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”
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)
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.
****
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.
****
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”
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
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)”
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
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.
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)
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.
****
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.
****
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
When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear. I love my little hole.
In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity…
And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
— James Baldwin / The Fire Next Time
I am lost…
… like the grandfather who lost his leg to photochemical exposures — cursing at a faded revolution.
… like the grandmother who lost her fight with (de) mentia and her superego — cursing at her nurse about blackness.
… like the father who lost his fight with reason in a drug-addled fug — his (de) mentia a vanishing wisp cursing at the ghosts beyond his reach…
All victims of a faded revolution.
What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)
Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems / Etheridge Knight (1980)
In 1980 this collection included new poems by Knight and selections form two previous works including his Pulitzer Prize and National Book award nominated collection: Belly Song and Other Poems (1973). It was in the preface of this book that Knight elucidated his concept that “Poets are naturally meddlers…” creating art in the form of a dialectic or “TRINITY: The Poet, The Poem, and The People.
His haiku forms are sharp in “Indiana Haiku — 2,” “Missouri Haiku,” and “Indiana Haiku.” In the “Missouri Haiku” compilation he writes about the existential menace he feels in “Boone County: The blue pick/up truck / Roars past: Sun shines on shotgun / Leering in window.”
And no matter where he is in America Knight reminds you that’s all the same existential dread, as in the free verse poem “Boston 5:00 A.M. — 10/74:”
AWAKE! For mornings
Are the same as nights
The troops
Goosestep
Down the streets
Other standouts in a book replete with standouts are “For Langston Hughes,”
“Welcome Back, Mr. Knight: Love Of My Life,” “A Poem For 3RD World Brothers,” “It was a Funky Deal,” among many others. Ebook, 02/05/21.
“manicured fingers shuffling
the same stacked deck
with the ante
raised”
— Etheridge Knight / “On Watching Politician’s Perform at Martin Luther King’s Funeral”
… I once had my foreskin tossed in the food processor by a moyle who didn’t know how to spell mohel. Unfortunately I was still attached to said foreskin and that’s why I’m called “French Tickler Shorty” nowadays.
We need to explode all canons: classics, literary, political, social… and I went in on a long pontification — extolling the virtues of true equality and intersectional access — for hours I went on.
And at the end of those countless hours a single hand was raised, only one question asked:
do you agree with the Kardashians that…
I was certain that it was all uphill toil from there. Pass me the maple syrup, please.
“I was always a bit contemptuous of the first person. I was stupid about it. I thought it wouldn’t allow me to write about other people. But, in fact, it allows you to do it in a really interesting way because it’s all inflected by the subjectivity of the character. Once I stopped feeling self-conscious about it, then it moved quickly.”
— Zadie Smith / New York Times, 17 October 2016
