Mosaic 35

CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC

BEVERLEY NAMBOZO NSENGIYUNVA

L I T E R A R Y

M A G A Z I N E

THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE

35

Spring 2015 $6.00 MosaicMagazine.org

1

“ ^^ ŝƐ ĂŶ ĞǀĞŶƚͲĚƌŝǀĞŶ ŝŶŝƟĂƟǀĞ ĨŽĐƵƐĞĚ ŽŶ ƚŚĞ ĂƌƚƐ ĨƌŽŵ ƚŚĞ ĨƌŝĐĂŶ ŝĂƐƉŽƌĂ͘ ǀĞŶƚƐ ŝŶĐůƵĚĞ Ăƌƚ ŽƉĞŶŝŶŐƐ͕ Ŭ ƌĞĂĚŝŶŐƐ͕ ŵƵƐŝĐ͕ ƚŚĞĂƚƌĞ͕ ĂŶĚ Įůŵ ƉƌĞŵŝĞƌĞƐ͘” ͶdĂŶĞƐŚŝĂ EĂƐŚ >ĂŝƌĚ͕ &ŽƵŶĚĞƌ

&ŽƵŶĚĞĚ ϮϬϭϰ

ÊÄã ã hÝ

917-409-6675 info@bakerstreetsocialclub.com www.bakerstreetsocialclub.com bakerstreetsocialclub BakerStSocial BakerStSocial

2

MosaicMagazine.org

content Reviews Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine ............................................ 6 Autogeography by Reginald Harris ............................................................. 10 The Lost Treasures of R&B: A D Hunter Mystery by Nelson George ............. 13 Driving the King by Ravi Howard ................................................................ 14 Interviews Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva by Beatrice Lamwaka ............................... 18 Saeed Jones by Danielle A. Jackson ............................................................. 22 Poems Last Portrait As Boy by Saeed Jones ............................................................. 31 Apologia by Saeed Jones ............................................................................. 48 Essays My Life by Morowa Yejide .......................................................................... 32 The African Renaissance by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond ............................ 38 Excerpt Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejide ......................................................... 34 Around Town by photographer Marcia E. Wilson .............................................. 44

Cover: Saeed Jones, photo credit: Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography

MosaicMagazine.org

3

Editor & Publisher Ron Kavanaugh ron@mosaicmagazine.org Mosaic Literary Magazine (ISSN 1531-0388) is published by the Literary Freedom Project. Content copyright Š 2014. No portion of this magazine can be reprinted or reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher.

Retail Distribution Publisher’s Distribution Group info@pdgmags.com Subscribe online: MosaicMagazine.org 3 Issues: $16.00 Institution Subscriptions EBSCO 1.205.991.6600 WT Cox 1.800.571.9554 Contact the editor We welcome comments. Send e-mails to info@mosaicmagazine.org Visit MosaicMagazine.org for submission guidelines.

Colophon Layout Software: Adobe InDesign CS5 Graphic Software: Paint Shop Pro 12 Mast Typeface: Whomp Editorial Typeface: Zapf Humanist Mosaic is made possible with the support of members and subscribers.

POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: Mosaic 314 W. 231 St #470 Bronx, NY 10463

4

MosaicMagazine.org

contributors Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of Powder Necklace, which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”. Named among 39 of the most promising African writers under 39, her short fiction was included in the anthology Africa39. Most recently, she was shortlisted for a 2014 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship.

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer. He’s the author of Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press) and Zero Saints (forthcoming from Broken River Books). His work has appeared in The New York Times, Verbicide, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Marginalia, Entropy, Word Riot, Spinetingler Magazine, and other print and online venues.

Danielle Jackson is a writer and multicultural marketing specialist living in Brooklyn, NY. Beatrice Lamwaka is an independent journalist and writer, working on her first adult novel, Sunflowers.

She is a recipient of 2011 Young Achievers Award, and a finalist for the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, and the South African PEN/Studzinski Literary Award in 2009. She has been published in various anthologies and journals.

Saretta Morgan earned her B.A. from Columbia University and is currently pursing an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute.

In addition to text-based writing, her interests include photography and performance.

Michelle Newby is a writer, contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews and National Book Critics Circle member. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in [PANK], Pleiades Magazine, South85 Journal, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic, World Literature Today, Rain Taxi, The Collagist, High Country News and Atticus Review.

Nicole Sealey is a writer. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, poet John Murillo.

Born in London, England, Marcia Wilson’s photography has documented many writers of the African Diaspora.

Her photos have appeared in Vibe, Publishers Weekly, Black Issues Book Review, LA Weekly, and QBR. She has exhibited at The National Black Writers Conference, Medgar Evers College, New Haven Public Library, New York Public Library (Flatbush branch), and Air Gallery.

She currently resides in Brooklyn. Visit www.WideVisionPhotography.com for additional information.

Morowa Yejidé’s short stories have appeared in the Istanbul Review, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Underground Voices, Adirondack Review, and other publications. Time of the Locust was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize and is a 2015 NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three sons.

MosaicMagazine.org

5

6

MosaicMagazine.org

Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine Graywolf Press Reviewed by Nicole Sealey By now you’ve read Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s book-length lyric that contextualizes this highly charged time in race relations and bears witness to events many would sooner forget. Unlike some poets of witness who pride themselves on giving voice to the voiceless—as if voice is theirs to give, as if those on whose behalf they claim to speak are incapable of speech—Rankine does not claim to speak for any one.

Citizen is a poetry of preservation and accountability.

Philip Rahv’s essay “Paleface and Redskin” (1938) codifies American authors as either glorying in Americanism or regarding their Americanness as a “source of endless ambiguity.” Rahv’s limited groupings, however, do not account for the Claudia Rankines, who—to paraphrase playwright and novelist James Baldwin—love America and, therefore, reserve the right to constructively criticize her. Citizen dares

MosaicMagazine.org

7

reviews

to criticize America and the world at large, but its intent is not to proselytize. The collection encourages readers, not to see as Rankine sees, but to, at the very least, open their eyes. And, in rare cases (and with all due respect), close their mouths.

You are rushing to meet a friend in a distant neighborhood of Santa Monica. This friend says, as you walk toward her, You are late, you nappy-headed ho. What did you say? …

Maybe she wants to have a belated conversation about Don Imus and the women’s basketball team he insulted with this language. You don’t know. You don’t know what she means. You don’t know what response she expects from you nor do you care. For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience this cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke…

You does not know what to make of her friend’s brash humor. The friend’s insistence on the comicality of “nappy-headed ho” is not unlike the excuse used by radio host Don Imus, who initially dismissed his infamous phrasing as “some idiot comment meant to be amusing.”

It seems this rationale never gets old. When a group of people is reduced to inferior status, it becomes easy—if not necessary—to address (read: demean) them accordingly.

Like a scene straight out of Citizen itself, Rankine was in attendance at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony when host Daniel Handler told watermelon jokes in reference to another black writer’s supposed allergy

8

MosaicMagazine.org

to the fruit. Handler later apologized for the faux pas via Twitter, posting: “My job at last night’s National Book Awards was to shine a light on tremendous writers…and not to overshadow their achievements with my own illconceived attempts at humor. …” * Even after our talks about Citizen, no matter how many times I ask her not to say the word “nigger,” she insists, when retelling an anecdote in which the word was originally said, on telling it word for word, nigger and all. * The tension in Citizen is palpable. There is no locus amoenus in which to escape. While in the United Kingdom, one of the book’s unidentified yous withdraws to the least noisy nook in a home where a party is being held. A novelist approaches you with “the face of the English sky” and what reads as affinity in his eyes. The pair begins to discuss the shooting death of unarmed Mark Duggan, a black man and suspected drug dealer,

by Scotland Yard’s special gun crime unit assigned to black neighborhoods, and the riots that ensued.

Will you write about Duggan? The man wants to know.

Why don’t you? You ask. Me? He asks, looking slightly irritated.

How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?

Though initially sympathetic, the now-irritated novelist struggles to see himself in Mark Duggan and, thus, fails to recognize the humanity of you, with whom he is in intimate conversation. Even so, his response is not without basis considering the construction of race, which leads readers (at least this reader) to assume “the man made of English sky” is not black. * While in graduate school a professor assigned Black Life, a collection of poems seemingly having nothing to do with black people and everything to do with the attitudes and images the color black connotes. A “black life,” as the author describes in the title poem, is “full of abuse… Dark purple monsters that are so full of blood they are a darkish bluish red.” This rendition substantiates claims Malcolm X made in his autobiography: Society cultivates a distaste for all things black. * Rankine does not let up, nor should she. “Stop-andFrisk,” one of the collection’s situational scripts created in collaboration with photographer John Lucas, offers episodes in which police officers shake down unsuspecting motorists. Lest we forget, Rankine reminds readers that there are those who are expected to respect authority and others who are taught to expect it, those for whom laws apply loosely and others for whom laws (written and unwritten) apply with a vengeance.

Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. I must have been speeding. No, you weren’t speeding. I wasn’t

speeding? You didn’t do anything wrong. Then why are you pulling me over? Why am I pulled over? Put your hands where they can be seen. Put your hands in the air.

Put your hands up.

Such incidents, Citizen illustrates, are not isolated. New York City Police Department’s Stop-Question-and-Frisk program permits police to stop and search pedestrians based on suspected criminal activity. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, during the first third of 2014, police stopped 38,456 New Yorkers. Of those, 54% were black, 27% Latino and 12% white. Well over 80% of those stopped and harassed were innocent.

These “routine stops,” essentially, are routine only in that they happen to the same groups of people over and over again. The following refrain attests to and intensifies that fact.

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

A second refrain reaffirms Rankine’s argument, complicates syntax and elevates music.

Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same. * I’d been browsing the shelves for a few minutes, even interacting with one of the associates, asking about one of the products and made my way to the counter to complete my purchase. During my transaction, the cashier asked to “peek in my bag.” Confused, I asked, “Peek?

