know you will only be a part of my mind, body, and soul, but I’ll never have the pleasure of physically touching you. On this particular night the familiar light that lets me know you have arrived, is the same light that blinds me. I slowly pick up the remote, press the off button, and think about the exhilarating journey. As my eyes close, I think, “My Heart, My Soul, My Spirit, My Strength, and My Passion.”

My music.

What I Am | by Sheena Steward
What I Am
What I am
What I’m not
What I feel
What I think
Are all a part of the woman I strive to be
What I am is strong, assertive, aggressive, and opinionated
But I realize these characteristics sometimes leave me alienated
I love a challenge and I’m always up for the chase

So please tell me what I can’t do so I can throw it in your face
I have an ego that’s as big as the Pacific
I do many great things but I won’t bore you with the specifies
Because in my mind I’m in a hot air balloon rising to the top
And the people beneath me are scrambling to find a needle
Because they think it should be popped

What I am
What I’m not
What I feel
What I think
Are all a part of the woman I strive to be
What I’m not is weak, meek, or lack the ability to think
I’m not a domestic goddess
And lord knows I could be a bit more modest
I’m not without flaws
And on any given day you could be introduced to them all
I’m most definitely not submissive
Seriously, it’s 2009 must we still ask for permission

What I am
What I’m not
What I feel
What I think
Are all a part of the woman I strive to be
What I feel
Now that’s a weird one…
Mainly because my most treasured emotions are always concealed

I feel if you wear them on your sleeve
They are susceptible for a thief to retrieve
They should be handled like a precious token
And only inserted into the games that won’t leave you battered and broken
I do understand that in life you must take chances
So always carry extra tokens to pop in life’s jukebox for carefree dances

What I am
What I’m not
What I feel
What I think
Are all a part of the woman I strive to be
What I think…wait…

I need a moment of silence
I must do this in peace
Because I have a tendency to get a bit too deep
Which presents a wall that’s a little too steep for on lookers to take a peek
I think I’m ever changing and very aware
Although I must admit I’m not together but I’m definitely getting there
I think I shouldn’t think so much and just learn to go with the flow
Instead of planning my next chess move on how that rook in my way has to go
So before I devise an elaborate scheme to trap my opponent’s powerful queen
I must take deep breaths while viewing life’s beautiful scenes!

So now you know
What I am
What I’m not
What I feel
What I think and
The type of woman I strive to be
So my only advice is remember to stop, take a break, and just be free.

Hurricane Season by Climbing Poetree

2009-08-03T11:31:00.007-04:00

WHY?: Saw this yesterday in Harlem at the National Black Theatre and can definitely say it's worth checking out. Bring an open mind. The message is inspirational and powerful -- not perfect. If anything, this is the type of message at the forefront of a generation that is starting to grow up, and it's refreshing to see. These women organized their concept diligently, compiled relevant information and combined it with their artistic gifts and put together a memorizing show that challenges us to know ourselves and our environment deeper.

Taking place in two acts, the first brilliantly addresses the calamities of our current reality -- the "what's wrong", the testimony. The second act mainly preaches solutions that Climbing Poetree believe in -- they use concepts of unity based on water like, "evaporation", "condensation", and "precipitation", to communicate the idea that transformation is an important ally to those seeking change. In a real sense, the second half leaves a bit to be desired though. It's a bit more vague than the first act, which is understandable because solutions are the hardest part. The second act is mostly promotion for the idea of a clean cut oneness and unity. And for the audience in the building last night it worked out great -- there was a mostly black and white, older, liberal, middle class audience.

I had hoped there would be a larger focus on local consciousness, and it seemed the leap to "universal oneness" was premature in the speculative narrative they told in the second act. But given their audience, it makes sense. But still, the fact that populations do not have equal access to their historical legacies is one of the most important road blocks to real concepts of oneness and I was a bit disappointed that it was skipped over in order to end the production with a happy ending.

Overall though, the emotion of the show and the inspiration it brings absolutely cannot be denied.

Giovanca [liberator mag extra]

2009-07-18T23:58:00.005-04:00

Never greedy, we like to share even what was left on the cutting room floor as we labored in love to produce [The Liberator Magazine 8.1]. And since we just so happen to have this here blog, what follows is a bonus Q+A with Giovanca. But if you don't want to miss out on the good stuff, subscribe to The Liberator Magazine today for just $5 a year using this special subscription link: liberatormagazine.com/excitingtimes.

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

(Giovanca | by Sidik Fofana) Ok, so Giovanca has one of those coy accents that make you daydream. Not a big deal unless you’re into that stuff or you hear it, whichever comes first. I don’t think the Holland nu-soul songstress is even aware of it, which makes her girlish modesty even more alluring. Her words filter through two languages -- Dutch and the Curacao dialect Papiamento -- before they get to English, weaving poetry in between. Instead of saying "native tongue," she says "my mother’s language." Instead of saying "empathy," she says, "pieces of me in other people." We couldn’t get enough of her, so let’s keep the transcript rolling.

Liberator: So, where were you born?

Giovanca: I was actually born in Amsterdam. When my mom was pregnant, my parents came to Holland on purpose because Curacao is a colony of the Dutch. Anyone who wants to have a proper future on that island moves to Holland anyway -- at least for a period of time -- and then move back to the island after they get a degree or something. They decided to come to Holland and have me there, but they ended up having more kids and staying. It’s like people who live in London but they’re Jamaican or from the Bahamas. It’s the same way with me. I was brought up in Amsterdam, but I had a Caribbean upbringing with the language and the food and everything.

Liberator: How old are you?

Giovanca: Well, I hate to say it, but I turned 31 in March. Nowadays, I read in a magazine [that] Rihanna is, like, 20. When I was 20, I was definitely singing, but I was in school. I was fighting with my parents about being an artist.

Liberator: I feel you. They breed them young here, but at the same time there’s definitely something very sophisticated about your music. What do you think that comes from?

Giovanca: I think it has more to do with personality than with age. There are also a lot of layers in my music and if you have the ears or the feeling for it when you listen to it, you will hear it. But if you don’t have that patience to listen to it in the right way, you will not hear that. Also my producer, Benny Sings, is the same way. We have a lot of experience here and there. We have things that we’ve been through ... and things we haven’t been through but have thought about. All those experiences and thoughts and music that we’ve heard before are all getting layered.

Liberator: How tall are you?

Giovanca: One meter and 79 centimeters. I don’t know inches. We don’t have inches. It’s like the same with miles and kilometers. But I’m quite tall, but not ridiculously tall because I’ve always been a model as well, and there were always models even taller than me.

Liberator: Off the top, that would be almost about 60 inches. So, you’re almost six feet. 5’10’’?

Giovanca: It’s so ridiculous because I want to know. Inches, miles. I don’t even know Fahrenheit either because we have degrees Celsius. It’s almost like changing money. It’s like a whole different value system that we have.

Liberator: You’re very charismatic and obviously very beautiful. Do people react differently to you depending on where you are in the world?

Giovanca: Because of the way I look?

Liberator: Yeah. Do darker skinned people have more appeal in Amsterdam?

Giovanca: I’m not sure. I found out by traveling that it really didn’t matter whether I was in a country that was familiar with black people, or not so familiar with black people, I would always have people looking at me. In Amsterdam, they’re looking at me like, "Hey, are you from here?" When I’m in New York, they’re thinking, "Hey, you are not from here, where are you from?" And the same thing happens in Africa and India. Even when I went to Japan last month, they were checking me like, "We’ve seen dark people on television, but we cannot categorize you, so which are you?" It’s the same experience with people from the same skin tone. Everyone is always confused about where could I possibly be from.

Liberator: What kind of guys do you like?

Giovanca: Oh, that’s a hard question. I like guys with a lot of creativity in the broad sense of the word. It could be a painter or poet, but it must be somebody who is creative in any kind of way. And that creativity has to be something he can apply in life, not necessarily with a pen or a piece of paper, but in life and how he views situations. I’m always checking out guys for that. When my girlfriends are like, "Did you see his hair?" I never pay attention to hands or eyes or eyebrows or whatever. That comes later. I like it when somebody shows me in the very early stage of my getting to know him that it doesn’t matter what happens, he can deal with it in a creative way. When I see that, that gives me a hopeful feeling that whatever happens, this person is not predictable.

Liberator: Is there any male American star that you have a crush on?

Giovanca: No, I don’t think so. In the past though, I do remember that everybody had a crush on the obvious Brad Pitt kind of people. But I had a crush on Blair Underwood, and it lasted for years! I couldn’t find any pictures of him in Amsterdam or anything so I couldn’t hang him on my wall, so I just had to watch his movies.

Liberator: That’s funny. Let’s talk about subways. A lot of your inspiration comes from being on the train. What differences do you notice from city to city?

Giovanca: New York is where it all began for me. I was riding the train in Amsterdam, as well, and I was already fascinated by how the atmosphere changes every time the doors open and close because the combination of people change every time. I would sit in the train and observe. This is where a lot of students come in, now it’s gonna be louder. After this, the students get out then the older people come in. I was picking up vibes and I was checking out the many emotions that I saw on people’s faces on the train. Boredom, frustration, or being in a hurry, and I was really into all of those emotions. Then, when I went to New York, it was even more pronounced because there are more people, more trains, more black people, more everything. They aren’t so many black people taking the train in Amsterdam. So I would be sitting there and I remember just writing, and trying to find the emotions that were interesting to me. I would find, how do you say, somebody who could feel the same — I was trying to find pieces of me in other people. If I was angry about something, I would scan obvious people and say like who of you are like me? Which one of you are experiencing the same thing? And in my head, I would write the song for all of us. This is how it started, I think it was the A train. Everywhere I go in the world, I check out the same thing -- how people are not communicating, how people are doing their own thing, how people sleep, how life goes underneath the pavement.

Liberator: Let’s talk about musical influences. Who are your idols?

Giovanca: Well, I have a lot of them. I think one of the biggest ones is Minnie Riperton. And then, I was listening to a lot of Rotary Connection and also Stevie Wonder had a girl, Sharita, who he wrote for. I love her as well. I like the fragile voices -- Roberta Flack, Diana Ross, Donna Summer -- and all those ladies from the past that didn’t have that obvious big voice. For guys, it was Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, but it changed a lot when I was growing up. All of a sudden it changed back into Hip Hop. For a minute, I gave up on singing and starting rapping, then I changed it again.

Liberator: Which Hip Hop artists did you listen to?

Giovanca: First, of course, it was Public Enemy. I also remember buying my first Black Sheep album. Eric B. and Rakim, Eric Sermon, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul -- I was really into them. Then, I switched again to different kinds of music. When I went back to Hip Hop again, it was hard. I felt like you could go in different directions. You could go more the Jay-Z kind of the way, or with Common, Talib Kweli and Mos Def. It wasn’t one thing anymore. I thought that was too complicated. It shouldn’t have all those rules, so I gave up on that again and went back to Jazz. That’s so funny with music, because you change as a person. You could be the same person, but change your mind, change your vibe, and music can change along with you and then come back to you.

Liberator: Who are you listening to nowadays?

Giovanca: Minutes ago I was listening to Estelle. I like her very much. She’s creative. She can sing, but also rap. I really like her style. I’m still checking out a lot of old music, a lot of Jazz cats, back to Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. It changes everyday. I could also wake up one day and have to put an old Michael Jackson song to be inspired. There’s also this album I really love from Bob Marley and the album is called Survival. Oh my god, sometimes I wake up and there’s nothing else I can listen to but that album.

Liberator: What do you think about Erykah Badu and Jill Scott?

Giovanca: I actually know Jill Scott pretty well. I met her a few years ago in Amsterdam when I was working in a little store. She and India.Arie come there a lot. Obviously, I was the only black girl working there, but besides being an artist on the side, we really had stuff to talk about. Every time she comes to Holland, we connect somehow. She calls me Gi Gi. She’s a sweetheart. A month ago, I actually performed as her after show. I just saw Erykah Badu for the I-don’t -know-how-many times. I went to her concert like three weeks ago in Amsterdam. When I first heard about them, I was 18, 19, 20. They obviously mean a lot to the Hip Hop/Soul industry -- especially for girls. Even now in Amsterdam, when we go to jam sessions, the chances that you hear somebody covering “Call Tyrone” are very big.

Liberator: What percent of your material do you write?

Giovanca: There are twelve songs on the CD. From the twelve, there are two that I didn’t write. My friend wrote them, the soundman of my previous band. He’s a very quiet guy. He’s doing the sound and he’s like, "I might have a song for you." He writes amazing songs, so the "Pure Bliss" song is totally his. It was just the piano and his voice. Me and a friend, we just made it soulful.

Liberator: Why did you choose to sing in English as opposed to any other language?

Giovanca: Well, I guess there’s not really a lot of choice in there. Have you ever looked up Holland on the globe? It’s a miracle that it’s on there. I think when you choose to sing a Dutch song or a German song, you’re really going in a certain tradition. I could also choose to write in my mom’s language, but only 125,000 people would understand. So, it’s either go with the Dutch tradition and go with the guitar singing rock songs in Dutch; write songs in my mom’s language and then I could please 125,000 people on my island, or write it in English. Basically, every artist in Holland writes in English.

Liberator: Do you sing in other languages on your own?

Giovanca: Sometimes I sing in my mom’s language. There’s one bonus track where one part of the chorus is in my mom’s language. But I think English is the easiest thing to do, when you know for sure that everyone understands you.

Liberator: Describe the writing process? Does it take days, does it come to you in a dream? How does this brilliant material just come out?

Giovanca: It usually comes out when I’m in the streets, when I’m in the middle of a lot of people. I need to be out there and see other people, see children, see old people, see blind people, see people traveling, see people laughing, see people falling down on their bikes or whatever and then it comes to me. Usually it’s like one or two sentences that make the base or the foundation of the song. I always hear the bass line first and connect to one or two sentences. I could be walking around six months just knowing that the name of the song is gonna be "To The Moon." I could walk with that for six months and one day sit down, and it just comes out.

Liberator: Talk about growing up in a city environment. Was your family rich, poor, middle class? How was it growing up?

Giovanca: Well, I was raised in the — what do you call it? -- when you have Amsterdam, and then there’s outside of Amsterdam ...
Liberator: Yeah, like the suburbs.

