Kai Lumumba Barrow: Nomad Approaches

Training
(for Kai)
if fun house mirrors
and loose sunk chains
could speak out loud
and scratch toward move

if curled archives
stacked under urgency
colored in spilled desire
were on display

if brown maps
stretched directions
of more than now
of sticky lifting
left calling cards

if revolution
had a whole car tag
a muralled rush

i could hear that
i could see it
i could recognize all of it
trained in the practice
of knowing you

**********

Critical Resistance is one of the many places that Kai makes revolution.

Nia/Mama Nancy

Nia
(for Mama Nancy)

your face is a playground
for things that grow
or that want to
and
your hands are gardens
for all that flies

your cheekbones are support beams
for everything fierce
everything wild
that tends toward love

i think your arms
must be passageways
to homes thought impossible
to marooned desires

i think your skin shares
a freckled map
of endless mines
of water prepped
for communal baptism

********
Nancy is Director of SpiritHouse

Zelda Lockhart: LeVenson Press

for Zelda
there shines an opening
there wakes an up
the way you listen
towards projectile laughter

there rings a grace
there steps a peace
the way you walk
towards a world
that pushes description
that requires us all

there sighs a simplicity
there holds a growing
the way you build
a today and a today and a today

there hands a warning
there ices a blessing
the way you carve out
grooves and sweaters for love

*************

Learn more about Zelda and LaVenson Press here

Karla Holloway

Composure
(for Karla Holloway)

if hope made fabric
like its own style of weaving
like the thick strength of soft
you'd be wearing it

if grace published dance steps
like shoeprints to keep going
like a sure turn to here
you'd be walking it

if beauty released a soundtrack
like bone structured bass-line
or a stretched sketch in ink
you'd be humming it

and
if bright put on a light show
with a symphony of leaves
and a resevoir of stays
i'd guess that you had
composed it.

Nana Nantambu

for Mama Nana

there is an open hand
waking a stretched goatskin
to the pulse of a
braceletted writst somewhere

there is a woven melody
a taut stability in
the wandering confidence
of a frictioned sole somewhere

there is a strained pattern
and a round stregnth
a holding quality
in a crafted connection somewhere

and rich spilling
a well arriving
a deep blessing
right here now

Shortwave Listenings: January 2007

Alondra Nelson (The Factness of Diaspora)
Nalo Hopkinson (The New Moon's Arms)
Kamari Clarke (Victim and Perpetrator)
Sekou Sundiata (51st Dream State(meant))
Judith Butler (Disciplinarity and Critique)
Fredric Jameson (Comment After Butler)
Henry "Poison" Gattis (Black Panther Party Chicago)
Ahmed Robin (Black Panther Party Detroit)
Jose "Cha Cha" Jimenez (Young Lords Party Lincoln Park)
Denise Oliver (Young Lords Party/Black Panther Party NYC)
Kathleen Cleaver (Black Panther Party Oakland)
Miquel "Mickey" Melendez (Young Lords Party NYC)
Tim Lenoir (Planning Our Intellectual Futures)
Karla Holloway (This is Not About Lacrosse/Glacial Change)
Della Pollock (Planning Our Intellectual Futures)
Lewis Gordon (Violent Non-Violence?)
Maurice Wallace (Political Theology)
Irene Silverblatt (Spanish Inquisition?)

So what happens when I get the chance to listen to some amazing brilliant people and I haven't made a collage in advance and they are talking to more people than just me oh my me? Shorwave listening! Kin to the reading essays on www.thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com, these will be essays about the many talks/panels that I may have listened to in a given week/ish period. This week I listened to all of these people (and they might not even know it!) at the Radicals in Black and Brown panel accompanying an exhibit about the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party @ the Stone Center @ UNC and at the Collapse of Traditional Knowledges Conference thrown by the Lit Program at Duke and at two of the job talks that the cultural anthropology department had (in order to try to replace Deb Thomas and John Jackson). Oh and Nalo Hopkinson happened to be hosted by the NC State Creative Writing Program. What can I say? It's been an intercolliegiate week.