MosaicMagazine.org

9

Peek where?” Surely, she could not mean my purse.

She was, indeed, asking me to show its contents. In a state of confusion, I complied. She looked inside and, apparently satisfied I had not stolen anything, proceeded to ring me up as if nothing could be more normal. * Citizen is compelled by more than mere circumstance.

Claudia Rankine’s deadpan delivery builds tension and, in an unexpected psychological reversal, emphasizes urgency. Rankine, author of four previous collections and the recipient of countless honors, manages the work, careful not to bend it to her will. Readers will either personalize each incident like congregants would a Sunday morning sermon or be amazed at the frequency with which such incidents occur. As the judges’ citation for the Jackson Poetry Prize notes, “[Citizen does] the work of art of the highest order—teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader.”

Autogeography

by Reginald Harris Northwestern University Press Reviewed by Saretta Morgan Autogeography begins and ends in transit. The first and final poems, “The Poet Behind the Wheel” and “Packing,” bookend a collection that is well versed in the art and necessity of transition. From literal sidewalks and interstates to the more figurative “streets of promise,” these poems navigate the interior land-and-lovescape of a poet who is both liberated and burdened by movement.

Whether moved by the rhythm and repetition in the poem “The Spinning Song: Pantoum for Herbie Nichols,” or by the mechanical left left left-right-left marching of soldiers in “Captain Blackman,” Reginald Harris’s poems guide us through a carefully crafted world.

Throughout the work, there is a strong attention (perhaps bordering on anxiety) to place. Titles like “Approaching Baltimore” and a meticulous network of epigraphs— North Carolina, I-85, 4 A.M.; Uptown/Avenue Market Metro Station; Louie’s Bookstore Café, Baltimore; Mobile, Alabama; Jasper, Texas; Camden Yards, Baltimore, Maryland—root Harris and his work in the cultural and

10

MosaicMagazine.org

geographic south. These locational tags also provide a sense of bearing for the reader as we wander where the poet has wandered, at all times aware that his movement is not, by any means, a thoughtless meandering.

As I followed Harris’s journey, Glissant’s Poetics of Relation stayed close to my mind—particularly Glissant’s concept of an errantry and exile that “silently emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities… and, at the same time, from difficult uncertain births of new forms of identity that call to us.”

There are true gems of poems in this book, but the real treasure is how they work as a collection. The simultaneous emphasis on rootedness and escape create a productive tension that compels the reader forward.

In the poem “Dream of My Cousin’s Wedding,” two children, both aware of their family’s suspicion of their burgeoning queerness, stage a make-believe wedding ceremony.

High on Communion wine transformed into grape juice, we race to fly out of this church, those clothes, that small town, into cities, adulthood, our true names.

Seal our vows of escape with a stolen kiss.

In this poem we glean one catalyst of the desire to flee.

The preceding poem, “The Star,” confronts the same source of conflict. The young speaker of the poem rummages through the closet of an older woman (likely a mother or grandmother), lavishing in lace and bright col-

ors, stepping into likely-oversized women’s dress shoes, as he—likening himself to Lena Horne—wonders: How could they not love him as he made his grand entrance, posed, placed a trembling hand on narrow hip, waited breathlessly, sure of their applause?”

This poem approaches the topic of gender non-conformity within black communities with a more hopeful tone, and the speaker seems eager to give his community the chance to accept him. But the additional space before the last line makes it too easy to attribute the question mark at the end of the poem to the surety of the speaker, rather than to the “how could they not?” that began the stanza. His cautious hope ads a level of complexity to the narrative and reveals the vulnerability of the poet, whose desire for acceptance leaves him open to pain, rejection and worse.

One of the things I appreciate most in Autogeography is the poet’s commitment to exploring his position within black communities as opposed to comparing himself to predominant (white) cultures. In the poem “Reunion,” Harris relishes an afternoon spent family-style around the backyard with cultural super-stars like Bearden, Lorde, Basquiat and Charlie Parker along with the poet’s own siblings, parents and grandparents. “Reunion” places Harris in a tradition of black artistic production. At the same time, this poem’s melding of public and family figures reflects the poet’s fusion of personal life and work—another maxim of radical black discourse which is best exemplified in figures such as Lorde, Baraka, and

MosaicMagazine.org

11

Baldwin. Like Harris, these writers used their own lives and experiences to examine larger cultural issues.

front your own actions (or inaction) in the wake of a brutal murder.

Harris’s desire to secure a place for himself in the communities of his youth (the church, Baltimore’s city streets, his immediate family) is simultaneously an attempt to dismantle hegemonic representations and problems he acknowledges within black culture at large, such as homophobia and the stigmatization of urban youth (which the poet views through child-eyes as his grandparents blame a group of “Loud and Wrong” kids for spoiling their neighborhood). Both of these issues further marginalize segments of the population that already live under the threat of violence. This is something Harris returns to often. His poem “The Lost Boys: A Requiem,” names men and boys in his life lost to a list of social symptoms, among them: AIDS, prison, suicide and drugs.

Published in 2013, these poems pre-date our now-postFerguson existence, but, sadly, all the grief of our contemporary moment haunts these pages in lines such as:

In one of the collection’s most successful poems, “On the Road,” Harris remembers James Byrd, Jr. The poem opens, “Imagine you wake up with / a second chance: Silent evening,” and goes on to imagine Byrd’s final hours until:

Despite this acknowledgement of pain and injustice, there remains space in Autogeography for love—both familial and sexual. The bittersweet complexity of joy in the midst of grief (as it must often emerge in black communities) makes this book a lesson in survival. Surviving as wandering. Wandering as forging a new way.

Funny what the mind will focus on: A silent calf standing in a field.

The blink of fireflies.

The way your leg twists back onto itself. A dented license plate the last thing of this world you see The poem ends with the repetition of “Imagine / you wake up.” The shedding of italics signals that the dream is over. You, the reader, are here, alive and left to con-

12

MosaicMagazine.org

Make No sudden movements Like from your neighborhood To someplace you don’t belong and even the seemingly trivial: homeboys swimming down the block, calling loose ones, loose ones.

The Lost Treasures of R&B: A D Hunter Mystery

by Nelson George Akashic Books Reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

and dirty cops to a missing record by Otis Redding and Diana Ross, and D has to try to solve it all while learning to readjust to Brooklyn and learning to cope with the failure of his security company.

Author Nelson George’s academic knowledge of hiphop and R&B and sharp, street-savvy prose come together in The Lost Treasures of R&B to offer a narrative that’s as much about the quest for an almost mythical record as it is about learning to survive and the effects of gentrification in Brooklyn. Equal parts mystery, celebration of New York City’s urban heart, and musical history lesson, this novel occupies the interstitial space between unabashedly fun entertainment and meaningful themes locked in a noirish atmosphere.

George possesses a distinctive voice that carries the narrative forward at a superb pace and makes The Lost Treasures of R&B a quick, satisfying read. While there’s enough action packed into the story to please fans of trope-heavy crime fiction, there are also a plethora of elements like music, history, and social/racial commentary that turn the novel into a hybrid between noir and literary fiction.

D Hunter is a professional bodyguard who’s just moved back to Brooklyn, his birthplace, after years living in Manhattan. His first job after moving back is protecting rapper Asya Roc while he goes to see the fights at an underground fight club in Brownsville. Unfortunately, watching the fights is not the only thing on the rapper’s mind; he’s also going to the illegal club to buy some guns. The man delivering the guns is Ice, one of D’s many acquaintances. While the deal is going down, a youngster bursts in with a gun in his hand and shoots Ice. D manages to drag the scared rapper to safety but ends up with the bag of guns and two armed men with bad intentions chasing him through the dark streets. D gets rid of the guns, but not before shots split the night and bodies fall down, which lands him in the eye of a corrupt detective named Rivera. What starts as a simple crime quickly turns into a convoluted mess of hidden agendas and secrets that go from the guns themselves

Besides the great writing and historical/musical angles, The Lost Treasures of R&B also offers an outstanding protagonist. D Hunter is one of those rare characters that, besides being likeable, believable, and engaging, feels like a necessary presence in contemporary fiction. He is not only a smart African American living with HIV, but also someone with a rich life story that has one foot in New York City’s past and one in the modern era of social networking sites and smart phones. Through D’s eyes, the reader analyzes New York City’s diversity and everchanging nature:

MosaicMagazine.org

13

“D sat back on his sofa and took stock of his life. He hadn’t lived in Brooklyn for decades and certainly never expected to again after he’d left like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, Alfred Kazin in A Walker in the City, and thousands of other Brooklynites who’d crossed the East River to make their mark, Brooklyn was a place of your roots but not your future, unless you planned on being a cop, crook, civil servant, or candy store owner.

Brooklyn had been a place to visit, Manhattan a place to thrive.”

Music is a very tough subject to write about because the way it makes listeners feel and the ethereal nature of live performances make it ineffable. However, George manages to write about it successfully by dealing with feelings in a very straightforward manner, offering great descriptions, and having dizzyingly creative spurts of alliteration: “…a bacchanal of boogying butts bounced to bodacious beats.”

While The Lost Treasures of R&B is the third entry into the D Hunter series, reading the previous books, The Accidental Hunter and The Plot Against Hip Hop, is not required to fully enjoy the narrative because it works well as a standalone. Many novels take place in Brooklyn/ Brownsville, but few are as entrenched in its history and present transformation as this one, and its deeply-rooted relationship to the streets and buildings allows the story to become a biography of place that does for NYC what the work of writers like James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler has done for Los Angeles. George Nelson’s passion for Brooklyn, the effects of time and change, and musical greats past and present coalesce here to offer a different and very engaging novel.

14

MosaicMagazine.org

Driving the King

by Ravi Howard HarperCollins Reviewed by Michelle Newby Driving the King by Ravi Howard evokes the effects of the Jim Crow South, both the daily humiliations and the blatantly outrageous ruination of lives, as they are felt by all levels of “Colored” society, both the janitors and the Nat King Coles. Over the course of a single day during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, interspersed with flashbacks of the events leading up to this day, Howard mixes historical fact and speculative fiction to take us on a journey with Nat Cole and his driver/ bodyguard Nathaniel Weary.