Giovanca: It was a mainly white neighborhood and the only other black girl in my school was my sister. We have a different education system than in the States so I wouldn’t know exactly what to call it, but it was the highest level of education. Everyone in my class was really rich, playing hockey, having their own horses and stuff like that. We were not a family like that. At that time in Amsterdam there was only one place where black people were living which you can compare to a certain ghetto life. My parents didn’t want to do that so they just made a sacrifice and told themselves they weren't going to live in that area. They said, "We’re gonna be confronted with the wealth of people that we don’t have, but as long as we live there and pay the rent and put the children in good schools, let’s see how long we can survive over there." From when I was young, I always knew their sacrifice. My school told us, for example, that we’re going to Rome for classical languages and you have to pay $1,500 to go on that trip. I already knew I wasn’t even going to tell my parents the school was going there. I didn’t want to put them through the embarrassment [of telling me] that I couldn’t go, so I didn’t tell them. I just did something else that week. I understand why they wanted us to grow up there and now that I’m older, I realize what they did. Sometimes they’re a little upset with us. They’re like, "We went and lived in this white neighborhood so you could go to a good school and have a good a 9-5, and here you are running around the world trying to be an artist!"

Liberator: So, how far did you get education-wise?

Giovanca: Well, I got pretty far. I went to college at the University of Amsterdam. And I finished my -- how do you say it? -- my Ph.D. in Educational Science. We don’t have the same words, but I just know that there’s nothing higher. That’s why my parents were like, "Silly girl. Here you have your diploma and everything. You could have a good job and have your own practice and work with children."

Liberator: What does the future look like? What are your goals?

Giovanca: Well, I don’t like to paint it all. I like to dream about certain things, not tell myself that I have to accomplish this or that. I trained myself not to think that way because I learned how changeable things are, including myself. When I tell myself in two years, I wanna have a second album, it feels a little suffocating to me to do that ‘cause I know that maybe in two months, something will come along and I will feel a different way. I just want to travel and meet people and try to share whatever I want to share with people, and also be open to what they want to share with me. If it means making another album, I will do that. I’m packing my suitcase right now because I’m leaving this weekend for MTV in Sierra Leone. I’ve been to East Africa and South Africa a few times but never to the West. I’m so excited because MTV is going to do a two-week documentary on child rights. I’ll be connected to one girl named Harriet. I’m going to build a radio program for her in two weeks. I’ll say 'hi' to the motherland for you! -END-

Two black women on Oumou Sangare.

2009-07-13T14:57:00.006-04:00

WHY?: When a phenomenal black woman in Toronto and a phenomenal black woman in Brooklyn tell you about the same person in a 2-day span unbeknown to each other, that person is definitely worth telling other folks about. The duet with Alicia Keys is just a teaser, the real good stuff is after the continued.

Cynthia McKinney + others detained by Israel.

2009-07-07T07:11:00.002-04:00

WHY?: Former U.S. Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney was [detained by Israel recently while delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza]. She has since [been released and is scheduled to return to the U.S. today], but while she was being detained she wrote this open letter from an Israeli jail.

[further reading: "Pirates Of The Mediterranean"]

(SOURCE: Cynthia McKinney) July 6, 2009: This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children; I had a suitcase full of crayons for children.

While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis highjacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver three tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, US-supplied F-16s rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full-scale, outright genocide. US-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to Al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water... It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color and paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it’s incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better... The once proud, never-colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel, only after they arrived Israel told them, "There is no UN in Israel."

The police here have license to pick them up and suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s first Jews and Christians. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for six months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and "yes we can" were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to [write one]. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the US have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] What are you willing to do?

Let’s change the world together and reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I’ve met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

Our saviour is here. And she's cold as hell. No lie.

2009-06-19T21:01:00.011-04:00

WHY?: Sorry Jonelle Monae (you the shit, and we still need to get with you yesterday) but I'm putting in my vote right now: Nneka on a Liberator cover needs to happen asap. I'm in love with this woman. Not like that.

Nneka, "Suffri" (album - No Longer At Ease)

If the chorus don't give you goosebumps, you are not human. lol

Suffri

Keep It On The (Download)

Just another 'Black girl and her hair' post*

2009-06-03T23:59:00.006-04:00

© Lorna Simpson, "Wigs"

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

*Author's note: Slightly rambling, Angry Black Woman post ahead; proceed with caution

I was walking around the Petworth/"14th Street Heights" neighborhood on Saturday, enjoying the weather, taking photos, looking for the right light, what have you. I pass by two old Black men (I would say they looked about 60-ish) on the sidewalk. Blame my Midwestern roots, my time at Howard, my belief in, I don't know, common courtesy but I smiled at one of the men and said "Hi, how you doing?"

He smiled back at me.

"I'll pay for you to get your hair done."

I was nonplussed, didn't really understand what he meant. "What?"

He pointed to the beauty salon I was walking past, and then to my hair, my black coils, kinks, and spirals. "If you go in there right now I'll pay for you to get it done." I looked inside, saw a hair stylist in deep concentration as she straightened another woman's hair.

I stared at him, more out of disbelief than anything. Still hoping he couldn't possibly mean what I knew he meant. He was still smiling but the smile hadn't reached his eyes.

"Very funny," I gritted through my teeth before turning and walking away, trying my best to ignore his laughter, his friend's taunting comments, "What's that, a natural? You in school or something?"

I wish I had said a thousand other things. Something just as vicious and needlessly cruel, if only so he would understand how it feels to be humiliated by a stranger. If only so he could understand how much more it hurts when the attacker is someone who's brown like you.

I know this is something I shouldn't dwell on. Maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing. But I will say this: as a Black woman, it gets damn tiresome having to justify yourself and your existence on a daily basis. It's even more tiresome and more hurtful when you have to do that with other Black people. In 2009, nearly a decade into the 21st century, is the idea of a woman wearing her hair the way she chooses really that offensive? To the point where people feel a need to be jackasses and make snide comments about it? I don't know what I expected though. I learned a while ago that every brother isn't your brother and every sister isn't your sister. Doesn't mean that shit isn't hurtful though.

Anyway, I look forward to the next time I leave my house with the nerve to be me. Maybe someone will whip out a paper bag and tell me I'm too black so I'd "better get back."

Audre Lorde: On personal identity and community

2009-04-29T12:33:00.011-04:00

"The important message seemed to be that you had to have a place. Whether or not it did justice to whatever you felt you were about, there had to be some place to refuel and check your flaps. In times of need and great instability, the place sometimes became more of a definition than the substance of why you needed it to begin with. Sometimes the retreat became the reality. The writers who posed in cafes talking their work to death without writing two words; the lesbians, virile as men, hating women and their own womanhood with a vengeance. The bars and the coffee-shops and the streets of the Village in the 1950s were full of non-conformists who were deathly afraid of going against their hard-won group, and so eventually they were broken between the group and their individual needs."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.225)

Another brilliant observational piece of wisdom from Audre Lorde. Again, even outside of the original context of same-gender relationships, Lorde's observations on human community are extremely accurate and relevant. Lorde also reaffirms here what I was feeling recently about Pan Africanism and notions of cultural, tribal, political and national unity (link).

And the fork in the road that occurs among brothers and sisters, where some inevitably take the wrong fork because the Maroon community (link) we build on this land just seems to never be efficient enough to help us all. Lorde touches on it at the end of this passage, so precisely and clear, reminding me of my father's stories about his own growth into manhood and him seeing his black male brothers fall to the wayside, and me sensing underneath it all a wish that their community could have somehow been stronger (link).

The rest of the passage is below, after the continued:

Unfortunately there are moments where you have to choose between your own integrity (according to YOUR individual/local values) or the survival of the larger group, which sometimes requires the sacrifice or compromising of your individual values. Sometimes compromise can be made without much stress. But other times -- like when my pops walked out of a local Black Panther meeting because they were discussing a strategy for robbing white folks' homes and stealing their guns -- the group isn't worth sacrificing your values for. Sometimes it is. What's deep about all this is that moment, that fork, that line in the sand, etc. is a call only you can make as an individual, according to who you know yourself to be and what that self values most in life.

Community formed on a foundation of individuals who don't know themselves can never be healthy or sustainable. The required compromises that it's going to take to sustain any group of people, MUST be built on honesty, and that honestly can only exist when a person actually knows himself enough to know when he is being honest with himself. Sounds simple. But it's shocking to learn, through the experiences of my elders, how many of us -- infected with this post-traumatic disease of identity loss, of loosing self -- can't make an honest compromise, not because we are stubborn (even though it appears that way on the surface), rather, we don't know ourselves enough to know when we are compromising something inside of us. Perhaps that, if anything, is one of the greatest losses we've taken as a people, as Africans in America. And I think it has to be one of our greatest "wartime priorities", as we are forced to fight every day to win back, preserve and defend our humanity.

The rest of the passage is below:

"For some of us there was no one particular place, and we grabbed whatever we could from wherever we found space, comfort, quiet, a smile, non-judgment.

Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different.

Each of us had our own needs and pursuits, and many different alliances. Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing.

It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.) It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own.

The Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other's names, but we seldom looked into each other's Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness. Some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned-away eyes.

Sistah outsiders. Didi and Tommy and Muff and Iris and Lion and Trip and Audre and Diane and Felicia and Bernie and Addie.

Addie was Mari Evans beautiful, a wasted sister-soul. Driven as we all were driven, she found ways out that were still alien to some of the rest of us -- harsher, less hidden.

That Sunday afternoon while Muriel and I waited for Flee and our photography lesson, Addie was turning Flee onto smack for the first time in a borrowed apartment across Second Avenue."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.225-226)

In Her Own Words: An interview wit' Angela Davis

2009-04-24T23:59:00.002-04:00

[2-day liberatormagazine.com featured story]

JR Valrey is the Minister of Information for the Prisoners Of Conscience Committee, an Oakland based organization founded by Fred Hampton, Jr. with the mission to liberate the minds and hearts of African and colonized people. The POCC takes the stand that all prisoners are political. JR is a regular contributor to The Liberator.

In Her Own Words. An interview wit' Angela Davis: Angela Davis is a legendary political activist professor in the U.C. System who has a history of resistance. She is a former political prisoner who has done work with the Communist Party, and she is also author of 8 books analyzing race, class, and gender. She also is a cofounder of the prison abolitionist group, Critical Resistance. She recently wrote a foreword to political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal's new book “Jailhouse Lawyers”, in which the Block Report did an interview with her to help promote.

I was first taught about Angela Davis being a political prisoner, later on the first jailhouse lawyer that I met through the mail was her codefendant who is still locked up, Ruchell Magee, whom I used to write occasionally. So this book gave me a better insight into what life as a jailhouse lawyer really is like. I dug the fact that Mumia picked a subject that is rarely discussed on this side of the walls. I learned a lot and it wet my appetite to wanting to learn more about these legal warriors. Check out Angela Davis as she talks about her foreword in Mumia's new book, in her own words...

M.O.I. JR: I want to talk to you today about your foreword in Mumia Abu Jamal's new book, “Jailhouse Lawyers”. Since I know a lot of readers do not have the book, I want to start off with reading a few quotes, and I will ask you questions in relation to the quotes. You say in your foreword, “Mumia points to me what was for me a startling revelation. Jailhouse lawyers comprised the group most likely to be punished by the prison administration, more so than political prisoners, Black people, gang members, and gay prisoners whereas jailhouse layers are punished by what Mumia calls 'cover charges'. Historically they could be charged with internal violations for no other reason that they used the law to challenge prison guards, prison regimes, and prison conditions. In your opinion what is the importance of Mumia choosing jailhouse lawyers to be the subject for his new book?

Angela: Well first of all, this is an amazing book. Everyone should read this book. And I was extremely excited to learn that he was working on a book on jailhouse lawyers because the story of jailhouse lawyers is a hidden story. Most people in this country are not aware of the extent to which resistance to the regimes of prisons, state prisons, federal prisons all over the country, has been shaped through the work of jailhouse lawyers. There is a long tradition of resistance. And Mumia, himself, is a jailhouse lawyer. And if one thinks about how many men and women have used the law in order to challenge the prison regimes, one gets a sense of what a powerful legacy that resistance is.

M.O.I. JR: In another quote in your foreword you say, “Mumia argues that the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act is a violation of the Convention Against Torture for in ruling out psychological or mental injury as a basis to recover damages such sexual coercion that was represented in the Abu Ghraib photographs if perpetrated inside of a U.S. prison, would not have constituted evidence for a lawsuit. Why did you point this out in your foreword?

Angela: Many people assume that the the P.L.R.A., the Prison Litigation Reform Act, as I tried to point out in the foreword, simply prevents prisoners from engaging in frivolous lawsuits. But as Mumia points out, it is a pointed attack on the capacity of prisoners to use the law itself. It is not about frivolity at all, it is about taking away from prisoners one of the only instruments that they've been able to develop to challenge the whole system. So we can't assume that under the Clinton administration the P.L.R.A. was passed, and that put prison lawsuits to rest. It's important for those of us on the outside to support the rights of prisoners to use the law to resist the violence of the state.

M.O.I. JR: Again to quote you, you say in the foreword of “Jailhouse Lawyer”, “The way he situates the P.L.R.A. historically as an inheritance of the Black Codes, which were themselves descended from the Slave Codes, allows to recognize the extent to which historical memories of slavery and racism are prescribed in the very structures of the prison system, and have helped to produce the Prison Industrial Complex.” Can you discuss the importance of Mumia making this connection in “Jailhouse Lawyers”?

Angela: Well this is one of the things that I really loved about Mumia, he knows how to make these historical connections. He makes connections with what might appear to be very dispirit and different kinds of phenomenon, for example he points out that the P.L.R.A. was passed at the same time as the disestablishment of the welfare system, and that there is a connection between preventing women primarily from having access to safety nets for their families, and this assault on prisoners being able to defend themselves. So I really like the way that he makes those connections with slavery. I think of the prison system today in this country, and especially the system of capital punishment, I think of it as a historical memory of slavery, as a palpable inheritance of slavery. And as a matter of fact, the existence of those systems provide us with real evidence of the fact that slavery was not fully abolished. So I like the way in which he can show us the similarities between the Black Codes, that were produced in the aftermath of slavery to basically replicate the system of slavery after slavery was allegedly abolished. And the P.R.L.A. serves a similar contemporary purpose.

M.O.I. JR: Again, you write in “Jailhouse Lawyers”, in the last sentence, “He (Mumia), allows us to reflect on the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them.” Why did you end your foreword with that statement in this book?

Angela: Well you know because people don't usually think of prisoners in general as defending democracy. They think of the prison as the underside, the underbelly, of democracy; as the place where you send people who no longer have the right to be citizens. But I think that what Mumia does, he manages to portray jailhouse lawyers in such a ways as to persuade us regardless of what our political persuasions might be, the jailhouse lawyers have been, in a sense, on the front line of the defense of democracy. I'm not talking about capitalists democracy. I'm not talking about neo-liberal democracy. I'm talking about the kind of democracy that would also tend to not only political equality, but racial equality, economic equality, and sexual equality as well.