First I have to say, with the exception of the Nalo Hopkinson reading (she's dropping a new book called The New Moon's Arms about sea people and a sunken slave ship..which if anyone is cross referencing my blogs besides the weirdo named Gregory whose been sending me hatemail...is important for me this week. I am listening to Glissant long distance. Anyway with the exception of my question about Hopkinson's relationship to history (which I must say came after the very boring standard.."how did you become a writer?" "what is hard about writing?" questions) I didn't ask anybody anything. I can call myself being a good listener (or make excuses about how I really shouldn't take up time with my concerns in another department's hiring meetings) I was really just afraid. I haven't really been in this academic setting with other academic people for a few months. I was embarassed about asking a question like..."how do you know?" or "tell me about your mother.." or "what about rape? what do you have to say about that?" So I just did my best to channel some questions into other psuedo open minds and write down my own daydreams.

Alondra Nelson was a complete surprise. I realize now that it may have been the rhyme of her title with Brent Edwards' The Practice of Diaspora that got me into the room, but whatever it was was meant to be. The way that she is framing herself in relation to critical black diaspora studies and narratives of population genetics is very exciting. She is also full of stories and interesting to listen to. The lesson that I learn from her is that positioning myself in relationship to theory that I'm talking about is crucial and can allow me to do all the storytelling that I want to do.




Kamari Clarke started with story telling and is clearly brilliant. Her work on the specter of African victimhood/criminality as a reinscription of colonialism in an information moment through the international court system is so necessary. What I learned from her is that if I every want a job (that's really an if) I need to prepare a job talk just for the job. This is the second time that I've seen a job talk seem rushed and nervous because of the difficulty of condensing a chapter of your book into a short talk outloud.

Then again maybe I should just get the whole job search committee to create a performance off the cuff. Sekou Sundiata opened up the session that he did for/at the Durham Literacy Center with some interesting meditations on dreaming and on the word American. Though a member of my eventual breakout group and even more eventual impromtu dance company said that the word "American" left an acid taste in his mouth, Sundiata seemed to embrace the word itself, seemed interested in reclaiming an "american tradition" of protest and revolutionary action through langauge...I'm not so sure. However I am attracted to his idea about the whole world being dreamed inside of America...not wistfully...but critically. To what extent is there a (Dionne Brand would say filmic?) an idea of the world being produced in the united states that is effecting us all? And in what place does that put mother/country radicals and those of use who see ourselves as thirdworldwithin type rebels in what Denise Oliver called the "belly of the beast". What is the technology of dreaming? I don't know...but it may be related to other technologies that we used that night..like the beautiful process of creating a conversation between strangers into a collaborative performance to share. With some people I didn't know until now (all teachers it seems...including one of my unnamed heroes from the ethnic studies hunger strikes in 1996 @ columbia) i danced the pain of the American dream and a vision of what communal education could look like. Damn. Fast results and the presence of love. I mean it...this is something that I need more of. I wonder how willing the folks in my academic setting would be to get up and dance with me. The most academic seeming breakout group at this session protested the assignment. Sigh.



The question that I just asked appears again. How seriously are any of us living in and off of the university willing to take Judith Butler's attractive claims that we are inside undone, opaque and related as people. Would we dance that together? Would we write with hammers on the walls of these buildings. Would we let go of the departments or the parts that we seem to want to play over and over again with different words. Would we relinquish all credit (i mean this word credit in the transnational economic sense) for how smart we sound?

What Jameson asks of us through his reading of Butler is the bravery to confront the violence in our community specifically in terms of the lacross team rape violence, or the false innocence that is being defended with all the strategies of capitalism itself. As if capitalism itself is at stake...and I think it is. In fact I think that is the reason for him to say that. I heard his statement (while literally holed up in the back corner of the standing only room) as a completely unexpected blessing. I felt something like love and something like a gratitude that I am afraid to have for the person I am supposed to think that he is.

