afterimage aftermath

Posted on February 19, 2021 by istsfor manity

Anodyne

Frenta blackens the screen by placing her hand in front of the projector. One half of the class turns around and looks at her, the other half screams out “hey” and “oh” and throw their arms up.

Frenta whispers polite invectives. They know she is blocking out an offending buttocks that traipses before the screen headed frame left. She admits to herself it is a shapely buttocks, but it is gratuitous in this scene and certainly to the film overall.

Her earliest memory of watching television is piqued. The living room, in Tallahassee, watching her father reclining in his chair, with a Falstaff can precariously perched on his paunch, laughing and occasionally saying things like “looka’ that rack,” and “jeez, what an ass,” while watching Three’s Company. Then the aftermath. The afterimage. She tries not to think of the afterimage aftermath.

As it concerns this “art film,” she would have never conceived of such a mise en scène — it’s sexist and it’s fatuous. And she is neither of those things, nor does she wish to impart that sort of image to her charges.

“It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no control over and cannot change. When this happens, it is some consolation to know that the dislike or hatred is unjustified—that you don’t deserve it.”

— Toni Morrison / The Bluest Eye

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is a canker

Posted on February 18, 2021 by istsfor manity

Toadeater Madness

Stop thinking out of your flask, and drink-in some sense for a change. Guttural palavering bridges no connection another caring human can manage. What you say? Lickspittles to madness. Stop posturing. Your people are burning toddler’s wooden blocks for warmth. You needed the Swedes to slap some truth into your right-harrumphing and toady dissimulation — your occipital lobe is a canker. Your party is a pustule, lanced, dancing off the edge of a cliff — harrumph harrumph and huzzah … no, it must be the abscesses on the temporal lobe — wait! Where does empathy reside? In the heart or in the brain? Is it a lesion on the frontal lobe thing? Where’s the sense and the empathy? Hello? Is there a human in there? Toadeaters of bankrupt ideas.

“Know now how artificial my desperation is. All my problems are created by the time and place I live in.”

— George Cain / Blueschild Baby

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dig a pony

Posted on February 17, 2021 by istsfor manity

Two of Us

I just dug a pony… and dig about for blue plastic soldiers.

I’m digging up around my backyard and my neighbor comes outside to see what I’m doing.

We live in a duplex. I in the south side duplex and she next door to the north of me. We are both six years-old.

“I dig a Pig-meat,” I say, parroting the Beatles album my sixteen year-old uncle plays three times daily. “The song’s called ‘Two of Us.’ I dig a pony too.”

She says she loves ponies. She rode on one this summer. “But,” she says, “it’s Pygmy, not pig-meat.”

I say I’m digging up the bones of old civil war soldiers. She says her father reads about the civil war all the time, and that the civil war wasn’t fought here in Miami.

My parents call them “los americanos.” My parents were born in Cuba. I was born at Mount Sainai Hospital in Miami Beach. A lifetime away from Havana. A cultural light year away from D.C. I’m not sure what that makes me, this is my first year speaking English.

A lizard catches my eye — a fringe of meat-red dewlap retracting. I say I can catch that lizard over on the palm tree, my dad showed me how with a long grass.

She says she wants to kiss me. She places her hands on my shoulders leans in to me and kisses me on the lips. I wipe my lips. I bend down and pull a weed stalk out of the ground and strip the flourishes off the ends and try to fashion a slip knot on the end.

But while I’ve watched my father do this multiple times, and move the noose onto the anoles neck and try to lasso it in it slips out and runs a foot up the tree. All I magage to do then is make various knots that shorten the stalk considerably. “My father knows how to do this. I do too,” I say.

She asks if I want another kiss. I drop the stalk and say, “O.K.”

This time I kiss her back and hold her shoulders as long as she holds mine. Just a second longer than the first kiss. I tell her, “it’s the first time I’ve —”

The back door to her duplex explodes, the chain lock clacking hard against a jalousie slat. Her mother runs out screaming, “Daisy, get away. Come here!” Her blonde hair in a drunken ziggurat of rollers, of varying size, dangerously close to toppling. The speed with which she moves, the menace in her face as she looks beyond Daisy — who is running to her — at me puckers my stomach.

My legs are electric. I run away past the palm tree, the anole scurrying up the trunk, past the blooming hibiscus bush up the side yard out into the air and sun.

I run across the street, and into my cousin’s backyard. I scramble up the mango tree, into the dense shadows, laden with ripened fruit.

“I can’t not respond to Basquiat any more than I can not respond to Chuck D and Public Enemy. It would be like brainwashing myself out of history and the call to action.”