M.O.I. JR: What is the importance of us recognizing that Mumia is facing deathrow right at this second, right when he released such an eloquent book on jailhouse lawyers? You also pointed out in this foreword that he rarely speaks of himself, so in the midst of this being a time of the first Black president of America, what does Mumia's imprisonment, with all the flaws in his case, say about the real political climate in America?

Angela: Well, first of all, Mumia's case is so important for us to get involved in. We have to save his life. We have to free Mumia. And yeah, as many people acknowledge he rarely uses his amazing talent and capacities to advocate for himself. He's always advocating for others, and that is all the more reason to be passionate advocates for him. I have traveled in other parts of the world a great deal, and there are movements to free Mumia all over the world. Sometimes I feel very embarrassed that we have not managed to overcome the power of the Fraternal Order of Police for example and the other conservative forces that are determined to put Mumia to death. But this book is yet another reason why we need to defend him, and why we need to use whatever is available to us, whatever knowledge, whatever instruments are available to us to guarantee that his life is saved and that he is eventually set free.

Audre Lorde: On learning love by living it out

2009-04-24T14:13:00.009-04:00

"[...] We were certainly the first to have tried to work out this unique way of living for women, communal sex without rancor. After all, nobody else ever talked about it. None of the gay-girl books we read so avidly ever suggested our vision was not new, nor our joy in each other. Certainly Beebo Brinker didn't; no Olga, of The Scorpion. Our much-fingered copies of Ann Bannon's Women In The Shadows and Odd Girl Out never so much as suggested that the perils and tragedies connected with loving women could possibly involve more than two at a time. And of course none of those books even mentioned the joys. So we knew there was a world of our experience as gay-girls that they left out, but that meant we had to write it ourselves, learn by living it out..."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.209-214)

This quote is a part of a greater passage from Audre Lorde's Zami, which I am currently reading. The passage follows, but the reason I'm sharing it is because I think in it is a lesson about where my generation (and perhaps those recent ones who've come before me) stands regarding love, family, relationships, sex, community, etc. So much of my discovery with these things has been learning by "living it out" as Audre Lorde suggests. Even though she writes in the context of a black lesbian experience, I find that I can relate to her despair at not having any REAL clear and honest instruction for how to reconcile all the emotions of love and lust. Of course there are instructions, but for me none of them seem to apply to how I really feel.

So, like Lorde, I've found that writing my own instruction book on love for myself is what has worked best. It's what has allowed me to live out my emotions and learn from them. I wonder if that is how emotions are supposed to be dealt with or if there is supposed to be some instruction. Ironically, the more I've had to survive without the instruction that a fully functional community might provide, the more I've come to embrace my strategy of learning my emotions through trial and error, which, of course, is the irony of survival mode -- the more you're forced into survival mode, the more you get used to defining yourself in terms of your survival instead of who you might have been before you were forced into survival mode. For reference: see "Tyson, Mike" (link) in the encyclopedia. While you're at it, look up "African American" too.

The rest of the passage is below, after the continued:

"Muriel and I loved tenderly and long and well, but there was no one around to suggest that perhaps our intensity was not always too wisely focused.

Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne. We were like starving women who come to believe that food will cure all present pains, as well as heal all the deficiency sores of long standing...

[...]In June, Lynn came to live with us. We hadn't planned it that way, that's just the way it worked out...

[...] Muriel and I took Lynn into our home to live with us. For a while that summer, we had a vision and possibility of women living together collectively and sharing each other's lives and work and love. It almost worked. But none of us knew quite enough about ourselves; we had no patterns to follow, except our own needs and our own unthought-out dreams. Those dreams did not steer us wrong, but sometimes they were not enough.

I found myself day-dreaming over the library catalogue, imagining Lynn's malocclusion, and I had to finally admit to myself how physically attracted to her I was. I was frightened and embarrassed as well as perplexed by this strange and unexpected turn of events. I loved Muriel like my own life; we were pledged to each other. How could I desire another woman physically? But I did. Naturally, the thing to do was to examine this new state of affairs in all of its endless ramifications, and to discuss each one of them in detail.

That is what the three of us did, endlessly, over and over until all hours of the morning. Muriel thought it was an exciting idea, possible in a new world of women. Lynn wanted to sleep with us both and no more to-do about it. I knew what I wanted, which was everybody one at a time, and since my wants felt contradictory, I had to figure out some way I could have everything that I wanted and still be safe. That was very difficult, because we were in uncharted territory.

What we were trying to build was dangerous, and could have enormous consequences for Muriel and me. But our love was strong enough to be tested, strong enough to be tested, strong enough to provide a base for loving and extended relationships. I always used to say that I believed in sleeping with my friends. Well, here was a chance to put theory into practice. Besides, every time Lynn laughed her slightly hysterical laugh or wrinkled her nose, my knees turned to pudding...

[...] So all in all, I was rather relieved one day when I opened the door after work to find Muriel and Lynn just getting out of bed together. A piece of me was furious (What, another woman's hands on Muriel's body?), and another piece of me was afraid (Well! Now I'd really have to fish or cut bait). But a large piece of me was just relieved that we had moved beyond talking, and that the direction of that movement was out of my hands.

The three of us kissed and held hands and had dinner, which Lynn cooked for the first time. Then Muriel went to Laurel's for a beer, and I found out that Lynn was every bit as delicious as I had fantasized her to be.

Our new living arrangement called for a celebration, so I took the next two days off from work...

[...] Muriel and I decided that nothing could break the bonds between us, certainly not the sharing of our bodies and our joys with another woman whom we had come to love, also. Our taking Lynn to our bed became, not merely a fact to be integrated into our living, but a test for each one of us of our love and our openness.

It was a beautiful vision but a difficult experiment. At first Lynn seemed to be having the best of it. She had both of us totally focused upon her and her problems, as well as upon her little horsewoman's body and her ribald lovemaking...

[...] We were certainly the first to have tried to work out this unique way of living for women, communal sex without rancor. After all, nobody else ever talked about it. None of the gay-girl books we read so avidly ever suggested our vision was not new, nor our joy in each other. Certainly Beebo Brinker didn't; no Olga, of The Scorpion. Our much-fingered copies of Ann Bannon's Women In The Shadows and Odd Girl Out never so much as suggested that the perils and tragedies connected with loving women could possibly involve more than two at a time. And of course none of those books even mentioned the joys. So we knew there was a world of our experience as gay-girls that they left out, but that meant we had to write it ourselves, learn by living it out...

[...] Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn't. Muriel and I attempted to examine why, endlessly. For all her manipulative coolness, Lynn was seldom alone with either of us for any length of time. Increasingly, she got the message that, try as we might to make it otherwise, this space on Seventh Street was Muriel's and my space, and she, Lynn, was a desired and sought-after visitor, but a visitor forever.

I had wanted it to be different. Muriel had wanted it to be different. Lynn had wanted it to be different. At least in all the places we consciously touched. Somehow, it never was, but neither Muriel nor I wanted to notice that, nor how unfair such a stacked deck was. She and I had each other; Lynn had only a piece of each of us, and was here on sufferance.

We never saw or articulated this until much later, despite our endless examinations and theme-writing about communal living. And by then it was too late, at least for this experiment in living out our visions.

Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.209-214)

Audre Lorde: On contentedness and stopping

2009-04-24T14:00:00.001-04:00

"About stealing food from supermarkets -- I felt that if we needed it badly enough, we would not get caught. And truth to tell, I stopped doing it when I no longer had to, and I never did get caught."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.216)

In coming to know the wisdom behind the saying "everything in moderation", I've found that contentedness is what actually allows us to live according to this wisdom. I've also found that capitalism does not encourage contentedness, rather it encourages unlimited consumption and discontent that can only be cured by two things: "more" or "new".

This quote from Audre Lorde is beautiful to me because it shows she was in tune enough with that wisdom to know that her theft was justified as long as she NEEDED it, and that it was no longer justified when she no longer needed it. And only her internal conscience could measure that, not laws, not commandments, not anything outside of herself. She was honest enough with herself and in tune with her inner voice enough to recognize the point at which she should stop -- and that, more than the traditional literal morality of "not stealing", is what I see as a wonderful human characteristic.

Audre Lorde: On the loneliness of unity, finding self

2009-04-24T11:32:00.011-04:00

"Every one of the women in our group took for granted, and would have said if asked, that we were all on the side of right. But the nature of that right everyone presumed to be on the side of was always unnamed. It was just another way of silently avoiding having to examine what our living positions were within our small group of lesbians, dependent as we were upon each other for support. We were too afraid those differences might in face be irreconcilable, for we had never been taught any tools for dealing with them. Our individuality was very precious to each one of us, but so was the group, and the other outsiders whom we had found to share some more social aspects of our loneliness."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.205)

So much of the lessons Audre Lorde learned in the context of being black and lesbian, I see as applicable to my people in general. Everything about this passage applies to the struggle of community in general, lesbian or not.

The full passage is below, after the continued:

"It was not that I didn't have friends, and good ones. There was a loose group of young lesbians, white except for Flee and I, who hung together, apart from whatever piece of the straight world we each had a separate place in. We not only believed in the reality of sisterhood, that word which was to be so abused two decades later, but we also tried to put it into practice, with varying results. We all cared for and about each other, sometimes with more or less understanding, regardless of who was entangled with whom at any given time, and there was always a place to sleep and something to eat and a listening ear for anyone who wandered into the crew. And there was always somebody calling you on the telephone, to interrupt the fantasies of suicide. That is as good a working definition of friend as most.

However independently, we tried to build a community of sorts where we could, at the very least, survive within a world we correctly perceived to be hostile to us; we talked endlessly about how best to create that mutual support which twenty years later was being discussed in the women's movement as a brand new concept. Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other; we learned lessons from each other, the values of which were not lessened by what we did not learn.

For both Flee and me, it seemed that loving women was something that other Black women just didn't do. And if they did, then it was in some fashion and in some place that was totally inaccessible to us, because we could never find them. Except for Saturday nights in the Bagatelle, where neither Flee nor I was stylish enough to be noticed.

(My straight Black girlfriends, like Jean and Crystal, either ignored my love for women, considered it interestingly avant-garde, or tolerated it as just another example of my craziness. It was allowable as long as it wasn't too obvious and didn't reflect upon them in any way. At least my being gay kept me from being a competitor for whatever men happened to be upon their horizons. It also made me much more reliable as a confidante. I never asked for anything more.)...

[...] In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society -- Black or gay -- I felt I didn't have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look "nice". To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn't realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.

But in this plastic and anti-human society in which we love, there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight. Unattractive, too, or so the ads in Ebony and Jet seemed to tell me. Yet I read them anyway, in the bathroom, on the newsstand, at my sister's house, whenever I got a chance. It was a furtive reading, but it was an affirmation of some part of me, however frustrating.

If nobody's going to dig you too tough anyway, it really doesn't matter so much what you dare to explore. I had already begun to learn that when I left my parents' house...

[...] Every one of the women in our group took for granted, and would have said if asked, that we were all on the side of right. But the nature of that right everyone presumed to be on the side of was always unnamed. It was just another way of silently avoiding having to examine what our living positions were within our small group of lesbians, dependent as we were upon each other for support. We were too afraid those differences might in face be irreconcilable, for we had never been taught any tools for dealing with them. Our individuality was very precious to each one of us, but so was the group, and the other outsiders whom we had found to share some more social aspects of our loneliness.

Being gay-girls without set roles was the one difference we allowed ourselves to see and to bind us to each other. We were not of that other world and we wanted to believe that, by definition, we were therefore free of that other world's problems of capitalism, greed, racism, classism, etc. This was not so. But we continued to visit each other and eat together and, in general, share our lives and resources, as if it were."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.179-205)

"Bulrusher", by Eisa Davis [theatre review]

2009-04-20T23:59:00.018-04:00

[Michal Daniel, 2008]

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

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Bulrusher, by Eisa Davis
reviewed by David Grant

(The Liberator Magazine) Pillsbury House Theatre is like "The Little Engine That Could." Or maybe a more appropriate story analogy for this little gem of a theater is "The Mouse That Roared." Like the larger, much better known Penumbra Theater of St. Paul, Pillsbury House has a modest home base in a venerable old community center. And like Penumbra, it has become a powerhouse home for brilliant world-class theater. Over the years of their tenure, co-artistic producing director Faye Price, and co-artistic managing director Noel Raymond (and before them founding artistic director Ralph Remington) have pulled off many minor miracles and a number of major coups in terms of what they've managed to present on that little stage. Pillsbury House Theatre's recent production of Eisa Davis' Bulrusher is arguably their most impressive ever.

The team of Faye Price and Noel Raymond is immensely gifted, and they can always be counted on to stage one of the more challenging and interesting seasons of any theater in town, but they outdid themselves this time by successfully snaring the rights to a play by rapidly-rising theater artist Eisa Davis that was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and then, just as impressive, by convincing the stellar Marion McClinton to come home to the Twin Cities to direct it. The young, talented Lauren Ignaut from the Guthrie literary department did the dramaturgy.

Eisa Davis, niece to legendary firebrand and freedom fighter Angela Davis, is a woman of many parts -- a Harvard grad whose interests and rich talents have led to parallel careers as a musician and songwriter/ composer, actress and playwright, and activist. She is currently starring on the Broadway stage in the Tony-awarded "Passing Strange," and she has recently released a CD of her original music called, "Something Else." Her play Bulrusher became one of last year's Pulitzer Prize finalists in a year when giants like Edward Albee and August Wilson didn't make the cut. Because Pillsbury House Theatre somehow managed to snatch up the rights to this play for their season, Twin Cities audiences are among a very small group of nationwide theater-goers lucky enough to see the play this year.

Questions of both personal and collective identity are core issues at the heart of African American literature, and that's the deep well from which Davis' play comes. But Davis' is definitely not a story we've heard before. Bulrusher's title character is an African American woman of mixed heritage who's got some uniquely major identity issues with which to contend. The fact that she was born "colored" in the waning days of the depression, in the midst of an overwhelmingly white and isolated rural town in California, would make the task of developing a strong, coherent identity hard enough for anyone. But add into the mix the fact that she was found floating in a basket down the river that flows through town, and has never had a clue about the identity of her parents, and you've got someone with a very interesting identity challenge indeed. And Bulrusher's challenge doesn't stop there. As the play opens, it's 1955. The unpopular war in Korea grinds on, liberation struggles among the world's colonized masses are heating up, and at home, America's own "colored" are growing restless and beginning to rise up too. The civil rights movement is taking shape and building momentum toward an historic showdown with institutional racism in America.

