August 3, 2016 | The Lit Issue

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Editor-in-Chief Jake Bittle Managing Editors Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger Director of Staff Management Ellie Mejia Director of Writer Development Mari Cohen Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner Education Editor Lit Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Hafsa Razi Sarah Claypoole Austin Brown Julia Aizuss Corinne Butta

Contributing Editors Joe Andrews, Eleonora Edreva, Andrew Koski,

Lewis Page, Sammie Spector, Carrie Smith Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producer Maira Khwaja Social Media Editors Sierra Cheatham, Emily Lipstein, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Jasmine Liang Layout Editors Baci Weiler Sofia Wyetzner Staff Writers: Olivia Adams, Maddie Anderson, Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Anne Li, Emiliano Burr di Mauro, Zoe Makoul, Sonia Schlesinger, Darren Wan Staff Photographers: Juliet Eldred, Finn Jubak, Alexander Pizzirani, Julie Wu Staff Illustrators: Javier Suarez, Addie Barron, Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu, Zelda Galewsky, Seonhyung Kim Editorial Interns

Gozie Nwachukwu, Kezie Nwachukwu, Bilal Othman

Webmasters Alex Mueller, Sofia Wyetzner Publisher Harry Backlund The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover art by Keara McGrawe

S ON OUR WEBSITE SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM

Visit our website for our full collection of poetry & prose

What goes into a poem? The cover of our third annual Lit Issue offers one recipe for a poem, while its contents offer recipes of several other kinds. You’ll find in these pages not just the work but what comes before it: the emotional ties and engagement with place that render these words so vivid.

From E’mon Lauren to Dan Sullivan, the original poetry that opens the issue grasps onto the warning Haki Madhubuti offers in his interview with Kevin Coval: “If you don’t know who you are, anybody can name you. And they will.” The need to name is predicated on self-knowledge; you’ll find the same instinct in poems from Brighton Park middle-schoolers and budding Young Chicago Authors. Their language does not narrow but rather breaks open the gridlines of power, intimacy, and lived experience to touch all at once. They share this generosity of knowledge with reprinted zines, which let you peer into a carefully crafted world you can hold and hear.

The interviews and features that close the issue do what journalism always should: they give access to worlds that you can step into fully. Like the other pieces, they open what it means to have written—what it takes, and where it takes you.

POETRY & PROSE

how to stay alive! at lakeshore psychiatric

a day too out south, on drowning, 75th

immanuel sodipe…4 coltrane ain’t this blue

o.a. fraser…5 black boy brown

chirskira caillouet…5 a perfect little girl

stephen english…6 where do brown boys go to die?

sarah gonzalez…7 “what’s

it like working in a gallery?”

charles daston…8 bricks in the yard (for diane latiker)

dan sullivan…8 crossing the desert

nicole bond…8 black magic

onam lansana…9 “are

there no workhouses?”

diane o’neill…9 kerry wood

jack murphy…10 speak

e’mon lauren…11 see me

sharon dukes…11

anonymous…19

peter rokowski…12 the dragon slayers

jerson valenzuela…12 to fight for family

jennifer nava…12 past tense

karina ruiz…13 poem 1: (no title)

dayana cetneno…8 water pressure

sammy ortega…14 smoke break response

charles donalson…14 sorry

melinda hernandez…14 oreo chronicles

antwon funches…15

ZINES the sick muse

sasha tycko, noah jones, jol(ene)isha w/e…16

brown

&

proud: knowing your worth

sarah gonzalez & rich gutierrez…20

FEATURES every person is a philosopher

“That’s the first thing that so many of the writers said: I’m not a writer, but I have stories.” darren wan…21 in your neighborhood

“I have no interest writing or creating things that people cannot access on some level.” sarah claypoole…23 on the block

“ Y’all can just close your eyes, okay?” maha ahmed…25 confronting evil

“The question becomes why, after fifty years, are we fighting for the same thing?” kevin coval…26 a new take on ya at the library

Super Smash Brothers competitions attract as many as thirty to fifty players. natalie friedberg…27 to be free

f.e.m.m.e.: queer theories of silence

amber sollenberger…18

“It’s a matter of faith that eventually justice is going to prevail.” anne li…28 AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

THREE POEMS BY IMMANUEL SODIPE

OUT SOUTH

On Drowning

SOUTH(side) a runaway from a bird call – a mothafuk to a Jim Crow, a side swipe and a middle finger.

Covered in a

South-South-South Side -- Kanye West (2014)

I dream me a liar.

Make me a lyric in a sorrow song.

SOUTH(side) a picnic – a run towards for potato salad and fried chicken.

SOUTH(side) the broad-shouldered boulevard

– the uncle at the picnic

who slide you few bucks in handshakes and

might slide you a High Life this time.

A “come here nephew.”

An “I don’t like this.”

A show up at next picnic no handshake.

A show up at next picnic or graduation.

Drown in my morphemes.

Metamorph me to a white aspiration: full human. full human.

And let us live beasts. Best we choke on that blood. Best we drown in the purest one. Best we cough us up a violent storm & choke. & choke. & choke. & choke. & choke. & choke.

“no one believes me.”

SOUTH(side) make life quick like – left lane on the Dan Ryan or Harold’s from 87th after marijuana.

Chicago the most like America – an industry, a North Side electric death.

A little destiny manifested as an off duty back head bullet shot unlike – Crowd goes wild – officer not guilty – salary paid by my blood taxes.

not a cleansing blood.

But rather, one to be laid on thick; on door posts, on school doors: “No lead shall come here!”

SOUTH(side) a red line and

an L train at the same time.

I dream me a bloodied thing.

the Bulls ever seen:

And learn better to live without this oxygen.

75th

Add a school closing. A teachers’ strike. And school closings.

And a “You not from here.”

And more school closings.

SOUTH(side) a baby’s cry – born in a choke hold and pockets filled with cigarettes.

A 1996 product of a mothafuk.

here’s to the cottage grove corner store newports & nachos from the king drive free bus ride to the sister talk “always be careful” here’s to her reminder: “you are a fragile on the fourth”

Immanuel Sodipe is a poet, essayist, and fried chicken enthusiast currently living in Chatham.

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¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

...your celebration is a sham... & ...We / die soon.

POETRY

Coltrane Ain’t This Blue O.A. FRASER

My friend, Rae hears voices.

She’s cool with that, like John Coltrane on a tenor sax.

What a little moonlight thorazine can do for you.

But, oh my God agoraphobia just squeals her horn off key.

“Is it catching,” she asks?

Rising from the sofa besides me, checking the cushions for who-knows-what.

“I haven’t been getting out this past month,” she moans.

Her forehead a hard brown shell ---eyes poking out like a two-headed turtle.

Staring at me.

Dusting her shoulders of imaginary agoraphobia dust.

Terror now.

“I caught it.

I think I caught it from you.”

Black Boy Brown CHIRSKIRA CAILLOUET with sky in his head dreams world without violence Multitude of ancestors cradles me to sleep when the gunshots rang like church bells The siren squealed a death knell. Circus lights approaching the madness of a chalked gingerbread man who ran away from home into the safe arms of his homies. Now his blood streams red like a river current searching for a mouth. The tin and brine captured the night air. Sunlight streams marked with dark spots warn not to cross this line.

The news crews point their camera shoot.

Witness says Keyshawn was always such a nice boy. He helped her bring in her groceries on more than one occasion. raised money to help. those in West Africa for the Ebola crisis. earned straight A’s at that all white high school. on the Northside.

Black boy brown with sky in his head dreams world without violence

O.A. Fraser is a writer living in Hyde Park; some of his current work explores mental illnesses as hidden disabilities; the constellation of anxiety disorders in general; and the experience, stigma, and quandary of agoraphobia in particular.

Chirskira Caillouet, award-winning author of Honey Licorice, captures the human experience through written and spoken word, teaches children, and cares for her family. She lives in Beverly.

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

PROSE

A Perfect Little Girl STEPHEN ENGLISH

S

he was a perfect little girl, or so she tried. Her mother always told her she had dreamed up. She decided the words were simply too big for her girl brain to understand. Besides, she’d of two daughters but her firstborn was a son. Her mother could only afford two chil- never heard of women veterinarians. dren on her husband’s factory-worker salary. SHE was born. Her second child was her On her sick days from school, which were more than the average child’s, her mother hope. Her fantasized daughter became her mother’s ears and constant companion. Folks told would bring out grandmother’s metal cookie canisters filled with hundreds of shiny buttons. the girl she was going to be a fine little wife. She swept the floor in compliance. In the time Her mind would swirl in a kaleidoscope of color as she sorted and counted the treasures and town where she grew up “feminism” was an unknown word. It for hours. Often her mother would even let her touch her own probably would have been thought to be a medical condition to be jewelry boxes filled with antique pieces, some hand-painted by her treated by a gynecologist, a male gynecologist. great-grandmother. She loved the cool texture of the orange coral She struggled to be good and thoughtful but really wanted to necklace. Most of all she loved the pearls. She held them against be pretty and soft. She was fine when her brother told her “she ran her face and slipped them around her neck. They dangled on her like a girl.” It made perfect sense. She could avoid the children’s chest, resting where she imagined her breasts would grow to fill rough games and never risk bruising her face, so important to girls her Maidenform bra. like her and Marilyn Monroe.