— Greg Tate / “Black Like B.”

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of our delusion

Posted on February 16, 2021 by istsfor manity

overload

captives of our own conditioning
we must short circuit the fuses
we must smoke ourselves out
of our delusion

or nothing will cleanse us

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.”

— Assata Shakur / “To My People”

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between sharpened incisors

Posted on February 15, 2021 by istsfor manity

Envoi / Envoy

I would like this poem 
to be an envoy —
Bearing a gap-toothed smile
between sharpened incisors …

What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)

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A Dialogue / James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni (1973)

A powerful edited transcript, in book form, of the Philadelphia Public Television current affairs program Soul! recorded in 1971. Giovanni and Baldwin talk about race, gender roles, literature, and more for nearly two hours. The book contains a short prefatory essay by Ida Lewis and an Afterword from Orde Coombs.

The video of the two episodes are available on YouTube, and is clarifying — it’s worth tracking down — of the few moments that are elided in the authors talking over each other, and revealing in the facial and physical expressions that are obvious to the viewer and in effect make clear some of the omissions, via physical communication, that the book doesn’t capture.

A wide ranging dialogue that include many illuminating moments like this:

“Giovanni: … I think that one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, Hey, I don’t like white people.

Baldwin: That’s a great liberation.

Giovanni: It was the beginning, of course, of being able to like them.

Baldwin: Exactly.”

Ebook, 02/12/21.

****

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Black Feeling, Black Thought / Black Judgment / Nikki Giovanni (1971)

This volume collates Giovanni’s first two poetry collections, both self-released in 1968. This is potent poetry, and a bit of a time warp back to the revolutionary zeal of the 1960s.  The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni 1968-1998 (2003) includes exhaustive notes on all the poems included in this collection, and is a helpful adjunct to this volume — it obviously also includes these two books.

Anyway, the poems here are at once persuasive, searing, righteous, and capture both the particulars of the era, and the historical and universal issues of self-determinism and pride.

There are many favorites here but one short section of Giovanni writing after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” gets at the gist:

“What can I, a poor Black woman, do to destroy america? This / is a question, with appropriate variations, being asked in every / Black heart.”

Excellent collection.

Ebook, 02/13/21.

****

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Going to Meet the Man / James Baldwin (1965)

Among the most powerful and visually disturbing short story collections I’ve read. I feel cheated that I have an undergraduate degree in English Lit, as well as plenty of postgraduate work, and I was never assigned any Baldwin stories, novels, or essays while in college. I guess better as an autodidact, and late, than never.

Includes the widely anthologized “Sonny’s Blues,” as well as “Previous Condition,” “Come Out of the Wilderness,” and “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” which are sublimely crafted and written stories.

The title story, which closes out the collection, is extremely disturbing in its nonchalance of a shocking event — it will stay with you a long time afterward.

Ebook, 02/15/21.

“Rhythm and Blues is not
The downfall of a great civilization
And I expect you to
Realize
That the Temptations
have no connection with
The CIA”

— Nikki Giovanni / “A Historical Footnote To Consider Only When All Else Fails”

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for cannon fodder

Posted on February 14, 2021 by istsfor manity

surely someone

you can tease out a great chain of being based on that?

I will not eat my rabbit pellets as prescribed, I will eat meat. Give me a definition as long as is the body of what I write. I produce canonical works for canon fodder …

… and give me thy holy name in debacles, as we proceed through nomenclature appeals. Say all right when you mean dissuade, say saudade when you mean salutary. Say suave when you mean salve.

until the opposition has a hearing

the scope of it all confounds me it seems as the sun is exploding now in our hallway

a modifying or cautionary detail to be considered

and I am consumed

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

— Frederick Douglass / “West India Emancipation” speech

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white as death

Posted on February 13, 2021 by istsfor manity

Agonal Haiku

Snow falls white as death
Fumes exhaust the dying earth
Black rime limns the ice

“it’s a question of power
which we must wield
if it is not
to be wielded
against
us”

— Nikki Giovanni / “Love Poem (For Real)”

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hash mark clusters (redux)

Posted on February 12, 2021 by istsfor manity

Notebooks

She hated blank pages like she hated the blankness of her life.

So she began by making marks – large, loose, gestural sweeps on the page. She then shifted from elongated serpentines to dense clusters of hash marks on the peripheries of the page – this reminded her of where the people who once cared about her were now in her life. She came to the middle of the page and drew one thick hyphen – this was she.  She went on this way year after year, filling thick notebooks with serpentines, hash mark clusters, and hyphens. Winters came and went with the usual snow and white brutality. Summers flourished in oppressive greens. Yet she went on. Fifty summers passed as she assiduously made her marks and filled notebooks.