But Bulrusher and the placid, rural, mostly white community around her, live far from the center of the fray. Their little valley is so isolated from the rest of the world that what's happening in Selma, Ala. seems just as far removed from their daily reality as what's happening in Seoul, Korea. Bulrusher has grown up with no idea whatsoever what it means to be a person of color in America. In fact, at age twenty, it's only been a couple of years since Bulrusher even discovered that she is "colored." In the world she knows, she's always been an outsider not due to the darker hue of her skin but because 1) neither she nor anyone around seems to know who her people are or where she's from; 2) her mystical relationship with the river has given her the ability to "read" people and to see clairvoyantly both their past and their future with uncanny accuracy. All someone needs to do is dip their hand in water; then Bulrusher puts her hand in that same water and "reads" it.

But as the action of the play begins in the parlor of a local whore house, Schoolch, the white teacher who took her in and raised her from infancy, has just asked her to stop doing this. This ability to "read" water is just one aspect of Bulrusher's relationship with the river. She talks to the river and confides in the river as she bathes in its waters. It's the only "mother" she's ever known. Scoolch now wants to pull her away from the river and toward a normal life in the real world. But there'd be no play if Eisa Davis weren't planning at this very moment on turning that "real world" completely upside down.

As soon as Bulrusher agrees to stop reading folks' water, the "real world" comes calling on her with a vengeance. She's never held a boy's hand; never been kissed. But now a young man she's known all her life decides to pursue her aggressively and win her hand in marriage. And no sooner has that uncomfortable dance begun than an African American refugee from the deep south comes to town in search of a long-lost uncle she believes is living here. When Bulrusher falls for the young stranger, this triggers a wild chain of events which completely blows her world apart. Suddenly, her relationships with the principle people in her life: with her suitor; with Schoolch; with the whore house Madam, and with the logger who is her long-time paramour; with the young visitor from down south with whom she falls in love -- with the river, and with herself -- will never be the same again.

That's a lot of dramatic material for a playwright to heap up onto the loom of her imagination and work with, but somehow, Davis pulls it off, deftly weaving a magical story from the stuff of all these diverse personalities and story threads she has placed into motion.

One of the most striking things about the play that hits a theater-goer immediately is the power and sometimes, the strangeness of the language. Part of playwright Davis' attraction to this particular town in this particular region of California is that, isolated in the remote reaches of their mountainous home, sometime during the late 19th century, the residents of Booneville (Boonts) made up their own language, lovingly referred to as "Boontling." "The language … was primarily devised," says Davis, "to discuss taboo subjects and keep outsiders out. But Boontling also functioned to document town history, create unexpected value from the strange, and satisfy the residents' overriding love of inventive talk." Hmmm …

One of the principal criticisms of much of the work created by African American playwrights in recent years is that the language is too much the star of the show, to the extent that it distracts from the dramatic action that should be driving the story forward -- that the language is "too poetic." August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, among others, are slammed for this, and now, Eisa Davis will be as well. But just as Wilson and Parks were never the least bit apologetic for this aspect of their storytelling style, Davis will be a proud standard bearer for the tradition too. When our ancestors were dragged here as slaves and they took away our mother tongue(s), we put this country on notice right away: "Y'all stand back, now. We f'in to do some real interesting stuff with y'all's language." And we have. And, primarily through hip-hop and spoken word, that tradition of bending and shaping the language to make it our own continues today.

The play is a celebration of that tradition. And it's also, in many ways, a celebration of the American myth of how the frontier allows people the freedom to create or re-create themselves in whatever ways make sense to them in the moment. Some will criticize this play for pushing the increasingly popular idea that we are now living in a "post-racial" America. But is Davis' play really saying that's where we are? It may seem so at first blush, but the answer is "no." All she's really saying is that identity is complicated, and fluid -- that self-definition is the first step to self-determination. As long as you're the one defining who and what you are, you're on a journey that expands your universe. It's when others do the defining -- including other black folks, that you find your possibilities and your universe constricted. At one pivotal moment in the play, when she realizes the opportunity which circumstances have just laid at her feet, Bulrusher exclaims, with emotion, that she feels like she's got, "An open ticket to the land of "could be." And as she bravely grabs that ticket and rides it for all it's worth, she pulls us along with her on an unforgettable ride.

Christiana Clark as Bulrusher delivered an exquisite, nuanced performance in a highly challenging role. The venerable James Williams -- one of Penumbra Theater's founding members -- Sonja Parks, Jodi A. Kellogg, Marc Rosenwinkel, and John Catron rounded out a very strong supporting cast.

Whenever you find yourself in the mood for an evening of theater, place Pillsbury House somewhere in the Big Three list of theaters you always check first. They're a little theater on a mission. That mission is big and it’s ambitious -- but this is a theater with the big heart and the big talent required to serve that mission well.

Audre Lorde: On the personal + political [sayings]

2009-04-17T14:28:00.004-04:00

"I didn't know how I was going to bring my personal and political vision together, but I knew it had to be possible because I felt them both too strongly, and knew how much I needed them both to survive. I did not agree with Rhea and her progressive friends when they said that this was not what the revolution was about. Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for."
~Audre Lorde, "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name" (p.197)

Why buy the cow when you get free milk?

2009-04-14T09:01:00.014-04:00

Before you shake your head and judge, think about this: Instead of berating young black girls about showing off their beautiful natural born sexuality, how about suggesting that they value it a bit more. The point ain't to suppress it, it's to treat it like it's worth something extremely valuable. Once you understand that, giving it away for free on Youtube, to millions of people who don't care about you, automatically seems like a bad idea. No head or finger shaking necessary.

Anonamas: "Us" [kiotd]

2009-04-13T11:50:00.012-04:00

Live From Planet Earth artists make the internets a great place to be again! Thank God for Anonamas.

Us

Keep It On The (Download)

Raising Boys: Tips For Single Mothers [trailer]

2009-04-11T17:06:00.002-04:00

From the producer: "We all agree that the Black man needs to come and take back his home and his community. However, the reality is that RIGHT NOW 70% of Black families are headed by the female. Our communities are suffering and prisons are being filled every day because of the lack of attention that is being placed on this phenomenon. Raising Boys intends to help the Black woman to be successful in raising Black Men. In a straightforward manner, Deric Muhammad addresses the struggles of single mothers doing their best to raise male children in this gripping,honest and must see documentary."

Memo to the world: Black mothers matter too!

2009-04-11T15:13:00.007-04:00

Kimberly Seals Allers submitted this post to us. She is an award-winning business journalist, editor of mochamanual.com (a weekly online magazine for moms of color), and author of both "The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy" and "The Mocha Manual to Turning Your Passion into Profit." Kimberly is also a divorcing mother of two and lives in Long Island, NY.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend recently about her worries about her students. My question was, who is in these kids' lives encouraging them and inspiring them to be guided by their interests and passions? I suspected that there weren't enough people getting INTIMATELY involved in young black people's REAL LIVES and that perhaps we need to work on how to make getting involved an easier process. Perhaps 25+ year olds would get involved more if there was an easy way for them to fit into the lives of younger black kids without having to initiate the process themselves. Afterall, more people prefer to get in where they fit in rather than pioneer a collective effort. Granted, this is for various reasons but, still, that's just the reality we live in.

She mentioned that there are many black women who are taking care of these kids as if they were their own. Yet, while that is vital for their survival, I think focusing primarily on survival has its downside. As a young black boy it was the combination of basic care AND advanced challenges that inspired me to not only survive, but also to try and live an honest life, full of passion -- confident and at peace with myself.

I do not think that maternal vs. paternal matters. What matters is that a child be simultaneously protected (so he can survive) AND guided (towards his passion and life purpose). Otherwise, I think what we see is a community where many grown black men are mere man-children -- they have survived, but they never learned the reason why they should live. It's no surprise to me that a person like this would trick off money and value material items and physical pleasure above many of life's other, more important, lessons and experiences.

What I'm saying, and what I think this article says very well, is that as communities, we need to make sure that we are not just solely fighting for the survival of our youth. We need to make sure that we keep them alive and healthy, while also assisting them in finding their own reasons to live -- passion, interests, purpose. It's not enough to just nurture and protect the physical, we must also nurture and protect the mental and the spiritual. Otherwise we're merely ensuring the survival of man-boys -- black zombies whose presence in our communities can often times be more destructive than productive, not because of any fault of theirs, but because their teachers, guardians and communities ensured their survival but failed to inspire them.

(Mom Logic) I have a gripe. I hate to start off airing grievances, but I figured I'd get this one off my chest so I can move on to other things. So here it is: there's a dominant mommy culture in this country and its face is mostly white and affluent.

That bothers me because Black mothers have an important perspective, unique insights, and many of the same across-the-board issues as all moms, but we are often overlooked in all the great mommy debates. We aren't seen as the thinkers in this mommy movement, not respected as an important perspective in shaping the future of say, maternity leave and childcare issues, nor is our journey in motherhood told in cutesy books or network sitcoms.

My fear is that there's some dangerous subliminal messaging here and the message is this; my job as a Black mother is simple: make sure my children don't become future criminals, gangsta rappers, dog-fighters, teenage mothers, or welfare recipients. Our hands are full; let's leave the policy making and big picture idea-shaping to someone else.

But more strikingly, I fear that black women are still viewed as breeders not nurturing mothers, women who "end up" mothers and not those who choose and embrace the path of motherhood. Hey, we're too busy rolling our necks, cussin' or smacking up our kids to take part in esoteric conversations about enacting meaningful legislation that supports mothers.

The last bit of blame falls on us. We have to speak up. We too want the best for our children, better maternity leave options, and flex-time schedules that aren't career killers. The truth is, we are intentional parents with supportive husbands and our relationships are not just baby mama drama. We can learn a little sumthin' from our Caucasian sisters here--if they have an issue they will create a community, live or online, in a minute. They will speak up, they will march, or start a foundation, but they will be heard. We can start by viewing our voice as important and demanding to be heard. We can start by rallying together. The world is officially on notice. (source)

Kiilu Nyasha: media, revolution + the BPP legacy

2009-04-11T15:00:00.006-04:00

Hans Bennett submitted this interview with Black Panther Party member Kiilu Nyasha. Bennett is an independent journalist and co-founder of Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal. This is an edited interview, featuring excerpts from Nyasha’s article: “Ruchell Cinque Magee and the August 7th Courthouse Slave Rebellion.”

(Black Commentator) Kiilu Nyasha: Media, Revolution + The Legacy Of The Black Panther Party

Hans Bennett: How did you join the BPP?

Kiilu Nyasha: I started running into Panthers when I worked for President Johnson's so-called “War on Poverty,” at The Community Action Institute (CAI) in New Haven, CT. We were supposed to organize the community, and of course they didn't really mean it; but I was politically naive. So I took them literally at their word and plunged into organizing, going to various community meetings.

A young Panther named Belva, just a teenager and known as "sisterlove," was sent to New Haven from Oakland to organize a free breakfast program. A town hall meeting was organized to decide whether or not they could institute the breakfast program. I was employed at the teen center where they wanted to house the breakfast program. I wound up being the Breakfast Program Coordinator after being eliminated by CPI when they closed the auxiliary Community Action Institute, absorbing those they wanted to stay into the main body, CPI. Later on, I was recruited from the Chapter to work as office manager and secretary to the attorneys for Lonnie McLucas, Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, including the late Charles Garry, Esq.

When I found myself jobless, I applied for welfare because having worked for Yale and the government, I didn't qualify for unemployment insurance. I had a 9 year-old son and rent for my apartment was $80/month, but they would only give me $25 a week. What was I supposed to do with that? So I joined the second chapter of the BPP in late 1969, created after the first chapter got locked up for murder charges, along with the Chairman, Bobby Seale -- basically recruited to organize around the Panther trials by Robert Webb [martyred] and Doug Miranda. At this time, I was still “Pat Gallyot”, because I changed my name later in the 1970’s.

HB: Tell us about the BPP.

KN: The BPP was initiated by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who were students at Merritt College in Oakland. They saw the needs of their community and began to address them with the Ten-Point Platform and community programs. They confronted police brutality by following the police around with law books and guns, because at the time, it was legal to carry arms openly. They witnessed arrests to make sure the police didn't go into their brutality mode. Eventually, there was a shoot-out between the police and the BPP when Huey's car was stopped, and an officer was shot and killed in self-defense. Huey himself was shot in the abdomen and the picture of him handcuffed in the hospital went around the world.

An incredible movement swept this country like wild-fire, because police abuses were a national epidemic. The BPP developed a 10-point platform demanding self-determination for our Black community, including land, bread, housing, clothing, education, justice and peace. We started free medical clinics, and in New Haven, the clinic was staffed by doctors and nurses from Yale. In Oakland, Dr. Tolbert Small initiated the sickle cell anemia awakening with education and free tests.

We propagated revolution and formed the original “rainbow coalition.” We worked with many groups, including the Young Lords, the Young Patriot Party from Appalachia, the Peace and Freedom Party, SDS, the Red Guard, the Brown Berets, I Wor Kuen, and the American Indian Movement. History books have omitted the fact that Blacks were leading the revolutionary movement in this country. Other communities adapted our programs for themselves. We organized within our own separate communities, but we all came to the same rallies. So then you'd have this huge multicultural rally led by the BPP. It was also intergenerational. I was practically an elder at 30 because most Panthers were teenagers.

HB: What is the BPP’s legacy?

KN: Once instituted, our free breakfast program was in high demand because kids were hungry. Subsequently, a free school lunch program was started in New Haven, and similar free food programs were instituted across the country.

The “Black is Beautiful” campaign elevated the mentality of Black people in terms of what we thought about ourselves. Don't forget, James Brown's song “I'm Black and I'm Proud” came on the heels of the BPP. Music and culture reflected the Movement. That legacy has endured.

The BPP ushered in a whole crew of Black politicians, but what did that do for Black people, especially poor Black people? For example, President Obama is a friend of capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. Fascism needs a new brown face to deal with the so-called Third World. Obama cannot and will not produce real change, like moving from capitalism to socialism, redistributing the wealth, abolishing the prison system per se, and changing domestic and foreign policies.

HB: How did the BPP fare against US government repression?

KN: We were defeated. They pulled every dirty trick in the book to wipe us out and succeeded. They organized fratricide and had us killing each other. They jailed and assassinated us. By 1969, 28 Panthers had already been murdered by the police. There was the blatant murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in 1969.