She loved hot baths and occasionally “borrowed” her mothShe dreamed of designing beautiful emerald satin gowns like er’s forbidden Jean Nate bubble bath. She always wanted to smell Dinah Shore might wear as she saw “the USA in her Chevrolet.” fresh, like flowers. She would soak until her fingers pruned and her She played for hours with mysterious treasures from her mother’s mother yelled her supper warnings. Annette Funicello had taught cedar hope chest in the basement. Rough grey stone walls created her that being “pretty” attracted the boys, required to “complete” her imaginary castle and the trunk filled with mildewed clothher. Sometimes there were bad boys and men in the neighborhood. ing accessorized her princess soul. Funny latex beach shoes transShe never spoke of the things they did to her. She scrubbed and formed into glass slippers. The rubber bathing cap with big floppy soaked longer, stole more Jean Nate, and waited for the lilacs to flowers magically became her coiffed hair and tiara. The cotton bloom again. flowered fifties skirt hiked under her arms billowed into her ball She baked and cooked with her mother and made her father’s gown. Her canine lady-in-waiting sat at her feet. She loved the egg salad sandwiches for his lunch break from the factory. She smell of mildew, lilacs, and the baked goods she stirred with her scrunched her nose at mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, and cereal mother. with milk. She hated the way they looked. They were all simply She adored the smell of lilacs. She envied her mother’s rectantoo gross. The feat of making egg salad was a meticulous task, congular glass bottle of lilac water that sat too high on the bathroom stantly guarding her fingers from touching the dreaded mayonshelf. It had a fancy rubber bulb and enchantingly released a cool naise. She remembered: “she was going to make a fine little wife.” mist. She was sure it must have come from Paris. She liked to Obsessed with infants, she would sit for hours watching and wake early and run alone to the backyard and walk barefoot on touching visiting babies, and grimace when her mother insisted the waking dewy grass. She loved the cool touch of spring lilacs on she go outside and play with other children. She only wanted to be her face. On more than one occasion she ate a blossom, hoping it with babies. The fascination increased as she grew. would make her beautiful on the inside. Her grandmother had told On a hectic Thanksgiving morning she fell down the narrow her beauty was only skin deep. basement stairs. The family doctor came with his weathered leathShe was Jane in her backyard jungle looking for Tarzan, er bag and diagnosed a slight concussion and prescribed total bed her furry stuffed monkey held close to her chest as she ruled the rest. I think the doctor gave her a shot of some sort, but I was too wilderness. Tommy, her twenty-pound yellow-striped alley cat, tired to remember. She slept till the next day. Her empty longing to changed to a ferocious but gentle guarding tiger. Neighbors would be a mother intensified. She would not understand the power and CHLOE LIN tell you she played for hours in the backyard. Behind the garage meaning of the fall for many years. she created a fort with lawn furniture, wooden crates, bottles and Every night she fell asleep after her Lay Me Down to Sleeps cans of grass, dandelions, and rocks. Stuffed animals and hand puppets swaddled in rags slept and family prayers. The back of her hands would be red and covered with lines of tiny smile in cardboard boxes or baskets as she prepared their individual dinners and medicines. Her imprints just below her knuckles. They were the tracks of her fingernails that tightly gripped stuffed monkey often rolled into a ball and tucked under her top as she waited for her Tarzan. and pressed her hands as she prayed hard for a baby. Every evening as her eyes closed she She could not read. Every morning she struggled in Reading Group C just before recess, pondered and whispered the same concern. “God, what should I do with this penis?” so if time ran out it didn’t really matter. Every day she was relieved she wasn’t shoved into the In my small town Lutheran Sunday school, teachers told us that when a request is made slow kids’ classroom at the far end of the hall. Her mind contorted trying to figure out a, e, i, of their God, he would give one of three responses: Yes, No, or Wait. Twenty-five years later I o, u, and sometimes y. The short and long of it all confused her. Those letters were clearly the brought my baby home, disabled and given no hope to ever read, write, or speak. The Sunday same size in her mind. She was a girl and, like all boys, her brother was smarter. She did wish School teachers were correct—my Goddess told me, “Wait.” At nearly sixty-six I will never she could read because there were rumors of women doctors in faraway places, but not her wear green satin gowns but will proudly love the fragrance of lilacs and their touch on my small midwestern town. She fantasized being able to understand. She daydreamed of being face. Sometimes in my solitude I may slip on my mother’s pearls. Like all men regardless of a veterinarian. She could heal and care for the animals like she did in Tarzan’s hut. She gave their gender identity, I will continually wonder, “God, what should I do with this penis?”

Stephen English is an LBGTQ essayist and humorist. He began Words By Friends in Beverly, where he resides with his husband and animal menagerie.

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POETRY

Crossing the Desert

Bricks in the Yard

ROBERT HARRIS

ROBERT HARRIS

Where Do Brown Boys Go to Die? SARAH GONZALEZ

where do brown boys go to die? when you bury a homie where do you bury the fury the nagging indignation where is the space on the altar for the howling of day old bones! i do not know but i know i want you to see your ancestors dancing between the letters of your last name to not hide its syllables and accents slathered and slaughtered by north american tongue. i know the war waged on

i want you to find your grandmother in the shades of your brown skin to not hide from your brown skin i want you to hold the softness of your mother or any other brown woman who speaks your name gently . with our mouths wrap your stories around our heart. no more need for sign language. our love has no color scheme. no hand signs. no bird calls. i want you to look at other brown bodies and see a mirror reflecting your heart beating to seek healing instead of vengeance when brown boys see colors and their pain paints

the barrel of their gun on 21st street & Wood would you please see the planets that orbit your insides the planets named after boys buried by their brown mothers it was never supposed to be this way the games we play as children toting toy guns cops & robbers we are robbing our humanity when we sink our broken teeth into brown flesh of boys who look for fathers on street corners caressed by rotting flesh in this fragmented rainbow of colors that bursts bullets that always find their way

to our hearts. so where do brown boys go to die? what does heaven look like for those of us who come from South side cook outs & our grandparents sipping micheladas under moonlight. what if heaven has shimmering low riders that bounce to cumbia! what if heaven has tented garages with house parties where it’s just too fresh for there to be alcoholism. what if heaven holds every father who gets a second chance at being a father. what if the fathers who told you that you wasn’t nothing get a chance to welcome in their new sons at the gates serve them Carne Asada as they walk in I can only Hope.

See page 21 for author’s bio.

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

“What’s it Like Bricks in the Yard (For Working in a Gallery?” Diane Latiker) CHARLES DASTON

DAN SULLIVAN

One day a father walks in with his very young son.

Paintings become quizzes of shapes and colors and things— What’s that?

A red stripe. A mango. A pink square— the boy turns a sudden right and sees Rothko’s No. 2: two fields of color, one purple, one red, on a gold ground.

A purple rectangle! he says without prompting.

and the mayor says Instead of jobs, health facilities, trauma centers and schools, let’s invest in the National Guard. We’ll reallocate funds and lock down the blocks that are most affected.

When Blaire Hope was shot on the bus everybody wanted to meet, march and rally. It wasn’t working for the young people. That’s where it started. He was the first.

He was 16 and he was the first. and the sergeant says They get them at the gun shows in Indiana. ATF is doing everything they can but until Congress regulates, it all rolls downhill.

With all due respect to you, Ma’am, this neighborhood is downhill.

When I was young I dragged my father to the front of airplanes to see the little round window and we would look out at the sky so little and round like the enamel charms on your bracelet.

You showed me all of them that day— Your hometown. Your father. Your rosary of Joan— It was the first time I wanted to kiss your hand.

The father puts on his son’s mittens and they bow their heads to the Chicago cold.

I am left watching Rothko’s No. 2: a purple rectangle walled off from rusted drainpipes and the grayish waves of melting snow.

Her memorial is a stack of stolen breath.

There are stories behind each one of the stones.

They are built to remember. Last year, it was 374 bricks.

Then she ran out of space in the yard. She’s trying.