Notebooks.

There was nothing else of use she could do.

It seemed as it was when she was a child and jumped from the bridge into that cold river. She watched people above her moving to and from their lives. The mornings filled with a flurry of black bowlers and slate fedoras – the afternoons a long procession of pursed lips and heavy eyes. Occasionally, a flash of brilliant blue or a fleeting smile, but it was mostly gray refracted above.

At the end she had stacked up thousands of notebooks from floor to ceiling. The notebooks filled her small apartment wall to wall. Then with this notebook she filled the last remaining slot of open space. As an opaque scrim spread itself across the sky she whispered, this is enough.

“One of the most important things the (Black Panther) Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors.”

— Assanta Shakur / Assanta: An Autobiography

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poorer version of

Posted on February 11, 2021 by istsfor manity

Bitter

Usually as a sacrilege, I stood on my head and peed into my own mouth as a chimpanzee might on bikini night promotionals.

There are jobs — and then there are the odd messes of oddnesses.

Working two jobs — the second one in a factory that made terrycloth track suits.

I got me a terrycloth track suit. I got me me an orange-faced watch.

I liked my orange-faced watch. I was a bit uncertain about the terrycloth track suit.

And then a couple of “well-off” others criticized my new presents. Then I found these gifts full of faults. Saw these gifts as they saw them.

A poorer version of…

We seemed to always have a poorer version of. Not only were we poor, but we apparently were without clue or taste.

Tasted bitter then.

So I can confirm that I conformed — and went one better: I became the clown. I became the chimp.

Until I wasn’t. Until I saw the dynamic clearly. Until I saw you for what you were.

“I’m not going to let the fact that I live in a nation with a bunch of fools make a fool out of me.”

— Nikki Giovanni / The New York Times, December 12, 2020.

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mosquitos and gnats

Posted on February 9, 2021 by istsfor manity

Muzzy

Always the muzz of mosquitos and gnats about our heads.

Blurs of barbaric pantaloons held in sanguine suasion and selective editing of those who would never fit the guidelines established by the groaning masses of under effect.

Pleased to meet you Mr. Man. How do you do? I do jackknife filigree in fine fashion and fractures. I once had a backyard neighbor who fracked a pool into existence — it was really more of a lagoon, which eventually sinkholed and swallowed up half of the county south of our shared property line.

There were suits and counter suits, but one day my neighbor up and died and then I impaled the remaining family members with beetle pins and framed them — and the entire situation just disappeared.

But now as the owner of property bordering a canyon I get all sorts of perks from tourism and looky-loos so I’ve named the canyon for the family impaled.

That’s how I make my living. If you can call this a life.

What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)

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Black History in its Own Words / Ronald Wimberly (2017)

A graphic novel with a twist — it’s not a novel, but a book of portraits. Pithy quotes —combined with strong a strong graphic style — featuring well-known (and some lesser-known) activists, artists, and various sports and cultural personalities. Some of the quotes feel too short and decontextualized, but Wimberly improves on this by providing a short introduction before each portrait. The effect, which might well be what he was going for, is to prompt the reader to do further research on the lesser-known individuals. Ebook, 02/06/21.

****

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Lakewood / Megan Giddings (2020)

Taut literary fiction in a distinct horror-thriller vein. Giddings’s debut novel follows a young woman coming of age while participating in a shadowy medical study. The simultaneous pressures of providing for her family while attending college ratchet up the tension. The scenes of intense body horror, and Dali-esque paranoiac-critical surrealism, are memorable. The formal shift about two-thirds of the way through the book is perplexing, and the narrative flow flounders a bit during the last third of the book. A gripping read. Ebook, 02/07/21.

****

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Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You / Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi (2020)

A remix (and YA-oriented take) on Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

I started reading this concurrently with Kendi’s original sourcebook, but this is shorter by 300 pages (at 294 pages) so I finished this first. A quicker read, but no less righteous and serious.

Reynolds is really effective at demystifying the sometimes ponderous history of racism/anti-racism, and especially the intricacies of the historical antecedents of segregation, assimilation, and anti-racist movements without dampening the importance of the subject. A great book based on an excellent, requisite-reading, history book. Ebook, 02/07/21.

“The god my grandma spoke about, the god I heard about in church, never spoke to me. I don’t mean that literally, like I was waiting to speak in tongues or to have him appear as a burning bush and order me around. There is no pleasure or comfort for me in the idea that an omnipotent being made a world like this one.”

— Megan Giddings / Lakewood

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