Mosaic 37

Fall/Winter 2015 $6.00

AMANDA JOHNSTON

BLACK POETS SPEAK OUT

BLACK HAIR

NAOMI JACKSON

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content Interviews Mecca Jamilah Sullivan by Nicole Dennis-Benn .......................................... 18 Amanda Johnston by Wendy S. Walters ...................................................... 22 Naomi Jackson by Arlene M. Roberts .......................................................... 34 Excerpts Blue Talk and Love by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ............................................ 16 The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson ............................................... 39 Poems Facing US/after Yusef Komunyakaa by Amanda Johnston ............................ 24 Answer the Call by Amanda Johnston ......................................................... 25 The Best Time by Mahogany L. Browne ...................................................... 26 my mouth became the moon... by Mahogany L. Browne ........................... 27 Essays Hair: Black Feminine Hair Care Divisions by Ciara Miller ............................ 28 Lesson Plan BlackLivesMatter: Black Poets Speak Out .................................................... 42 Mosaic's lesson plans, developed for secondary school educators, demonstrate how our content can serve as a connective tool to empower educators to use books, writing, and reading to engage students.

Around Town by photographer Marcia E. Wilson .............................................. 53

Cover photo: Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography MosaicMagazine.org

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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.

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contributors Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, will be published by W.W. Norton/Liveright in July 2016.

Her writing has won a 2014 Richard and Julie Logsdon Fiction Prize; and two of her stories have been nominated for the prestigious 2016 Pushcart Prize in Fiction. She's a 2015 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a 2015 Sewanee Writers' Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, a 2014 Lambda Foundation Emerging Writing Fellow and a recipient of distinguished fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, Hedgebrook Residency, and Kimbilio.

Mahogany L. Browne is a Cave Canem and Poets House alumnae and the author of several books including Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended

by Small Press Distribution & About.com, Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word and UK’s MOBO. Ellen Hagan is the author of Hemisphere (Northwestern University Press, 2015) and Crowned (Sawyer House Press, 2010). She recently joined the poetry faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan in their low-residency MFA program. She is the director of the poetry and theatre programs at the DreamYard Project and co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer's Retreat at Adelphi University. Hagan’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Underwired Magazine and in the anthologies She Walks in Beauty (edited by Caroline Kennedy) and Southern Sin. She lives with her husband and daughters in New York City.

Ciara Miller, a native of Chicago, holds both an MFA and MA in Poetry and African American/African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University. She also received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She has served as the cohost and co-coordinator of Bloomington, Indiana’s poetry slam series for three consecutive years. She is also the founder of Chicago Artists Against Gun Violence.

Arlene M. Roberts, an attorney turned policy analyst, is the author of an independent study The Faces of Detention and Deportation: A Report on the Forced Repatriation of Immigrants from the English-Speaking Caribbean, the first and only in-depth study on the topic. Her report has been highlighted in the New York Daily News, Trinidad Guardian, Trinidad Newsday and by the Migration Policy Institute; she has been interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and reviewed in law blogs.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide (Sarabande Books, 2015) Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem Books, 2014), Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press (Long Beach, CA). Forthcoming projects include a book of essays to be released by Sarabande Books in 2015. Walters was a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Bookforum, FENCE, and Harper’s Magazine.

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.

Amanda Johnston earned her MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, the founder of Torch Literary Arts, and co-founder of Black Poets Speak Out, a campaign that unites poets and allies to speak out against police violence.

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The Literary Freedom Project is a Bronxbased 501c3 tax-exempt nonproďŹ t arts organization that seeks to restore the importance of reading books as an essential tool for creating intelligent, productive, and engaged young people. Towards this goal, LFP publishes Mosaic Literary Magazine; develops literature-based lesson plans; and hosts the Bronx Book Fair and Mosaic Literary Conference.

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read with your family

Mosaic’s list of recommended reading is developed to reconnect readers to literature and strengthen cultural, historical, and ethnic iden!!es. Titles are selected 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 7 (Foreword), Denise Oliver-Velez (Foreword) 2010, 269MosaicMagazine.org pgs.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

by Nicole Dennis-Benn 8

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credit: Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s collection unfolds like a letter bestowed by an elder who has kept certain secrets at bay until the reader is old enough, mature enough to receive it, appreciate it. With language that Rick Moody deems as “Faulknerian,” Blue Talk and Love is written with the voices of the people that echoe the reality of New York City, namely Harlem, and its inhabitants. But what makes this book special is its unflinching honesty in depicting issues that we, as women of color, rarely discuss beyond the kitchen table; or for the most part, leave unsaid. I read Sullivan’s collection while attending a residency at Hedgebrook, which is a coincidence given that some of her stories were written there. The story “WolfPack,” which was published in Best New Writing 2010 anthology, resonated with me as a lesbian woman of color living in the very city where these women were assaulted. This story, from a writer whose work I had only been vaguely familiar with, was detailed as it was heart-wrenching, possessing masterful prose that some may deem “literary swagger.” Sullivan boldly explores a variety of topics and styles, which include magical realism, adolescent sexuality, slavery, homophobia, mental health, and body image. The souls of the female characters glittered and sparkled in every word, every sentence. Above all, Blue Talk and Love is a celebration in itself of the voices of women. At the center of its gaze is the lives of the women it portrays. Our heart aches for them as their stories unfold. Esteemed poet Cheryl Clarke puts it best when she writes: “[Sullivan’s] rich and imitable characters, most of them young black women [who] struggle in a world they did not make but one they must confront, tear down, and remake. Black girls matter and Sullivan shows us just how much.”

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Prior to writing this profound body of work, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s short stories have appeared in American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, and Callaloo, among many others. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts,, and residencies at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, Hedgebrook, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship.

Her critical and scholarly work on sexuality, identity, and poetics in contemporary African Diaspora culture has appeared in publications including Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin the The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life, Ebony. com, Zora Magazine, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, and The Feminist Wire, where she serves as Associate Editor for Arts & Culture. Currently, Mecca is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College.

The power of Blue Talk and Love, a book that tastefully merges Mecca’s literary and academic lives, comes not only from its dynamic female protagonists, but from its rich, magnificent depiction of Harlem—the history, the horror, the beauty. It’s the place where Mecca Jamilah Sullivan calls home no matter where in the world she lands. We began this conversation earlier this year at the Kweli Journal Reading Series at the New York Times

building where we both read. We continued into the summer, followed by email exchanges.

Nicole Dennis-Benn: While reading your book I felt I was given a personal tour into the people, places and culture of Harlem. Can we talk about that?

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: Yes, Harlem is very important to me and to my writing. I grew up there, in the section of Harlem being billed as Hamilton Heights, which is up to the north and west, just below Washington Heights.

It’s really Sugar Hill. The neighborhood means a lot to me because it’s where I learned what I know about language, and about the joys of listening. Growing up there in the late 80s and 90s was an immersion in a soundscape of languages, voices and musical styles—there were plenty of different forms of black American English, Dominican and Mexican Spanish, Jamaican patois, some Haitian Kreyol, plus hip-hop, soul, merengue, pop, R&B and blues musics, plus children and cars and sirens and block parties—all the sounds of a neighborhood that’s truly alive. Harlem trained my ear and taught me to listen. So I would say that most of the stories began during those years, in one way or another, which is why several of them are set there, and why it’s a place I know I’ll return to in future writing.

NDB: Your book is dedicated to documenting the inner lives of women characters, specifically women of color.

Take me through this process of writing about these characters, especially in an era of Black Lives Matter. How had it been for you writing these stories? Black women have been ignored for the most part, yet in your book, you dare us to say their names.

MJS: For me, writing about young black and brown women is both personal and political. It’s impossible to live as a woman of color and not notice how our stories are flattened and erased in contemporary culture. Right now, we’re living in a world and a social moment when there’s actually a public conversation happening about race, and, to some extent, about gender and sexuality, too, and I know many of us are thinking it’s about time.

And look what it’s taken to get here. To me, the Black Lives Matter movement –which of course was founded by three black queer women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi– is evidence of the tremendous brilliance, eloquence, savvy, creativity efficaciousness and power of black youth and black queer women. But of course, Black Lives Matter is also evidence of how violent the world is toward us—proof that it takes an international campaign prompted by a seemingly unending slew of highly visible state-sanctioned murders to affirm the simple point that we deserve to exist. Both of these qualities—the brilliance and the violence—are obvious and in fact blaring for young black women, but both have been obscured in American literature. That’s the nexus that my characters walk through in Blue Talk and Love. What does it mean to be a young black woman— or a young queer person, or a young person of color— creating joy in a world that denies that your right to live?

NDB: Your stories shed light on certain issues mentioned previously, written with such intimacy and compassion.

One story that stands out in my mind is “Wolfpack.” The role of language was masterfully explored in the story that documented the true story of The New Jersey Four.

You tackled the implications of hate and ignorance, painting a picture of four lives that were affected by it—

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four human beings—and the looming consequences of daring to love and live. You gave us a heart-wrenching story of the demonization of this group of young, lesbian women. Tell me more about your research process, and merging fact with fiction. In our most recent conversation you had mentioned that a couple of the women reached out to you and commended you on this story.

What was that like for you as a writer hearing that?

MJS: I had the chance to meet Patreese Johnson and Terrain Dandridge at my friend Toshi Reagon’s Word*Rock*Sword festival last year, where Patreese read some of her poetry. It was an honor to talk with Patreese and Terrain about their experience, and about writing.

I had already written the story, and so I shared it with Patreese and Terrain, and Patreese shared it with Renata Hill. I can’t say how much it meant to me to know they found value in the story. As a writer, any time you take on a voice or an experience that comes from another person’s pain—no matter how loose the connection to what you’ve written—it feels like a little like a transgression, and a risk. You want to recognize your positioning, think about who stands to gain what, and what, if anything, you’re contributing. I had to think for a long time about whether I wanted to publish that story, particularly because all four of the women the story was inspired by—Patreese, Terrain, Renata, and Venice Brown—were still incarcerated when I drafted it. I decided to go ahead with it because I felt there was an important piece of the case that no one was talking about—how the layers of systemic violence were replicated and echoed in the language used to talk about their case. They were constantly dehumanized not only by the judge’s violent sentencing, but also by the media, who referred to them as animals on several occasions, and by the man who they were

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convicted of assaulting, who called one of the women an “elephant” before threatening to rape another woman.