One of those lesser-known historical facts is that Nat Cole was the victim of attempted murder onstage by a group of white men while giving a concert in his hometown of Montgomery in 1956. The author takes this incident and imagines what might have happened had a black man from the audience, the fictional Nathaniel Weary, come to Cole’s defense. What happens in Driving the King is Mr. Weary is charged with attacking the perpetrators, goes to prison on a ten-year sentence for aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and inciting a riot.

“I had to stop yearning for the world. There was no place left for ambition. So after all those hollowedout years, pumping gas in a filling station five miles from Kilby [the prison] was dream enough. It was damn near heaven.”

Then a bit of Karma: upon completing his sentence

Weary accepts a job offer from Nat King Cole and leaves Alabama for Los Angeles. Didn’t someone once say that living well is the best revenge?

But what happened in Montgomery haunts Cole and Weary. Cole says, “I think about Montgomery and I don’t hear any music. I see a man with a pipe. You [Weary] in prison. If I remember it like that, then I wonder if that’s how the homefolk remember me.” So Cole and Weary return to Alabama in an attempt to right history and negate the power of that memory with a new memory.

Weary thinks, “I hoped for him the same thing I hoped for myself. We could hear the old sound for only a few hours more, until the show gave us a brand-new memory, loud enough to make that long-ago noise nothing more a whisper.” When they return to Montgomery the bus boycott had been ongoing successfully for a year.

“Half of Montgomery walked with their work whites wrapped up or folded inside out to keep them clean through all that traveling. Every season brought a different kind of road dust – pollen, red dirt, mud, crushed leaves. The boycott was a new kind of season, and it had brought problems besides the dust and the weather.”

Those problems include threats, being hit by cars and ar-

rested for carpooling. Weary captures the conflicting feelings: “I loved my people for fighting, but hated the reason why, and that left me with that crosscut notion of pride and anger pulling in different directions, two kinds of muscle fighting for the same piece of bone.”

Ravi Howard’s writing flows smoothly throughout Driving the King as he moves backward and then forward in time to tell the history of these lives, individually and collectively.

The plot is well-constructed and the pacing well-calibrated.

Howard has a talent for a turn of phrase that is simultaneously simple and richly evocative. The first time Weary sees his father after being released from prison: “Then he dropped his head once more, this time on my arm…My father’s hands were leaner than they had once been. We had both aged more than we should have, and the only muscle left was the rugged kind that clung close to home. I couldn’t tell his pulse from mine, and that was better than anything.”

The humor in Driving the King is restrained but smart and effective. A love interest of Weary’s in LA on the advisability of dating someone new: “Your first Christmas out here away from your people.

My people warned me about meeting a man around the holidays. It’s winter and folks go out with their pores open, liable to catch something. Like a feeling.”

Howard makes you care about what happens to his characters without eliciting pity. Driving the King is a visceral experience of a time and place that, unfortunately, is still not behind us. ★

MosaicMagazine.org

15

Start A Book Club in Your Community With professional instruction from a teaching-artist the We Are Family Book Club engages in a literary “call and response� by reading and discussing books that reflect institution-defined communities. We create flexible reading and writing programs that meet the needs of a variety of populations including teenagers, after-school, r-school, out-of-school, out-of-schoo and senior r citizens.

WeAreFamilyBookClub.com WeAreFamilyBoo ookClub.com wearefamilybookclu wearefamilybookclub@gmail.com lub@gmail.com 347-454-2161

16

MosaicMagazine.org

books + culture + education

we are family book club

The We Are Family Book Club's list of recommended reading is developed to reconnect readers to literature and strengthen cultural, historical, and ethnic iden••es. WAFBC selects •tles based on their accessibility to mul•-genera•onal readers —teens, adults, and seniors. These books re•ect the cultural iden•ty and sensi•vi•es of many communi•es, and o•er opportuni•es to engage •c•on, non•c•on, and poetry; while re•ec•ng such urban sensibili•es as race, gender, and economics. WeAreFamilyBookClub.com The Beau•ful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates 2008, 227 pgs.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 1993, 224 pgs.

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Dan•cat 2007, 288 pgs.

The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney 2010, 180 pgs.

Brown Girl, Brownstone by Paule Marshall 1959, 255 pgs.

Bu!er"y Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa by Rigoberto Gonzalez 2006, 224 pgs.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas 1967, 352 pgs.

Drown by Junot Diaz 1996, 224 pgs.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

by Ntozake Shange 1975, 64 pgs.

Fresh Girl by Jaire Placide 2002, 224 pgs.

Girl in the Mirror: Three Genera•ons of Black Women in Mo•on

by Natasha Tarpley 1998, 196 pgs.

Krik? Krak# by Edwidge Dan•cat 1996, 224 pgs.

Long Division by Kiese Laymon 2013, 276 pgs.

Macnolia: Poems by Van Jordan 2005, 144 pgs.

Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown 1965, 416 pgs.

March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell 2013, 128 pgs.

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor 2013, 432 pgs.

Powder Necklace by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond 2010, 280 pgs.

The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson 2013, 352 pgs.

The Revolu•on of Evelyn Serrano by Sonia Manzano 2012, 224 pgs.

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

by Emily Raboteau 2013, 320 pgs.

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones 2011, 368 pgs.

Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo 2010, 112 pgs.

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo 2013, 320 pgs.

We the Animals by Jus•n Torres 2011, 144 pgs.

Where A Nickel Costs A Dime: Poems by Willie Perdomo 1996, 80 pgs.

The Young Lords: A Reader by Darrel Enck-Wanzer (Editor), Iris Morales (Foreword), Denise Oliver-Velez (Foreword) 2010, 269 pgs.

Programs presented by the Literary Freedom Project, a 501(c)3 non-pro•t organiza•on, are made possible in part by dona•ons, and MosaicMagazine.org public funds from the Bronx Council on the Arts through the New York State Council on the Arts Decentraliza•on Program and New York 17 City Department of Cultural A•airs; New York Council for the Humani•es; and the Ci•zens Commi!ee for New York City.

by Beatrice Lamwaka

18

MosaicMagazine.org

Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva is dedicated to her Africanness. A Ugandan writer and mother of two, she dared to found Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation (formerly the Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award for Ugandan women), which began in 2008 as a platform for promoting poetry in her beloved homeland. In 2014, the award expanded to encompass the entire continent –targeting both men and women. Not satisfied with the award accomplishments, the foundation recently published an anthology of poetry, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, which consists of poets from a variety of African countries.

Beverley is also the founder of the Babishai Niwe Women’s Leadership Academy –Babishai Niwe means “creating change.” She was nominated in August 2009 for the Arts Press Association (APA) Awards for revitalizing poetry in Uganda after initi-

MosaicMagazine.org

19

ating the Beverley Nambozo Poetry Award, the first poetry award for Ugandan women.

Beatrice Lamwaka: At what point in your life did you decide that you must start a poetry award?

Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva: This is a fascinating question. In 2008, during maternity leave and reflecting on the enormous amount of knowledge I had received from the NGO I worked at, I too wanted to give back to women. Combined with my passion for poetry and the overwhelming lack of it in public spaces in Uganda, I decided to motivate closet poets. Given that poets hardly earned an income from it, a cash prize would be a real motivator. That is how the poetry award for Ugandan women began.

BL: Are there any regrets with starting this award?

BNN: Every single year when I struggle with financial resources and when I face utmost difficulty in translating poetry’s importance to people in my everyday life. It is at those times that I start applying for jobs again, in order to be ‘normal.’ And then that inner stubborn reminder of the successes and the potential of the award, keeps me going, as well as tremendous support from friends, family and the past winners.

BL: What made you open up the award to men as well?

BNN: They make up a huge part of my thinking space, and even more, when I visit another country from the continent, the value of poetry increases because it’s so much larger than what we think in Uganda. It’s so much more intricate than the way we view it in Uganda.

20

MosaicMagazine.org

BL: What has changed since you opened up space for men and the rest of Africa?

BNN: Firstly, I discovered many Ugandan poets like Moses Kyeyune Muyanja, whose three poems were longlisted in this year’s award; secondly, that very many poets across the continent were waiting for the BNPA team to open it up. This year, we were the only organization based on the continent, with an annual African poetry award. There is growing support from art communities around the world, because it’s a worthwhile indigenousbased creative cause.

The number of submissions increased by over a hundred percent with close to 1,500 submissions this year and the interest in the award across the globe has heightened tremendously.

BL: How has the anthology, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, been received?

BNN: A Thousand Voices Rising, as of the time of writing this, is the latest African poetry anthology released, in the world. Many readers are enthralled that more poetry from East Africa is being anthologized because the majority of people expect not only to see a poetry performance but to also read it. One friend said that the anthology has saved the written poetry word in Africa from extinction. It’s the individual poets that contributed and showed so much support, to whom we, as a team, are indebted.

The more interesting reception is from non-poets whom I meet and they share how the poetry is so relatable,

quirky, daring and a reflection of their own daily experiences.

BL: Do you have some favorite poems, there?

BNN: “The Careless Cook” by James Dwalu from Liberia. It’s succinct and voluminous in multiple meanings.

Also, “Soft Tonight” by Ugandan poet, Lillian Aujo. This poem won the BN Poetry Award in 2009 and it’s unforgettable. “I Laugh at Amin” by Dr. Susan Kiguli is also truly amazing.

BL: What keeps you motivated to do more each day?

BNN: The unrelenting hope and belief that together with the BNPA team, we can and we shall. Exercise gives me renewed physical and mental energy as well. If I don’t spend two hours walking, then I swim continuous laps for over an hour.

BL: What are some of the things that make you say, yes, I did it: I am glad I did it?