Charles Daston is a fourth year at the University of Chicago majoring in English, and works as a docent at the Smart Museum of Art. He grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Crossing the Desert NICOLE BOND

Sunlight shines through the window on her plastic Aldi bag …facing front…moving forward…traveling backwards into canned quicksand.

Behind her stands a man at the door …his plastic Save-a-Lot bags on the floor, parked between black-laced Nikes.

Sitting across from them both, I got a plastic bag too …mine more upscale, got upsaled, no drawstring.

Black and white pictured for all to see Santa Maria della Pace.

Roman church where no man is a treasure island …roamin’ streets filling seats

Riding back to the desert 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and the neighbor says That girl Just another one. I know she was somebody’s daughter. She was somebody’s Lil Snoop too. Ain’t no stones in Tookaville. That bean downtown to me look like a silver bullet and here you can get a gun easy as a pack of gum.

She is keeping count and trying to find space for 470 more.

Each brick has a name. It is written in hard ink after every fallen child. Their names cover us like hydrant water in August, taken from the city’s earth and stretched red and warm across the avenue.

Where no food is grown; no food is sold.

‘Cept day old doughnuts and double D cups from behind bullet proof glass Inside the same place you can buy gas.

Nourishment goes: Flamin’ hot Cheetos extinguished by turquoise waters Syrupy sweet inside toxic plastic bottles.

Tossed by the wayside Waist size gianormus Hail damaged asses sausage cased into spandex and lace Spilling onto two and a half priority seats Morbidly obese Yet horribly malnourished Diabetes is a peace treaty for population control Survival of the fittest. Don’t you see this?

He’ll get a kidney.

You’ll get dialysis.

On this bus All of us

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

Dan “Sully” Sullivan is a Chicago native and an MFA candidate at Indiana University. His book, The Blue Line Home, is available on EM Press.

Some get apples.

Others get the serpent.

Nicole Bond is a writer and performance poet who is pleased to have her voice included again in the South Side Weekly Lit Issue.

POETRY

“Are There No Workhouses?”

DIANE O’NEILL

Chicago 1972

Frosty glares burn my back

Dominick’s checkout line

Grocery cart proclaimed guilty:

Food stamps don’t cover

My grandmother’s herring Let them eat bread and water

Whole wheat only

Never cinnamon raisin

Tuna, not herring

Better be generic How dare she

I work hard so hard so hard Not fair!

ANA MORALES

Black Magic ONAM LANSANA

“Trayvon Martin armed himself with the concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman’s head,”

— Mark O’Mara, George Zimmerman’s Defense Attorney concrete: death bed. morgue. casket. ammunition. black magic is being able to turn anything into a weapon. black magic kill you with, arizona iced tea. skittles. air. toy guns. your cells. cars. the concrete trayvon killed was on. everything: gun or dagger in hands of a nigger. don’t matter what we hold.

The jar, fish in white sauce Imported from somewhere Gran’s Donegal girlhood Laughter with other maids The remembering worth empty end-of-month refrigerator Remembering

Before she crossed the ocean, came here

Then her husband drowned

Working Belmont Harbor docks

Height of Great Depression, four toddlers,

Scrubbing floors, cursing fate Now old

Social Security pittance

And food stamps That don’t cover luxuries Like herring Or essentials Like toilet paper Chicago 1972

I pull out dollars

Not stapled booklet of stamps

Contemplate quitting high school

Working McDonald’s, anywhere

Escape, run grocery gauntlet

Dodge darts of scalding scorn

Diane O’Neill is a lifelong Chicagoan whose career has focused on creative writing and disability rights; she holds degrees from National University and Columbia College and has had essays and poems published, including some in the South Side Weekly.

Onam Lansana is a high school poet who is a co-captain of the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. Rebirth is the number fourranked poetry team in the world. He is a Louder Than A Bomb Team Champion, a Louder Than A Bomb Indy finalist, and a Louder Than A Bomb Chuck D award winner. His work focuses on social issues in today’s society.

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

PROSE

Kerry Wood JACK MURPHY

1.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, a National League record, the second man to strike out his age, I thought for sure I would love baseball forever. From then on, I wanted pitchers to destroy sluggers like Sosa, a man I once believed capable of hitting a ball deep into Lake Michigan some 5,000 feet away.

Pitchers hated batters, I figured, and batters feared pitchers.

And so I preferred Wood, got his jersey for my birthday, learned to throw pitches with a wiffle ball that moved like his, though my father warned my elbow would explode, as Kerry’s did not long after.

But truth be told, some years went by when I did not love baseball. I realize now it’s when I got a car—when I lost the capacity to wait: for my mother to get home from work to drive me to karate class, to sit through Biology and Algebra before I could eat my lunch, to stand on the platform for the Red or Brown Line, whichever came first.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, I was watching with my grammie, who was babysitting us like usual. I came home from school in the 5th inning; she greeted us at the door in excitement wearing her white converse wrapped with red baseball stitching. I ran to the television still wearing my backpack and forgot to take it off for an inning and a half. The bricks were closer to home plate at Wrigley then, and there weren’t any ads. Mark Grace still played first base. The ivy was, of course, brown, so early in the year. It was cold that day. The stands were mostly empty, until about the 7th when suddenly fans appeared—I like to imagine them running down Clark to get to the stadium before it was too late.

2.

Lately I’ve been riding the bus again, and lately I’ve been watching baseball. I like myself better when I like to watch baseball, or maybe I like baseball better when I like myself. Most of watching baseball, after all, is sitting alone with yourself.

And now that I’m riding the bus again, I see it works the same way—that the Red Line, like baseball, is an individual team sport, that written and unwritten rules silently hold us all together.

I like the ambient slowness baseball imposes on my life, just as I like seeing the faces of the people on the Red Line again, to sit among and with them, not apart alone in our cars on the expressway.

Like that it’s easy to write a poem while you watch, that announcers go minutes it seems sometimes without speaking, interrupt their silence only to tell you the direction the wind is blowing. Like the players who are very, very fast or wear their socks high, who have extremely dirty batting helmets or always seem to be eating. Guys who hit a home run and run either as fast or slow as they can around the bases.

Love little kids who can imitate with a wiffle bat the batting stances of all the players perfectly, love listening to the radio broadcast while sitting in the stands, love the names of the pitches: curve, slurve, knuckle, fast.

That they sing for the 7th inning stretch twice if the game makes it to the 14th.

3.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, I called both my parents at work to tell them what was happening. I ran around the living room between pitches, like a puppy trapped in the house all day. He struck out Bagwell, who I hated, three times. Biggio, who I hated even more, he hit with a pitch, which was even better than a punch out. Derrick Bell, who I tolerated, looked to be quivering in the batter’s box; Kerry Wood was closer to my age than his. I’m not sure if that’s true. I think it must be. At least that’s how it seemed. This would be the summer I broke my arm sliding into second base.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, I think about playing shortstop in winter time.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, I walk down long hallways and imagine flicking a ball across the diamond to the other end.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, I am driving alone to Wisconsin listening intently to a playoff game as I go and can almost see the players imprinted on the supernatural darkness, until the signal grows weak, until it’s nothing more than static on the outline of evergreens.

When Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros, I find myself walking down to the park to watch the high school JV team play on chilly nights in mid-April. And I’m pleased to be reminded how much of any given game is spent shivering alone on a spot of dead frozen grass or else meticulously smoothing a spot of dirt with your cleat for fear of the dreaded Bad Hop. I’m struck by the quiet of the game, with only a handful of parents bundled in blankets watching from the metal bleachers, staring out onto the field waiting for something to happen knowing full well very little actually will. And the pitchers seem very scared, and the batters, too, and the infielders and outfielders, as well—everyone seems scared. Baseball affords plenty of time to consider one’s failure before each pitch—and baseball players fail a lot, almost all of the time, in fact.

And it feels like I’m visiting a time when all I did was wait, when it always felt like three o’clock in the very middle of summer with one out in the 5th inning and a pitching change underway. And this is, I know, because on some level I do not want to die, do not want my leg to hurt for no reason, for doctors to check my blood pressure, for my teeth to rot, for bills to come due— want the things I’m waiting for to seem wonderful and possible again not ugly and inevitable.

But I’m a tourist here, in the same way I’m a tourist on the Green Line or the bus, the type who rides for pleasure not necessity as I once did, and so after a few innings walk back up to my nice one-bedroom with all my nice things and the life I’ve created on my phone.

It was raining, when Kerry Wood struck out 20 Astros. My little league game was cancelled, but I put my uniform on anyway, threw a rubber ball against my garage in the drizzle until my fingers pruned.

The water almost ruined my glove. To this day, it smells like lilacs.