In the judge’s sentencing, he admonished them with the line “sticks and stones may break my bones…” as though the violent language of a rape threat does not constitute “real” violence. To me, this was simply a reinforcement of the same violence—another wound to them and to other black queer women trying to live and be out in public space. No one was talking about that, which was an unacceptable to me.

NDB: One thing I admire about your work is voice. You have that “good ear” that we hear people talk about.

You gave people voices in the true sense of the word.

The way you intersperse dialect in your narratives brings to mind Junot Diaz, Zora Neale Hurston, Patricia Powell, William Faulkner, and others who have dared to delve into the literary taboo of dialect. Did you ever wonder how those stories would be received?

MJS: You know, I couldn’t imagine not using dialect in my work. The writers you mention are all major influences for me, especially in terms of how they render their characters’ voices. I’d also add Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Dionne Brand, Stevie Wonder and the Notorious B.I.G. Because I grew up in Harlem, my understanding of language is that it’s complex and variegated and constantly shifting. That’s a huge part of why I write—because I think language is magic. Now, having spent years studying and writing about black and postcolonial literary theory, I can’t separate critiques of dialect from questions of class, colonization, elitism and representation—the notion that there is a “correct” English (or French, or Dutch, or whatever colonial language), and that language is important because it validates voices of color and provides

NDB: I was first introduced to your writing at a reading on the college campus where I taught. You read “Snow Fight”—a story narrated by a young urban teen—to a room of professors and students. You captivated the entire room with the first sentence: “This white nigga starts talking and everybody on the train shuts up real tight for a second.” And this was only the beginning!

Was this intentional?—to air this voice that we don’t usually hear within the pristine walls of our ivory towers? As you read this story aloud, I thought of James Baldwin’s essay, “If Black English isn’t a Language, then Tell Me What Is” where he states, “Language is meant to define the other—and in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.” In that room, you revealed the essence of Baldwin’s poignant thesis. Would you consider your story as a form of activism?

MJS: Absolutely, especially in the sense that the most effective activism works on both structural and individual levels, wrestling with injustice as it shapes both the worlds around us and the worlds within us.

credit: Marcia E. Wilson/WideVision Photography

them power and access in the world. I think of Derek Walcott’s essay, “Fragments of Epic Memory,” in which he talks about the violence of linguistic erasure in the Antilles, and the beauty and creativity of dialect and linguistic innovation. The African diaspora is a polyglot place, and we speak multiple languages, acknowledged or not.

That beauty and power of black language stretch from Trinidad to Durban to Paris to Harlem. A world without dialect would ring false to me. And even if it were true, I think it would be less interesting to me than the world I grew up in.

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NDB: Which is your favorite story in the entire collection? Why? Were there any that were closest to your truth?

MJS: It’s hard to say which story is my favorite, but I will say that “Snow Fight” might have been the most fun to write. The story is about a group of junior high school students who have a huge snowball fight inside a subway car on the 1 and 9 train line (the only line in that part of the city that has an outdoor, above-ground stop). The story explores race and gender and what happens when black and brown teenagers take up in public. But for me, it was also a really fun experience with voice. It was a thrill to write, because it came from listening to Harlem and hearing what Harlem’s young people had to say.

NDB: What is your writing process like now? You mentioned that you’re working on a second book. How do you balance teaching with writing?

MJS: I find that teaching can actually complement writing when I have the opportunity to teach classes that connect with my work and my interests. I enjoy conversations with engaged students, and when I introduce them to books or ideas that I’m really dealing with in my own work, I can often learn a lot from the conversations.

I’m thinking of Audre Lorde’s essay “The Role of the Poet as Teacher,” in which she talks about the exchange that happens between teachers and students as they work together through reading and writing poetry, and how productive it is on both sides. I think the same is true for fiction, and for literature in general.

NDB: Do other art forms inspire you as a writer? Which ones?

MJS: I enjoy drawing, especially with color pastels. I also

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keep colored pencils around, and sometimes I paint. I think I’m drawn to visual art because it offers a space outside of language that can be equally expressive, but because I don’t think of myself as a visual artist, I’m freer to pursue my vision in different ways in those forms, and maybe freer to make mistakes.

NDB: Rick Moody has compared you to William Faulkner. Who are the authors that you’re most inspired by?

MJS: There are so many. Those that I mentioned earlier, plus Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Cheryl Clarke, Samuel Delany, Assia Djebar, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ama Ata Aidoo, Lorrie Moore, James Baldwin. I’m influenced by many, many songwriters as well. Biggie, Stevie, Michael Jackson, Fiona Apple, Nina Simone. And there are so many writer friends whose work inspires me: Tiphanie Yanique, Jacqueline Woodson, Natalie Diaz. I’m an admirer of your work as well, as you know. I think we’re lucky to be writing at a time when it’s relatively easy to be in touch with so many great writers doing challenging, moving work.

NDB: You mentioned that your novel is a follow-up to the story “Saturday,” one of my personal favorites, given its unflinching narrative about a young girl who is forced to consider her weight at a young age and her painful introduction to what it means to be a woman living in a body image obsessed realm. What prompted you to expand on that particular story?

MJS: Thanks for this. That story is important to me for the reasons you mention. It thinks about how obsessions with weight and body image, especially among women, affect many aspects of our lives, even from a very young

age. The main character of “Saturday” is eight years old, and defines her world almost entirely through food.

There’s a lot of joy in that for her—she loves food and has a very robust view of the pleasure it brings her. But there’s also a lot of pain, since she’s already learning to monitor herself, to make sure she doesn’t take up too much space, that she doesn’t indulge too much. Thinking about how cultural obsessions with weight, body and food impact girls and women at different ages, I realized that I needed to see this character through various stages of her life. The fight to own our bodies changes as we grow, but it’s almost always there. For a lot of women, that struggle shapes the context of who we are, but also gives us new opportunities to define ourselves and make space for our bodies.

NDB: Now that you’re working on a novel, which do you find to be the most challenging, a short story collection or novel?

MJS: I would guess that writing is a challenge in every genre, but I think there’s a great payoff of joy when you find the genres you like most. For me, the novel and the short story are very different, but both offer real rewards.

I feel proud when I finish a story I’m happy with. Since I love indulging in language, the economy of the short story—the need to pull back, pan out, and eventually leave the voices and characters behind—can be tough.

If I like the characters, I don’t want to let them go! So when I feel like I’ve pulled that off, there’s definitely a sense of accomplishment. You need those skills with the novel, too. But the novel also offers the chance to stay with the characters a little longer, which can mean following them through a longer or more complicated run of ups and downs, and seeing how the world continues

to change them. Sometimes it seems to me that writing a story requires you to sort of drop your characters—and your reader—off at a point in the journey that’s important and meaningful, but isn’t necessarily the end. I think the same is true for the novel, in a way, but in the novel you’ve gotten more time with them, and so you can untangle hands slowly, look back over where you’ve been, and ease away. For better and for worse, it’s a different kind of goodbye.

NDB: Thus far, you’ve heard everything I love about your writing, so let me leave you with this: What do you love about your writing? And what do you hope readers will get from it?

MJS: Oh, this is a good one. I can say what I love most about writing is that it allows me to consort with a limitless number of voices. I love the sense of possibility that comes from getting to know a character and her world.

That’s a process that challenges me to learn new things and re-think what I thought I knew, and gives me a lot of joy in the process. I hope it does the same for my readers. ★

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A Magic of Bags Reprinted from Blue Talk and Love by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan. Riverdale Avenue Books, 2015.

When Ilana Randolph left her house that Saturday night, the only people outside were on their way. Only a handful of shadows moved under the streetlight as Ilana pushed through the blocks toward Convent Avenue, a garbage bag full of babies in tow.

Everyone knew Ilana was unusual, even before she left with the babies. In her almost-seventeen years of life, Ilana had amassed an impressive crew of teddy bears, My Little Ponies, black Barbie dolls, and others. There were handmade rag dolls with black yarn hair and skin that had thinned to the texture of old paper bags. There were antique brown china dolls with painted swirls of black hair and eyes that closed lazily when jostled, as though silly with delight or begging for sleep. Her favorite had been a brown-skinned, bushy-haired doll with a gleaming white faux-fur jacket that engulfed it like a marshmallow, and with perfectly round bubble-gum colored dots on its cheeks.

Until Ilana was four or so, the dolls had been her peers.

She had once enjoyed waking up on Saturday mornings, spreading her blanket on the floor and joining her dolls for mornings of cold cereal and cartoons. But when her classmates began to refer to their dolls as their sons and daughters, Ilana was done. She stopped combing their hair, stopped offering them cereal, stopped taking them to swim in the bathroom sink. She let their eye sockets cake with dirt, let dust settle deep into their fur and

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hair. She had never bothered to box them, perhaps out of laziness. She simply let them lounge atop her desk and dresser, sit in her chairs, hang from her mantle, and press their paws and fingers against her window sills as they pleased. Still, for years, the dolls kept coming as gifts from her mother, and from cousins and uncles too distant to know that, ever since age four, Ilana had had no interest in dependents.

Now, under the watch of the dolls, she would think of the Grange Women, from the homeowners’ association her mother belonged to, who always caucused to gossip with the kind of gleeful disdain of which only the deeply lonely are capable. Ilana would think about what tragedy of life must have made them who they were—what error kept Joyce Turner’s full lips running and glassy eyes darting in her doughy face as though calamity would come if she let her mind be still? What indiscretion made Marietta Mann so quiet she seemed to be shocked by the sound of her own breath? These women had been defeated, it seemed, by the quest to fall in line with domesticity’s parade—find a good man, find a good job, keep both, have good children that would be willing to lather, rinse, repeat. But the cost of this process, the lint in the trap, seemed always to be the women themselves. Their imaginations, their joys, the brightness of their smiles all seemed to vanish in the tumble of family life, and so they found themselves empty, their bodies warn to laundry bags for other peoples’ futures.