BNN: Interviews like this one. Honestly, magazines like this, TV stations like NPR in the US and local media houses like The Monitor and New Vision, continually interview me and share about the award. It’s because they are far-sighted and see it as a magnificent initiative.

When that happens, I say Yes!!! We did it.

BNPA event, I say, Yes! We did it.

BL: What are your dreams for BNP award?

BNN: To produce a poetry anthology based on the theme of Kampala. It’s going to attract artists from all over the world who have had an experience of this multi-ethnic and multi-diverse city. It will be in collaboration with poets, fine artists, and musicians.

To organize poetry residential mentorship camps across the continent.

To produce a toolkit for children who read and write poetry, so that they can be given the benefit of learning the ropes from a young age.

BL: If things could be done differently, what do you wish were in place/can be done to promote poetry in Africa?

BNN: We need more mentorship for poetry in Africa. A lot of emphasis is placed on prose and so poetry camps and residencies are extremely important.

We need more local language poetry that is performed and documented. Many wonderful oral performances go undocumented, unrecorded and untelevised, which is a shame. ★

When financial support comes from major institutions and philanthropists from and outside Uganda, I feel so blessed to know that someone can give so much support towards a cause they deem extremely worthy.

When I see poets from all over Uganda gathering for a

MosaicMagazine.org

21

Saeed ones J

by Danielle A. Jackson

22

MosaicMagazine.org

MosaicMagazine.org

23

Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography

Prelude to Bruise is an airtight collection of visceral and stunning poems that coalesce into a narrative about Boy, a young, black gay man who leaves a stifling birthplace and abusive family dynamics for a freer life in a cosmopolitan city. A survivor of family violence, Boy brings his history with him, as we all do when we move from one situation to another—his troubled, shaky past of longing and strife manifests into lonely isolation and challenges with relating as an adult.

While Prelude to Bruise, which was recently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, certainly works as narrative poetry, the collection is equally effective as something more ethereal. Saeed Jones, a lover of words and sounds and the son of a musician, has shaped the collection into a meditation on the vocabulary and sonic landscape of trauma, grief, survival, race, sex, and oppression. He riffs on the word “boy” throughout the collection; it is the main character’s name and, of course, a racial slur. Alternatively throughout the text, the word bears connotations of frivolity, childhood and sexual playfulness as well as perversion.

In Birmingham, said the burly man--Boy, be a bootblack.

Your back, blue-black.

Your body, burning.

I like my black boys broke, or broken.

I like to break my black boys in.

-From titular poem “Prelude to Bruise”

24

MosaicMagazine.org

The poems are not delicate and demand to be read aloud. They are vivid, urgent, and without filter. “Boy in a Whalebone Corset,” about a brutal argument on the night Boy’s father finds him trying on his mother dress, leaps off the page, a fully realized nightmare of Old Testament fire and brimstone, Nina Simone records, and pain.

I had a wide-ranging conversation with Jones, who is also the LGBT editor at Buzzfeed, about origins, influences, artistic tastes and sensibilities, and his plans for forthcoming work and institution building.

Danielle A. Jackson: Where were you born?

Saeed Jones: I was born in Memphis, and most of my family is from the Whitehaven area, and lived there for several generations back. But I grew up in North Texas.

My mom and I moved to Dallas, kind of the suburbs, when I was in elementary school. So North Texas, the suburbs, is really where I did all of my growing up.

DAJ: How did you know that you wanted to pursue writing as a professional, or in your academic career?

SJ: I’ve always loved English. I’ve always been very right brained. I’m horrible at math. I like science but I’m not good at it. But I’ve always loved literature and reading.

It was always something that felt very natural to me. A natural interest. So English class always felt like a delight.

But it really took, you know, teachers.

DAJ: Yes, that’s what I’m wondering, who told you that writing as a profession was viable? So many times people grow up, especially people of color, feeling like it isn’t.

SJ: Well I did speech and debate in high school and col-

lege. In high school, my debate coach, Sally Squibb, who I’m still very close to, was a huge influence, and we spent so much time together. With speech you’re taking literature and bringing it to life and really begin to internalize, and certainly with poetry, with rhythm and sound and all of that, it ceases to just be something on the shelf.

And that was an experience where I had someone saying “You’re good at this, you’re talented. This isn’t just average, and you need to keep working harder.” So along the way I felt like I kept having those kinds of mentors who would go, “You’re onto something, keep working harder.”

Because I do think there is a moment where if you are not a straight white man, if you’re not incredibly wealthy or privileged, not always but I do think often, we are kind of looking for permission, looking for a sign. You know we have our instincts but you’re not sure because often you don’t have a blueprint. I didn’t know of contemporary black queer writers until almost my senior year of high school. Actually my debate coach introduced me to E. Lynn Harris’s work. And as it turned out his work was on the bookshelf that I grew up with, right next to James Baldwin’s work. I don’t even think at the time initially when I was reading James Baldwin’s work—my mom had a copy of Another Country. So I was like whoa! This is amazing, seeing interracial relationships, bisexuality, jazz music, everything in New York. And I was like wow!

I still didn’t realize that Baldwin himself could be queer because in class that’s not how we would talk about that. So it still took me a while to get to that point, and even longer before it was like contemporary writers. You know, Jericho Brown, Rickie Laurentis, people now I’m able to email. So really, I think for the first 18-21 years of

my life, as is true for any young writer, you know, teachers are a series of bridges. It’s like Audre Lorde in Generations warning you need not drink the water; we pay for these bridges with our blood. I think that’s what it is, you have people who are further along, who have been fighting, and been breaking through, who have made it through some doorways and are gracious enough to hold the door open for you. And that’s what kept me.

DAJ: In your New York Times’s essay “A Poet’s Boyhood at the Burning Crosswords” you write about becoming obsessed with one word at a time and getting lost in that process. Is it the idea of poetry being therapeutic that drew you to it? Or how rigorous every single word must be. Why poetry? Because it seems like you could write anything.

SJ: I’m not sure. And I do like writing all kinds of work.

I’m working on a memoir now. I don’t know. I think I love language, I’ve always loved etymology; I love the history of words. I love the origin of names. I always want to know, what’s your name? What does it mean? And so I think that attention and the idea that these words that we use so casually have all this history packed into them, like the word “boy.” I was ultimately able to write an entire book because I felt that there was so much packed into it. It’s a word we take for granted and just throw it around but it’s also a powder keg of identity, of expectations, of assumptions, of slurs, of desires, it’s all there and it’s such a simple word. And because [with] poetry you are able to zero in on language. Because my poems have always been really tight, you know, and almost like corsets, I think that allowed me to obses over language.

Before I was writing poems—I can imagine, my father was a musician, the way musicians and singers get melo-

MosaicMagazine.org

25

26

dies and rhythms and da da da da da—my father was always the kind of guy that would walk around singing random lyrics that would make no sense to himself. And it was just a part of him. He’d offer no explanation, it was just a part of his life, in the way that I don’t know, whether we put our hands in our pockets when we’re walking down the street. It’s just a part of our anatomy and that’s always been my relationship. And I think as I got older and started doing performance and theatre and speech and debate and beginning to see the way poetry can take the unnamable, the ineffable, and turn it into a sonic experience. I just think that’s so beautiful.

And so I felt creating that sense of propulsion that is sonic and also narrative. The poems open with a bang and end with a bang, often pointing to peril or a startling moment that I think draws to, coming from a theatre background, it's like a scene ending with a dramatic blackout.

DAJ: It’s really important to hear you read, and even on the page, your work demands that kind of “out loud” dealing.

SJ: I hope so. I think about Frank Bidart, in particular, in the way that he arranges his poetry on the page where it’s almost like sheet music for orchestral music. It’s very beautiful. DA Powell, I was just re-reading his books from Graywolf, and I loved that, because it was something I wanted to make sure I do with my work. That if you’re able to see me read, if I’m able to read to you, you get something special that can only happen when we’re in the room together. But also if I’m not there, which is far more frequent, you should have some sense of the rhythm. To me it does feel like something is a bit amiss.

I mean it’s ok, everyone brings their own interpretation to how they read poems, but I do want to guide the reader in a certain sense. And I do feel like with Prelude to Bruise, because it has this narrative trajectory, and it’s this journey. For me I’m like how am I going to move this reader through this really kind of brutalizing terrain? It’s not a pleasant journey for the voices or for the reader.

DAJ: It felt visceral.

SJ: Very visceral. And part of that is just who I am, I’m an expressive person, I think in terms of color.

MosaicMagazine.org

DAJ: I was struck by the use of some seriously dramatic elements and I felt in particular some super traumatic stuff was handled in a really vivid way. I would think, ‘This feels like an argument.’ This feels like a tumultuous tornado in a household. I guess this is deliberate?

SJ: Yeah, for me it has to be.

DAJ: Your work is very colorful.

SJ: Yeah. And the writers—I think of Patricia Smith’s work who, you know she’s someone I started reading in high school. I remember reading Close to Death in the public library in Lewisville. And she’s writing poems that are disturbingly prescient now, poems about young men being killed too soon, and this sense that finally after years in class thinking that poetry was only Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare, ee cummings, Walt Whitman, though I love all of their work you know, and respect it. Finally feeling that singular experience that we all have. It’s different for every reader and every person because it’s about their life, but that the poem grabbed you, you felt the grab to your shoulders. That was and is such an important part of how I experienced literature as a reader.

DAJ: Did that happen to you first with Patricia Smith’s

poetry?

SJ: She was definitely one of those writers. I remember reading a Margaret Atwood poem in school, her poem “Siren Song,” and I was like —oh my gosh this is a brilliant persona poem. And the poem, the character in the poem lies, at the end of the poem she lies, so you realize at the end that she’s been seducing you and has tricked you, too. Even though she’s been telling you about tricking other people. I remember just being like. “You can lie? You can manipulate? Oh that’s so exciting!”

You can be difficult. I love that and I love those kinds of characters. That was a whew moment. Audre Lorde’s work. I mean, seeing for the first time queerness in a black woman. And a black woman who was both a mother and a lover, a warrior. That’s very important in terms of the themes of the work. And Prelude to Bruise is also about the brutality of American culture. And the way, often in particular, men negotiate manhood and expressions of manhood.