Jack Murphy lives in Chicago.

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POETRY

Speak

See Me

I got a family reunion in my mouth. Love Jones on molars. Chuuch under my tongue. Loud packs and loose squared language. Bootlegged babble. Mild saucy and slick. Quick card crackin gramma. Squad a sanctuary on my top lip. Throw the handles of my cheeks. What’s good in the hood of my mouth. The yo in my yawn. A fugase flap and flick of tongue. Southside schtick and slobbered. A candy lady’s cabinet. Bud and MC Lite/ Lyte a boombox on my beak. Suited and booted. Food and liquor leaking. Tripping on my tonsil. A1 and K47.

The rink skating on my no’s and what consent mean. My gots belong to Giovanni and Jasmine. A Different World in a Dutch Masters. Elbows off the table of my teeth. Don’t you have any manners. Melanin in the suck. Auntie pokie neck roll caught in my throat. Living Single and large on my bottom lip. Natalie Diaz in my cupid’s bow. I speak a queer language. Color coded. No code switch or swap in my mouth. I hold a rainbow coalition in my tongue. Obama Care is in my back throat. Let my mom claim the baby in my teeth for tax season. I speak sacrifice. Urban dictionary in the suburbs. Know my rights and speak them. Loud. Like my music. Like my body. I speak my body. I speak my bossy. I speak Trina and Cardi B. I speak woman runs the house. I speak field and house. I speak house. I speak Chicago. Chicagu. Chic A Go. Redline lingering lick. I speak shaa(r)p. Sharp sword. Bible translations. Revenue. I speak Avenues and Blvds. Stomping grounds when I chew. Cabrini when my mom cooks. LeClaire Courts on 26th and California. I speak free my mans. I speak free my energy. I speak in royalist. In concrete King/Queendoms.

I love my nature The Pretty in Pink in Hopscotch The tango vibe in a sister’s thrift store earrings The veins in a “I don’t know weed” through the cracked concrete

SHARON DUKES

E’MON LAUREN

I also love the Ghost of gardens past fighting their own “rumble in a backyard jungle” daring you with their thorny backside to come chopping “My ghost is free I can almost here them say” I was here before your great great greats.

You could be too if you’ll love your nature, it’s wildness, it’s vastness, it’s remembrance of barren feet sinking, into a rapturous soil of humanities bliss.

You can remember if remembering is not just a memory.

Lituanica 8

Lituanica 9

DMITRI SAMAROV

DMITRI SAMAROV

E’mon Lauren Black—E’mon Lauren. November 9, 1996. Southside Chicago.

Redline. Harold’s Chicken. Mild sauce. Early graduate. Slam poet. Louder Than a Bomb champion. ‘14. Louder Than a Bomb Indy finalist. ‘14. Brave New Voices.

‘13 & ‘14. Louder Than a Bomb College Slam champion. ‘16. Chicago’s Youth Poet Laureate. ’16. Playwright “Commando.” ‘16. Vocalist. Emcee. Teaching artist. Published artist. The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. ‘15. Performing artist. Non-binary agender. Woman. Human.

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

M

y name is Xian Franzinger Barrett and I teach the discipline of beautiful troublemaking and healing through student writing and voice to seventh and eighth graders at Brighton Park Elementary school on the Southwest side of the city. It’s the best job in the world. Middle schoolers can be some of the angriest human beings in the universe, but when they are affirmed and supported to turn that power toward justice, what results is earth-shattering.

It’s been a hard summer. We are expecting a beautiful tiny activist to join our family in October. Thanks to our city and state leadership’s corruption and oppressive governance, it appears that my position will be cut and this program that the students and I

A day too

PETER ROKOWSKI (8TH GRADE) Going back outside, Getting my bike Making sure everything is intact Going for a cruise Staying quiet Hearing the clicks on my bike chain After a while I made it to the park As i arrive People stare at me They look into my soul But then, i hear screaming Gangbangers come running around the corner Chasing me Yelling and screaming Throwing up signs I am going as fast as i can go Breathing hard But then The yelling stops I want to turn around But i don’t want to stop After the crazy chase I made it home I hurry to my bedroom Close the door And lie on my bed Thinking of what would have happened Asking myself All these questions I stand up Open my door Look out the window I see nothing I went back to check on my bike I pick it up I noticed a scratch I go to spray paint over it But i doublethink about it So i grab so sand papers I sand down my bike to chrome I respray it Trying to forget my day.

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

have built together will be dismantled (for the third time in six years).

I often tell my students, “Read everything you can and cultivate your voice as if our lives depend on it.”

Our lives do depend on it.

They will keep killing folks in our communities until we take the power away from them, forever.

So these students write. And I believe their writing, our love, our struggle will save the world.

As you lovingly read their work, I suspect that you will come to believe the same.

T hese poems were all written by seventh and eighth grade students in a writing program at Brighton Park Elementary School, a neighborhood school on the Southwest Side. They were compiled for publication by Xian Barrett, a teacher at BPES who led his students in nontraditional writing classes that focused on expressions of trauma, identity, and community. The poems printed here are just a few examples of the students’ work; a larger portfolio, to be updated throughout the summer, will be available on southsideweekly.com.

The Dragon Slayers

To Fight for Family

D

I grew up without a father, meaning my mother raised me and my siblings, we all went to Brighton Park considering that I live literally right in front of Brighton.

JERSON VALENZUELA (8TH GRADE)

ragons take over Chicago, burn down hundred of civilians’ houses. “Saturday night around 8:00 pm and I walk outside, I looked to the left and I see so much smoke coming from a couple blocks down. They had destroyed Cabrini Green” - said a Chicago citizen. (ID is being kept private to protect the innocent. Dragons do not like the voices of the innocent.) The damage the city is taking is outrageous, the dragons will address this at press conference today.

A

t the press conference, the Dragons said they tore down houses to build “better” ones. They said they only close schools because there was not enough money. But in reality they’re the ones who steal the money.

The Major Dragon said he just wants to work with the city and make it great again, but he’s the one destroying the city.

Dragons killed 17 year old Laquan McDonald by shooting him 16 times and covered it up for a year! But then we fought back together as a city and we got a few dragons captured or banished. But more come back in their place.

Another Dragon steals money from Chicago Public School and uses it for other companies. We pushed! We protested!

And now she’s gone!! But that’s not it. The Major Dragon covers up killings and then pretends to care about what we feel!!

Our Community of Color has faced and feared this for too long and now the day has come for us to be Dragon Slayers. Why don’t we take them down? Because dragons only attack when no one is looking. But we are learning to see.

We’re learning to smell their stench. We NEED an action now!!!! We are uniting to take these dragons out. We don’t want more of us losing shelter. We need our schools. We will protest and we will fight in a non-violent way until we get what we want.

We must raise a shout, “The Major Dragon must go along with all of his companions!! We are losing freedom!

We are losing power! We are losing our city! Demands must be made! The Major Dragon and his companions must go!

Our schools must get back all the money that they stole!

Our whole city of Chicago should be blanketed with the feel of freedom. We have power and we will we have our City back!”

Are you a Dragon Slayer?

JENNIFER NAVA

Some of the teachers that taught my brother who is now twenty­-one are still at Brighton to this day.

I consider Brighton Park my second home, and everyone there is my family, even if we do disagree with things.

I am who I am today because of the people there, Mr. Dollear, my pre-K teacher taught me that sometimes the best medicine for a bad day with a horrible joke and a smile.

Ms. Zupansic, my fifth grade teacher taught me to keep trying no matter how many times you fail.

Mr. Vazquez, my sixth, seventh, and one of my eighth grade teachers now, showed me that the corruption in this world can be fought against if we join together.

And Mr. Barrett, my seventh and now eighth grade teacher gave me the chance to fight for what I believe in.

All of these amazing and brilliant people have changed my life in so many ways and I’m sure that statement can be said for all of you here about your teachers.

And now, our schools, our second home, will lose some of its family members because of the greed in this world.

It’s up to us to fight for what we deserve and believe in. I stand here to ask you, as a fellow student and human being, to stand together and fight back, to keep all these amazing people in our family.

Not only for ourselves, but for everyone that will be affected by this cut. Remember, no obstacle is too big to overcome.

BRIGHTON PARK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Past Tense

Poem 1: (no title)

I used to live in a house on a corner And look outside the windows I used to ride my bike in the spring And scrape my knees I used to like the holidays And build snowmen in the winter I used to laugh and play And like the things that stayed I used to like the yellow hummer down the street And look amazed at the way the engine growled I used to like pink and wear a daffodil dress And look twice at the boys who wore ties

At sundown Curfews call for the youth at brink of extinction--Home Streets vacant, a drunk man howls a song or desire, sorrow and regret, filling the sober streets with echoes of melancholy gibberish.