So Ilana decided to do things differently. She would handle life selfishly, and never give it to anyone. Sometimes, she was sure of it: she would create no family, no children, nothing but herself. She would consider sharing

that selfish life with somebody else only if she truly and deeply felt like it. In the meantime, she would make the ornate ballet of Harlem’s social life her entertainment. She would live her life and enjoy herself fully, even if it meant making a little trouble.

The most delicious of her plans involved DeShawn Master, whose mother, Ann, was arguably the primmest and most anxious of the Grange Women, and who was, himself, smart and, truth be told, pretty cute.

Ilana had seen him for the first time in a while at her father’s funeral six months before the babies, and had immediately come down with a terminal crush, though not the typical kind, she was sure. Most of the Hamilton Heights girls admired DeShawn for the regular reasons: he was known for his deep red skin only lightly peppered with pimples, his pretty singing voice and his elaborate tags on the walls of the abandoned school on 145th Street. But he was also rumored to have single-handedly masterminded the Destino 2000, a phantom gang whose only real criminal activity was spray painting neon-colored peonies over parking signs and turning traffic signals the wrong way.

This, more than anything, made Ilana swoon.

She plotted her first major encounter with DeShawn carefully. It was no small feat; DeShawn was a senior at the rough-and-tumble Catholic boys’ school in the Bronx, and Ilana was tenth-grader at her small, artsy nerd-nest on the Upper East Side. There was no chance

of unplanned encounters outside of Harlem, and given Mrs. Randolph’s awkward standing in the Grange, to trade on their neighborly connection wouldn’t have been much help either.

After weeks of planning, Ilana decided to meet DeShawn on his own terms. She skipped school for a week and left the house each day with spray cans, stencils, box cutters, and colored chalk stuffed in the bag where her textbooks should have been. Starting at the rock wall on Riverside Drive where DeShawn and his friends smoked weed after school, she began to place ornate, sprawling letters in paint so thickly glossed it shimmered under the streetlamps. She painted these letters beside the Destino 2000 tags, working her way south and east from the Hudson, past her home off of Amsterdam Avenue, past the Grange office, moving north with DeShawn’s flowers as her guides until she reached the row of tidy brownstones on 145th and Convent, where Ann Master’s home sat proudly on the corner. There, she swapped the spray cans for the chalk, crouched to the pavement, and placed the biggest and most elaborate letter yet—a lemon-yellow I, winking with glints of peach and lime.

It took only two days for news of Ilana’s work to wash back on the whisper mill. ShaLondra Prior, a slim tenement girl from Broadway known for her involved and continued on page 50

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AMANDA JOHNSTO BLACK POETS SPEAK 18

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ON During the summer I conducted a Q&A with Amanda Johnston of Black Poets Speak Out, a social justice intervention and collaborative video performance project, about the project’s impact and future ambitions. When we were a little more than halfway through this inquiry, which we had been conducting through email, news of the death of Sandra Bland went mainstream. She had been driving from Texas back to her home in Chicago after securing a new job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M. While being held in a Waller County jail cell for a supposed traffic infraction, she was said to have committed suicide. Her family disputed this claim and has sought a formal investigation. This moment emphasized the pace at which this kind of violence recalibrates our understanding of law and justice.

Black Poets Speak Out (BPSO) was created by Amanda Johnston, Mahogany L. Browne, Jericho Brown, Jonterri Gadson and Sherina Rodriguez-Sharpe after the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the murder of Mike Brown in late November 2014. The project is curatorial, as poets submit short films they have self-produced. The content is poetry, more specifically work by black poets, which makes a record of protest. Instead of drawing attention through slick production values, the careful delivery of the lines asserts the eternal significance of the lyric and the act of making poems.

Before sharing a work of their choice, readers begin each video with the following statement, “My name is [insert name] I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.” Claiming anger as a right situates many of these poems as testimony to the way violence both ruptures and creates community.

Collecting and curating this work has not been easy. Only two of the original founders remain, Amanda Johnston and Mahogany L. Browne. The expected duration

by Wendy S. Walters

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credit: David Flores Photography

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of the project has changed, too. The founders’ initial goal was to continue the campaign until March, but once they realized there was so much more work to do, they removed the deadline and didn’t set another one.

Wendy S. Walters: What made you feel you would find or could create a community organized around poetry as opposed to some other kind of political engagement?

Is there something unique about poetry communities, or how they form, that made you compelled to this particular kind of activism?

Amanda Johnston: As a person struggling in the face of this injustice, I asked myself: What is the greatest resource, tool, I have? We are poets and I knew we had voice and could use that, like so many of our elders and ancestors have done in the past. In the moment, I was looking for a direct path to the greatest source of collective power accessible to me from my kitchen table.

Without doubt or hesitation, I knew that was the Cave Canem fellows. In the collective you find poets, writers, scholars, activists, lawyers, doctors, students, teachers, administrators, hustlers, sweet spirits, and brave fighters. I knew if there were a group I could come to low and vulnerable, it would be these people because that shows in the poems. Those poems go out into the world and carry those hearts and minds to make connections with other people. I believed in the undeniable power of poetry and that it could speak out for black lives in this time of crisis.

WSW: Can you talk a little bit about what the phrase “speak out” means to you, specifically with regards to Black Poets Speak Out? Does speaking out have to do

with the distance the message travels, its impact, or volume? Or do you feel speaking out serves the speaker on a more personal level?

AJ: Speaking out is one of the most powerful tools we have as people. Speaking our truth and calling out injustice is the first action necessary to create change. When poets and allies share videos through BPSO they are not just putting forth the words and sentiment of the poem, they begin with an opening phrase, declaration, “I am a black poet, and ally, who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.”

With that statement, the reader publicly takes a stand against police violence and commits their voice to the collective outcry for justice. As Audre Lorde stated, “Your silence will not protect you,” those committing to speaking out through BPSO know that we cannot be silent and seek justice. It takes the risk of self through voice and action to amplify the urgency of the movement.

WSW: Your comment about Audre Lorde makes me think about two things with regards to her approach to poetry and politics.

Much of Lorde’s work focused on racism and sexism in the United States. She clearly saw them as linked aggressions. There has been some conversation about how the Black Lives Matter campaign might better recognize the contributions of black women as organizers and supporters and give more attention to black women killed by police or racial violence. How have Black Poets Speak Out dealt with this intersection, and are there any challenges from this that as organizers you have become more aware?

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AJ: The Black Lives Matter movement was started by three black women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Throughout their work and organizing, the many intersections of black lives have been represented, mourned, and rallied around. So, as a movement leadership, I think they are doing the work. Now, as supporters of that work, sadly we have seen less of a collective action and outcry for the murders of black women, children, and members of the LGBTQ community. Similarly, BPSO was founded predominately by black women and the leadership remains as such. If you look at the poets, allies, and poems being shared, you’ll see a strongly diverse representation across those intersections. Both men and women shared Audre Lorde’s poem “Power,” children and elders have offered original poetry, and many of the readers and poets being read are LGBTQ. However, as organizers, it is our responsibility to not just accept that diverse representation is present in our campaign when we know as a movement there is work to be done to improve that area. An example of how we address this in word and action is showing up for and spreading sharing information about demonstrations such as the Say Her Name march on May 21st and making sure to share resources and opportunities to speak out (live and in print) across our community. The most important thing is that we stay active in our work and community building. Exclusion does not support the movement when we know all black lives are at risk and suffer the threat of police violence.

WSW: You mention that BPSO, among its many other accomplishments, has been an exercise in community building—both in print and online—virtual and in the real. Have you seen any sub-communities develop out

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of BPSO’s actions or events? If so, could you share some of them?

Also by what mechanisms do the contributors to BPSO move forward collectively, check in with each other? Is it a network that moves primarily in social media spaces or does the community seek to sustain connection through other kinds of events, interventions, and/or interactions?

AJ: At the BPSO events in Austin, TX, multiple organizations and activists came together to speak out. Groups like The People’s Task Force, the Austin Justice Coalition, and members of Creative Action and Red Salmon Arts have come together through BPSO events. That work continues to build through collaborative efforts for future events such as a joint demonstration at City Hall scheduled for August 8th and BPSO poets speaking out at the PTF Justice 4 Jackson rally on July 25th. By supporting each others’ work and coming together collectively, we are able to reach a larger audience and call for action in the fight to save black lives. I know the same is true in New York. Mahogany can speak more on that as she coordinated several join BPSO events including one at the Brooklyn Museum that included representatives from various activist organizations with the same goals in support of the movement. Other poetry communities are sharing similar success as these BPSO events are open to the public and, as poetic protests, call out to those who dare to speak out. The audience members include poets, activists, allies, and other supporters. Some had never attended a poetry event before but felt drawn to the reading as an accessible and direct means to combat police violence.

As for advancing the work of BPSO, active and potential

participants contact us through the website to propose new events and, collectively, we share information on our Facebook open group page. This way we can share the information widely across our joint social media pages and coordinate showing up to support in person. We are online and live. We are on and off the page.

WSW: Sandra Bland died the same day that Eric Garner’s family received a 5.9 million dollar settlement from the city of New York on their wrongful death claim. How do you (and BPSO) make sense of all this? Is it a struggle to keep moving forward with so much bad news still coming in? And if so, how do you do it—what’s the goal?

AJ: The system is designed to wear you down and silence you. A monetary settlement, no matter the amount, is not justice. It’s an acknowledgment of wrong-doing and reaches for an end. Justice would be that Eric Garner was never murdered. That he was alive with his wife and children. Justice would be Sandra Bland alive and excited about her future. As BPSO poets and writers, our duty is to continue to speak the truth and say their names through our work. Sadly, we know these are two victims out of hundreds dead and thousands who’ve suffered police brutality. I think one goal is to not become complacent in the death of black lives. With the constant bombardment of images, a natural response for survival is to turn off and look away. It can drive you crazy.