Speaking of capitalism itself...the so necessary, so affirming black panther/young lords panel at UNC was moderated (rather rudely i must say) by an old unfriend of mine (Columbia resurfaces in Durham) anyway this woman was a grad school member of the International Socialist Organizaton Columbia Chapter. I hope this organization has completely changed, but when I showed up at the first meeting it was group of white folks and this one sista ready to co-opt all things colored and tell me what to do. I said point blank that if i wanted some white guys to tell me what to do (and to pay the party to do it at that) then I would just go to the bank..as usual. When I told this sista about the art for social change stuff i was doing with the so-called lumpenproleteriat she said that if i didn't buy a membership to the ISO I "wasn't really an activist". Right. Evidently I listened to that, and I remember that...but I didn't learn that. Evidently neither of us have learned...I'm still trying to explain the creative process of revolution and she's still trying to stifle activists (but now it's Kathleen Cleaver lookin at her like she's crazy and about to get slapped.)

Runaway star of the Black Panther/Young Lords panel, Denise Oliver (Jurina's favorite) who was a member of both parties...and who was the first woman on the central committee of the young lords. She got off to a beautiful start when Micky Melendez explained something about an "all male reading group" and she interrupted "hello? I was there...Marlene was there...." This woman will not be invisible even while continuing to represent a movement that keeps invisiblilizing women's leadership. Kathleen Cleaver presented an alternative narrative to the one I just presented...a narrative that i want to believe that the urban warrio woman actions of the panthers were illegible to the public because of the public's narrow views of what women could be. i want to belive that. Anyway the most important thing about Denise Oliver is the fact that she says "We could do this today!" refusing to sit proud of a glamourous radical history and insisting on the possibility of what we (and the people younger than me) can do now.

Runners up for the position of "star" are Micky Melendez who presenced the poets and leaders from the Young Lord Party who are now in the space of ancestors. His invocations were timely and sacred (even though homegirl tried to cut him off). and Poison spoke about his love for Fred Hampton in a way that was almost lust using the exact phrase "testicular fortitude" to explain how Fred convinced him to join the party. The question that I take from the session is the question that the panthers posed to the Young Lords when they were a gang. "Why are you fearless when it comes to gang violence and scared when it comes to the police?" How to change that question seemed their structural goal and that need for a critical relationship to violence and power remains.



The relationship to power that I want to embody is Karla Holloway's. Her beautiful last owrds for the Collapse conference "this is not about lacrosse" alonside a description of glacial change...ice islands moving south and academic institutions catching up with some kind way to break off from the culture of violence was what I would have been saying if I could ever know how. As usual. I have a lot more listening to do.

Michelle Johnson: Orange County Rape Crisis Center

for Michelle

Through

through a veil of absent orchards
and television gloss
i look towards you

and imagine you climbing
up a route made of chain mail
the inside of an armor
that cannot fit growth
your fingers not small enough
to hold
through

i imagine that your days
are not made
of bright material
not sheltered in draped silk

i imagine that your everyday
is woven in dull silvers
and worn with leaks
shaped like protection
with holes
practiced endurance

so that light slips through
and recolors your face
with and unflinching warmth
so that light slips
through

************
Orange County Rape Crisis Center

Jan and Jen: Triangle Community Works and the Gay and Lesbian Helpline

for Jan and Jen

i picture you both
wearing pails of water
standing on slanted ground
pop-up pyramid stories
and strained leg muscles

or i see you in a field
emptied of color
and peppered with buildings
trees like footstools
and a gray that could be
green, blue or neither

i think you would be
brightly dressed
and my eyes watching you
take turns switching you each
alternating in the foreground

and you two try
to let your smiles spill
to watercolor the whole scene
to radiate a saving light