But now that everything’s changed I no longer think nor function that way I no longer live in the house on the corner of that street So I can’t look out the windows It’s no longer safe to ride my bike in the spring But at least now I can’t scrape my knees And it seems like the holidays have lost their meanings So it no longer feels right to build snowmen in the winter I don’t laugh and play And no longer like things that stay That yellow hummer no longer passes by And the engine now collects dust I don’t wear pink and that daffodil dress is a mere memory Nor do I look twice at the boys who wear ties

The stench of wood offends my nostrils, strikes at my brain.

I head out after the signal is omitted I exit out the door and leave behind a day’s worth of tedium-at the restaurant.

KARINA RUIZ (8TH GRADE)

Now I live in the middle of a not so nice street In a house that’s not mine and a street that does not matter There are no windows and the smoke outside clogs my lungs Bikes no longer interest me neither does the spring or scraping my knees As the years go on the things I get for the holidays don’t come close to the feeling Of the cold on my cheeks and the laughter that accompanied the three large balls of snow It’s been long since I’ve felt happy which makes it impossible to laugh or play Nothing seems to stay so I’ve come to terms with things that go away I don’t know what has become of that yellow hummer But I hope some day to see that engine roar to life again I wear the color of sorrow and pain and regret and everything unhappy And boys who wear ties always seem to be the type to play with me So I’ll stay away from them and everyone So hopefully someday I can be that little girl with the daffodil dress again

DAYANA CETNENO (8TH GRADE)

Lights flashing and blinking, damaging my eyesight as no one turns their heads.

Fragile things we are, yet, prone to what night terrors could produce so we look away without second thought.

A clock makes a swift notion, 11 at night and I still do worry, what entities lurk at night.

11 o’clock and I keep silent because god forbid I get jumped.

God forbid I run into fate and tragedy, holding hands at the corner So I fear A dry spring morning, Cracked lips, And bad humor I walk to school, Tardy slips I turn to shreds, And mourn over a restless night Full of worry And headaches Guilt overcomes my confidence A victor in my constant battle So I fear Late again Time is a treadmill, I stumble upon it Pacing, Last night’s homework Last week’s homework Graphite marks go untouched and I live with a burden that will hold me down Like a psychic before their own demise Before the loss of a soul I fear the end of the street I walk on.

So I fear.

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

W

rite To The City is Young Chicago Authors’ annual summer writing camp for poets, activists, and aspiring educators. Participants step up their craft through hip-hop poetics, the tradition(s) of Chicago realist working class portraiture, and contemporary art practices. Led by Jamila Woods, Kevin Coval, Safia Elhillo, and Nate Marshall, Write To The City challenges ideas about what art is, how it’s made, and by whom.

Water Pressure

Smoke Break Response

Sorry

On a 90+ degree day the sun decides to tie its shoe gangbangers out again They pack a tool when the sun is out They open fire hydrants For children to run into streets pushed to curve By water pressure XL basketball shorts falling Midway ass cheek Gangway filas become sponge The law is upset

(After Chance The Rapper)

(After Angel Nafis’ poem Gravity)

I am the seed of, Of a lynching tree, A child of genocide, They’ve crushed me, Since I was big enough, We don’t got no time, To go, I don’t got no time to breathe, I was catapulted, Into a war drafted, On my birthday with a bullet in my behind to make sure I’m still breathing, Haven’t found drugs on my body yet, They still have reason to, Kill police ain’t saving no, Niggas killed my brothers and said my mama was, The trigger far from rope but you got me, lifted at least, I am the son of gang, Violence the nephew of police, Brutality the grandson of the white man who funded it all.

Pea You are dwelling in the past. Things like this happen all the time. So what? Yeah. 3 months. I do have feelings for your brother. I. Wasn’t.

Using. You. Why was I in his bed? Comfort. Sleep. Depression. Forgive me.

SAMMY ORTEGA PHOENIX MILITARY ACADEMY

Gangbangers open fire Never mention the hydrants Never mention The day where Most of us are safe From fire

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

CHARLES DONALSON (AGE 17) OAK PARK RIVER FOREST HIGH SCHOOL

MELINDA HERNANDEZ (AGE 18) PRITZKER COLLEGE PREP

But you are using me. I feel neglected. I feel hurt that you feel betrayed.

It’s been a year. Are you really gonna throw out 8 years for a 3 month affair?

And You don’t understand. I didn’t cheat. I was going through things. Sex? It wasn’t ever about sex! Do you feel better? It’s been a year. Forgive me. We shouldn’t have ever dated.

I still love— I still love— Love hold still in my eye without you.

Can you really not forgive me?

Princess I crush peas in sets of 3, or in this case 2, with my body. My limbs stretch to the vertices of my mattress as I spread my emotions thin. Then I remember, 10 mammals each jumped off the bed before they all hit rock bottom. I curl my knees into my chest and even squeeze my toes to conceal my heart. Call me selfish. Once in a blue moon I’ll forgive to mend bridges. For now, I forgive to sleep well at night. I forgive for me. Forgive me for not foregoing life without a pea the size of a gulf ball. I crush them in sets of.

3. Little pigs wander for a house. I am pork and wolf of my own hay. I am oink and growl of my own body. I am sorry to be so ironically unforgiving and in the same wolf hush I am relentless in leaving you for me. “A dollar I once had had a dream of a buck fifty.” Even the money would leave me for the money. Sleep.

Golden. Pea. Pink. Princess. Thrown. Own. 3 little monkeys jumping in the bed.

2 fell off and hit their head.

1 little monkey still in the bed.

Monkey got my princess head.

YOUNG CHICAGO AUTHORS

Oreo Chronicles ANTWON FUNCHES SIMEON CAREER ACADEMY

Broken record writing that both Percussions privileged eardrums and convinced my community, “I AM ONE OF YOU!” The snare ranges from a whip, to a baton, to a gavel.

My writing looks like: Bullet points on police brutality, Black death, Forever 21 appropriates dashiki, black theft.

“You people always play the race card!” Black deck.

“You don’t know how to bop?” black test

I don’t like parties.

The speaker’s bass vibrates with enough force to flick everyone’s turn up switch.

Hips crave concussive content Friends mad dash to dance floor, and take positions, Move like a tribe asking the skies for rain, And to grant their suppliants, their pours perspire Bursting beads of sweat unthread fros, and dreads Leave the room as humid as the Congo rainforest.

Perfect climate for them to bloom, but I lie dormant.

Dance floor too barren for a wallflower to germinate.

So this tree trunk body buries itself at a chair, table, or against the wall, Vines gripping the party’s perimeters, rooting myself in a comfort zone.

Their stems move so gently in the breeze of the bass.

Ease and grace.

Any time I tried to move that way, I was reminded of my rhythm’s absence.

Too much equilibrium to Wobble.

Too dishonest for Shakira’s hips Too nonviolent to hit Quan, Nay Nay, or Folks.

Black chef, This mind is an acidic witch’s brew Cooking up the comments, content, and coffins That often clog up my cauldron.

My Ebonics is a stallion turned seed.

Branding iron burned away double negatives till not none left.

Domesticated by the stage, and “Boy, yo ass better enunciate.”

Now these commissioners think I’m a show pony.

A racing stripe all the whites bet on.

They love when my poems about oppression, police, poverty, or poplar trees.

Proof of affirmative action’s affirmation Love when I spit that ABC, CNN, CBS, murdered in front of a CVS. Five o’ clock, five white glocks cocked at a black boy’s thoughts.

Don’t shoot the messenger, the tribune keeps giving me Afrocentric Ammunition to buckshot bullet riddled writtens.

Blame the television.

Blame my English teacher preferring Virginia Woolf over bell hooks.

Blame block boys for turning bus terminal into territory for temper tantrum.

My stem is too stagnant, My roots too absent.

Their happiness organic, I am genetically modified.

My tongue, all adapted; adopted, redhead Black sheep amongst a herd of clouds.

Still bound by comma placement, proper punctuation, future English major Articulate achievement, Subject Verb agreement, I stopped using contraction, Formal essay pattern.

Speak like Times new roman Anglo, English, Roman 12 point, double space to make room for my classroom criticism Header to the right Indent or indentured.

Confusion incarnated into a carnation.

Petals prove same pigment, but the other crops know I don’t belong.

I don’t share my people’s pollen

This tongue ain’t free!

A shackle round the uvula to ensure I don’t gag when pride is swallowed.

Full of the ancestor’s knowledge, but peers deem me hollow

Always seemed a bit Anglo From the food on my table To shows on my cable From juke jams to common conversations.