Through the work and words of fellow poets, elders, and ancestors, I find strength. We’re planning a vigil for Sandra Bland tomorrow night in Austin, TX. We’ll walk to the capitol, share poems and prayers, and say her name in the heart of Texas before the public official’s sworn to protect and serve us. In community, locally and linked across the country, we move forward (not beyond, not

passed) but forward toward justice and freedom.

WSW: BPSO reminds me of the journalist Ida B. Wells, who encountered many obstacles as she decried slavery.

With her in mind, I am thinking again about the idea of speaking out—and does it relate in any way to the kind of journalism Wells practiced in Memphis when lynching became an active means of political and economic repression? How do you see the function of the poem in relation to journalism, or perhaps more specifically what can a poet do in speaking out that is different from the work a journalist can do?

AJ: I think one of the important things that come from people speaking out is the ability to reach multiple audiences. A journalist is going to reach those who follow them and their news outlets. Poets will reach their followers, readers, and literary communities. I feel like poetry has a way of calling you out privately. Even in a crowded reading, the poem can somehow find you, whisper your name, and call you to action. Journalism can reach and inform millions of people loudly. We need everyone to raise their voice against police violence and reach as many people as possible.

WSW: There is something quite moving about hearing a poem read out loud that is different from just seeing it written. The voice imbues the poem with life—a vitality—that is indisputable. They are also generative acts.

It’s interesting to think of these poems confronting death with life in a kind of metaphysical way. Perhaps I am overreaching here, and please let me know if I am, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about that?

AJ: When someone creates a BPSO video, multiple acts are happening at once: the reader is committing their

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Facing US after Yusef Komunyakaa

name and image to resisting police violence, they are publicly affirming that black lives matter, a vast chorus of black poets’ words are being called up that span across time and place, and when someone clicks on the video, from wherever they are in the world, a connection is made between them, the reader, the word, and the movement. The viewer is confronted with the reader as a living person (often first someone they know personally) speaking out through the power of poetry to demand change. The participants show their will to live freely through art in the face of a very real attack against that freedom. It’s urgent and powerful.

WSW: Can you talk a bit about the duration of this project and how you envisioned it? Where do you see ahead for BPSO in the next few months? What is the best way for those who are interested in participating in BPSO to get involved?

AJ: BPSO as a campaign will continue to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of our participants are educators and are currently preparing for their fall classes.

Soon, BPSO will share free lesson plans on our site that focus on creative writing and social justice activism. Our hope is that educators will use them as a resource to keep the conversation going with students. Readings and forums are still being organized at venues and college campus internationally. Our letter writing campaign will continue to demanding action from elected officials against police violence. That work will provide valuable information for our community and voters as we move into the 2016 election season. We need poets and ally volunteers. Anyone interested in supporting Black Poets Speak Out can contact us through our website www.blackpoetsspeakout.org or email us directly atblackpoetsspeakout@gmail.com. ★

My black face fades, hiding inside black smoke.

I knew they'd use it, dammit: tear gas.

I'm grown. I'm fresh.

Their clouded assumption eyes me like a runaway, guilty as night, chasing morning. I run this way -- the street lets me go.

I turn that way -- I'm inside the back of a police van again, depending on my attitude to be the difference.

I run down the signs half-expecting to find my name protesting in ink.

I touch the name Freddie Gray; I see the beat cop's worn eyes.

Names stretch across the people’s banner but when they walk away the names fall from our lips.

Paparazzi flash riot across a protester’s stare.

The ground. A body on the ground.

A white cop’s image hovers over us, then his blank gaze looks through mine. I’m a broken window.

He’s raised his right arm a gun in his hand. In the black smoke a drone tracking targets: No, a crow gasping for air.

−Amanda Johnston

Note: Originally published in pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture 24

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Answer the Call “I need you. I need y’all’s help. I can’t do this by myself.”

– Sandra Bland Can you hear it? A faint whisper at first trickling in from the ether. A cool hush against your heart. Be still. Listen to the words flicker, I need you.

You, not some other doer busy with the living.

You, of heart and spirit, can you hear Sandy speak? It’s louder now, burrowing through your spine. Can you feel it pull you to your feet, feet to pavement from Illinois to New York, from Waller County to Austin, Texas? This work, this woman.

You’ve seen her in the market, on the street.

She is your sister, your friend, your reflection pinned against the mirror. A crack across the glass meant for you to swallow. Spit back. Answer the call. Say her name.

Carry it forward into a new world.

−Amanda Johnston

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The Best Time

the best time as a teenager: be a bottle of cisco & a sideshow at the uptown gas station. after Kenny’s body was bludgeoned by his girlfriend & her two brothers ain’t no one to tell us we couldn’t can’t talk loud & follow our e c h o e s ragged w/haunt & laughter. before Andre lived to tell about his hit & run accident @ the homecoming party brown limbs held forty ounces a delicate enchantment.

& each other’s ego// after Andre was left for dead in a stalled car a year later

the air c r a c k l e( d) & the tires squeal(ed) a lullaby in the emptying parking lot we abandone our smiles for scowls before Shawn’s body flew through the car windshield

all we know is move & drink & swivel & the promise for our kind of brown (only) worthy of a casket of black bones

of death caked by the dust

−Mahogany L. Browne

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my mouth became the moon...

my mouth became the moon/ found a way to fly up/ up & a ways/ like a star. no, like a moon. & some/one said i should shine like that/all glow. no. my body should be silent like a bullet./or./no. like a star./a dead spark -- if you look close enough. & then/just like that -- my mouth, eclipsed

a tacit & clean suture./...where my face be

−Mahogany L. Browne

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hair

BLACK FEMININE HAIR CARE DIVISIONS

by Ciara Miller

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Both Gwendolyn Brooks and Carolyn Rodgers address the impact of Black beauty culture on Black women’s perception of self within their poems. According to Robert L. Boyd’s article “the Great Migration to the North and the Rise of Ethnic Niches for African American Women in Beauty Culture and Hairdressing, 1910-1920”, few studies have examined the impact of the Great Migration on the economic opportunities of African-American women. The vast majority of African-American women worked low status jobs, and many responded to this labor market disadvantage by becoming self-employed in occupations within the AfricanAmerican community. The most popular of these occupations were beauty culture and hairdressing, which provided African-American women with an ethnic niche which can be defined as an activity in which members of an ethnic group are concentrated and gain economic benefits. This enables them to “cope with modest skills and employer discrimi-

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nation.” An ethnic niche is also an entrepreneurial occupation that lends itself to self-employment and can be the foundation of an ethnic enclave economy for a particular ethnic minority group.

An ethnic enclave economy is an arrangement of ethnic-owned businesses that, by providing opportunities for self-employment, help members of the ethnic group avoid entrapment in the secondary labor market of the larger economy.

In Chicago, the number of businesses owned by African Americans rose from 371 in 1908 to 1, 260 in 1921— an increase of nearly 240 percent.

Most of the African American owned businesses created in the north during the early years of the Great Migration involving close contact with customers were namely: barbering, beauty culture, and hairdressing. The growth and segregation of the black population and white merchants’ desires for social distance created protected markets for African Americans in personal services. These protected markets supported the ethnic niches that provided African-American women and men with their best prospects for business ownership and self-employment. The most famous ethnic niche story of the early 20th century was that of Madame C.J. Walker of Indianapolis, who developed a hairrelaxer in 1905 and later founded a company that manufactured cosmetics. When she died in 1919, her wealth was estimated at over a million dollars, making her the first woman in the United States to become a self-made millionaire.

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As early as the nineteenth century, Black women's bodies became a battleground in the resistance to and development of a modern Black womanhood.

A heightened discourse and debate ensued over the practice and consumption of hairstyles and bodily adornment during the period of the Great Migration. Black women inserted their own visions into the mass marketplace to create a Black beauty culture. More than simply a politics of "straight vs. natural," the specific consumption habits and tastes of Black migrant women reconstructed white commercial beauty standards. Black women's entry into beauty culture created new sources of employment. Madame C.J. Walker argued that her company offered working women relative autonomy over their civic, economic, and aesthetic choices in both the private and public world. Walker never intended for her hair straightening products to represent a means of a social progression, but instead placed pictures and images of her accomplishments in ads as a source of female desire.

Walker’s national organizer, Chicagoan Marjorie Stewart Joyner, took students to Europe to exchange the latest beauty and hair care techniques.

She also engaged actively in politics and lobbied the Illinois state senate for the protection of hair care businesses. The growing popularity of Black beauty products redefined acceptable representations and occupations for working-class African American women. Women like Madame C.J. Walker and Marjorie Joyner and the people who purchased their products transformed beauty cul-

ture into a sphere of race pride, labor, and politics.

So gimme an upsweep, Minnie.

Although Madame C.J. Walker never intended to draw a rift between women with natural and relaxed hair, once African-American women were able to straighten their hair through her products, there became a politicized division between African-American women who maintained their natural hair and those who presented a more assimilated look. Madame C.J. Walker’s Black haircare business even impacted the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. In Brooks’ poem “at the hairdresser’s” in A Street in Bronzeville republished in her collected works Blacks, the speaker sassily declares:

I’ll show them girls.

Gimme an upsweep, Minnie, With humpteen baby curls.

‘Bout time I got some glamour.

I’ll show them girls.

They think they so fly a-struttin’ With they wool a-blowin’ ‘round.

Wait’ll they see my upsweep.

That’ll jop ‘em back on ground.

Got Madam C.J. Walker’s first.

Got Poro Grower next.

Ain’t none of ‘em worked with me, Min. But I ain’t vexed.

Long hair’s out of style anyhow, ain’t it?

Now it’s tie it up high with curls.