**********

Queen Precious Jewel: Embrace

For Queen Precious Jewel Zabriski

It's officially carnival
when you show up
and as if wearing secret
service earphones
we all comply

there is suddenly room
to (un)wind
and jump and wave
there is more than space
to laugh, clap hands
be seen
fall apart

the streets become clear places
to stand down fear
to dance with ancestors
to paint our bodies
bright excess of peace
you

everything shines
when you come through

Mandy Carter: Out Southern Black Lesbian Social Justice Activist for Peace!

for Mandy

like a readying breath
for a worldwide corset
you make the impossible beautiful
you break revolution down
into free gifts and short stories

i imagine your days
as a mosaic of boarding passes
an archive where the artifacts
are themselves
containers
for full air technologies
the quality of seeing through smoke
the superpower of listening past tolerance

like a penciled reminder of possibility
you hold the luxury of yes
you trace the footpaths to "we"
as the windbreaker against no itself

yours is a tale for roadtrips
a beat for banjos
through bright lenses of salt
yours is a story of move meant

**********
Mandy is one of the founders of Southerners on New Ground (SONG)

Pauline Ann McKenzie: Momma Pajama

(i am)

if i were slicing a mural
with every rubber-souled scuff mark
on your or someone elses
clean floor

if i were melting a painting
with every tear
evaporated into the air of an art gallery
or sunk into a movie theater cushion

if i were mixing a soundtrack
with the first note
of every question
every statement
of every no and yes
and amen

if i were keeping an archive
of every warm surface
every deep smoothness
every electric reflection
i glimpsed passing

if i was writing a poem
with the extra cradles
made from your brown arms
in embrace

it would all
every mural
every painting
every song
every library
every poem
every outfit
every outburst
every project
every event
every performance
every accident
every essay
every miracle
every sigh
would all be
dedicated
to you

and I am.

Linda Bryant: Heart of Charis

for Linda

if home could be light
the weight of static attraction
the soft embrace of hair
tucked toward a shoulder

if home could be listening
your voicebox a doorbell
playing high notes of recognition
and low afffirmations
of specific me
being anyone

if home could be open
like warm brewezes
and free tea

than home may be
exactly what
you make
for me

*******
Charis Circle

Elizabeth Anderson: White Mother Country Radical

for Elizabeth (WMCR)

we once named each other
in the urgency of acronyms
codes both mocking and protective
of how dangerous it was
to speak

even then
i recognized in you
a diligent faith in words
a demand that shapes in ink
were spaces for holding
what the world would deny
again

and you with your dependable wardrobe
and i with my charged (if symbolic) fist
insisted that printed and scribbled letters
were black on white pages
by so much more than coincidence

so when we draped Atlanta
in recycled black panther party slogans
all power
to the people
more power
to the youth

yes.
we were desperate
for a prayer we hadn't made yet
yes.
we were dazzled
by the glamour of illegal youth

but we were also saying
what we still say now
over distances more literal
than the ones we first noticed

we were already saying
all we need to say this time
which is

yes.

********
Click here to read or listen to an award winning short story by Elizabeth!

Mama Nayo: Everything

Full Notebooks
(for Mama Nayo)
i think
ink grows in the glow of your face
i think
truth remembers how it needs to be said
when you speak
especially when you yawn

i think there is
a reverse photosynthetic effect
that turns the light
in your hello
into full notebooks
and ideas
green and explosive
with their need
to be born
with their need
to be
now

this is neither the best
nor the last attempt
i will make to explain it
but just by you
being you
something grows


*********
Alternate Roots is one of Mama Nayo's many many affiliations...

Kim Arrington: Griot/Alchemist

i remember
the growl
that strides
longside your laughter
up under your confidence
drumroll to your
explosive revelations
underground bassline
for your ever-ready hook
ancient signal alarm clock
to those who would remember
and i remember
that

it's a hard call
to write a poem
for a poet
but at the same time
its the only thing
to do
that
and to listen
for the basement
for the foundation
for the referent
for the growl