DAJ: I kept thinking about notions of suffocation. There was something coming through about how suffocating normative conventions of black masculinity can be, especially in the father character, more so even than Boy. SJ: Yes. Because it’s not a novel, and you only get shades of their voices and figures but not quite characters. But yeah, I’ve always thought off the page father was very interesting, because what would be happening in his life.

DAJ: Yeah. I know he isn’t fully a character so much but the father definitely struck me.

SJ: I’ve thought about it a lot. In my mind, the narrative that is kind of there is that the boy and the father

are alone and live in a cabin at the end of town. And Mother, the mother figure, either ran away or has died.

And so for me this creates a dynamic—a father and a son—the father is forced to be a single parent. The stress is apparent, right. And if you add grief, which for many of us activates all of our other emotions, everything else comes up. If Boy is missing his mother and trying on his mother’s gowns and becoming his own person as all children do, how would the Father react? It would trigger both his grief and his fear for his son—is my son gonna be safe in this world? Which I think in terms of heterosexuality often means, “I’ve gotta bully him into being a man now to make him strong.” And that to me, because I already knew what the project of the book was about, Boy and all the facets, I needed to create a kind of triangle that would propel us forward. It couldn’t have just been Boy on his own. It had to be tension. And there is a great deal of tension in masculinity.

DAJ: Do you mean black masculinity in particular? Were you trying to touch on that?

SJ: All of it. You know, yes, on one hand, the thing about black masculinity is that there are both these dominating ideas of being a man in a more general sense that aren’t necessarily about race. “Be a man.”

DAJ: And there’s this hyper-realistic layer for black men.

SJ: Right, it’s kind of like threefold. So you have “be a man” just in general. And then you have be a black man because you are in a dangerous world, you are already in peril, everything born black also burns. You gotta be twice as good to get twice as far. So that version of masculinity, black masculinity, which is –I am preparing you for a brutal world. Strangely, it’s a violence that is also

MosaicMagazine.org

27

DAJ: I think that happens with black women, too.

SJ: Everyone. Often, on the other hand, women become the authoritarian, often the grandmother, right? And then the other part of that, the third part of black masculinity is where queerness and vulnerability come in. And where that is seen as a disappointment, as a betrayal.

To me, where W.E.B. DuBois talks about double consciousness, that’s always been something I have felt really resonate in my life and within my work. Whether it’s a double consciousness between being a black man and an American or a black man and a gay man or witnessing racism in the LGBT community. Or homophobia everywhere. All of these things are mixed up, we’re no one thing. So to me, a thing that creates this grenade that is all too often and too tragically is too much for people.

And so in these poems Boy leaves. Which is in some ways is an act of violence, too, to literally rip yourself from the context of your family, from your homeland, from your history. To go, “I’m getting out of here.”

DAJ: I wanted to talk a little about where you see yourself in negotiation or conversation with other so-called canonical black poets. I was preparing for this conversation on Langston Hughes’ birthday.

SJ: When was that, February 1?

DAJ: Yes. And I was wondering what would American poetry be without Hughes? What would black theatre be without him? So do you think about that at all? Do you think of yourself as some bearer of a tradition? How does it feel? I see you that way and I think others do.

28

MosaicMagazine.org

SJ: Well I think saying bearer implies a singularity that no one writer can or should, but it is a heritage that I am a part of. As much as I am a part of my blood family. I am part of an extensive legacy of people and the histories they contain and share.

DAJ: Many writers feel like everything they write is in conversation with whoever came before, for example with Ellison and Baldwin.

SJ: Absolutely, yeah. I think Bruce Nugent, the only out poet during the Harlem Renaissance, is really interesting.

And the queerness of the Harlem Renaissance itself, and the subversion of Langston’s work and the deftness of it.

Langston’s embrace of class as a narrative when really even at the time that was regarded as we can’t do this.

You can’t talk about lower class black people. Tennessee Williams, in terms of the canon of his work, and you get to see the trajectory over generations. That is something that is interesting: what is identity over the course of time? I’m obsessed with that. Toni Morrison, absolutely.

In the sense of creating a pantheon of characters and of people who are mythic. Beautifully mythic. Pilate, Sula, and Hannah. I mean these are epic characters. And that they are all so complicated and I think every African -American reader has a moment where they are like we deserve complex, rich stories, too. That are not so cut and dry. Where it’s not so easy to delineate heroes from villains. Good from bad. We need humans. That’s the work I respond to.

But also it’s in the tradition of writers like Rita Dove, pooling Greek mythology and putting it on a slave plantation. Seeing the way writers have used form and persona. Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination. Huge. Taking

Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography

an act of love. People think this is how I love my son.

Toughening you up.

MosaicMagazine.org

29

an idea, taking a current events subject, taking the news and turning it in on itself. Creating a voice. Hugely important.

And so you read as much as possible.

When I was in college and graduate school I would lock myself in the library basically and then just sit in there for hours at a time just with books everywhere. I would be like, “Today’s the Lucille Clifton day” and I would read every Lucille Clifton book that was on the shelf. And her poem about Jasper, Texas is fire and is singular to her voice and focus. And so obviously my poem “Jasper” is in conversation, humbly, respectfully, with hers. So yeah, ultimately books don’t just happen, writers don’t just happen. Poems don’t come out of the ether rather everything, all of the art, not just the books, you’re engaging with, comes through the filter of your life.

DAJ: In another interview we spoke about this idea of writing yourself / oneself into existence and that’s another recurring theme in African-American literature and art in general.

SJ: Absolutely. And this is my offering. My offering is creating a version of boyhood. A kind of black boy. Not all the black boys. The kind of black boy who’s isolated.

Notice Boy is always alone. He doesn’t have friends. He isn’t that kind of person.

30

MosaicMagazine.org

DAJ: Why doesn’t he have friends?

SJ: I don’t know!? That’s a good question. He’s very singular. And this is in retrospect but I notice that even in the poems where there’s a crowd, like the poem in Nashville, it’s still clear that he’s very lonely. Even making love with someone, there’s still a sense of deep isolation. But that was one facet of humanity that I was like, “I could do this.” And I myself obviously am someone who has traveled, who has gone on a journey, so that is something I deeply identify with. But there are still so many characters I cannot wait to encounter. Either I’m lucky enough to write them or read them in work by other people.

I was thinking today, in terms of television, one character you still haven’t seen is the awkward black kid (laughs).

The awkward black boy. You have the awkward black futuristic kind of black girl, Issa Rae and Janelle Monae.

DAJ: They’re still pretty niche though, right?

SJ: Very, totally. There’s a bit of that with the gay character in the movie Dear White People. I think he’s [Tyler James Williams] a very good actor. There’s something about him that communicates this vulnerability. And I guess that’s one thing I’m interested in—it happens is my book where a character is actually quite a bit vulnerable, but for whatever reason, because he’s not broadcasting it using the typical signifiers of vulnerability, nobody’s noticing it. So Boy’s walking around with his heart on his sleeve for whatever reason. And I think one of those reasons is racism—ok he’s a black guy.

DAJ: We tend to wear these masks. continued on page 46

Last Portrait As Boy

It’s not barking, but the sound of teeth just shy of sinew, taut insides of my thighs.

I’m in the woods again.

Branches snip my clothes into feathers, each step farther in my own silhouette. Or is this the locked room of my body?

A grown man called boy gone inside himself, the circles of wolves blinking gold just beyond the trees.

I am not a boy. I am not your boy. I am not.

Saeed Jones

MosaicMagazine.org

31

essay

My Life Morowa Yejide iously, what else can we do to protect our children and make things better for them?

How hard can we push the envelope to give them the greatest chance possible?

I’m an explorer of the wonders of human behavior. If the world was comprised of five doors that read “Who, What, Where, When, and Why,” I would walk through the door that reads “Why.” My fictional family in Time of the Locust certainly differs from my own, and that is part of the thrill for me in exploring the possibilities of the imagination and what other “lives” my imagination bears. And yet I feel that this fictional family at its core is still striving to do what many families work at every day, including my own; steering that little boat in a big ocean, trying mightily to navigate the rough seas and uncharted territory and high winds of the world. Of course I love my husband and three boys tremendously, and together we continue to weather any number of storms like growing pains, career challenges, and balancing it all. Every day we look around at what’s happening in society and ask ourselves how we will navigate and thrive. As parents of three young black males in today’s world, we discuss and wonder, sometimes anx-

32

MosaicMagazine.org

I believe that this parental desire to make things better in the face of pervasive challenge is universal and the driving force in many families. It’s one of the elements that drove me in writing Time of the Locust— trying to hammer at that dynamic through the characters. In the book, Sephiri represents that pure, eternal light that children come here with and that we as parents try desperately to keep from being extinguished. Brenda represents the undying power of a mother’s love and as a mother I can identify with that power. Many of the men in Time of the Locust represent that timeless, unbreakable spirit that will rise again and again no matter how hard forces try to break it— a spirit I’ve seen in men like my father and my husband and the spirit I hope to nurture in my sons. And although I’ve created these characters, I can stand back and admire their strength in the face of even more challenging situations than I’ve had to endure. They represent a composite of many people, known and unknown, who have lived through and risen above mountains higher than mine.

The uncharted or unknown has always fascinated me.

That might be why I’ve always been drawn to things like astronomy and deep sea exploration and neurology. And after I had my own children I came to understand that there are larger mysteries beneath what I thought I understood as an adult. I think that children, by the universe’s design, are amazing beings that come to us with

gifts and predispositions— some that seem to come from us and some that seem to come from somewhere else.

It is that “somewhere else” that drew me to exploring autism. I believe that autism is one of the great mysteries of the mind, a kind of undiscovered country that we have yet to understand. And aside from reading the multitude of materials about autism, I felt I learned the most about this mysterious condition simply by observing the hundreds of home videos that parents of autistic children themselves put on the internet and reading what they shared about what their day was like, what their children were like, what autism “looks and feels” like at any given time.