My mom says I need to binge watch BET. My aunt is waiting for me to bring home a white blonde.

My hood thinks me Uncle Tom.

“Every black person knows this dance!”

And there it is!

Proof that there is an error In the ones and zeroes of my genetic coding!

Excommunicated grandma groping Holy Ghost.

BET inside jokes are something I’ve never known.

Only time I mention soul food is to make poems more soulful.

The key ingredient to impressing an audience who doubts my authenticity.

Coping with audience thinking me Oreo Until oppression poems make me oracle.

Everyone asking for my mouth’s melanin, And name dropping Assata, Huey, or Malcolm in poems hasn’t aided the search party.

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

• Asphalt

The Sick Muse Excerpts from Issue 2

SASHA TYCKO, NOAH JONES, JOL(ENE)ISHA W/E

LYRICS So Blueprint do you feel that to rhyme is divine?

Inkwel that might as well be embedded in my mind Because nothing on Earth shines brighter than tight rhymes So to answer your question I feel to rhyme is divine

-Greenhouse Effect

The Sick Muse was first imagined as a platform to present lyrics by Chicago bands. When put to song, even just one word may take on the emotional saliency of a novel, transmitting experience at unfathomable speeds with improbable densities. At a show, the words usually come through in shadowy waves. Through reverb, feedback, overworked PAs, shouts, dancing bodies etc. some words jump out of the dark: “shoelace” “lilt” “gash” “falling without motion” … no matter what those words will begin to coalesce from a sound into a feeling— anguish, ecstasy, fury, protest, love you got, love you don’t got…

Here we put lyrics down in the piercing silence of print, and there they kinda dance around naked on the page, mingling with a new crowd of colors and lines, and see what kind of new ideas and experiences come out of them.

Pick apart a lighting bug and still see if it will take to the sky or not.

Every time I close my eyes, take it away, all I see is gray.

All I see, is gray. Brown, black, and gray and red on asphalt.

Even with my hands held high to the sky I still get no reprieve.

I cant, breathe...

I watched the tape today I watched the tape today I heard the breath the moment it left their chest The Bland The Brown The Gray The bodies lay The brain escapes My pocket glows The same mistakes The process shows Who we forsake The pavement knows able to take the construct of relationship and I use it to express Its favorite taste my it own encountering with other things. Like take the song 3am; Lets face : melanin that songs takes the idea and plays with it on different levels. the single drop connection causemyitsrelationship relevant and A part of that song is about withprevalent my spirituality, so don’t forget complexion cause evidence negligence how the time between 3am andits4am I alwaysoffind myself doing to edify the deep victims ofsearching an age old malevolence some soul bullshit.

My sophomore year of college, months I had broken up with that still affectsfirst thesemester, nature ofa few a culture inafter development my ex (who “For Joshua” is about) were a series of we build a broken system on the backsand of there our brethren events that had happened... with deaths in my family, racism that’s prejudiced and threatened by intelligence that I experienced, homophobia that I experienced -- things that sees as and impediments toI etiquette thatbrown had justbodies piled up, I remember had a handle of svedka a social in And the regiment andafterbirth it was justthat onethrows of thosestatic nights. before I knew it I was We pledge allegiance to handle a antiquated setwas a testaments halfway through this and there broken glass, there werethe cuts all over my body, blood in my bed. A friend found me, that vilify dead especially three fifths a specimen it wasthree probably of the lowest moments of my life, and I was Especially fifthsone a specimen, lamenting the love I had had with this person that I sacrificed No way to hide the asphalt teaches lessons kid. because I wasn’t ready. Because of the religion I had grown up

THE SICK MUSE featuring KID MADE MODERN

upee

Art &

with had told me that it wasn’t okay, the communities that I had grown up in on the Southside of Chicago told me that it wasn’t okay. I just wasn’t secure enough in my sexuality and spirituality All I to see, is gray.

Brown, black,toand gray and recognize that rhetoric as harmful myself.

On a lot of red on asphalt. levels our song 3AM is about that point in my life, its about my relationship with my family, my relationship with religion, and detrimental relationship I hadto with alcohol drugs Eventhe with my hands heldthat high the sky and I still getforno reprieve. most of college experience. It was my relationship with all these toxic things that I had to let go of. And that’s one of the ways that I re-imagine things. We have very real, active relationships I CANT, BREATHE... with things that are not people, that are not human... they manifest in these objects and they are our demons. That’s what 3am is about.

MYKELE: I really love what he [Madison] is saying because I’m sitting here and I’m listening to some of the stuff he’s saying and I never even known some of this stuff and that’s the cool thing about KMM is that we find things that are very germane to each other that can vibe on the same song, but we have two different vantage points. We try to get it so close to each other lyrically and storytelling wise that it seems like the same subject matter, but we are completely different artists. The beautiful things about the band is we don’t all have to be writing about the exact same thing, about this umbrella term. We can find things very akin in our own writing and show human element in that That to me is reimagining the world, but like in the way we find the similarities as a vantage point in, and also the differences too. Wherever you find the differences, like I go up and he goes down you know what I mean?

MADISON: Yeah here is inherent dissonance that is in our music MYKELE: Even the time measure changes in 3am from when Madison is singing it and then he changes the whole thing when I have to start rapping because it’s a completely different form.

MADISON: And its great because it keeps us on our toes and there is a lot of room for organic discoveries

13

28

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

ZINES

T

he Sick Muse is a (sort of ) monthly zine by and for DIY (“do it yourself ”) artists and musicians in Chicago. The Sick Muse makes accessible the lyrics that are often lost to overworked PAs and noisy crowds, and gets inside the minds of Chicago’s creators. The Sick Muse is a community organizing project, a forum for intentional communication and reflection.

Based on submissions, The Sick Muse prints lyrics, essays, interviews, poems, photography, collages, etc. about music, art, Chicago, DIY, community, and whatever else people have to speak on. We are always accepting submissions, questions, and thoughts at sickmuse.chi@gmail.com. The next issue of The Sick Muse will be released on August 6 at Hostel Earphoria. Their manifesto is as follows:

I’m back at home, rushing, eating too fast, listening to David Bowie, my brother is talking to me, I feel abused by him, a lot is happening, too much for me to swallow, I have to get to the sexual violence townhall, and then… the organizer of the townhall makes a status, listing David Bowie with Bill Cosby and R. Kelly

FOR ALL TO CHURN THE SHIT OF REALITY INTO BUTTER! TO FEED INTO THE MINDS! A SICK MUSE WITHIN, WITHOUT. WE HAVE EXPERIENCED THE AWESOME CREATIVITY OF CHI DIY MUSIC, BUT WHAT ABOUT ITS WORDS, THEORIES, AND POETRY; ITS POLITICS, ART, AND EROS; ITS MIDNIGHT LAMP; ITS MUSE? THESE ARE THAT WHICH WE WISH TO ADDRESS, “NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER.”

I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar I am dizzy somewhere a thinkpiece, I have to go

why are you attacking me

something happened on the day he died somebody else took his place and bravely cried

Below, find pages from Issue 2 of The Sick Muse, featuring lyrics from local music collective Kid Made Modern and an excerpt of an essay called “Sexual Violence Everywhere, or what i learned the day after david bowie died” by South Side rapper and educator + (pronounced “plus sign”).

I walk into the townhall, I am wearing the glitter tears I have been wearing all day for Bowie’s death. A white man talks a few times, “not trying to be insensitive” starts one phrase why are you attacking me I feel the air leave the room when he talks, then he is a victim, then “i’m going to play devil’s advocate” why are you attacking me

It’s over, so many friends, warm hearts, good thoughts, exchanging emails, my friend says something about de-friending people who she’s disappointed in for all their David Bowie shit, she is smirking, he is a “pedophile” and a “Nazi sympathizer”

Every time he speaks, and someone is politely but obviously reacting with the microphone, we don’t have time for your shit, white man, don’t have the emotional capacity. 8 of 10 women, less than one percent,

why are you attacking me!

I am speaking, about support for survivors and perpetrators, utilizing the community, the perpetrator’s friends and mentors, and transformation, the perpetrators must be cared for it is good but I am hot, and what are they doing maybe I am saying the wrong thing, or it the wrong way, I am attacking everyone I am sure of it, I came here to do the work, and I instead I am a fool, I knew it, I know it, it’s my fault we don’t have time for this.

I laugh and make an excuse, my joy is gone but I am still smiling/smirking back. Lazarus has died twice in one day, and I am dying too. The organizer of the townhall says my glitter makes her so happy!