********
Learn more about the ongoing Alchemy of Kim Arrington here.

Tema Okun: on White Supremacy

I think you
are perfectly named
if your name means peace
if your name means intention
if your name is the spoken form
of still water moments
of sure growth
of the imperceptible
contribution of paint and grass

i think you are
perfectly named
if your name means
holding
if your name means
sharing
if your name is a code word
for let's all embrace into a deep breath

i think you are perfectly named
but maybe that's because
when we speak your name
we mean what you have
already been for us
continue to name yourself
love

*******
Read Tema's article about the Culture of White Supremacy

And check out her work with the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop

sheila broderick: DUKE Sexual Assault Support Services

mixed use

they used girls like me
instead of mannequins
in the glass windows
of the Limited Too
at the Fashion Mall
in Plantation, Florida
on weekends

underweight girls like me
they found us
slightly
more alive
than plastic

i imagine that sometimes
your weekdays are like
my saturdays were then
a public stillness
breathing disguised as nothing
a mandate (not) to make eye contact
a fear of
a hunger for
the laughter that could make it
all fall apart

they used girls like me
instead of iron
as anchors
on the Paideia High School track team
4 by 4 relay squad
all over Georgia

conveniently black girls like me
they called us
natural talent

i imagine that sometimes
your weekdays are like
my saturdays were then
a chronic inability to stay
between the lines
a dizzy aversion
to running in circles
a tight urge
to steal the baton
and run towards where home might be
forgetting the girls that depend on you

i have no way of knowing
what any day
any week of yours has been
but i want to know
how do you feel
useful?

*******
Duke Sexual Assault Support Services

Serena and Caitlin: on the Politics of Sex Work

For Serena and Caitlin

do you know
that you send
bright electric charges
through the air
you move in

i wonder
can you tell?
i see you
narrating what was
the romance between your hand
spirit fingered out of habit
into the thing right beneath that
i see you swallow a vindictive memory
see the bruise
in the inverted nod
of your listening
and i wonder
can you tell?

i see you
punching the matter
of exhale
pushing your voice
as if rhythm could
make your thoughts
into dough
as if heat
would harden your
dreams into bread

and i wonder
can you?
can you tell?
and
sometimes
(like right now)
i think
yes

Kenya Fairley: North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Against
I picture your office
as a full place
pressed up unwilling
to a loud-grunting monster with barbed skin

everytime it exhales you
barely escape being crushed
and when it inhales you
breath quicky
and try to get us all to
hold hands
squeeze our eyes open
or sing at a frequenct that will
find the beast a soul
something!

I see your desk
as an inflatable lifeboat
heavy with need
and electronic implements
and that gigantic porcupined colonist in your office
keeps popping new wholes
and you stretch to make it float

and I imagine your face
as a storybook of changes
making sound more various
than sattelite cable
responding to truths
you will never learn
to properly expect

what I am trying to say
is that I am already in awe
i am already over proud
of you for breathing
even before you say
what it is that you do all day