I was surprised to find that I could relate to some challenges like trying to run errands with uncooperative kids in tow, mealtime triumphs or battles, and tantrums. I was in awe to find things outside of my experience like my child not looking at me or smiling, interactions with seemingly invisible things, or fixations on what seems inconsequential. But the enigmatic look in the eyes of these children, as if they are gazing into something apart from the rest of us, was something I couldn’t turn away from. The magic hidden in the worlds of these children is also evident in the beautiful art they are capable of rendering before our eyes.

Most of all, I was struck by a kind of inexplicable dialogue that seemed to exist between parents and autistic children— and I came to believe that this mysterious interaction was the same thing it is for everyone else: love.

And as every parent likely knows, there is no playbook for parenthood. Sometimes you build on lessons passed down to you. Sometimes you learn as you go. You teach your child what you can and show what you know and try to connect with what you believe is inside. But ulti-

mately you are only watching that child unfold. Still, I had the easy part in exploring autism as a writer. I only had to imagine what it might be like through the characters in Time of the Locust while others live it every day.

The Woman Writer’s Life Since I have never had the luxury of the “writer’s life,” that wonderful routine where I get to sit at a desk in a mahogany-shelved room with a roaring fire, I’ve gotten very good at compartmentalizing whatever it is I have time to do. Sometimes I’ll pick a “sanity break” day and just go to the gym or garden or take a three-hour bath. My husband is very supportive of me in this regard and my kids are used to it, having grown up with this blocked-out “mom time” their entire lives. On other days “me time” starts near midnight when I can read or write, catch up with people on social media, or just watch a documentary—all of which work well with bouts of insomnia.

Mother I lost my mother to breast cancer as a young woman and I learned very early that time is a gift from the universe that is not to be wasted. My mother was a big believer in relentless pushing for your goals and she was the perfect example of that principle. She could tell me— even from a hospital bed— that living my dream and moving forward without regret is the greatest gift of life. So I guess what inspires and drives me is time, understanding that it is both infinite in the scheme of all things and finite in the course of one’s physical life, and accepting that how much time I have can never be known but what I do with it is all important. “Life is a series of choices,” my mother would say. “Make the right choices for you and the world is at your feet.” ★

MosaicMagazine.org

33

excerpt

Time of the Locust

by Morowa Yejide Atria Books

Bean Hole Man Jimmy Eckert walked swiftly through the massive front gate of the Black Plains Correctional Institute to his car in the cold night air. Chafing wind cut into the folds of his jacket, chilling him. Wispy blond hairs whipped about his balding head as the cold rouged his pale nose and cheeks. The walk ended a double shift he’d started the day before, when the sun was already recoiling behind the Rocky Mountains, when an ashen shadow spread over the plains behind him like an evening tide, swallowing light as it washed over the Supermax facility.

Now, in the dark, he hurried to his car. The parking-lot lights were out, and there was a quarter-moon visible in the starry sky. He had memorized the way and knew the paces, the spaces, the distance by heart. As on so many black nights, the stars looked down at him through the veil of eternity in that cold, familiar way. And like other such nights, when he looked up at the distant constellation of stars, detached observers of all he had endured, he thought of the fire. The blaze that had burned the barn, his family’s livelihood, his inheritance, to the ground.

The sound of horses screaming shook him awake in that long-ago time. He ran out into the black night, a wedding quilt of dark velvet over the land. Clouds snuffed out what lay beyond the sky. In the full dark, in the split-

34

MosaicMagazine.org

second slide of reality and unreality, he could see only the nebula of fire in the distance. The barn burned brilliant, like a dying star. In those moments, he could not explain what froze him there, mute and shirtless. The clouds cleared then, like a great curtain moving across a stage, all the better for the stars to see the spectacle below. He had looked up at them in the seconds his mind was able to pluck from the flypaper of awareness and beheld a cold, unfeeling audience.

The seconds smeared into time and dripped like wax.

He arrived at the inferno first and stood before it as he would before an altar of death, awestruck by its grandeur and terror. Waves of crimson and gold climbed to the sky in spectacular peaks and crashed down onto the falling beams, the screaming horses, the billowing white bushes of burning hay. He stood hypnotized in the heat and glow and wax melt of dream and purpose. From the edges of the barn, he could just make out the figure of one of the great black beasts. The money and years his father spent breeding perfection made no difference in the blaze. Its coat melted into black oil and ran freely in the flood of liquid fire. What might have been left of the other horses dissolved into the sound of his father shouting, “You left the lantern in the barn!” The one he had been using earlier that evening because he liked to polish rifles in the deep calm of firelight? He did not want to believe what his father was saying. No, of course he hadn’t left the lantern there. It had been someone else, that other part of himself that would not have thought such a slipshod act could lead to such devastation.

As the fire swept aside their lives, the stars looked down at them all, unchanged, unmoved by the singular event that was to shift the course of their destiny. The fire

burned everything to the ground, and those same stars watched as his family tried in vain to right what could not be altered. Guilt and bitterness coated Jimmy Eckert like the mess from a slop jar. Years later, when he learned about the inevitability of all things within Black Plains, he came to understand that it was fate that held him transfixed before the fire. It held him now in the vise of daily shifts.

The wind swooped down from the Rockies, and Jimmy Eckert shivered, pulling his coat tighter over his body. All those years ago, when he had tried on his black polyester uniform for the first time in the mirror, he did not know that his shift would be the start of his own prison sentence.

He didn’t realize that he was beginning a life on the inside that would change him into someone who could not function outside the walls of Black Plains. He would not have thought that the facility would author his destiny when he first reveled in his uniform and weapon, the license given to him to inflict his will.

He could no longer see beyond the Rocky Mountains.

He no longer felt himself to be a free man. He could not hear man’s flurry of murder and procreation, debauchery and virtue, living and dying. He stopped watching television, since he could no longer relate to simplistic scenarios solved in hourly frames. He had long ago stopped wearing a watch and threw all his clocks away.

Women, enigmatic creatures that they were, held little interest for him, and he had no patience to decode the endless combinations of their words and feelings. He

could take himself in his hand or take an unfortunate to bed. The pithy feeling was the same, an unremarkable sensation that gathered and dispersed. He had become one with Black Plains. He breathed its stale air and tasted its tinlike water even when he was alone in his dead parents’ house. His pillow and bed were framed in concrete. At night, when he closed his eyes, he saw only steel doors and stone floors. He dreamed of scalps rippling with ringworm and rotting flesh. He awoke to the sound of a loud buzzer in his head.

There was no escape far enough away from the facility. There were no books, no fiction or autobiography, that could capture what he came to inhabit, for the world outside had nothing to do with the world in which he lived.

It was as if Black Plains, the Secured Housing Unit, Warden Stotsky, the horses, the liquid fire, and the stars— everything—had always been. It had always been as it was in the swirl of time. He began to ask himself difficult questions with difficult answers. The kind of time Jimmy Eckert had come to know was born of something else.

He didn’t know if it was evil or justice. It did not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. He was certain of one thing: he was bottled in it, along with the prisoners he guarded.

Jimmy Eckert fumbled with the frozen lock on his car and got in. In the world of the facility, the inmates held infinite combinations, infinite possibilities of wretchedness. He observed them for the specimens they were,

MosaicMagazine.org

35

for the natural enemies they were. In the showers, each held his own genitalia, the last of what he was, the last of what the prison would take. Each of them with his reasons for crimes committed. And when Jimmy Eckert looked at them, he saw only that they were once males, not men. And inside Black Plains, they were no longer males, they were rodents. There were exceptions, of course. Anomalies. But not enough to change the numbers. Not enough to change the form of the prison state, this hidden nation. None of any of it mattered in Black Plains, a realm unto itself, a world away from the world.

the seal of each steel door interrupted only by the slot through which he would shove a tray. He would pick up the stack of food rations to be distributed to the fated men and begin walking the row slowly, pushing rations through each slot. He could hear the rodents in the wee hours of his shift, the conversations they had with themselves or other personalities inside of them, how their voices changed to mimic other people. Sometimes he wondered if what they talked about had come from reality, or if it grew from what Black Plains ladled into their minds.

Sometimes, when he stepped into the vomit-green walls of the receiving room for ID check-in, he pushed his baton into its holster and was struck by the fact that he was not permitted to carry a gun, nor had he ever fired one. But in such a place as Black Plains, his real weapon was more powerful than batons or bullets. His weapon was control and the deathlike stillness that came with it.

The only currency to be had by any of the rodents was worthlessness. He had earned a wealth of it himself; he would dole it out to those who earned the right to receive it. He reminded himself of these facts daily, as he nodded to the guard at the elevator, as he prepared for his descent. Each day, the elevator awaited Jimmy Eckert to escort him to the underworld, where the souls in the Secured Housing wing writhed in cages seared with fury. Where fluorescent light embedded in the concrete beamed like an Alaskan midnight sun, and he, the falcon, roamed a fiery, encased sky.

From behind the door marked 02763, there was usually silence. Staring at that door always filled Jimmy Eckert with excitement. He would stare at the numbers stamped onto the steel, listening. He had grown tired of knowing the ending of each prisoner at the beginning. But when he stood by Horus Thompson’s door, he imagined that something was growing inside of the cell, something coveted that he had a hand in creating, a thing he came to own. And it was in certain moments, like when he opened the bean hole and pushed the tray through, that Jimmy Eckert felt as if he was feeding something besides a prisoner.

He spent every day ambling down the wing, the line of solitary-confinement cells standing eternally at attention,

36

MosaicMagazine.org

And sometimes it seemed, even in the wretchedness of small acts of rebellion, that Horus Thompson was trying to move to a place where he could not reach him, where Black Plains could not reach him. It reminded Jimmy Eckert of the Mummy. The old man was a sort of mascot of Black Plains, with his weeks of eating three beans a day and cupping his own urine and swallowing it. The Mummy refused food numerous times before escaping

into the opaque realms beyond insanity, to which there was not even a window for spectators. He assumed the old man’s mind was too feeble even for nightmares or babbling, and he lived in his own sarcophagus. He worried that 02763 might follow.