Brooks’ poem highlights the impact of Black haircare businesses on Black women’s sense of self value. The speaker of her poem notes that she tried both Madame C.J. Walker’s hair straightening products as well as Chicagoan Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone’s Poro Grower, which was intended to lengthen Black women’s hair. However, neither of these products worked for her hair. She then asserts that her “upsweep” will allow her to compete with other Black women. This signals the respectability politics associated with Black women’s hair.

In order to assert her worth, the speaker has to find another avenue to compete with prevailing ideals of Black feminine beauty.

Brooks’ poem also utilizes communal Black beauty salon language. The reader is expected to have an understanding of an “upsweep” or arguments surrounding Black feminine beauty. The poem oscillates between quatrains and quintains, creating both an even and uneven disposition. The penultimate stanza is written as a quatrain and the final stanza is one verse which, if combined with the previous stanza, would leave the poem on an uneven versed stanza which alludes to the disjointedness of Black women as it relates to Black feminine beauty standards. Brooks, concluding the poem with, “I’ll show those girls” showcases the speaker

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as separate from other Black girls who embrace a different beauty aesthetic.

In her book Primer for Blacks, Brooks writes about the impact perms had on Black women in her poem entitled “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals.” As Brooks often does in her writings, she places herself outside of this experience of naturalness. She writes: Sisters!

I love you.

Because you love you.

Although Brooks often writes in third person, she is not totally against the use of the “I” in this poem which calls attention to her own battles with perceiving herself as beautiful. She writes: You have not wanted to be white. Nor have you testified to adoration of that state with the advertisement of imitation (never successful because the hot-comb is laughing too).

Brooks salutes the willpower of women who wear their natural hair while also subtlety calling attention to both her strength in being able to confess a desire to be white or imitate whiteness as well as the weakness of not being able to fully accept herself. The poem has a bit of a misleading title because Brooks’ folks are not just women who maintained their natural hair considering the speaker, herself, does not remain natural. Brooks’ reader-

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ship is expected to be those concerned with the ways in which media affects how Black women perceive themselves.

In later years, Carolyn Rodgers would embody the “natural haired woman” that Brooks praises. In Rodgers’ poem “For Sistuhs Wearin Straight Hair” from her collection Songs from a Blackbird, she writes about her own handlings with her natural hair and confronts women with permed hair: me?

I never could keep my edges and kitchen straight even after supercool straighter perm had burned whiteness onto my scalp.

The poem implies that perms and other products to straighten or tame her hair never fully worked because her hair always returned to its natural state or that she always returned to a state that distanced her from whites.

Structurally, Rodgers’ 1976 National Book Award nominated How I Got Ovah has less special gaps in the writing. Her stanzas are organized more geometrically. It has less commands in terms of the ways in which she seeks to galvanize Blacks into action. It is a book more concerned with the “I”.

The book was written after Rodgers graduated from the University of Illinois, earning her Bachelor’s degree and it shows a more structured approach to activism. At the time the book was published, she

had entered the University of Chicago to achieve her MA in English.

For Rodgers, Black women’s hair is symbolic of their politics. Rodgers opens the book with “for muh’ dear” still addressing the significance of the mother or mother-figure in Black women’s quest for self-definition. In this poem, the Black mother hasn’t changed much from a figure of contention for the speaker. However, the speaker is more concise and owns her Blackness. The mother and speaker clearly depart: “told my sweet mama to leave me alone about my wild free knotty a nd nappy hair cause I was gon lay back and let it grow so high it could reroute its root and highjack the sky!”

Her primary focus in this poem is to define the self as an individual despite advocating for Black collectivity. Rodgers assists the reader in understanding her own poetic aesthetics by juxtaposing herself and her mother. She makes a definitive point to highlight the contrast between older generations of thought regarding Black feminine beauty and her own rebelliousness. She believes her mother to be too docile. Relatedly, her poetry rebels not only against canonized poetic formalities but it also rebels against the traditional displays of Black femininity.

Both Brooks and Rodgers assert who their folk are by claiming their interests and concerns as it relates to Black women’s hair. A community is a portion of the dominant society which is connected through similar interests, ideals, or location. Through perspectives on Black hair politics, both poets showcase who their words and visual appearance address. For Brooks, she writes for Black women who are on both sides of the fence regarding Black beauty aesthetics. She admires women who wear their natural hair while also acknowledging, for herself, the bravery she lacks to “go natural.” For Rodgers, her folk are those who embrace a natural Blackness that removes itself from the need for approval. Her writing seeks to galvanize Black women to commit to a particular idea of Black self-love.

She appeals to those who believe in Blackness as an identity that can sufficiently define itself without depending on white societal ideals of beauty or worth. Both writers allow readers to see the political divisions that played out in Chicago amongst Black women who chose to embrace a particular beauty aesthetic. ★

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MosaicMagazine.org credit: Lola Flash

Naomi Jackson

by Arlene M. Roberts Labor Day in Brooklyn is synonymous with the West Indian American Day Parade, an annual event preceded by months of preparation and festivity. Several years ago, I hosted a Labor Day brunch that showcased some fine Caribbean culinary fare –much to the delight of my family and friends. Since then I’ve added a literary dimension. Every year, I invite a literary artist of Caribbean heritage to my home to read from recently published work.

In 2014, Dr. Elizabeth Nunez read from her memoir, Not For Everyday Use. This year, I was honored to have Ms. Naomi Jackson read from her debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill.

Of the book, Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning, writes, “Naomi Jackson has written a tender novel exploring the complexities of motherhood and childhood. The Star Side of Bird Hill holds together opposing elements—the book is quiet in the telling, but the story being told is sharp and vibrant.”

In anticipation of her reading, Ms. Jackson agreed to answer a few questions about the novel and her writing process.

Arlene M. Roberts: I’ve read your book twice over two consecutive weekends, with absolute delight. The more familiar narrative is that of an immigrant’s quest or journey, navigating the terrain in America. You’ve opted not

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only to reverse the direction, but also to shift the focus to a younger generation, as you explore identity and belonging through the eyes of two sisters, Dionne and Phaedra. What influenced your decision?

Naomi Jackson: It’s moving to hear that you chose to spend so much time with my book, and with these characters. When I started writing the book, I didn’t intend to tell a specific kind of story; I was simply working with the characters as they appeared – four kids, two American, two Bajan – getting into trouble in a church yard in rural Barbados. Over time, as I continued to work on it, I began to see the value of a novel that reflected the experiences of myself, my family and my friends, of having lived in America but nursing a strong connection to home.

AMR: Stylistically, I appreciate the manner in which the mother’s illness, initially unnamed and addressed indirectly, hovers over various family members, yet propels the pace of the novel. Why do you focus on mental illness?

NJ: I chose not to address the question of Avril’s diagnosis head on for a few reasons. I wanted to squarely focus the book on how Avril’s illness affected her family members. Because I choose to write Star Side in a shifting point of view, having some haziness about the specifics of Avril’s diagnosis allowed me not to confuse the reader by pulling them in yet another direction. It was also important to me that readers got to know Avril before drawing conclusions about her. I wanted people to see her flaws as well as her strength, and to allow her a level of nuance, dignity, and compassion that’s not always a given for people who have these struggles.

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I think that a conversation about mental illness, and more specifically, about how mental illness affects not just the person who’s sick, but an entire family, is an important one that needs to happen not just in Caribbean communities but also in our society as a whole.

I’ve had a diverse group of readers – African-Americans, white folks, children of Caribbean, Latino, and African immigrants – tell me that the book resonated with their experiences being raised by mentally ill parents. I’m glad that this is the case; there’s so much solace in knowing that you’re not alone.

AMR: One of the recurring themes is that of status – ‘insider’ vs. ‘outsider’ – whatever the parameters for membership. Discuss.

NJ: The theme of belonging recurs throughout the book – the desire for it, and its elusiveness. All of the major characters in the book are struggling in some way with their yearning for community, for belongingness; they are either trying to work through their rejection by others or recover from it. Even Hyacinth, who’s 63, feels like an outsider; she’s in service to so many people on Bird Hill, but feels that she is very different from most of them.

Phaedra, who’s ten, imagines that she’ll make friends in Barbados easier than she did in Brooklyn, but that’s not the case. She does find love and friendship in Barbados eventually, but this is hard-won. With Phaedra, I was interested in exploring the naïveté of expecting immediate kinship based solely on a shared country of origin.

AMR: Grandma Hyacinth is a woman way ahead of her time, part keeper of the old guard and values, part activist advocating for reform and challenging the system.

In spite of her humble upbringing, Grandma Hyacinth

envisions and harbors high aspirations for her daughter and granddaughters, rooted in a solid educational foundation. Who inspired this character?

NJ: Hyacinth is a composite of my grandmothers, mothers, and father, all of whom had a hand in raising me.

My family is a mashup of the old school West Indian way (manners, thriftiness, organized religion, etc.) and a contemporary willingness to adapt for the sake of the next generation’s success and happiness. My grandmother only had a fourth-grade education, but she made sure that each of her boys graduated high school and had steady work afterwards; many of her grandchildren have gone on to college and graduate school, which makes her very proud. I’ve inherited an odd mix of commitment to both tradition and to social change. As I think more about it, though, I realize that this combination isn’t that new or strange. Many of these values – education, a focus on community and family, social justice – are commonly held in black communities in both America and in the Caribbean.

AMR: You cover the spectrum of skin tone and hair texture, from ‘light skin and long hair’ to ‘deep ochre’ and ‘shade of chestnut with close cropped hair.’ Let’s talk colorism in the Caribbean, shall we?

NJ: After I finished the book, I briefly waded into a heated discussion on social media about colorism and whether writing about skin tone and hair color was an indication that the writer themselves was guilty of being color struck. I can see why there is such strong feeling about this – to this day, color, hair, and appearance determine so many of the opportunities that are available to people (relationships, housing, jobs). That said, I thought it was important to show how Caribbean people teach their

children to value whiteness – Hyacinth tells the girls at one point that she doesn’t want any black-black pickney running around. I also wanted to illustrate the ways that girls in particular privilege white features, admiring and putting on a pedestal other girls who are considered pretty by virtue of their skin, eyes, hair, etc. I heard so many painful stories from women in my family – particularly women in my mothers’ generation – about being teased and put down because of having dark skin, and I was so troubled and saddened by their stories. Because these unconscious behaviours are so deeply ingrained in our psyches, I wanted to draw attention to them. I don’t think that we can change anything that we’re not able to name and look at critically first.