Diamonds in my eyes, I’m a blackstar, I’m blackstar, something happened on the day he died Hypocrites, you know how to examine the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to examine this particular time? Why do you not judge also for yourselves what is righteous?

25

For example, when you are going with your legal opponent to a ruler, while on the way, get to work to settle the dispute with him so that he may not summon you before the judge, and the judge deliver you to the court officer, and the court officer throw you into prison.

‘There is nothing wrong,’ I say slowly to the floor. ‘I’m in here.’

I’m raised by the crutches of my underarms, shaken towardwhat he must see as calm by a purple-faced Director: ‘Get a grip, son!’ DeLint at the big man’s arm: ‘Stop it!’

‘I am not what you see and hear.’

Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking.

‘I’m not,’ I say.

26 AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

F.E.M.M.E.

Excerpts from Volume 1, Issue 3: Queer Theories of Silence AMBER SOLLENBERGER

F.

E.M.M.E. is named for an imaginary group of radical feminists called the Federation of Enthusiastic Misandrists & Miscellaneous Emasculators; I’ve been making a series of zines under the F.E.M.M.E. banner since 2011. Each issue has a loose theme that emerges as I am putting it together, and while each issue varies a bit tonally, stylistically, or both, F.E.M.M.E. generally features writing and images on queer identity-making.

Below, find excerpted pages from F.E.M.M.E. Volume 1, Issue 3: Queer Theories of Silence. Most of this issue considers the benefits of choosing an articulate/ legible identity, versus occupying a more ambiguous or unnamed category—visual art and the language of theory undergird these questions. These questions were almost certainly inspired by the fact that I was in my first queer relationship at the time.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

Amber Sollenberger has been living and making in Chicago since she moved here to attend college five years ago. When she’s not working as a reproductive health assistant at a local Planned Parenthood clinic, she’s¬ reading about medicine and public health or urban planning.

Many of her zines aim to explore these topics as they relate gender, sexuality, class, and racial politics.

She also loves pigeons.

How to Stay Alive!

At Lakeshore Psychiatric ANONYMOUS

T

here has been a huge need in the UofC and greater South Side community for this guide.

It brings together in one document all of the existing policies, protocols, and resources that those who have been admitted to Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital have at their disposal, to determine their care and fight for what they want and need. Before it, this information was scattered in many different sources, or else actively hidden by state health officials and university/ hospital administrators who are all caught up in a system in which liability (understood as threat to profit) is more important than providing meaningful care.

ZINES This zine was designed to let all of us access the care we need to stay alive in a system that too often excludes our specific wants and needs. What’s brilliant about it, though, is its form.

Part bullet-list instructions, part fill-in-the blanks, this zine is twenty-eight pages of questions.

Ranging from the pragmatic issues (“Who is going to pay for my mental health?”) to the more intimate (“Who do I want involved in my care? Is where I’m living a place I feel supported, safe, and comfortable in?”), it asks you to define your own mental health, and shows you the tools for getting what you need for your care.

Too often we fail to realize that even though we may not “identify” fully with a thing, that doesn’t mean that thing’s not accessible to us—making your cupcakes vegan just means more people can eat them. This zine is a reminder that crisis can strike anybody, any time, no matter how privileged or how educated. It reminds us too that determining your relationship to your mental health is a process that requires a lot of energy, a lot of dialogue, and a lot of questions. (It also sometimes requires going to the hospital.) (Alex Relihan) The following four pages are only excerpts from the zine, which can be found in full at bit.ly/2aBv8IA. You can also email alexbuckrelihan@gmail.com for a PDF.

DAY 1 YOU FIND OUT YOUR FRIEND HAS BEEN ADMITTED

STAY ALIVE!

Call LS at 773-878-9700 and ask to speak to your friend. Legally, LS is not allowed to tell you if your friend is a patient, but they can let them know that you called and ask them if they would like to call back. On each floor of LS there are only 2 phones for all of the patients, so it may take them a little while to get back to you - this doesn't necessarily mean they are upset with you. If you do not hear back within a few hours call again... sometimes people will miss the message that you called.

SUGGESTIONS TELL YOUR FRIEND TO SIGN A 5-DAY What floor are they on?

Do they want visitors? If so, who?

When are visiting hours?

Does the University know that they have been admitted?

Is there anyone (family/friends) they need the contact information for, or they want you to get in touch with?

FIVE DAY RELEASE FORM If you voluntarily commit yourself you are entitled to leave the hospital 5 days (excluding weekends and holidays) after you arrive.

HOWEVER, in order to do this, you have to sign a 5 day release form.

You will have to ASK for this form because it will not be handed to you otherwise. Like everything in the hospital, ADVOCATE FOR YOURSELF and ASK ASK ASK until you are able to sign a 5 DAY. You should try to do this on the first or second day you are there!

This means that if you feel like leaving the hospital after 5 days (and you have an aftercare plan set up for yourself) you will be released.

According to (405 ILCS 5/3-403) (from Ch. 91 1/2, par. 3-403)

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

Knowing Your Worth

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

I

SARAH GONZALEZ & RICH GUTIERREZ

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

What follows are a few of these stories from three young South Siders: Angel, Jeffrey, and Luis.

n late 2015, when Sarah Gonzalez and Rich Gutierrez had just finished their zine, Knowing Your Worth, they told an interviewer that they “wanted to capture the experiences of people of color that are sacred and familiar, to make them visible, and open the possibilities of relating to others’ stories.” The two had long observed that, as people of color, their friends and students often felt their own stories and experiences seemed worthless or unimportant. The project became an attempt to counteract those emotions and instead create a space for lesser-heard voices to be noticed and appreciated.

In a larger sense, both Gonzalez and Gutierrez understand that creating connections and giving voice to people of color is not a politically neutral endeavor. They view a project like Knowing Your Worth as contributing to a process of reimagination and reclamation; the subversion of traditional perceptions of marginalized people and places appears and reappears throughout the zine. As Gonzalez remarked in the same interview, “We are always going to cause harm to each other, but connecting our stories creates the possibility to restore and reconcile. Connecting our stories is literally a life and death urgency.”

ZINES

REMNANTS

Every Person is a Philosopher

Afterlives of the Journal of Ordinary Thought

BY DARREN WAN

Rich Gutierrez is a mixed brown boy, writer, musician, designer, social advocate, and artist born and raised in San Jose, California.

A strong supporter of using art and writing as structure to heal and unlearn, most of his work is centered around acknowledging fears and strengths and the importance of both. He believes in acknowledging the true beauty and duality of Black and Brown folks by reinforcing the importance of documenting our own histories regardless of how sad, hurtful, loving, or strong, and that we will create and continue to create in the face of misfortune.

Sarah Gonzalez is a Xicana-Indian writer, poet, and educator from Chicago but with strong roots in the Los Angeles area of Califaztlan. She is on a journey of deep heart excavation work, which requires her to write down memory constantly in an effort to preserve. She lives and teaches high school English in her community of Pilsen, and she fervently believes in the brilliance of Black and Brown youth and transforming generational trauma into resilience.

She is particularly interested in working with young people who are gang-involved because of her own family background, and seeks to co-facilitate spaces for storytelling, identity-building, and archiving of young people’s personal histories in an effort to have a space for healing. She is not anti-gang, she is PRO-YOUTH POR VIDA!

O

n November 20, 2013, the board of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA) announced its immediate closure, rendering defunct the Journal of Ordinary Thought, the quarterly publication of the seventeen-year-old community literary institution. “It was an issue of capacity—a lot of nonprofits were hit by the economic downturn,” recounted Sue Eleuterio, a former board member and interim director of the NWA, as well as a workshop leader of ten years for Ordinary Thought. In spite of the despondency that accompanied the sudden collapse of an institution that shaped literary worlds across the city, the cherished memories—and numerous afterlives—of the Journal of Ordinary Thought still keep it in the hearts and minds of many Chicagoans today.

The Journal of Ordinary Thought was the brainchild of Hal Adams, who founded it with support from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991. Adams conducted writing workshops for communities on the West Side of Chicago and published their work in the journal, but funding began to run out after a few years. To prevent the journal from folding, Adams worked together with Deborah Epstein and Sunny Fischer in 1995 to found the NWA as a nonprofit organization a year later, giving them access to resources to keep the journal afloat. “I was completely taken by the writing groups, the journal, and the whole effort. Sunny shared the excitement, the energy, and insight of the writers that they brought to their work, and the reception that it was getting in various communities. So we all wanted to find a way to keep it going,” said Epstein, a consultant for arts and culture nonprofits and executive director of the NWA from 1995 to 2002.

Early financial supporters of the NWA included the MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust, allowing Ordinary Thought to thrive and expand across Chicago.