President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover orchestrated COINTELPRO and another program that was behind the walls called “NEWKILL.” We were targeted and declared the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the US. This came out when the secret programs were revealed after files were stolen from the FBI office in Media, PA. Later, Senator Frank Church conducted hearings further documenting the repression.

HB: What impact did the BPP have on police brutality and prisons?

KN: We may have caused a temporary calm, but it actually got worse. For example, Panthers Harold Taylor and John Bowman (currently of the SF8) were chased down in Los Angeles by plain-clothes police and shot at. They shot back, were eventually arrested, had a capital trial, but were acquitted on grounds of self defense. However, today we're getting shot left and right. The incarceration rate is the highest in the world. President Clinton ushered in a prison boom that has our prison population up to 2.4 million today. Here in California there are 180,000 prisoners, with many more on probation and parole. We're living in a police state and have a cradle-to-prison policy for our youth. We have to regroup and develop new tactics and strategies that address today’s conditions.

HB: What can we learn from the successes and failures of the BPP, so that we can be more effective today?

KN: Organizing worked! As in, door-to-door street organizing, on the ground, rolling up our sleeves and going right to the people, and helping them meet their own needs. People have gotten far away from that. Stop knocking on city hall’s door! Why are we asking our enemies for help? Working within the system only works if you consider yourself an infiltrator. We have to draw the line and stop supporting it. Today, we should organize gardens to grow our own food.

Propaganda is a necessary tool and our job right now is to raise consciousness to educate to liberate. The BPP had regular political education classes. That needs to happen again. People need to get into small study groups and discuss politics.

Also, students aren’t organizing on the campuses like they used to. I think it's partly because the lower class isn't on the campuses these days because nobody can afford it.

HB: What do you think of recent events in Latin America, where people are fighting US domination and local ruling class power?

KN: I’m inspired! I highly recommend the recent documentary film about Venezuela titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The people’s reversal of the attempted coup is such a wonderful demonstration of people's power and what an impact it can have. Watching it recharged my batteries. I was like "Oh my goodness!" It's very exciting, promising, and I hope we have sense enough to be in solidarity and support the struggles there and everywhere else oppressed people are fighting. How else is the US empire going to be defeated? The global economy is here to stay.

HB: This issue of global solidarity reminds me of Huey Newton's idea of “revolutionary intercommunalism,” emphasizing that in today’s age of transnational corporate power, the US working class’ liberation is inherently tied to that of workers everywhere. Globalization is a popular topic today, but do you think Huey gets credit for talking about it back then?

KN: Huey’s theory was brilliant, prophetic, and is a perfect solution in today's world. Of course Huey has not been given proper credit and it’s the same thing with Malcolm X. Now more than ever, oppressed people around the world need to unite against the common enemy that is transnational corporations. We can’t let them divide us. We're in the throes of a death spiral right now, and if we don't hurry up and deal with climate change, for example, things will get horribly worse for ordinary people and we can kiss this planet good-bye, probably within this century.

HB: When did you start working in media?

KN: Because of my years of secretarial work, I had typing skills. At the time of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins’ trial in New Haven, on behalf of the Panther Defense Committee, we printed a tabloid and I co-wrote and typeset an article covering the story. I also wrote articles for the national BPP paper, and eventually learned how to put a newspaper together. After moving to San Francisco, I was working for a local Black newspaper called The Sun Reporter, but left in anger after they chopped up an article that I wrote about the uprising at NY State Prison in Attica that resulted in the massacre of some 39 prisoners and guards. Afterwards, in late 1971, a bunch of us had political education classes that met at my pad in the Fillmore, and we put together a tabloid called "By Any Means Necessary." In '72, I wrote and published another tabloid titled, "Niggahs of the World Unite."

Later, I lived in the Hunters Point neighborhood, and while practicing a very strenuous form of martial arts, my muscles started deteriorating. I wound up in the medical system for many years--a long, hairy story. Suffice it to say, I walked into the system in 1975 and rolled out in 1980, and have been in Chinatown ever since, living in a 12 story Housing Authority building that they said was the only place they could find that was wheelchair accessible.

HB: How does the mainstream media today compare to 40 years ago?

KN: It’s much worse! I used to see BPP leaders Kathleen Cleaver and David Hilliard on TV. The movement used to get media attention. Now you can't get any media attention on prisoners. We can have a demonstration with 10,000 people, and they still don't cover it. You don't even have good journalists anymore.

HB: Why do you think that is?

KN: Look at all the journalists who’ve been fired for telling the truth. Not to mention all the journalists who have been murdered these past few years, particularly by the US in Iraq. It intimidates people and they need real courage to tell the truth today.

HB: How has the alternative media changed?

KN: It's not anywhere as bold. We had the BPP newspaper and all kinds of badass tabloids. Today they censor you. To me, with a few exceptions, the Black press and other alternative media have fallen down on the job.

HB: Your recent Black Commentator article titled “Black August 2008” focused on the legacy of the late prison author and BPP leader, George Jackson, who was assassinated by guards at San Quentin Prison on August 21, 1971.

KN: I initiated a correspondence with George in early 1971, and months later, got a one-hour visit in the holding cell of San Quentin. I’ve met no one before or since more dedicated to revolutionary change. George’s book of prison letters, Soledad Brother, was a best seller, and his second book, Blood In My Eye, had just been finished at the time of his death, and was published posthumously.

George was one of the three “Soledad Brothers,” whose story began on January 13, 1970 when a tower guard at Soledad State Prison shot and killed three Black captives on the yard, leaving them unattended to bleed to death: Cleveland Edwards, “Sweet Jugs” Miller, and W. L. Nolen, all active resisters in the Black Movement behind the walls. Others included George Jackson, Jeffrey Gauldin, Hugo L.A. Pinell, Steve Simmons, Howard Tole, and the late Warren Wells.

After the common verdict of “justifiable homicide” was returned and the killer guard exonerated at Soledad, another white-racist guard was beaten and thrown from a tier to his death in retaliation. Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and Jackson were charged with his murder, and became known as The Soledad Brothers. A campaign to free them was led by college professor Angela Davis, and George’s brother Jonathan. The three were awaiting trial, with a mandatory death sentence if convicted, at the time of George’s death.

HB: You wrote that we should honor Jackson’s legacy by working to free two California prisoners: Hugo “Yogi Bear” Pinell and Ruchell “Cinque” Magee. Currently housed in Pelican Bay State Prison’s notorious “Security Housing Unit," Pinell has been in continuous solitary confinement since at least 1971. On January 14, 2009, Pinell was denied parole for 15 years, a virtual re-sentencing.

KN: The book titled “The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison,” by Min Yee, documents how Hugo Pinell was one of the original members of the Black Movement, led by George Jackson and others in Soledad Prison. At that time, it wasn't safe for Blacks to walk the yard. The collusion between the racist, KKK-type guards and white racist prison gangs was horrendous. These conditions were horrible.

Yogi was eventually transferred to San Quentin, and was there on August 21, 1971, when George was assassinated. That day, in what was described by prison officials as an escape attempt, George allegedly smuggled a gun into San Quentin in a wig. That feat was proven impossible, and evidence subsequently suggested a setup designed by prison officials to eliminate Jackson once and for all as they had tried numerous times. On that fateful day, three notoriously racist prison guards and two inmate turnkeys were also killed. According to an eye witness, when Jackson was shot while running on the yard, he got up instantly and dived in the direction of some bushes. He was subsequently murdered while lying on the ground wounded.

Six Black prisoners were charged with murder and assault. Hugo Pinell, Fleeta Drumgo, David Johnson, Luis Talamantez, Johnny Spain, and Willie Sundiata Tate became known as the “San Quentin Six.” Johnny Spain was the only one convicted of murder. The others were either acquitted or convicted of assault. Hugo is the only one remaining in prison, and badly needs our support.

HB: Tell us about Ruchell Magee.

KN: I first met Ruchell in the holding cell of the Marin County courthouse in the Summer of 1971. I found him to be soft-spoken, warm and a gentleman in typically Southern tradition. We’ve been in correspondence pretty much ever since. I was then working for The Sun Reporter, and covering the pretrial hearings of Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee. By 1971, Ruchell was an astute jailhouse lawyer. He was responsible for the release and protection of a myriad of prisoners benefiting from his extensive knowledge of law, which he used to prepare writs, appeals and lawsuits for himself and many others behind the walls.

Ruchell was fighting charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and conspiracy to aid the escape of state prisoners. Although critically wounded on August 7, 1970, he was the sole survivor among the four brave Black men who conducted the courthouse slave rebellion, leaving him to be charged with everything they could throw at him. On August 7, 17-year old Jonathan Jackson raided the Marin Courtroom and tossed guns to prisoners William Christmas and James McClain, who in turn invited Ruchell to join them. Rue seized the hour spontaneously as they attempted to escape by taking a judge, assistant district attorney and three jurors as hostages in that audacious move to expose to the public the brutally racist prison conditions and free the Soledad Brothers.

McClain was on trial for assaulting a guard in the wake of Black prisoner Fred Billingsley’s murder by prison officials in San Quentin in February, 1970. With only four months before a parole hearing, Magee had appeared in the courtroom to testify for McClain.

The four revolutionaries successfully commandeered the group to the waiting van and were about to pull out of the parking lot when Marin County Police and San Quentin guards opened fire. When the shooting stopped, Judge Harold Haley, Jackson, Christmas, and McClain lay dead; Magee was unconscious and seriously wounded as was the prosecutor. A juror suffered a minor injury.

Magee had already spent at least seven years studying law and deluging the courts with petitions and lawsuits to contest his own illegal conviction in two fraudulent trials. As he put it, the judicial system “used fraud to hide fraud” in his second case after the first conviction was overturned on an appeal based on a falsified transcript. His strategy, therefore, centered on proving that he was a slave, denied his constitutional rights and held involuntarily. Therefore, he had the legal right to escape slavery as established in the case of the African slave, Cinque, who had escaped the slave ship, Amistad, and won freedom in a Connecticut trial. Thus, Magee had to first prove he’d been illegally and unjustly incarcerated for over seven years. He also wanted the case moved to the Federal Courts and the right to represent himself.

Moreover, Magee wanted to conduct a trial that would bring to light the racist and brutal oppression of Black prisoners throughout the State. “My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery. This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

On the other hand, Angela Davis, his co-defendant, charged with buying the guns used in the raid, conspiracy, etc., was innocent of any wrongdoing because the gun purchases were perfectly legal and she was not part of the original plan. Davis’ lawyers wanted an expedient trial to prove her innocence on trumped up charges. This conflict in strategy resulted in the trials being separated. Davis was acquitted of all charges and released in June of 1972.

Ruchell fought on alone, losing much of the support attending the Davis trial. After dismissing five attorneys and five judges, he won the right to defend himself. The murder charges had been dropped, and Magee faced two kidnap charges. He was ultimately convicted of PC 207, simple kidnap, but the more serious charge of PC 209, kidnap for purposes of extortion, resulted in a disputed verdict. According to one of the juror’s sworn affidavit, the jury voted for acquittal on the PC 209 and Magee continues to this day to challenge the denial and cover-up of that acquittal.

Ruchell is currently on the mainline of Corcoran State Prison doing his 46th year locked up in California gulags - many of those years spent in solitary confinement under tortuous conditions! In spite of having committed no physical assaults or murders. Is that not political?

HB: Let’s conclude with a quote from George Jackson.

KN: He wrote in Blood In My Eye: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.” (source)

Pena and Pistols: an interview wit' Ebony Colbert.

2009-04-11T14:57:00.003-04:00

JR Valrey is the Minister of Information for the Prisoners Of Conscience Committee, an Oakland based organization founded by Fred Hampton, Jr. with the mission to liberate the minds and hearts of African and colonized people. The POCC takes the stand that all prisoners are political. JR is a regular contributor to The Liberator.

Pena and Pistols: an interview wit' Ebony Colbert authour of "Lessons Learned..."

I have worked for the SF Bay View Newspaper for the last 7 years, and since then, I have learned a lot and have met a lot of intelligent, creative, and dedicated people; many older and some younger. Out of the young writers that I have met, Ebony Colbert is definitely one of of the most talented writers that I had met since I considered myself a writer. Her stories were always flowed, she had interesting topics, and her articles were always thoroughly researched. I also came to admire how she perfected her talent in the midst of having two children, a husband, and trying to maintain a household. She is the personification of "you can do anything that you put your mind to".

Since she left the Bay View, she has been involved in a number of literary projects, the biggest one, which has recently been released is the autobiography of Frisco street and rap legend Herm Lewis, "Lessons Learned From a Hunter's Point Street Soldier". It is hood literature but not written in the flowery non-realistic tone that Black Romance novels are written in. Ebony wrote a dope story filled with the realities of growing up Black in one of the most notorious hoods in San Francisco, Hunter's Point. I'm not going to say too much more about her Eb and Herm's newest accomplishment, you're are going to have to buy the book. Now check her out as we get updated on what her life has been like after working at the Bay View...

MOI JR: Can you describe your new book with Herm? How long did it take ya'll to make it?

Ebony: The new book, "Lessons Learned...", is an autobiography of Herm Lewis, it chronicles his life from childhood til today and touches on significant changes he's been through. We talk about his growing up with his brothers and sisters with a single mom, getting into hustling, then drug abuse, going to prison and then getting into the music industry. It also has some information on certain people in the industry that most people don't know. It took us less than a year from the time we first started talking about the book to print.

MOI JR: What was the creative process like? How many times did ya'll hook up? And what did ya'll do on those days?

Ebony: Herm would come see me every week with a stack of notebook paper. He would write about certain situations or people and I would start another chapter or another piece of the book. While I read what he wrote, I would do a couple of things, first I would edit it and write down questions that any reader would want to know. Like if he was talking about a young lady, I would ask him, "what was her name, where was she from, what did she look like, how did y'all meet?", If it was about an event or someone famous, I would go online or look for other sources to verify or elaborate on it. Once I finished a chapter, I would give it to him he would go over it, add to it, make any changes or say "run it". The whole time, Herm would use his memory and I would use my talent as a writer to make his life into a story we could all read. We did that for a good 8 months, until the book was finished.

MOI JR: How did you make the jump from Bay View Newspaper writer to book writer?

Ebony: I started writing for the Bayview in 2002, at 21 years old, and even before then, I was working on my first novel. As I got more stories and more editorials, people would suggest that I do a book. I just didn't have the time with working and the kids, I would do my book a little bit, here and there. When I stopped writing for the Bayview, people started approaching me about writing for their publications... I've done Hoodstar, Bay Area Makeup Artists (mag), which will launch in the summer and a number of other bay area publications. In 2007, Herm and my husband Shawn ended up working together. It was a huge coincidence because the same year, I started working for Herm's digital distribution company. to make a long story short, he told my husband he was working on a book and my husband called me immediately. I put my book on hold because it was fiction and I felt herm's story needed to be told, it was on time. Now, I'm finishing my book series, which will be ready by 2010.