AMR: The temporal references/setting places the mom, Avril, as my contemporary/peer. The younger daughter, Phaedra, at 10 years of age, is just two years older than my niece who, in recent years spends her summer with Granny and Grandpa in Trinidad and Tobago. Your novel makes for interesting intergenerational discussion.

Is this who you envision as your audience?

NJ: I never thought about an audience other than myself when I was writing the book. The fact that this book has readers now is no small miracle to me. Now that it’s out in the world, I’m very excited that, because the story has multiple points of entry for people at different life stages, it is quite accessible. I have been excited to have folks buy the book for their moms, daughters and nieces; I’ve signed quite a few copies of the book for mother/ daughter pairs.

AMR: The duality of existence – traditional beliefs infusing practices of organized religion – and role of the

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church as not just a place of worship, but a venue for social gatherings and interaction is apparent. How common is this?

NJ: I can’t speak to the commonality of blending traditional beliefs with organized religion in the time period when the book is set (1989). That said, I tried to draw a complex character in Hyacinth, someone who’s equally devoted to her religion as her reason, and to see her legacy live on in Phaedra, who’s both profoundly rational and very much interested in magic and God. AMR: Typically, any mention of Carnival in the Caribbean and the conversation centers on revelry and festivity.

However, you’ve chosen to delve into the less glamourous aspects, like human trafficking. Why? NJ: Tiphanie Yanique’s story in How to Escape from a Leper Colony, “Kill the Rabbits” influenced my writing about Crop Over in The Star Side of Bird Hill. I haven’t read that story in some time, but it was my favourite one in the collection because of the way that it went well below the superficial level of revelry, dancing, and eros we typically associate with Carnival, to expose more difficult layers beneath. I’m reminded here too of the classic Brazilian film, Black Orpheus, and how the characters’ lives turn on a dime during Carnival in that movie. So I was inspired by these two examples of gritty writing about carnival. I also wanted to use Crop Over as an occasion to meditate on the ongoing legacy of slavery in Barbados, one that I believe manifests in the contemporary exploitation of young women.

AMR: When you embarked on your literary trajectory, which authors shaped your consciousness?

NJ: I started out writing poetry, and some of my favou-

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rite poets growing up included Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, and Langston Hughes. I liked reading books that featured girls of color as protagonists. Some of the books that I read at the beginning of my journey as a writer are still with me today. These texts include Jamaica Kincaid’s classic Annie John, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl Brownstones, June Jordan’s Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, as well as many of Jacqueline Woodson’s young adult books. As I write more essays these days, I look to James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay for inspiration.

AMR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

NJ: I’ve read lots of great interviews in this magazine, and I was fortunate enough to interview Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Mosaic many moons ago; it’s a real honour to be interviewed by you now. ★

The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson The people on the hill liked to say that God’s smile was the sun shining down on them. In the late afternoon, before scarlet ibis bloodied the sunset, light flooded the stained glass windows of Bird Hill Church of God in Christ, illuminating the renderings of black saints from Jesus to Absalom Jones. When there wasn’t prayer meeting, choir rehearsal, Bible study, or Girl Guides, the church was empty except for its caretaker, Mr. Jeremiah. It was his job to chase the children away from the cemetery that sloped down behind the church, his responsibility to shoo them from their perches on graves that dotted the backside of the hill the area was named for. Despite his best intentions, Mr. Jeremiah’s noontime and midnight devotionals at the rum shop brought on long slumbers when children found freedom to do as they liked among the dead.

Dionne Braithwaite was two weeks fresh from Brooklyn and Barbados’s fierce sun had already transformed her skin from its New York shade of caramel to brick red. She was wearing foundation that was too light for her skin now. It came off in smears on the white handkerchiefs she stole from her grandmother’s chest of drawers, but she wore it anyway, because makeup was her tether to the life she’d left back home. Hyacinth, while she didn’t like to see her granddaughter made up, couldn’t argue with the fact that Dionne’s years of practice meant that she could work tasteful wonders on her face, looking sun-kissed

and dewy-lipped rather than the tart her grandmother thought face paint transformed women into.

Dionne was sixteen going on a bitter, if beautiful, fortyfive. Trevor, her friend and eager supplicant for her affections, was her age mate. Although Dionne thought herself above the things the children on Bird Hill did, she liked the hiding place the graveyard behind the church provided. So it was that she and Trevor came to the cool limestone of Dionne’s great-grandmother’s grave, talking about their morning at Vacation Bible School, and imitating their teacher’s nasal Texas twang.

“Accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is the only sure way to avoid eternal damnation,” Dionne pronounced, her arms akimbo.

Trevor grinned, his eyes caught on the amber lace of Dionne’s panties as she walked the length of the grave.

“What do you think happens when you die?”

Dionne asked Trevor.

“I don’t know. Seems to me it’s just like going to sleep. Except you never wake up. Why do you think so much about death anyways? ” “We are in a graveyard,” Dionne said. She traced the name of her ancestor while Trevor’s hand worked its way beneath her dress and along the smooth terrain of her upper thigh. She liked the way it felt when Trevor touched her, though she hadn’t decided yet what she’d let him do to her. She’d let Darren put his hands all the

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way up her skirt on the last day of school. But here, where girls her age still wore their hair in press and curls, she knew that sex was not to be given freely, but a commodity to ration, something to barter with.

Dionne squeezed Trevor’s wrist, halting his hand’s ascent, and then crossed her arms at her chest, which was testing the seams of her dress. After a few weeks of eating cou-cou and flying fish, her yellow frock fit snugly and rode up on her behind. Dionne was a copy of her mother at sixteen—her mouth fixed in a permanent scowl, her slim frame atop the same long legs, a freckle that disappeared when she wrinkled her chin. She hoped that one day she and her mother would again be mistaken for sisters like some of the flirtatious shopkeepers in Flatbush used to do back when her mother still made small talk.

Dionne’s and Trevor’s younger siblings, Phaedra and Chris, played tag among the miniature graves of children, all casualties of the 1955 cholera outbreak. Nineteen girls and one boy had died before the hill folks abandoned their suspicion of the world in general and doctors in particular to seek help from “outside people.” This was just one of the stories that Dionne and Phaedra’s mother summoned as evidence for why she left the hill the first chance she got. “They’re clannish. They wouldn’t know a free thought if it smacked them on the behind,” their mother would hiss, her mouth specked with venom.

Chris and Phaedra darted between the tombstones, browning the soles of their feet, losing track of the shoes they shook off on the steps at the top of the hill. They had become fast friends since Phaedra and her sister arrived from Brooklyn at the beginning of the summer.

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Phaedra was small for her ten years; even though they were the same age, her head reached only the crook of Chris’s elbow. Her skin had darkened to a deep cocoa from running in the sun all day in spite of her grandmother’s protests. She wore her hair in a French braid, its length tucked away from the girls who threatened her after reading about Samson and Delilah in Sunday school.

Glimpses of Phaedra’s future beauty peeked out from behind her pink, heart-shaped glasses, which were held together with Scotch tape.

Hyacinth tried to get Phaedra to at least cover her head and her feet, saying that she didn’t need any black-black pickney in her house, and that, besides, good girls knew how to sit down and be still, play dolls and house and other ladylike games. Phaedra had never been one for girls in Brooklyn, and she didn’t see herself starting now.

At the beginning of the summer, a whole gang of girls her age filed through her grandmother’s house to get a good look at her. They drank the Capri Sun juices Phaedra begrudgingly offered them from the barrel her mother sent.

They chewed politely on the cheese sandwiches Hyacinth made and cut into quarters. Once they’d asked her all the basic questions (Where did she live in New York?

What year was she in school? How old was her sister?), there was little left to talk about. They papered over the awkward silences by staring dumbly at each other and then promising to stop by soon. But by the time VBS started, none of them had come over again.

Phaedra knew that these friendships were doomed the moment she met Simone Saveur, the ringleader of the ten- and eleven-year-old girls because she towered over them and spoke with a bass the boys their age didn’t

yet have in their voices. On her first and last visit of Hyacinth’s house, Simone Saveur, sat down and started looking around, taking mental notes, collecting grist for the gossip mill. Because while Hyacinth could safely say that she had been into almost every house on Bird Hill, whether to deliver a baby or visit an old person who was feeling poorly, or just to sit for a while talking about who had died and left and been born, only a handful of hill women could say that they had seen Hyacinth’s house beyond the gallery where she sat with guests. All of them had at one point or another been invited to admire Hyacinth’s rose garden, which in her vanity she sometimes showed off, going on about how they bloomed, the insects that troubled them, her pruning techniques.

It could be said that Hyacinth’s rose garden, which she tended to like another set of grandchildren, was an elaborate fortress whose beauty so thoroughly enchanted its visitors that they never questioned why they’d never been invited inside. ★

The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Naomi Jackson, 2015.

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

Email info@mosaicmagazine.org to reserve your placement.

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Black Poets Speak Out (BPSO) began as a response to a conversation initiated by Amanda Johnston. Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, Jonterri Gadson and Sherina Rodriguez-Sharpe responded to the call with ideas, suggestions and various plans of action. What resulted was a hashtag video campaign house on a tumblr site featuring hundreds of videos from Black poets reading in response to the grand jury’s decision on November 24 not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Mike Brown. According to organizer Mahogany Browne, the project’s purpose “is to centralize in one space hundreds of poems, songs, prayers and testimonies speaking on behalf of black mothers, black fathers, black brothers and sisters—thousands of voices insisting on justice. BlackPoetsSpeakOut videos are a collective outcry for our black lives.”