North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Kenya was supposed to me my first listening session, but we never actually met up. The collage I made for her remains open at the opening of my rap-book. This is probably the loudest message that I need to hear: crisis response work and pre-arranged appointments are not particularly compatible. At all. Lesson 1: there is nothing to say that wouldn’t be redundant when someone who works in crisis response calls you to cancel because of a....crisis. Lesson 2: when someone who works in crisis response calls you a week before your appointment and says she can meet then...Go!
This starcrossed exercise in listening to air, through cell phone towers and email reminds me of what a major stream of this project is about the balance between sustainable nurturing long-term poetic creation of community and IMMEDIATE RESPONSE. In other words....though I made a collage that I love for Kenya and wrote the best poem that I’d written in a while with the possibility of knowing her in mind, I completely failed to live into her context. I completely failed to make my response immediate, a fact that is amplified by the fact that may never know what her in-person response to my art towards her was or will be. (I have since emailed her both the collage and the poem because it seems that I will ultimately be meeting with a less busy representative of North Carolina Coaltion Against Domestic Violence. How mediated is that?)
So there are two things that I want to focus on here. First the ramifications of the term that stands out to me most in the NCCADV name: domestic, and second (a concern that I will come back to) what does it mean to respond immediately to a pervasive something. In a paradigmatically violent society, what does it mean to be responsible for violence?
The collage that I made features an archival photograph of a first nations person in Canada in front of a Teepee in what we are meant to understand as traditional (very heavy-looking) garb glaring into a camera, a red arrow against a black background facing down, a pair of sign language hands spelling something that I don’t know, and some visibly black people carrying their belongings in garbage bags and leaving New Orleans, maybe forever. I’m going to go through this backwards (as a process that leads from visual art to poem to “interview” and ends with questions might imply already.) What does the term domestic imply when George Bush II persists in calling New Orleans “this part of the world”, when many people (myself included) made the mistake of calling people escaping disaster in the Gulf Coast refugees, as if they were not citizens and residents of the United States, as if the violence that they experienced was not so definitively domestic? And in blocking access to goods coming from to the Gulf via it’s neighboring Caribbean Sea from Cuba to people struggling to survive, escape, breath, save each other in the Gulf Coast how does the United States government (and the story we tell that keeps us from overthrowing it) both disavow and enforce the domestic violence.
In a nation transubstantiated out of a settler colony can the domestic ever have anything to do with the indigenous? It seems, of course, that idigeneity and domesticity imply very different relationships to land, on characterized by dynamic relation and a responsibility (response-ability) to the land and the other characterized by enforced boundaries, predictable expulsions, constant policing, delayed, delinquent or with-held responses. It seems to me that the word “domestic” is continually seeking to colonize the concept of “home” while only really BEING at home when pushed up next to the word “violence”. This seems to me to be the place where the word domestic belongs. (It occurs to me tangentially that the words “public” and “housing” have a different but related relationship...something like an unhappy arranged marriage or the abusive result of another ironically compatible pair of words “shotgun wedding”.)
But what gets silenced and is not translated in this discourse of the domestic? What allows us to believe that citizenship exists? What prevents us, the literate, the literary, and those of us who are making our lives out of intersection, “those of us who live at the crossroads”, those of us in crisis (work) to be able to really speak what we mean? I mean to say what does it mean to be “against domestic violence”? I think that in one sense being “against” domestic violence very accurately describes our position, at least my position...uncomfortably close to domestic violence, like a rush-hour number train through Times Square, a relationship characterized by too much pushing, trying to get somewhere...but when do we acknowledge that if get anywhere we will be getting there together....that we might want to practice what that place might look like or feel like...to talk honestly about what defense can ever do, how we would have to shift to embrace each other in the ways that we want to be embraced...which brings me to the red arrow. What is the direction we have in mind? Knowing that violence is never linear, but rather explosive and unpredictable in its traumatic ramifications and collateral damages means that responding cannot be a linear movement either...even in the direction that tries to be named in the word “against”. So immediate response seems to me to be relenting (i almost said relentless) invocation of now and of you and of me and of now and of you. I started out knowing that it had something to do with listening, and i definitely think it has something to do with speaking, with holding, with releasing. Immediate response seems to me to have to be as much an engagement with land(ing) or with environment as it is a matter of being present with people.
And somehow all this from the loss of missing a chance to listen....

Kriti Sharma: Everyday Ethics

For Kriti

sometimes you hold words
suspended between your hands
like a transplanted honeysuckle
sprouting invisible routes
back to your throat

sometimes you toss words
high with your eyes
light like ping-pong
magnetic to clouds
and everyone waits for them
to fall in into the telekenetic place
you're conjuring with the rest
of your face

and sometimes you catch words
low in those blooming hands
steadied to your focused chin
and safe in your open mind

what I mean to say is
you make language
you make us
you make listening
into a shrine
to growth
to anticipation
to the miracle of response

****************
Indulge in Kriti's generous wisdoms