MOI JR: What did you have to do to put out a book independently?

Ebony: During the time I started working with Herm, I started my own artist management company called Basic Black Business. I already had two rap clients who I was doing marketing for so when I started working with Herm, I knew first thing first is marketing.We had already cut the fliers for promotion, I set Herm up a myspace page and started doing marketing online. Then I let his reps at his distribution company know what was hasppening. Lastly, I contacted my friends, family and media folks to get it out there. I researched different publishers and printers and decided it would be in our best interest to try to do the distribution on our own to save money. So while we were writing the book, we hooked up with a printer who would bind and print the book and we could do our own distribution. It was that decision that caused Herm to hire me as his publicist/manager.

MOI JR: What else are you working on literary-wise?

Ebony: I have a book series called "3 Street" that I'm finishing. The first book in the series is called "Get Back" it's about a young married couple who moves out the ghetto but the drama they grew up in follows them to Atlanta. It's a thriller. It's not one of those romance novels, or unreal "urban fiction books". There will be violence, sex and drugs...but it is well done, not glamourized or overdone. It's real... they've moved out the hood, own their own businesses and look like they're living fly! But they are keeping secrets from eachother that tear up their marriage and the pretty little playhouse they built. And atleast 5 characters are modeled after people I know...and people you might know too! I'm doing the autobiography for Victor "CreatureMan" Jones from the Scalen Family (he was on most of Messy Marv's songs) and "Paradise Ventures" for a community writer named Marvin Crutchfield. Plus, I got the documentary and compilation cd for Herm's book coming out this summer so I'ma be real busy for atleast a year.

MOI JR: How could people keep up with you?

Ebony: I'm flexible....you can visit me at myspace.com/blackbusinessgrp, call me at (415) 519-5470 or email me at basicblackbiz@yahoo.com. I'm also looking for models, comedians, rappers who want management, marketing and booking help.

Why have a manager, when I do all the work?

2009-04-11T12:47:00.006-04:00

Chaquis Maliq will be performing May 16 at Live From Planet Earth [livefromplanetearth.org]. This is a recent blog post of hers that I had to share.

(Chaquis Maliq Blog) Why should an indie artist have a manager or Agent if the ARTIST DOES ALL THE WORK?! So yeah, this is the third time I have done a trial run with a manager/agent. Guess what? I still book all my gigs and have to provide them with all the marketing strategies, networking ideas... so on and so on.

No, I don't sign contracts with these cats! For what? No one ever makes it past the probationary stages. These cats always claim they know someone. Then, guess what, no one knows them though... LOL! I'm not saying I know cats in the industry on some major hype, but at least be able to know the names I drop or at least have some names to drop. The moves I make are from SELF MOTIVATION that GOD provides me with. No Kids... to slow me down, no relationship to hinder my passion and interfere. GRIND GRIND GRIND...

America's new racial boogieman: Rosa Clemente

2009-04-07T16:24:00.003-04:00

America's new racial boogie-man: Rosa Clemente

via [Davey D]

Alice Walker blasted in essay by her daughter.

2009-04-02T17:14:00.008-04:00

Electricladylike asked me to post this. She'll be traveling South America for the next few days:

Electricladylike: "Couple of things: 1) I'm not surprised by any of the things Alice might have done. 2) It's wild because "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" is an awesome essay that in my view really salutes Motherhood. 3) I find it very interesting that Rebecca focuses so much on the beef between her and Alice. She doesn't mention any beef with her father or his "conservative" family. Was her step-mother as loving of her as her own white children? 4) Regardless, I feel like this was a bit much. It's one thing to address the issues but it seemed more along the lines of trying to tear down Alice's image publicly and I just don't see the point in doing that. Okay, so you air the very dirty laundry and then what?"

(Daily Mail UK) How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart by Rebecca Walker: She's revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women's rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn't buy in to Alice's beliefs -- her daughter, Rebecca, 38.

Here the writer describes what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a cultural icon, and why she feels so blessed to be the sort of woman 64-year-old Alice despised -- a mother.

The other day I was vacuuming when my son came bounding into the room. 'Mummy, Mummy, let me help,' he cried. His little hands were grabbing me around the knees and his huge brown eyes were looking up at me. I was overwhelmed by a huge surge of happiness.

I love the way his head nestles in the crook of my neck. I love the way his face falls into a mask of eager concentration when I help him learn the alphabet. But most of all, I simply love hearing his little voice calling: 'Mummy, Mummy.'

It reminds me of just how blessed I am. The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother - thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.

You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.

In fact, having a child has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Far from 'enslaving' me, three-and-a-half-year-old Tenzin has opened my world. My only regret is that I discovered the joys of motherhood so late - I have been trying for a second child for two years, but so far with no luck.

I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son - her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world - goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it's time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution.

My parents met and fell in love in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. Dad [Mel Leventhal], was the brilliant lawyer son of a Jewish family who had fled the Holocaust. Mum was the impoverished eighth child of sharecroppers from Georgia. When they married in 1967, inter-racial weddings were still illegal in some states.

My early childhood was very happy although my parents were terribly busy, encouraging me to grow up fast. I was only one when I was sent off to nursery school. I'm told they even made me walk down the street to the school.

When I was eight, my parents divorced. From then on I was shuttled between two worlds - my father's very conservative, traditional, wealthy, white suburban community in New York, and my mother's avant garde multi-racial community in California. I spent two years with each parent - a bizarre way of doing things.

Ironically, my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa - offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me - a 'delightful distraction', but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting.

According to the strident feminist ideology of the Seventies, women were sisters first, and my mother chose to see me as a sister rather than a daughter. From the age of 13, I spent days at a time alone while my mother retreated to her writing studio - some 100 miles away. I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.

Sisters together

A neighbour, not much older than me, was deputised to look after me. I never complained. I saw it as my job to protect my mother and never distract her from her writing. It never crossed my mind to say that I needed some time and attention from her.

When I was beaten up at school - accused of being a snob because I had lighter skin than my black classmates - I always told my mother that everything was fine, that I had won the fight. I didn't want to worry her.

But the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.

Now I simply cannot understand how she could have been so permissive. I barely want my son to leave the house on a play-date, let alone start sleeping around while barely out of junior school.

A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things.

Although I was on the Pill - something I had arranged at 13, visiting the doctor with my best friend - I fell pregnant at 14. I organised an abortion myself. Now I shudder at the memory. I was only a little girl. I don't remember my mother being shocked or upset. She tried to be supportive, accompanying me with her boyfriend.

Although I believe that an abortion was the right decision for me then, the aftermath haunted me for decades. It ate away at my self-confidence and, until I had Tenzin, I was terrified that I'd never be able to have a baby because of what I had done to the child I had destroyed. For feminists to say that abortion carries no consequences is simply wrong.

As a child, I was terribly confused, because while I was being fed a strong feminist message, I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on.

There was always food in the fridge and she did all the things my mother didn't, such as attending their school events, taking endless photos and telling her children at every opportunity how wonderful they were.

My mother was the polar opposite. She never came to a single school event, she didn't buy me any clothes, she didn't even help me buy my first bra - a friend was paid to go shopping with me. If I needed help with homework I asked my boyfriend's mother.

Moving between the two homes was terrible. At my father's home I felt much more taken care of. But, if I told my mother that I'd had a good time with Judy, she'd look bereft - making me feel I was choosing this white, privileged woman above her. I was made to feel that I had to choose one set of ideals above the other.

When I hit my 20s and first felt a longing to be a mother, I was totally confused. I could feel my biological clock ticking, but I felt if I listened to it, I would be betraying my mother and all she had taught me.

I tried to push it to the back of my mind, but over the next ten years the longing became more intense, and when I met Glen, a teacher, at a seminar five years ago, I knew I had found the man I wanted to have a baby with. Gentle, kind and hugely supportive, he is, as I knew he would be, the most wonderful father.

Although I knew what my mother felt about babies, I still hoped that when I told her I was pregnant, she would be excited for me.

'Mum, I'm pregnant'

Instead, when I called her one morning in the spring of 2004, while I was at one of her homes housesitting, and told her my news and that I'd never been happier, she went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden. I put the phone down and sobbed - she had deliberately withheld her approval with the intention of hurting me. What loving mother would do that?

Worse was to follow. My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I'd mentioned that my parents didn't protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer. I couldn't believe she could be so hurtful - particularly when I was pregnant.

Devastated, I asked her to apologise and acknowledge how much she'd hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding affection and resenting me for things I had no control over - the fact that I am mixed-race, that I have a wealthy, white, professional father and that I was born at all.

But she wouldn't back down. Instead, she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than 'Mom'.

That was a month before Tenzin's birth in December 2004, and I have had no contact with my mother since. She didn't even get in touch when he was rushed into the special care baby unit after he was born suffering breathing difficulties.

And I have since heard that my mother has cut me out of her will in favour of one of my cousins. I feel terribly sad - my mother is missing such a great opportunity to be close to her family. But I'm also relieved. Unlike most mothers, mine has never taken any pride in my achievements. She has always had a strange competitiveness that led her to undermine me at almost every turn.

When I got into Yale - a huge achievement - she asked why on earth I wanted to be educated at such a male bastion. Whenever I published anything, she wanted to write her version - trying to eclipse mine. When I wrote my memoir, Black, White And Jewish, my mother insisted on publishing her version. She finds it impossible to step out of the limelight, which is extremely ironic in light of her view that all women are sisters and should support one another.

It's been almost four years since I have had any contact with my mother, but it's for the best - not only for my self-protection but for my son's well-being. I've done all I can to be a loyal, loving daughter, but I can no longer have this poisonous relationship destroy my life.

I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities. It's helped open the doors for us at schools, universities and in the workplace. But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?

What about the children?

The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn't take into account the toll on children. That's all part of the unfinished business of feminism.

Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

I hope that my mother and I will be reconciled one day. Tenzin deserves to have a grandmother. But I am just so relieved that my viewpoint is no longer so utterly coloured by my mother's.

I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters - a happy family. (source)

Down goes the King [Magazine]

2009-04-02T16:54:00.005-04:00

El Fin has come for King Magazine. They closed shop after finalizing their April issue (sources). Men around the world are tempted by the flesh of black women. Me included. The inevitable question was, are men willing to pay for those images? No matter how many sponsors you start out with, if you don't have a loyal and committed community (big or small) holding you up, you're done even before you start.

My theory with these magazines is that no one will miss them. They get ran through. Folks pick them up, skim them, and throw them away or pass them along. Not a very sustainable business model.

This theory has always applied in my perception of The Liberator. The ones without readers who really care about the publication sort of deserve to fail.

This is why print will not die. It will just die from capitalism's radar, somewhat -- like Jazz, or radio (or Haile Gerima -- haha!). Those who've always loved it for what it is will continue to. Those who were on the bandwagon will leave. Those publications that are sustained by bandwagons will die. Those publications that are sustained -- like Jazz, printed books, or radio -- by committed communities, will thrive. And that's the way it's supposed to be in my view.

Those in the trade who know this will not shed a tear for these publications that are failing left and right. We know -- when all is said and done -- they were just in the game as long as the bandwagon was poppin.

Never read an issue of King Magazine myself -- only covers on newsstands and in bookstores. A part of me thinks it sucks to see folks loosing their jobs. On the other hand, a part of me is rejoicing.

On Black Women in Film.

2009-03-27T13:10:00.003-04:00

Djenabu Mare lives in Toronto Canada with her family. She is a singer/songwriter and documentary filmmaker.

(Kenya London News) Women have to stand up and be counted. The "Image of Black Women Film Festival" (link), in London this weekend, is great. It's definitely a pity that I won't be in London for this. More so, that, this year we have a Kenyan woman director exhibiting.

I'm yet to watch "The Secret Life Of Bees". Going to the movie hall has lately become a luxury for me. But then I guess with family engagements, this is inevitable with most mothers. Recently the U.S. First Lady, Michelle Obama, admitted that she can’t remember the first time she went to an adult movie.

Thinking that there was a time when every Friday night caught me in the theatre; it is a pity that I don't catch anything on giant screen in surround sound any more. I should have thought of it yesterday when you asked me about movies, including mainstream, that interest me. I caught one called "Phat Girlz" featuring Monique and Jimmy Jean-Louis. Written and directed by Nnegest Likke. This one I actually bought legit!

Another movie I own that is truly wonderful is "The Amazing Grace" directed by Jeta Amata and produced by William Ebiye. This is the Nollywood version of the movie, because there is a Hollywood rendition too. I haven't watched it yet -- not necessarily a good thing because Youssou Ndour acted in it. You know how I love me some Youssou Ndour! It is based on the same story, but featured different takes of it. I will need to get it and watch it now actually. Interesting to note though that upon its release, the Nollywood version outsold the Hollywood version! We definitely can do great things in film -- we just need that ever elusive consumer solidarity because we are so many, but tend to be disjointed when it comes to financially standing behind our own artists in all forms.

As a consumer base, we need to bring it -- spend money on our movies, CDs, DVDs, make concerts the high charged and patronized events that they used to be, collectively stand firmly against piracy, before the mainstream understands that the African art form is a powerful force. We also don't need any external validation. There will be nay-sayers -- that is the nature of the beast. But if Tyler Perry has done nothing at all, the success of his very first movie (Diary of a Mad Black Woman) which was driven by African-Americans, does indeed prove that as a people, we can believe in something and support it wholeheartedly, naysay or not. Let's of course not forget that he was already doing great with his underground plays before he started filming them for the movie screen. Maybe a lesson in patience. Work on that base even at an underground level and they will spur you on -- all in good time.

My firm conviction however is that before we can target the consumer level of our independent movie/film directors, our governments -- African governments in particular -- need to start supporting the arts. Way too much lip service is paid. It is time that governments realise that our arts are an aspect of our cultural make-up that needs to be nurtured and heavily backed from a high level. I am one of those people who will watch a movie/documentary and wait for the credits to roll. I watch each and every credit all the way to the very end and wait for the blank screen before I consider the show finished. I have watched many documentaries about Africa and its people which have partial funding from levels of government from Canada and the U.S. for example, along with other sources. A couple that come to mind immediately (since I just watched this again within the last two weeks) are "Their Brothers' Keepers" and "The Man Who Became King". Then I ask myself, where is African government presence in all this?