While the first phase hosted videos shared throughout various social networks until nearly viral, the mantra echoed clearly before every poetry video, “I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.” In addition to showcasing contemporary poets’ original work, videos present poems by such iconic writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Cornelius Eady, Audre Lorde, Harryette Mullen and Ed Roberson, among others.

Phase Two serves as an off-line literary protest for poets and the community. The importance of the poetry protest is a safe space for the community to gather, share information for marching, understanding and healing. A large part of BPSO’s success lives in the shared stories and experiences of the poets and the people. These community readings are free to the public and host an intergenerational audience.

The audience recites poems, songs, scriptures and prayers. These poetic protests are unique in its existence as there are never any features, there are never any bios shared, there are never any book or cd sales conducted, as no one voice headlines over the fallen, no one person’s sorrow owns the spotlight. Through this direction

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a lesson plan

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BPSO vows to maintain open dialog through poetry and a call to action against police violence.

Phase Three ties the power of the poetic voice to civic engagement through a unique letter writing campaign.

Poets and allies submit letters to their elected officials with a different video from the BPSO site attached. The letters call for immediate action against police violence and outline solutions presented to the President, Vice President, and Attorney General by organizers across the country.

These lesson plans are the continuation of this campaign into its fourth phase: #BlackPoetsSpeakOut: Classroom. As educators and life-long learners, we believe one of the most important ways to empower communities is through education. In classrooms and workshops on college campuses and in public libraries, this work is intended for all people to have access to the stories (lives and witnessed) by contemporary, elder, and ancestor poets of the challenges and uprising against police violence and systemic oppression. We hope others will use these lesson plans to initiate important discussions and inspire the next wave of creative artists who stand up and speak out.

Onward, Amanda Johnston & Mahogany L. Browne Black Poets Speak Out, co-founders

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I. I’m Not Ready to Die Yet: Dismantling Police Brutality & Racial Profiling & Exploring Poetry as Balm

by Ellen Hagan This three lesson unit was created in response to the murder of Michael Brown, the latter non indictment of police officer Darren Wilson and the organized civil disobedience happening in Ferguson, Missouri. These lessons were intended as communal learning opportunities for all of us (participants, teaching artists and interns) and gave us all ownership over studying, distilling and creating poetry as a dialogue and response to police brutality and racial profiling. Through the crafting and revision of poems and the participation in the social media platform: #BlackPoetsSpeakOut, participants will engage with the larger community and continue to create art as response and balm. * Title taken from a poem by Aracelis Girmay ** Originally produced for DreamYard Project, Art Center Unit Objectives • Research: Students will spend time reading articles, timelines, slideshows and hashtags around the events in Ferguson, Missouri and around the themes of racial profiling, police brutality and institutionalized racism.

• Crafting poems: Students will use forms such as

•

ekphrastic, found and narrative poems to dialogue with the issues outlined above.

Creating videos: Students will revise one poem to be shared and included in the social media campaign: #BlackPoetsSpeakOut

1.Graffiti Walls •

• •

• •

Graffiti Walls: Write the following words on separate pieces of poster paper – “Mike Brown, Activism, Freedom, Justice, What I would fight for.” Students will travel the tables responding to each word or phrase with their own questions and responses. During the Graffiti Walls we will listen to Black Rage by Lauryn Hill.

Read and respond to: I'm Not Ready to Die Yet by Aracelis Girmay Timeline Sharing: Students will go over the Michael Brown timeline of events as a group--each student will write down phrases or questions/sayings, etc.

Crafting: Students will use the phrases and words from the timeline to craft a poetic response.

Sharing: Students will share poems they are beginning to craft.

Resources: • I’m Not Ready to Die Yet by Aracelis Girmay www.phunkmeisterphresh.tumblr.com/ post/19462835043/i-am-not-ready-to-die-yetaracelis-girmay • Michael Brown Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath in Ferguson: Timeline

•

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/12/ us/13police-shooting-of-black-teenager-michaelbrown.html Black Rage by Lauryn Hill: www.lyricsfreak.com/l/ lauryn+hill/black+rage_21047497.html

2. Not An Elegy for Mike Brown by Danez Smith • •

• •

Read and respond (in writing) to: Not An Elegy for Mike Brown by Danez Smith Research Rotation: Create seven different stations: ekphrastic poems (2), Metaphor work w Danez Smith poem, Letter to Trayvon poem by Vincent Toro, Night, for Henry Dumas by Aracelis Girmay, NY Times article (found poem) Hashtag research (Twitter).

Crafting: Students will use their research to craft a poetic response.

Sharing: Students will share poems they are beginning to craft.

Resources: • Not An Elegy for Mike Brown by Danez Smith www.blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2014/08/poem-ofweek-danez-smith.html • Night, for Henry Dumas by Aracelis Girmay www. fishousepoems.org/night-for-henry-dumas/ • Michael Brown Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath in Ferguson: Timeline www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2014/08/12/us/13police-shooting-ofblack-teenager-michael-brown.html • Funeral for Michael Brown in St. Louis: www.

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•

•

nytimes.com/slideshow/2014/08/25/us/FUNERALSS-nytnow.html#1 Protests: www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/ ferguson-darren-wilson-shooting-michael-browngrand-jury.html Exploring hashtags: Setup a computer to explore #MikeBrown.

3. Night, for Henry Dumas by Aracelis Girmay • •

• •

Read and respond (in writing) to: Night, for Henry Dumas by Aracelis Girmay Research Rotation Continued: Create seven different stations: ekphrastic poems (2), Metaphor work w Danez Smith poem, Letter to Trayvon poem by Vincent Toro, Night, for Henry Dumas by Aracelis Girmay, NY Times article (found poem) Hashtag research (Twitter).

Explore poems and poets from #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. Filming: Students will perform their favorite poem to share and link up with #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.

Resources: • Night, for Henry Dumas by Aracelis Girmay www.fishousepoems.org/night-for-henry-dumas/ • #BlackPoetsSpeakOut: www.blackpoetsspeakout. tumblr.com • Michael Brown Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath in Ferguson: Timeline www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2014/08/12/us/13police-shooting-ofblack-teenager-michael-brown.html • Funeral for Michael Brown in St. Louis: www. nytimes.com/slideshow/2014/08/25/us/FUNERAL-

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•

•

SS-nytnow.html#1 Protests: www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/ ferguson-darren-wilson-shooting-michael-browngrand-jury.html Exploring hashtags: a computer set up to explore #MikeBrown.

II. Black Poets Speak Out Archives

by Mahogany L. Browne 1. GOALS • • •

Introduce young people the history of American culture.

For young people to utilize legacy and the African American experience as learning tool.

Observe how Black History inspires our everyday lives.

2. OBJECTIVES • • •

•

Analyze meaning and craft of poetry.

Discuss the activism and art as a social vehicle for change.

Discuss and identify several literary terms, including rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, form, free verse, stream of consciousness, lyricism, and imagery Apply an in-depth understanding of lyricism, rhythm through the creation of their own work.

3. ICE BREAKER • •

View Black Poets Speak Out videos.

Each student will receive a word upon entering the room. When the video is over they will congregate themselves into a comprehensive sentence using only the words on their index card as direction. (I AM A MAN; SHUT IT DOWN; or create a line of poetry)

4. REFLECTION: • •

If poem shared on BPSO video is a cover poem, how does it relate to now?

What poem did they create with the words they were given (similar to magnetic poetry)? Did the reading from the poet inform the mood of the poem? If they like the poem, why? If they don't like the poem, why?

5. WRITING EXERCISE: •

• •

Freedom Is - Write a poem written using only the 5 human senses to talk about Freedom. (i.e., : Freedom Taste Like, etc).

Share as many poems as time allows within the group.

What do you like about the poems shared? Warm Critique (each student offer an image or moment from the poem that resonates with them.

III. Remixing the Revolution

by Amanda Johnston A. Topics for Discussion 1. What do you imagine when you think of a revolution?

2. What does the word “remix” mean to you?

3. What historical revolutions can you think of?

4. Do you think we are currently in a revolution? If yes, how is it the same or different from other revolutions?

5. Have you heard the phrase “The revolution will not be televised?” What does that mean to you?

B. Essay Idea Research contemporary artists who have borrowed from or imitated other works of art or literature to create new work. Explore the differences and similarities between the work and the historical context.

C. Additional Activities 1. Compare poems from the Black Arts Movement to lyrics of contemporary revolutionary hip-hop songs.

What’s the same? What’s different?

“Hip-Hop” by Dead Prez - www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4jNyr6BJZuI “Every Ghetto” by Talib Kweli, 9th Wonder, Rapsody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeRp34Uol7Y 2. Read excerpts from S.O.S. – Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (edited by John H. Bracey Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst) along with excerpts from The BreakBeat Poets: New Ameri-

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can Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall).

S.O.S. - Calling All Black People: www.umass.edu/umpress/title/sos%E2%80%94calling-all-black-people The BreakBeat Poets: http://www.haymarketbooks.org/ pb/The-BreakBeat-Poets 3. Read “Incident” by Amiri Baraka and watch video edit by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. What’s different? What’s the same?

Read – “Incident” by Amiri Baraka http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171266 Watch - “Incident” by Amiri Baraka read and video edit

by Rachel Eliza Griffiths: www.blackpoetsspeakout. tumblr.com/post/104644214452/rachel-eliza-griffithsreads-incident-by-amiri 4. Read: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gilscottheron/therevolutionwillnotbetelevised.html Listen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGaoXAwl9kw What happens when music is added to the piece?

IV. Honing Political Voice in Poetry

by Amanda Johnston What makes a poem political? What's at stake when writing about (or avoiding) subjects that might be considered political? This lesson will address those questions and more by examining poems that witness with a whisper and push back with a fist. Participants will create new work that adds to the poetic political landscape.

A. Topics for Discussion 1. Why do you think people might want to censor or suppress certain poems?

2. Writers have been persecuted around the world when governments or extremists don’t approve of their work. Why then do people write political poetry?