He turned the ignition over and listened to the engine struggle with the cold. These were concerns that he could only admit in the backwaters of his mind. Because he needed Horus Thompson there to punish, to talk to, to listen to, to act as an accelerant of his misery—the only feeling he had left. They talked, if you could call it that: him peering through the bean hole to whisper and 02763 writhing in silence, in delusion, in rage. Jimmy Eckert hated and needed all of this. He had given up understanding why.

He put the car into drive. And as it moved forward, he was overcome with the creeping feeling that his relationship with the prison was the relationship he would have had with a whore. Even in brief moments of pleasure, he wanted to strangle the life from her. The years had become one repetitive motion, one rising and falling of the moon. What was left at the start and finish of each day was the call, the obligation, to step through the ruthless jowls of Black Plains yet again. He sat in his car and listened. The wind whipped in short bursts. Coyotes bayed from distant lairs. It was cold and getting colder. Dark and getting darker. He ground his teeth and pulled out of the parking lot. The Rocky Mountains pressed against the starry sky. Through the frosted glass of his car, he could not see the white flickers of the stars piercing the black, but he felt their mockery as he drove away. ★

MosaicMagazine.org

37

essay

The

rican

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

renaissance

38

MosaicMagazine.org

In the past two years, African literature has undergone a renaissance of attention. Articles in the New York Times and The Guardian have noted the growing number of African literary stars; new awards like the Etisalat Prize and the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship have cropped up to fete and foster talent, and blogs like James Murua’s Literature Blog, Brittle Paper, The Ehanom Review, Mary Okeke Reviews and AfriDiaspora.com are among several dedicated to keeping their audiences abreast of writers and writerly news from the Continent.

Contemporary African authors are earning global recognition for their work. Zimbabwean NoViolet Buluwayo’s debut We Need New Names has racked up a slew of awards including most recently the 2014 Hurston-Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Nigerian-Ghanaian Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go, was named to Granta Magazine’s list of the Top 20 literary stars alongside Nigerian

MosaicMagazine.org

39

A

wunderkind Helen Oyeyemi whose lauded 2006 debut Icarus Girl arguably foreshadowed this renewed interest in new African voices. Nigerian Teju Cole, author of Open City and Everyday is for the Thief, regularly crops up on Best lists, and Nigerian Chinelo Okparanta is fast becoming a force on the literary scene with finalist and shortlist nods for some of the industry’s most prestigious awards.

And then there is Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The author of three novels — Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah – and the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck has earned a bevy of accolades including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize. In September 2013, the film version of Half of a Yellow Sun debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival starring Thandie Newton, Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Anika Noni Rose. Two months later, a TEDxEuston talk she gave on feminism went beyond viral when Beyoncé sampled it for the “***Flawless” track on her surprise visual album Beyoncé. Adichie has since released an e-book of the speech. Most recently, Oscar winner Lupita Nyongo bought the rights to make an Americanah movie; Brad Pitt will produce.

But with all this attention has come questions about who has the right to call themselves an African writer. At two panels at the recent Port Harcourt Book Festival, Utahborn Nigerian Tope Folarin, winner of the 14th Caine Prize for African Literature for his short story “Miracle“, was queried about the authenticity of his African identity, even as some in the audience expressed frustration that African writers only get recognition when publishers,

40

MosaicMagazine.org

critics, and prizes based in the West deem them worthy.

Nigerian author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani articulates this frustration in a piece titled “African Books for Western Eyes” published, ironically, in the New York Times‘ Sunday Review. Nwaubani points out a truth most writers aspiring to be published face — a truth often felt most acutely by writers who are not white, male, and privileged: “Publishers in New York and London decide which of us to offer contracts, which of our stories to present to the world. American and British judges decide which of us to award accolades, and subsequent sales and fame.”

To give you a real world example of how this cultural gatekeeping plays out, in 2007, an agent I pitched my debut novel Powder Necklace to, told me it sounded “a bit too similar in theme to a YA novel that [African author’s name redacted] (the author of that novel) might be working on herself in the future. I wouldn’t want to step on my own toes in that way, so I should step aside, but thank you very much for giving me a look.”

Amidst this interrogation of African identity, there is also hot debate about why fluency in English and other Western Languages remain barriers to entry to scribes from the Continent. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been outspoken about how colonizers used language as “the means of the spiritual subjugation” of Africans. In a recent review of the Africa39 anthology, which features new writing from African writers aged 40 and younger, wa Thiong’o’s son Mukoma wa Ngugi devoted much of his reading to this issue.

He writes: We do not write in our own languages; we write in the language of the departed yet present colonizer. …This is how bad things are for writing in African languages: since its publication in 1958, Things Fall Apart has been translated into over 50 languages, but not Igbo, Achebe’s mother tongue. A close parallel would be if Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had never been translated into Polish — but even then not quite, since Conrad identified and was received as an English writer while Achebe identified and was received as an African writer.

And here is the irony: Things Fall Apart has been translated into Polish. Who will give African literature in African languages a second life, if not some of the 39 writers from this anthology? wa Ngugi, an Assistant Professor in Cornell University’s English Department, has answered his own call. This month, he announced the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature at Nigerian author Lola Shoneyin‘s Ake Art & Books Festival. “The prize recognizes excellent writing in African languages and encourages translation from, between and into African languages,” the press release says.

The beefs expressed are legitimate — but they are also disingenuous. On the surface, we are talking about the very real problem of Western gatekeepers deciding which Africans to publish and promote, and how to authentically express African life in letters — but beneath the dialogue is an older and unresolved debate about

control and privilege.

In other words, we are arguing about the fact that the Western world still controls the African narrative, even when it is written by Africans; and we are arguing about the fact that most Africans who are published usually have some tie to the West (born there, live there, work there) that gives them access to some of the privileges afforded to Westerners.

But just as we decry a single story about Africa e.g. impoverished, war torn, ravaged by disease, corrupt, we have to accept that time and circumstance have expanded the definition of an African too, and by extension, the African story. With 12 million souls kidnapped from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, and millions more in the diaspora due to conflict and economic free fall in their home countries, several generations of Africans have been born outside the Continent or lived abroad for so many years their accents and tastes may be unrecognizable to those that stayed.

The largest population of African people outside of Africa live in Brazil because of slavery. When I visited in 2012 as a BID Fellow, I was pleasantly shocked to find street vendors dressed in African attire selling acaraje (twin

MosaicMagazine.org

41

to Ghana’s kose) and cornmeal wrapped in corn husks that looked like Ghanaian staple kenkey. Practitioners of Candomble in Brazil have maintained the traditional African religion so faithfully, many Nigerians go and study it there. Who am I, or anyone else, to tell them their stories are not authentically African? Caribbean culture also retains many traditional African religions and foods.

Are they no longer African because they practice and eat outside of Africa?

African Americans are reminded daily they are not American as race-based violence, economic oppression, and other forms of institutionalized prejudice prevent them, en masse, from achieving equality in the US. Perhaps for this reason, companies like AncestryDNA and other such DNA services have found a target market in American blacks seeking to identify their African origins.

But even when they find out they are X% Senegalese or Y% Sierra Leonean, they are often held at arms’ length as foreigners in the home countries they reclaim.

African-American poet Malaika Beckford performed a piece at the 2008 UpSouth Festival founded by veteran editor and Homeslice Magazine founder Malaika Adero called “Ghetto Names” that ascribes the monikers many African-Americans give their children to a longing for identity. She says: “Searching for the Bantu word for ‘beauty’, the Akan word for ‘strength’, the Yoruba word for ‘power'; looking for ‘Oya’ found ‘Latoya’ and ‘Shatoya’.

In search of ‘Yemaya’, found ‘Shadaya’. Separation from the Mawu-Lisa called for ‘Tanesha’, ‘Keisha’, and ‘Jameisha’. These are ghetto names. Misplaced,

42

MosaicMagazine.org

Retraced. African slogans. Reworked goddesses that rollback the syllables of time…” This poem partially inspired my allegorical selection in the Africa39 anthology “Mama’s Future”.

I am only one generation removed. Both my parents were born in Ghana, and were among the three million that left the country between 1966 and 1996 due to a failing economy, unstable government (four military dictators in two decades), and constricted opportunity. Despite their physical distance from Ghana, they raised us with strict Ghanaian mores and even sent us to school in Ghana. (My experience at Mfantsiman Girls’ Secondary School is the basis of Powder Necklace.) Yet, whenever I go to Ghana (at least once a year, to the purists that demand to know the last time I was there every time I tell them (in Twi or Ewe) that I am Ghanaian.) I am called a “broni” (“white person” or “foreigner”) and harangued about what “we” (real Ghanaians) don’t do/wear/etc.

Ironically, because I visit Ghana so much, I recently went to the Ghanaian consulate to apply for a passport. When I presented my American passport, my parents’ Ghanaian ones, and a completed application form, they told me, “You are already a Ghanaian by heritage. You don’t need to fill this out.” When I asked what I did need to do to get a Ghanaian passport, they said they would investigate and call me back.

The way I see it, Ghana — and Africa — is my birthright, and I will not give it up no matter how many born in Ghana tell me it isn’t. If the country were in a better situation, my parents would not have had to leave, and I would not have had to endure “African booty scratch-

er” slurs or other identity issues related to my Africanness growing up in the States. I have a vested interest in Ghana (my country) and my continent emerging from the morass of corruption, vulnerability to extremism, and exploitation of resources, and I would like to conscript Africans born in the diaspora too.

What would Africa be if we did not let external forces continue to subdivide us? If African-Americans, Afro-Latinos, Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asians, etc. looked to Africa as a home they felt responsible for improving?