I will, however, note one country which is very present in the support of its artists -- Burkina Faso. The land for whom Thomas Sankara fought and died. Home of FESPACO and the International Art and Craft Fair, Ouagadougou (best known by its French acronym, SIAO). It is no wonder that as an artist, this is the country I have every intention of relocating to. A couple of movies that I have watched from there (with subtitles) include Tilai (Idrissa Ouedrago) and Bud Yaam (Gaston Kabore). (source)

Shirley Chisholm [mumia]

2009-03-08T20:00:00.006-04:00

Shirley Chisholm

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

Thousands of Black Women [mumia]

2009-03-08T20:00:00.005-04:00

Thousands of Black Women

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

Billie Holliday [mumia]

2009-03-08T20:00:00.000-04:00

Billy Holliday

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

Black Women of the Pen [mumia]

2009-03-06T15:57:00.017-05:00

Black Women of the Pen

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

Cynthia McKinney on Obama’s tenure thus far.

2009-03-04T23:59:00.000-05:00

Ruminations on President Obama’s Tenure Thus Far and “Acceptable Punditry” by Cynthia McKinney: I have played around with this idea for hours now, on whether or not to write this piece. But the events of the last few hours, I believe, mandate that I raise my voice once again.

I have read and re-read President Obama’s Joint Congressional Address. All of the “acceptable punditry” have spoken and given the President glowing reviews. And so, to them and the population that still believes in them, “All is right with the world.” But for the rest of us, who refuse to swallow the pill that puts us into the Matrix, a good dose of reality is strongly called for.

But reality is not what we’re getting, not even from one of the national columnists whom I’ve met, Maureen Dowd.

I think Maureen Dowd characterized it as “Spock at the Bridge.” Now, being the Trekkie that I am, that headline grabbed my attention. I nearly gagged, however, when I got to the line supposedly from President Obama calling President Bush to proclaim, “‘I’m ending your stupid war.’ Mission Relinquished.”

Why write things like this now that it is clear that the Obama Administration is continuing the Bush policies for missile strikes inside Pakistan; torture; rendition for torture; public release of Bush Administration e-mails; illegal wiretaps; status of prisoners at the U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan; and workplace immigration raids?

For the record, President Obama is also pursuing Bush policies on Iran and Israel. As recently as yesterday, President Obama’s Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, responded when asked whether Iran was capable of building an atom bomb. Admiral Mullen replied, “We think they do, quite frankly.”

Dowd concludes her “Spock” piece by imbuing the President with “a Vulcan-like logic and detachment.” But I think the detachment of “acceptable” political punditry from the real world is what is totally lamentable. In the process, they render themselves irrelevant.

So, it’s clear. I’m about to step into marshy soil here, by noting that I found 19 questionable Obama policies or statements in his Joint Congressional speech delivered three days before his announcement that upon the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, up to 50,000 U.S. troops could remain through 2011, after the “pullout.”

And while various “mint” operations are peddling Obama “Change” coins for purchase, complete with a certificate of authenticity, I wade further into the muck by noting that the President continues the giveaway of our hard-earned coins to an economic team intent on keeping mismanagement structures in place, serving economic ends that do not constitute the common good. I would refer readers to the many statements that I issued during the final days of our Power to the People Green Party Presidential campaign about re-creating an economic system truly and finally owned by the people, operating in our interest. It is possible to do that. All it requires is enough political will.

But what forces me out into the open marshland of “non-mainstream” political punditry has to do with the latest Obama “pullout:” the decision to withdraw from the April 2009 Geneva United Nations World Conference Against Racism, dubbed Durban II.

We heard the same palaver in 2001 from the same forces inside our country, basically that a discussion of Zionism, in the context of such a Conference, would be anti-Semitic; therefore all the world’s dispossessed and marginalized people must continue to suffer and sacrifice while muting their grievances so that no discussion of Israel would take place on the world stage in this context.

Well, in 2001, upon hearing this line of reasoning, I went to then-Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Chairwoman, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and asked if I could be appointed as the CBC Task Force Chair on Durban. The non-participation argument was also a handy “peg on the track” with the potential of derailing many conversations, including a real discussion about the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the issue of reparations. Respectful of the excellent preparatory work that had been done, I wanted to avoid that outcome.

Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson made the appointment and I led a delegation of 5 Members of Congress to Durban.

The current Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Barbara Lee, was a member of my delegation to Durban. From my position on the International Relations Committee, we successfully argued for U.S. participation in that Conference at a Hearing designed to quash our effort. We not only met with then-United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, we also presented her with the untold story of COINTELPRO and the remaining unsolved deaths of its Black Panther Party member victims, commissioned by me and written by Kathleen Cleaver and Paul Wolf.

Our CBC Chairwoman made a beautiful statement of why it was imperative that the United States join with our Native American and Latino brothers and sisters and with oppressed peoples all over the planet and not only make our statement of solidarity, but also institute policies at the Congress that recognized their needs. It is incorrect to say that the United States was not present at Durban. We were there and only when the duties of Congress pressed us to return to Washington, DC did the Bush Administration make a big deal about anti-Semitism and then staged its phony walk out. The United States delegation of Congressional Black Caucus Members was there to support the phenomenal work of U.S. activists and the African and Caribbean delegations, in particular. I think everyone in Durban was moved by the plight of the Dalits in India and understood better the surging political power of Afro-Latinos.

Durban was a clear victory for the world’s marginalized peoples, including those of us who reside inside the United States. But, when the Congressional Delegation returned to the U.S., there was no time for celebration because the tragedy of September 11, 2001 unfolded.

What has happened in the interim has devastated the very people that Durban was designed to address, unfortunately, much of it due to U.S. policy. Now is not the time for the United States to shrink from this call.

In order to prevail in Durban, I had to go toe to toe with the Anti-Defamation League and Members of Congress Tom Lantos and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who, among many other Members of Congress, vociferously denounced Durban. This was something that I did because I felt it was the right thing to do. Given Israel’s recent actions in Gaza that have brought upon it the world’s opprobrium, I can imagine that this is the last point in time that Israel might want to revisit Durban. Israel has said that it will not attend the Conference in Geneva.

Early last year, a government official announced Canada’s decision to not attend Durban II after deeming the Conference to be anti-Israel. Shortly afterwards, France followed suit with French President Nicolas Sarkozy stating that the “excesses of 2001″ transformed the Conference “into an intolerable platform against the State of Israel.” I would note also that France must be particularly loath to discuss racism now with what is happening in Guadeloupe and Martinique as I write this piece. And remembering that Paris, itself, was literally on fire just a few years ago.

The UK, which has been under severe racial tests with Asians rebelling openly in the streets since Durban 2001, and the Netherlands have both threatened to withdraw their support for the Conference if a “negative spiral” of events takes place. Interestingly, these remarks came at the same time as the release of a European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance report which found that the tone of Dutch political and public debate on immigrant integration, racism, and other issues relevant to ethnic minorities, had experienced a “dramatic deterioration.”

So, we shouldn’t be surprised that the racism stress test is revealing cracks and fissures in human relations. But the United States and President Obama should not shield them or this country from these stresses. This Conference gives us the opportunity to get the issues out in the open and to deal with them. That’s the way to put them to an end. The world might have changed because of events occurring in September 2001, but it wasn’t because the United Nations successfully convened the World Conference Against Racism.

And now that I am as completely in the middle of the marsh as I was as completely in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea when my boat was rammed by the Israelis, let me make an observation about one aspect of marshes. I have witnessed the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets on the Savannah, Georgia marshland. And the most beautiful rainbows. Being away from the glass and concrete can give one a better perspective.

I observed last year that I thought U.S. voters went to the polls in large numbers to try and regain a bit of dignity lost during the eight years of outright banditry played out in our names, with our resources, against our interests. But I was reminded at the recently adjourned Transpartisan Alliance convention in Colorado that dignity will not come without first an acknowledgment of the truth: with truth we can have justice; and with justice we can have peace; and it is only with peace that we can truly have dignity. Something as easy as a vote, alone, is not going to be enough to wrest us from this mess that has been wrought.

This morning, I sent the following message to the White House:

‘Mr. President, it was with great disappointment that I read of your decision to pull out of Durban II. Even the Bush Administration, under pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus, provided some funding for the United Nations effort and sent staff to support the Congressional delegation that attended the Conference. I was there. I was head of the Congressional Black Caucus Task Force that negotiated Congressional and Administration engagement on this issue. There is still time for the U.S. to participate. Your decision is not irrevocable. I would encourage you to please reconsider this decision and not only attend the Conference, but also provide funding to ensure its success.”

I implore the Members of the Congressional Black Caucus to spearhead the participation of the United States in the United Nation’s World Conference Against Racism: to boldly go where we have gone before. Dr. King reminded us that “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” On this issue, President Obama has shown us his measure. I hope that the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus and the Democratic Caucus can show us, oh, so much more. (source)

Giving on a shoestring.

2009-03-03T23:54:00.010-05:00

[image by clarissa james]

Erica James and Arlene Hendricks, the directors of Carousel Children’s Center, with a sample of some of the hundreds of pairs of shoes collected for Malawi children.

(NY Times) What does a family daycare center in Fort Greene have to do with Malawi, an African nation known as much for its high infant mortality as for Madonna’s adoption exploits? On its face, not much, but the sinking economy has brought the two together.

The Carousel Children’s Center on Fort Greene Place is trying to grow a pile of donated, wee lil’ shoes -– some 750 pairs expected as of Monday — that are destined for Malawi. Bins are filled to the brim with tiny Old Navy canvas low-tops, dress shoes and Skechers. Baby- blue Crocs made for a 1-year-old sit in the “gently used” bin. Next to them are a little pair of red ruby slippers.

The shoes will be sent to needy children in Africa, a way of providing aid even in tough economic times.

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, a mother of two who has one child enrolled at Carousel; her husband, Masauko Chipembere; and the rest of their family had been giving money for years to the Women’s Initiative Network Malawi, a non-governmental agency founded by Mr. Chipembere’s mother, Catherine Chipembere, a few years ago.

On a tiny budget, Catherine Chipembere feeds about 1,000 African children a day in 12 preschools built by WIN Malawi in rural Mangochi. Most of the children are between 2 and 6 years old. Several are AIDS orphans.

As the recession slowed contributions and raised WIN Malawi’s costs, the organization was beginning to feel the recessionary bite. One area of concerns was its ability to provide shoes.

Malawi is wet during the rainy season and dusty during the dry season, so shoes are more than a comfort issue. Wearing shoes lessens the likelihood of infection from the rocks, debris, glass and worms that get caught in the children’s foot padding.

Yet shoes are a rare commodity among the youngest children in Mangochi. They are often passed down from one generation to the next. Most of these kids have never owned any, and the few that do may own just tattered flip flops. “When the little ones get shoes,” said Erica James, the co-director of Carousel, “they become the most important person in the village.”

A thousand pairs can transform an entire countryside of villages. In January, Dr. Gordon-Chipembere, Ms. James, and another parent, Marie Fuer, began a campaign they call “1,000 Shoes for WIN Malawi.” They are looking for new or slightly used children’s shoes.

The center is also making the point that giving doesn’t have to stop, even during a recession.

“I don’t know if you can ask someone to donate $30 today,” said Dr. Gordon-Chipembere, an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College. “It’s extremely difficult.” But she said, “It’s tangible for people to go to Payless and give shoes.”

Mr. Chipembere will deliver the heaps of shoes, embarking on a two-day odyssey to Malawi on March 9. It’s a 10,000-mile journey from JFK, across multiple continents and using two different air carriers.

When Mr. Chipembere arrives, he hopes to set up a Skype conference between Carousel and the schools in Malawi. Considering the terrain, the time difference and lack of infrastructure, that may be a tall order. But communication is an important goal of the project.

“A thousand shoes is great,” Dr. Gordon-Chipembere said, “but we really want to set up a partnership with these schools.”

All of this, though – the shoes, the trip, Skype – was in doubt because of the expense of Mr. Chipembere’s trip alone. That’s when Ms. Fuer, another parent, stepped in.

“She’s the sort of person that if she hears you sneeze, she won’t stop till she finds you a tissue,” Ms. James said.

Ms. Fuer approached her boss. Stephen Gatfield, CEO of Lowe Worldwide, a global advertising agency, who agreed to donate 80,000 frequent flier miles to the effort — something he could do, even in a shrinking economy.

“Everybody’s been affected by the economy and it’s forced us to be a little more creative,” Ms. Fuer said. “We’re all just one step away from needing help.”

But that, she said, has created a new level of empathy. “The people want to give now more than ever,” she said.

The drive is open to anyone with a check or a pair or two of children’s shoes to spare. Mail or drop off donations to:
Erica James
Children’s Carousel Center
96 Ft. Greene Place
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217
(source)

Real talk.

2009-03-03T20:06:00.010-05:00

The idea that black women cannot, or are told that we should not put ourselves first because of the crap that black men face on a daily basis. That whatever crappiness we face, especially at the hands of black men, is not to be discussed, but rather, swept under the rug where we pretend it doesn't exist.

It pisses me off. A lot. I've been blogging about how much it pisses me off and why it pisses me off for years.

But Latoya Peterson at Racialicious posted this and the conversation taking place in the comments is just as important as the original post.

You need to read this.

The above came from my people over at Awesome and Fabulous!, a blog that's part Feministing, part Racialious, part Michelle Obama fan site and part, um, whatever randomosity comes to the authors' minds. Anyway, I read this post and headed over to Racialious, and so many comments struck a chord with me.

The good folks here at the Liberator touched on this a while ago when the infamous Black Male Privilege checklist first made its rounds here, here and here. Let's keep the conversation going. And be sure to read the comments.

He's not that into you.

2009-02-25T10:12:00.007-05:00

This is a guest blog post from Stacie Bethune. She is a potential new blogger for The Liberator. If you enjoy her post please leave a comment.

"He's not that into you" by Stacie Bethune: I was recently dragged to go see the movie, well ok so I wasn’t dragged I went willingly, sort of. I don’t have the patience to sit and read the book but I felt I could get the gist of the book from watching the movie. Just like in school, when you didn’t want to read the book, you would just watch the movie. While the movie didn’t give me any useful relationship lessons, there were a few that some women would buy into and even believe to be true.

A few of these include:
women are to blame for being single,
if a man cheats it’s our fault,
oh and if you want a guy to like you just ignore him or treat him badly and then he’ll want to marry you.