3. What’s the difference between direct and indirect political poetry?

4. Can you think of a time when a poet or artist made a political statement?

5. Can you think of a time when an artist was censored?

6. When you write a poem, do you worry about what other people will think?

7. What’s the difference in censoring a poem and revising a poem?

B. Essay Idea

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Write an essay about the different ways poets and artists are addressing political issues in their work. Research the communities and organizations that create space for this work, such as Black Poets Speak Out and Split this Rock, and how they directly connect poetry to political actions.

a lesson plan

C. Additional Activities 1. Watch video on Huang Xiang, first writer to be provided sanctuary at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, PA. What hardships did Huang face in China? How did he come to be in the United States? www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=JKRLHuoLHpg&feature=youtu.be 2. Read: “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay and “Power” by Audre Lorde. Compare the intensity and the political relevance of each poem. How are these poems politically direct or indirect?

Read: “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2015/04/poem-of-week-ross-gay. html Read: “Power” by Audre Lorde www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240144 3. Write ekphrastic poems based on these images: a. Devin Allen's photo on the cover of Time magazine http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/africanamerican-art-communitys-response-black-lives-matter-n404261 b. Bree Newsome taking down the Confederate flag in South Caroline http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/ cpsprodpb/177F3/production/_83934269_83934188. jpg ★

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A Magic of Bags

by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan frequently-changing hairstyles, suspected Ilana immediately. ShaLondra had been DeShawn’s girlfriend in the sixth grade, and had maintained a de-facto claim over him since then, at least in her own view. She approached Ilana one afternoon, her hair pulled into thick, mile-long box braids and piled on top of her head like Janet Jackson’s in Poetic Justice. Ilana looked up as ShaLondra neared the stoop, then turned back to her cereal.

them Is and Fs and shit. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? And, anyway, how you gonna tag my mother’s house, though?”

“Do you know the bitch who’s fucking with Destino?”

ShaLondra demanded, patting at her temples.

“But damn, why you gotta be so loud?” He mumbled through a smile. “Hold on.” And he came downstairs in flip flops, socks, and basketball shorts to let her in.

He rolled a blunt, and the two spent the day writing rhymes and blowing smoke out of Ann Master’s parlor window, taking care not to disturb the masks and statues that decorated the room, or to ash on the Strohmenger & Sons piano, which was polished to an indignant shine.

When enough time had passed and DeShawn seemed high enough to have forgotten himself, Ilana turned to him and traced her fingernails between the hairs on his knee. She tilted her head to the side, pushed her chin toward him, and softened her lips for a kiss, but DeShawn jerked away.

Ilana shook her head and studied her Craklin’ Oat Bran.

“That’s some weird shit, yo,” ShaLondra said. “It’s just a bunch of random letters. What the fuck is an L or an E supposed to mean anyway?” She watched Ilana’s face for a beat. When Ilana said nothing, ShaLondra pursed her lips, pivoted on her heel and turned away, the burnt ends of her braids taking flight behind her.

Ilana knew then that she was on the right track.

The next morning, she marched to Ann Master’s house, armed with her paints and stencils. She posted herself behind a dumpster on the corner and waited for Ann to leave for work. When Ann was out of view, Ilana pulled her tools from the bag and shook a can of silver paint as vigorously as she could, its metal agitator ball rattling loud just beneath DeShawn’s bedroom window on the first floor. The window rose as though on command.

“What the fuck, Ilana?” DeShawn mumbled, his voice still gravelly with sleep. “I knew that shit was you. All

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“Oh, you live here?” Ilana said, still shaking the can. “I didn’t know. Plus, rhododendrons and azaleas don’t exactly say ‘step off.’ I halfway thought Destino 2000 was a group of kindergarten girls.” She shook the can again.

“No,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I mean, that can’t happen. You’re cool but, you know. My mother and shit… She wouldn’t… you’re not…”

He continued to stammer, beginning explanations and stopping mid-sentence, gathering his voice and trying again, but Ilana didn’t need to hear the words. The next day, she called DeShawn to tell him that it was okay, that she understood what he’d meant, and that she still

wanted to be friends.

In the following months, she established a tight liaison with DeShawn. The two skipped school together, tagging buildings and writing songs, stealing icies from the coco helado man while it was still warm and snatching knishes from the hot dog trucks in Central Park when it got cooler. By January, Ilana had succeeded in becoming his truest homie. They even had their kiss, and a few others here and there, but Ilana assured him each time that she wouldn’t mention that to anyone. Even when ShaLondra Prior gusted up to her stoop one day, a fresh weave of auburn curls floating behind her like rings in a ringtoss, and said “yo, what the fuck is up with you and D?” Ilana only stirred her cereal and said “What do you mean? We’re just peoples,” and watched ShaLondra spangle away. Ilana understood what their touching meant, she told DeShawn: nothing.

In those months, she made herself a fixture in Ann Master’s home. Ann would return from work many evenings to find Ilana and DeShawn sitting on her front steps, scrawling in their notebooks and moving their heads back and forth in synch like a pair of twin gulls. Ilana enjoyed watching Ann struggle to be pleasant with her.

It was a sweet irony, Ilana felt. The imperious restraint that made Ann hate Ilana also kept her from saying anything bad about her, at least to her face. No matter what Ilana did, Ann would greet her with the same arched eyebrows, the same squinting eyes, the same dismal lipraise that strained to pass for a smile. It was a good exercise for the woman, Ilana decided, this intense effort to smile against her will.

trainer, forcing her into a calisthenics of the spirit. She pulled strands of synthetic hair from her rainbow-colored packs and stuffed them in the crevices of Ann’s bags, tied them around the clasps of her necklaces, stuck them down into the legs of her daysheer pantyhose. She watched Ann’s smile grow stiffer and her face more flustered each time she saw her—no pain, no gain, Ilana thought. This was progress, in her book. Sometimes, DeShawn would report finding whole braids in the cupboards, where Ilana hadn’t planted anything at all. Ilana didn’t quite understand it, but she didn’t complain.

It was gratifying to watch her efforts work on Ann, but Ilana hadn’t anticipated annoying DeShawn as well. He confronted her one afternoon as they smoked blunts sitting on the fence at Edgecombe park. “For real, I wish you’d stop fucking with her. I know it’s nothing, but still. She’s an unhappy woman,” he explained, blowing smoke over the park’s stony cliff. “She’s lonely. You don’t like people, so you wouldn’t understand about loneliness.”

Ilana began to imagine herself as Ann Master’s personal

During those weeks, Ilana spent time with her dolls,

Ilana stopped going to school shortly after that conversation. It wasn’t a decision so much as it was something she observed, as though on the TV screen. She saw herself waking up day after day, the silly morning DJs on the hip-hop station bantering in her ear for only a few minutes before she turned the radio off, rolled over, and continued to sleep. With the exception of a few forays to the Crown Fried Chicken around the corner, she recused herself from the world and retreated to her room to make plans.

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and nearly no one else. DeShawn became distant, too, and soon new rumors foamed up on the whisper mill— some saying that he was dating a light-skinned girl from Stuyvesant High School, others saying that ShaLondra Prior was pregnant with his child.

Mrs. Randolph did not notice her daughter’s transition into sloth, so busy was she conducting the quiet symphony of her own life, which had become a different thing to manage now that George was gone. And the fact that Ilana had become impossible to talk to in that obnoxious teenage way didn’t help. But, one Saturday afternoon, while mopping the floors outside of Ilana’s bedroom, Mrs. Randolph decided to peek in. If she could not get to her daughter, she reasoned, just going into her room might be a start. But, taking stock, she was horrified. Her good mahogany dresser and vanity were covered in pen marks and paint stains, and smears of electric blue and green chalk clung shamelessly to her elegant salmoncolored walls. Pens and spray cans rolled lackadaisically over her antique rug, surely an injury waiting to happen to any soul brave enough to ventured up to the room in the first place.

It had been a beautiful room once, but there was so little to be admired here now. This was the thing with teenagers, she thought. Their vision was so clouded with the dramas of their lives that they failed to see the very real dangers before them—for Ilana, not just death-byspray-can, but also the long and lonely life of a woman unconcerned with keeping house. But Ilana had not always been that way—Mrs. Randolph was almost sure of that. Ilana had never been as neat as Mrs. Randolph

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would’ve liked, but as a girl she’d always used her creativity around the house to good result, decorating her bedroom room with symmetrical—if tacky—drawings of rainbows and flowers, and bringing beautifully-iced cupcakes to school whenever there was a birthday. And then there were the doll babies, which Ilana had treated with a meticulous love as a child. She had talked to them, bathed them, fixed their hair and clothes with a fastidious and thorough interest that even Mrs. Randolph had struggled to understand. And even though she’d neglected them later, she never threw them away.

Mrs. Randolph looked for the dolls, ready to admire the collection she’d amassed for Ilana, to feel the hope of those decades of floral print dresses, the years and seasons of perfect pinafores, the generations of patchwork in the oldest dolls’ blouses, passed down from her mother to her, to Ilana, maybe still. She wanted to touch the yarn hair her favorite doll, to run her fingers over its faux fur jacket, which, only by this lineage of maternal commitment had remained a floury white. It was probably only five minutes or so, but it seemed she’d searched at least an hour before it dawned on her that, in fact, the babies were gone. ★

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.

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September 20, 2015 - Margo Jefferson, Negroland, and Jason Reynolds, The Boy in the Black Suit, were two of 300+ writers who read from their work or participated as panelists at the 2015 Brooklyn Book Festival. Another great day to be a reader.

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September 12, 2015 - A little Amiri Baraka, a pinch of Arkestra, Sekou Sundiata, Parliment, Gwendolyn Brooks, mix in some bad weather... Beautiful night in Brooklyn, NY spearheaded by the ringleader and poet Thomas Sayers Ellis (2nd from left), Heroes Are Gang Leaders. Photo: Marcia E. Wilson/WideVisionPhotography

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A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE BUT A WONDERFUL THING TO INVEST IN.

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