The colonizers were so effective in chopping Africa up, even making sure Francophone colonies neighbored Anglophone so citizens of countries like Ghana and Togo, for example, could not easily communicate with one another in their “official” languages and unite against a common enemy, but in 2014 we can begin to reverse the damage by coming together. Africans can’t afford to focus on where other Africans were born or live, or what languages they choose to speak. Slavery, colonialism, and our own inept governments have displaced too many. If we say those who were born abroad or only speak English, French, or Spanish have no stake, we only do ourselves a disservice. ★

Advertise Feature your ad in the next print edition of Mosaic.

Email info@mosaicmagazine.org to reserve your placement.

Full-page Ad Rates Color: $200 Black & White: $150 Ad-design service available: $50

Ad Deadline: January 1, May 1, and September 1 Print Specs Average Print Run: 1,500 Paid Subscriptions: 300 (13% are libraries) Total Circulation: 950 Frequency: Tri-annual 8 1/2 X 11” Retail Distribution: PDG Group

MosaicMagazine.org

43

around town Freelance photographer Marcia E. Wilson gallivants around NYC looking for literary events to spotlight on the "Around Town" page. She may be at a reading near you.

For more visit MosaicMagazine.org.

March 10, 2015 - Writer Paul Beatty (right) was joined by Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, at McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City to discuss Beatty's new book, The Sellout. The novel is a "biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality--the black Chinese restaurant." -Farrar, Straus and Giroux

44

MosaicMagazine.org

Join our Publisher’s Circle Mosaic Literary Magazine thanks the following Publisher’s Circle members for believing.

William Aguado Crystal Bobb-Semple Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center Justin Collins Lorraine Currelley Linda Duggins Grace Edwards Kim Coleman Foote Pearl Gill Rigoberto Gonzalez Rachel Eliza Griffiths Monica Hand Troy Johnson Tayari Jones Sandra Kitt Lutishia Lovely Ron McKenzie Tanya McKinnon Elizabeth Nunez Meows Osse The Page-Turner Network Lorraine Patrick J. Everett Prewitt Charles Rice-Gonzalez Brooke M. Stephens Karen McLane Torian Marcia E. Wilson Anonymous

We rely on the generosity of our supporters, subscribers, and readers. Join our cause. Your support will help maintain the quality editorial and education programs you’ve come to expect.

Donate $100, become a Publisher’s Circle member and strengthen our ability to present the literary arts.

Yes, you can make a difference.

Visit www.MosaicMagazine.org Ron Kavanaugh Mosaic Literary Magazine MosaicMagazine.org L ITERARY

MAGAZINE

45

SJ: Yes, for the sake of protection, for survival.

DAJ: You’re working on a memoir right now?

SJ: I am. Essentially the essay I wrote for the New York Times would be the early part of the narrative. And then it basically covers about ten years. Because that was 1998, the focus of that essay, and that was the year James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard were killed. About ten years later, my last semester of college, I was gay bashed. And so I wrote another essay a few years ago about that. And suddenly I started realizing all of these threads are connected. And for me, that is how every book or project starts. I’m not trying to write a book.

Rather you write one poem, or one essay, or a story, and time goes by and you do other things as you just keep writing, keep going. And then you write something else, and you have a moment that goes wait a minute, huh!

And for me it gets interesting when there are questions that I can only maybe not even answer, but write my way toward, and then that becomes the engine.

DAJ: Your description of this new work reminds me of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. And then some of your poems reminded me of her second novel Salvage the Bones, with all of the classical imagery / references that you weave in.

SJ: Yes, wonderful. I love that. Part of it is the main character of Salvage the Bones, Esch, the way she’s obsessed with Medea, so was I. DAJ: I was going to ask you that—were you into Greek / Roman mythology as a kid?

SJ: Yes, I loved Greek mythology and Euripides tragedies—Medea in particular. With Medea, I was so fasci-

46

MosaicMagazine.org

nated with a character that has an impossible decision.

Truly impossible. Where there’s no winning. I think that’s fascinating. In American culture, the push is for easy answers. This is wrong, that is bad. The push for easy, simplistic outrage that is ultimately saccharine, cursory, not really deeply thought out. Beginning, middle, and end, we’re done. You’re wrong, I’m smart. Boom. As opposed to recognizing the depth. And so yeah, Medea was one of the first characters I really encountered where I saw that dynamic.

DAJ: Where it’s an impossible situation?

SJ: Yes, it’s an impossible situation, and part of the situation is sexism, for her, right. It’s patriarchy. You ain’t gonna win. Antigone, again, and I was always drawn to the women in mythology, because they’re the ones always with impossible situations, particularly in Greek mythology. And because of the way patriarchy guides and informs Greek and Roman mythology, with the female characters, there’s always a lot more vagueness, because they weren’t the heroes, so they aren’t totally outlined.

Because it’s about Hercules, it’s about Jason, it’s about Odysseus. So I think that leaves a really great opportunity then to come in and create, and kind of draw them more fully. In the way that I feel the mother figure in Prelude to Bruise is a figure I think about often because her absence really clasps the book. She’s the river, she’s the water.

DAJ: I feel like there has been some sort of shift in the demand for contemporary black literature. People are again starting to expect more complicated stories. I worked for a time with a commercial publisher / retailer of black books and I’m not sure if it is because of the ten-

or of our times in general, but it feels like people again are grappling and searching for answers and are looking to artists to guide them.

SJ: Yeah, the stakes are very high. If you want to look just at police brutality. At #BlackLivesMatter. And for me, as an LGBT editor, I’m looking at violence against, sadly far too frequently, transgender women of color, but also violence against the broader LGBT community. And so the stakes are high. I think certainly from last fall to this winter, and can go farther. You can say this goes to Trayvon Martin, you can say this goes to Oscar Grant. You can say this goes to Rodney King.

DAJ: Right, there’s been a build.

SJ: Right and this has been building. Particularly these last six months, it’s felt like we were already at 10 and we just shot through to 11 or 12. And I do think, in terms of poetry, if one of the concerns of poetry is the ineffable.

The experience that defies casual language, where the easy judgments and the easy rhetoric no longer cut it.

Where we need a new alchemy of language to express.

I think that’s why jazz exists, that’s why blues exists, because you have these moments in American history where the known language, the known art isn’t quite there. And I do feel, and I think Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is an excellent example and it’s so powerful because it feels so in sync with our daily experience not just like this feels pertinent to what we’re talking about. But it’s like yeah when I was walking to this reading tonight, I experienced a micro-aggression. Someone touched my hair, someone did this. And I’m now stepping into this work and so it feels not just on time but it feels in the nick of time.

DAJ: Some of this is fueled by sort of the digitization of everything. Social media for one, so pervasive. Everybody’s hyper-aware because we’re hyper-connected.

SJ: That’s true. And something I’m always grappling with is the question, are more people being shot and gunned down by police now than ever before or is it that we’ve gotten to a point because of technology and also cultural breakthroughs that we know it when it happens? Or is it both? It’s probably both. But what’s absolutely clear is that it is intense. It feels like the news is 3D now, it’s not this distant 2D experience. It’s not a newspaper.

DAJ: One of the last things I wanted to ask you about is your youth and ideas of mentoring. How does that inform who you are as a writer, what you want to do? How do you want to change things—whether its language or institutions?

SJ: Well, you know the New Yorker just published an excerpt of Toni Morrison’s next novel. And she’s, what, in her 80s? So for me in terms of youth, which feels increasingly fleeting, I feel like I have a lot of work to do.

And I hopefully have a lot of books ahead of me. And a lot of reading to do, and learning and that’s exciting.

And I think it’s humbling, too. I read wonderful, gamechanging books and so many poetry collections every week that, sadly, don’t get the opportunity to get into more hands. And I won’t lie. I’ve been given an opportunity and I know this is really special. And my awareness of that, all it means to me is gratitude of being aware that this is not just me. This is a community. This is a broader family of writers, of booksellers, of editors, of readers, of interviewers, who have created the circumstances in which when I was able to do my best, which is all you can do, there was an opportunity for me to have some-

MosaicMagazine.org

47

Apologia

If I started with the words He made me— not like He created me, not like With my clothes off, you can still see his thumbprints in the clay that became my skin.

No. If I started with He made me lick the taste of bullet from the barrel of his revolver would you use your body to guard my body tonight?

The roof has been ripped off and the stars refuse to peel their stares from my bruises.

I didn’t mean He as in God; I meant the man I traded you for.

Saeed Jones

48

MosaicMagazine.org

thing to offer. Like I was saying earlier, writing a book is like saying I have something to offer to the conversation, someone else had to create the circumstances for the conversation to exist. Langston Hughes talks about a place at the dinner table. Someone else had to make a seat at the table possible. So out of gratitude for that, I have to keep working, keep reading, and keep learning.

And any opportunity I have for my peers and younger writers to do everything I can to help them as well.

I turned 30 last year, in November, and I had a moment a few years ago when I thought of mentorship as something that I was too young to do. And then I was like well, don’t you need to kind of practice? If you do want to become a mentor one day, how do you think you start? You start by doing it. My dream, ultimately, one day is to own a property that can be a year round kind of art / retreat space. But also there would be a place for say a mother, a single mother has an idea for a book, but who can afford to just stop working or to not pay rent. You have a place to stay. A young queer kid where home is not safe.

You have a place to stay. Where people who don’t get to make it into MFA programs, we can have a workshop space. Like a ground, and obviously this is part of Cave Canem or Mosaic, you know, there are many ways to create spaces. Sometimes a space can just be opening up your home for a night. But something that is actually a ground, I feel like it is so important. So that’s my dream, and so to get there, I have a lot of work to do. ★

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00

❑ Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00

❑ Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00

❑ Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463 MosaicMagazine.org

49

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00

❑ Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00

❑ Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip ❑ One-Year Subscription: $15.00

❑ Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

★ MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463 50 MosaicMagazine.org

MosaicMagazine.org

51

Take time to

be a dad today.

52

MosaicMagazine.org

Call 877-4DAD411 or visit www.fatherhood.gov