I couldn’t really discuss this with my friend because not only does she have the book but she has numerous books and relationship bibles that tell her what to do in her relationships. I can’t say they’ve worked for her because she’s still single. Well anyway, let’s get back to the movie, the movie follows five women and four guys (who are all subsequently intertwined with each other—who knew Baltimore was so small).

The first gal you meet is a single gal whose on a mediocre date with a guy but she makes herself believe that there’s a connection. Personally, there are like 50 million things I can sum up about the guy that are wrong. He’s short, he’s arrogant, he’s boring and the list can go on and on. So this girl is supposed to be the prototype for all single women on how neurotic we act, oh and according to the movie, women have no life so we sit around watching the phone waiting for a guy to call us and our happiness depends on a date or a potential love interest. The movie also follows a married couple- the husband clearly doesn’t want to be married but still married his wife because she gave him an ultimatum—marry me or we break up. I mean whose fault is that, is it really hers?

I think not, if you don’t want to be married just don’t get married, it’s quite simple. Then the wife is super crazy so I guess that’s why he cheats-- it’s all her fault, (sarcasm). It’s funny how women get the blame for men’s wrong doings. Next, we have the couple who have been together for seven years, living together and practically married but he doesn’t want to make it official. So it takes her having to leave him in order to make him realize he wants to get married. I mean is this real, should a woman really need to give an ultimatum for a guy to walk her down the aisle? Then there’s the slutty sexy female character (isn’t it funny, how all movies have one of these but not the single, educated woman who doesn’t need a guy to give her anything—it’s easy to see how Hollywood views females) who the married guy cheats with and she has this delusion that she can get the guy to leave his wife for her, if she gets him to fall deeply madly in love with her.

On the other hand she has a guy who she uses for emotional support, whenever she feels down or not so good about herself she calls him up, um, sound familiar? Oh and she fails miserably at her plan, because she is the rule and not the exception and this only happens for the exception, ( rolls eyes). We’ll talk about this theory a little later. Then there’s this desperado character-- she’s worse than the single gal character we met earlier because she goes on Myspace and Facebook to meet men, and when she finally meets a guy (that she didn’t meet through the Internet) she closes the accounts, awww love ( sarcasm again).

To sum it all up, what I got from the movie is that us women are single because
1. We are desperate.
2. We have no lives.
3. We want to be in love (Yah, like who wants that?).
4. We are crazy.
5. We want commitment. and
6. Black women don’t date.

I also got that if anything good happens to us it’s because we are the exception, I mean so what is the rule, to be single? Not sure about that one, I may need to actually get the book on CD, because I refuse to walk around with that book. I mean dating in DC, is hard but I won’t be caught dead with a relationship self-help book.

On Zami + the difference between surviving + living

2009-02-23T18:31:00.006-05:00

Reading Audre Lorde's "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" (amazon link), I come across a passage that relates so closely to a recent conversation in my local monthly study group where we discussed the difference between people being forced to live in survival mode versus a reality where survival is not one's primary concern and where one has the privilege of just... living.

It also relates to my recent post (link) exploring "forced separation" as an alternative path to spiritual growth for many urban communities in the U.S. Of course, that links closely to the idea of a "vision quest" or "spirit walk" in many indigenous-American communities, which of course link to similar practices in indigenous-African communities, specifically the one we've been reading about in our group, which was undertaken and written about by Malidoma Patrice Some in his book "Of Water And The Spirit".

Survival mode has its rules about navigating and surviving oppression. Some folks live their entire lives in this mode. Where as some folks have the privilege of living in a healthy, safe, pro-active self-and-community building mode that allows them to express their total humanity without self-imposed (albeit necessary when in survival mode) limitations, disciplines, and restrictions.

In this passage from Chapter 8 of "Zami", Audre Lorde examines her mother's self-imposed survival mode and she examines the effects that living in that mode had on her mother's view of reality, as well has the effect that her mother's teachings had on her:

(Zami: A New Spelling of My Name) As a child, the most horrible condition I could contemplate was being wrong and being discovered. Mistakes could mean exposure, maybe even annihilation. In my mother's house, there was no room in which to make errors, no room to be wrong.

I grew Black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing -- copying from my mother what was in her, unfulfilled. I grew Black as Seboulisa, who I was to find in the cool mud halls of Abomey several lifetimes later -- and, as alone. My mother's words teaching me all manner of wily and diversionary defenses learned from the white man's tongue, from our of the mouth of her father. She had had to use these defenses, and had survived by them, and had also died by them a little, at the same time. All the colors change and become each other, merge and separate, flow into rainbows and nooses.

I lie beside my sisters in the darkness, who pass in the street unacknowledged and unadmitted. How much of this s the pretense of self-rejection that became an immovable protective mask, how much the programmed hate that we were fed to keep ourselves a part, apart?

[...]

"Fair, fair, what's fair, you think? Is fair you want, look in god's face... Child, why you worry your head so much over fair or not fair? Just do what is for you to do and let the rest take care of themselves... Look, you hair all mess-up behind from rolling around with foolishness. Go wash your face and come help me dress this fish for supper."

Climbing PoeTree: Art with purpose, loses its ego.

2009-01-27T21:39:00.017-05:00

When paired with purpose, art losses its ego...Climbing PoeTree, celebrating the common flame*

Hurricane Season: The Hidden Messages in Water is imperfectly-perfect: painful, powerful, and visionary. It is one of the most compelling pieces of art I have ever seen. There is a kind of bliss that comes from ignorance and another that comes from having seen and felt with eyes and heart wide open...and finding the bliss within the layers. The foundation for our survival is Mother Earth. Water makes up 70 percent of the Earth's surface and 70 percent of our bodies. It is no coincidence. There are no coincidences here - yes, everything that happens happens for a reason.

Climbing PoeTree have spent years calculating the meaning, distilling the purpose, and planning the mission. Crafting a siren's call through their art and relentless activism; bringing the message over and over to thousands of people...

WE ARE ALIVE RIGHT NOW FOR A REASON.

Again:

WE ARE ALIVE RIGHT NOW FOR A REASON.

Alixa and Niama have harnessed the power of their combined voices and vision into a compelling road map for the issues at hand. They have taken the most pressing issues in this time of golden crisis and woven them with hope into the fabric of solutions. You leave armed to the teeth with tools of your own, local connections, how-to guides, and a blazing spirit.

THERE IS NO PLACE WHERE LOVE CANNOT FIND YOU.

Again:

THERE IS NO PLACE WHERE LOVE CANNOT FIND YOU.

This passion must become our own. Hurricane Season has become a place where one is invited to ignite, add their own light, to join in. This is a place of community, tribe. It is a place where poetry meets action and philosophy meets resolution.

Let me tell you from my own firsthand experience, creating something organic from the grassroots, with intention, precision and follow-through is no small feat. It takes the conjuring of miracles, the belief in a higher self and in an urgent purpose.

"It's snowing in the desert ya'll." The words come out of both of their mouths simultaneously; it is beautifully propelling. Their poetry is percussive, it hammers, it bellows, it builds in momentum to break you open and it finds in that openness the precious seeds of life and the power of individual and community spirit alike.

This performance will take you deep. Far beyond being entertained. If there is one lesson I see so clearly here it is the fruits, the gifts, the knowledge, and the joy that comes from following through. Be ready to jump into the deep-end everyday, see what is happening with a sharp eye, follow through and watch something snow ball. Hurricane Season is growing and at a rapid pace.

When I look back through the catalogue of experiences I have had while traveling the world, my journeys were always based on documentation, which in turn has grown into the mission of creating an image bank for revolutionaries. On the tour I had Sallome announce that all of my images are available for free usage to those working in media, visual arts, activism - just contact me, and as long as you have a mission that I feel reflects unity, progress, and peace, I am happy to share all that I have.

I felt honored and privileged to document this illuminating event in our herstory. Climbing PoeTree's work has been received by sold-out crowds and with enthusiasm across this land. In fact, Alixa and Niama received the Common Folk National Award for community activism just a few weeks ago in Washington, DC.

They should be supported, hailed, and inhaled in our light. Make time in the new year to listen to their words, get the album, see the show! As one rises, we all rise. As we reach out our hands to each other, there is only more support, more room for letting go, more space to take flight. I learned and grew endlessly from documenting the work of these women and the amazing group they have brought together to yield a vision. Hurricane Season: The Hidden Messages in Water.

With gratitude and respect.

Bless & be blessed.
//layla love

This is a link to my site, where all images are offered as a free gift to the revolutionaries: Love Photography

These are the links for the brilliant Alixa and Naima, combining their forces into Climbing PoeTree.
Climbing PoeTree and Hurricane Season Tour

Exclusive + uncut Michelle Obama interview [lol]

2009-01-27T15:22:00.001-05:00

Women and polygamy in Burundi.

2009-01-26T14:00:00.031-05:00

(Baobab Connections) In Burundi as in many other African countries, polygamy is well enrooted and seen as a normal social phenomenon. In fact, this phenomenon was largely practised in African traditional society. “In traditional Africa, one man could be married to four women and this gives him social respect,” Ndihokubwayo an elder said. This phenomenon because more vigorously practised with the advent of Islam in African countries. Many social consequences resulted from it. For example, women are divorced without any plausible reason and mothers are abandoned with their kids at home.

Asked to give their position about the phenomenon of polygamy, Burundian women don’t hide their disgust towards this phenomenon. Noëlla Haziyo, a young lady in first year of university, describes polygamy as a way through which our ancestors could satisfy their greed. In way viewing things, she vigorously rejects the idea of bringing a second wife simply because a wife resembles another, as she goes on saying. More striking is the fact that this phenomenon which has existed since long ago does not outgrow itself despite its negative impact on the African society.

Here many agree on the idea that the phenomenon cannot disappear as a long as only women are victims. “I can never understand the reaction of my husband. He let me alone with our children and I haven’t seen him for months and months,” Claudette angrily denounces her husband. “I really regret my marriage with my husband; he doesn’t love me and my children,” she says.

Fatima Shaban, a Muslim woman, seems not to understand this practice within her religion.

According to her, every husband who brings a second wife in denies the fact to the first. “Love from one man can never be shared between two women,” she reveals. Asked to give her position about the idea that polygamy is legal in Islam, she mentions that Muslim men do it to satisfy themselves and don’t follow what is preached by Islam. We can’t help mentioning that cases of polygamy continue to be revealed despite the different attempts by Burundian government to abolish it... (source)

Notes to Obama: Maya Angelou

2009-01-26T14:00:00.019-05:00

(BBC) I am a poet. What I'm going to say to you now, however, is not a poem, it doesn't pretend to be. These are ruminations or reflections upon the advent of President Barack Obama. We needed him. We the race needed him. We the American people, we needed him. Banks, automobile companies, insurance companies needed him. The stock market in Japan and Germany, in France and Britain, in China, in New York City needed him.

And out of that great need, I believe he came. Barack Obama, Senator Barack Obama came. Intelligent, facing forward, including everyone, excluding no-one. He came with some charm - not enough to make him seem glib.But what he did is he brought something we cannot live without, and that is hope. He brought the possibility that we might really see ourselves as we really are. A great country.

I believe in the secret part of every heart of an American is the desire to belong to a great country.

I think that President-elect Barack Obama offers us the chance to have a great president with whom we can identify.

Not as a black person, not even as a male, but really as an American citizen who will speak for the voiceless, who will not forget the poor black or the poor white, who will remember the out-of-work Asian and the dislocated Spanish-speaking person.

This is a man who I think I would like to hear speak to people in hospitals, he has intelligence and compassion. Those two elements are not always to be found in the same person.

It is said to whom much is given from them much will be expected. I believe we have been given a great president. I believe he needs us probably more than we even needed him.

I believe that each of us, each American, has got to pay back or pay it forward. I believe each of us has got to do something to help us become more of what James Baldwin called these yet-to-be United States.

I think that each of us can find a place to give some time... I think these seem to be small things but they accumulate. And I do believe that good done anywhere is good done everywhere.

I think that our new president deserves all our help. I believe we Americans, we deserve the most we can get. I believe we are a great people and I believe we will have a chance to show it.

When I see the cabinet President-elect Obama has chosen, I realise he's very serious. He really means to bring together a team who will match the mountain of work - we have men and women in that cabinet who match the mountains.
They may not be all that cunning politically but we've had quite enough of that, I think. They may be more forthcoming, and not a minute too soon.

I know what an American is. You can say it in these three words: Yes I can.

I can be better than you imagine. And if you force me, I can be worse than you can imagine. Yes I can.

In a climate where all men and women are known to be equals, "yes I can" speaks for the brahmin in Boston and the theologian in Nashville, Tennessee. It speaks for the rabbi at the hall of tolerance in Los Angeles and it speaks for the imam in the largest mosque in the United States. It speaks for us all. (source)

Alice Walker's letter to President Obama.

2009-01-26T14:00:00.017-05:00

(Newsweek) Dear Brother President: You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you delivering the torch so many others carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be brought down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear.

And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. Not to mention your brave and precious grandmother.* And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: it is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is only what so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, but this is because it is not clear to them yet that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must all of us learn not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise. It is understood by all that you are commander in chief and are sworn to protect our beloved country. However, as my mother used to say, quoting a Bible with which I often fought, "hate the sin, but love the sinner." There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit. This has already happened to people of color, poor people, women, children. We see where this leads, where it has led.

A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to Earth, to Peoples, to Animals, to Rivers, to Mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

In Peace and Joy, Alice Walker

*Obama's "brave and precious" grandmother made her return to the Great Source a day before her grandson's historic turn of the historical wheel. We imagine her flying, smiling, free. Well done, Grandmother. Those of us who intuit your greatness send our thanks. (source)

Ms. Dynamite: "It Takes More" [video]

2009-01-26T14:00:00.001-05:00

Queen Ifrica: "Daddy" [video]

2009-01-25T19:39:00.000-05:00

Ms. Dynamite: "Put Him Out" [video]

2009-01-25T17:53:00.000-05:00

Ms. Dynamite: "Father" [video]

2009-01-25T17:52:00.000-05:00

Sticky: "Booo!" f. Ms Dynamite [video]

2009-01-25T17:48:00.000-05:00

More "Black/Womyn: Conversations"

2009-01-24T06:08:00.002-05:00

[Staceyann Chin talks about homophobia in Jamaica]

"We're violent people because we are relgious people who repress sexuality."
~Stacyann Chin

[Nor and IQ talk about taking a chance at being out]

[Misia denea talks about what it means to be an out black lesbian]

[Reese talks about her struggle with sexuality and religion]

[Lisa.s. talks about misconceptions about lesbians]

[Helen talks about the hardship she has had in relationships due to her disabilty]

[Q talks about internalized homophobia]