“The model for the entire organization

was weekly ninety-minute workshops that were free and open to anyone over the age of eighteen in the city of Chicago,” said Eleuterio, a professional folklorist. “People were welcome to bring fiction, but our focus for the print publication was personal experience, narratives, and poetry.” The Journal of Ordinary Thought is rooted in the proposition that every person is a philosopher, a declaration that capped the masthead of every issue. Participants at the workshops were encouraged to share their personal stories, all of which, the organization believed, had their own inherent value. Hollen Reischer, who was the assistant director of NWA and the editor of the journal from 2010 to 2013, said, “As anyone who’s read the Journal of Ordinary Thought knows, ‘ordinary’ people have extraordinary stories to tell, as well as fantastic ways of telling what might seem at first blush like mundane stories. The goal was to make sure the writer’s words were clear so that his or her unique voice would come forth in all of its power.” Eleuterio added, “The mission of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance was to provide people who were in some way disenfranchised the opportunity to write and publish, whether because of economic situation or gender or race—people who felt like they’ve never been given the opportunity to write.”

With the establishment of the NWA, the Journal of Ordinary Thought’s first move toward expansion was on the South Side—a one-time workshop at DuSable High School during the summer of 1995. Its success spurred the NWA to seek a more permanent location in Bronzeville. They decided on the Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library, which became the oldest, largest, and most consistent of NWA’s writing groups. Epstein, who was the first workshop leader at the Hall Branch, noted that the selection of the Hall Branch contributed to the growing attendance of the weekly writing workshops.

“One of the interesting things was that many of the people who came didn’t currently live AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

CRISTINA RUTTER / COURTESY TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD WRITING ALLIANCE

in Bronzeville, but they’d grown up there.

The library held a real place in their literary lives, and they came back to it. And that’s how they stumbled on the writing workshops.”

The writers at the Hall Branch, said Epstein, had an unflagging enthusiasm in their literary pursuits. “Hall grew so big— there were too many people. So I started a second group at the Bee Branch Library up across from Stateway Gardens. And the funniest thing was that when I started at Bee, all of the Hall branch members would come to both. They were coming—this same big group—twice a week! No matter how I tried to engineer it, I was not going to be successful!” Eleuterio later took over Epstein’s role as workshop leader of the Hall Branch, where her fondest memories of her time at the NWA were made. “When the Hall Branch had their seventy-fifth anniversary, they asked us if we would participate in their celebrations,” Eleuterio recalled. “So we co-wrote a poem—every single writer in the Hall Branch wrote part of the poem—and we performed it at the anniversary.”

For many budding writers, the workshops conducted by the NWA encouraged them to be confident in their work and receive feedback in a convivial, unintimidating space. Donna Kiser, a writer published in the journal who later became a workshop lead22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

er in three branches, noted her growth as a writer through her participation in the weekly workshops. “I never really considered myself a writer, but I’ve always wanted to write.

And that’s the first thing that so many of the writers said: I’m not a writer, but I have stories. And after two years with the group, I returned to school at Columbia College Chicago in the creative writing department.”

The caliber of the journal’s writers won recognition not only through the awards they received from the Illinois Arts Council, but also via a play entitled The Journal of Ordinary Thought. Playwrights Luther Goins, Mignon McPherson, David Barr, and Douglas Alan-Mann collected almost a hundred pieces published in the Journal of Ordinary Thought and strung them together without revision. Staged by the Chicago Theatre Company, Alan-Mann’s pioneering black theater in Woodlawn, in September 1999, The Journal of Ordinary Thought received rave reviews in many Chicago daily newspapers.

While this theatrical homage to Ordinary Thought has not been staged since, the journal has left indelible traces for many communities across Chicago and beyond.

In many cases, the writing groups that were formally disbanded with the closure of the NWA have continued to meet up. A group in Uptown, at the Bezazian Branch of Chicago Public Library, has been meeting weekly

since 2013, as does the group based at the Hall Branch, albeit informally. Many interpersonal connections and friendships that were forged through the NWA have persisted, and some have resulted in literary projects.

Along with Charlene Smith, Phillis Humphries, and Barbara Banks, three writers who published in Ordinary Thought, Eleuterio is co-writing a chapter in an upcoming book entitled Comfort Food Meanings and Memories, published by the University Press of Mississippi. The chapter, called “Even Presidents Need Comfort Food,” will focus on Valois Cafeteria in Hyde Park. On this and other related collaborations after the 2013, Eleuterio remarked, “While I’m sad that the organization doesn’t exist formally, there is still community-based gathering that’s going on, and so many good memories.”

Perhaps the most enduring of the journal’s descendants after NWA’s closure is Every Person is a Philosopher, a writing group that Kiser established in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year. After joining a writing workshop in Ravenswood, she attended Columbia College Chicago and later became workshop leader of three writing workshops across Chicago. After working with the NWA for a decade, she left Chicago for Wisconsin.

Every Person is a Philosopher has adopted the model of the NWA weekly writing workshop because Kiser ardently believes in

its value. “It’s about bringing people together who would never usually sit across the table from each other and converse, and have a dialogue about life. Everyone comes away with a different understanding, an eye-opening experience.”

Despite the unceremonious closure of the NWA, the Journal of Ordinary Thought has touched so many lives and shaped so many literary endeavors that its traces continue to show up across the city of Chicago and beyond. Reischer, among the last editors of the journal, noted, “NWA writers seized the opportunity to reflect on life through the written word, and together with NWA’s support created a beautiful treasury that this city should honor as a documentary of its residents.” Perhaps this is how the Journal of Ordinary Thought is best remembered—an archive of Chicagoan voices that would otherwise have remained unheard, of words that would otherwise have gone unspoken.

Throughout all these years, a particular line in the fall 2011 Journal of Ordinary Thought has stuck with Reischer, a line by Rafael Colón. It is a line that captures the work, the memories, and the afterlives of the journal, and the innumerable, manifold individuals whose experiences have been given voice: “Qué palabra tan grande, VIDA...

What a big word, LIFE.” ¬

COMMUNITY

In Your Neighborhood A conversation with Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall

BY SARAH CLAYPOOLE

N

ate Marshall and Eve Ewing spent years as what Marshall called “Chicagoans in exile”: both born in the city, but departed in the course of their education (Marshall to Nashville then Ann Arbor; Ewing to Boston). But by this fall, both will be back in Chicago full-time. The creation of their new project Crescendo Literary, an organization devoted to community-based art, formalizes the exchange of ideas between the two longtime friends; its first projects, an Emerging Poets Incubator and a block party (both hosted in tandem with the Poetry Foundation, the latter also including The Renaissance Collaborative), took place July 28-30. Ewing and Marshall have both been poets and teachers in a multitude of settings, ranging from Young Chicago Authors to the University of Chicago, and their conversation with the Weekly (to which Ewing called in from New York) traced the shifting balance between art, community, mentorship, and political engagement in their life, work, and promising collaboration.

How did the Emerging Poets Incubator and Block Party come about? Were those ideas that came to y’all in tandem?

EE: Yeah, so, the Incubator and the block party were two separate ideas that now are living together in a really exciting complementary way…I thought of this block party idea—it kind of came to me—I was thinking about Afropunk…in the middle part of its lifespan, it went from being something that was explicitly for a black punk rock community to being a space where people regardless of their interest in punk or their familiarity with it could just come out and be together. Or, I think another model, like I just said to somebody earlier, is Blues Fest. Chicagoans like to come to Blues Fest whether or not you think of yourself—there are people there who are blues connoisseurs, and there are people that are there just because it’s a really intergenerational, engaging summer event. So I was thinking, what if we had a literary festival that people came to because it was fun, and not just to signal their participation in an elite poetry community, but because there was fun stuff

you could do and you could bring your kids or your grandma could come? That’s kind of where the idea of the block party came from— something that uses poetry as the center of a much larger community gathering space.

NM: Myself and a lot of my friends and colleagues are early career poets. So poets that have, I would say, fewer than three books, and are younger than forty-five, or whatever. That’s a lot of my world. And I’ve stayed thinking a lot about why—like what are the gaps in our knowledge, and particularly not around the artistic development. Because, in some ways— EE: Because we’ve got that.

NM: Right, right, because MFA programs exist, and workshops exist, and that stuff is sort of clear. But when it comes to, like, what does it mean to make a life as an artist, I think that a lot of those sort of hard skills—for lack of a better phrase… Like there’s no one standing there saying “Hey, you’re like a freelancing teacher and performer, this is how you do your taxes,” or “Hey, you’re curating an open mic in your city, here’s how you build an audience,” or “You’re working with young people, here’s how you create safe spaces that can effectively limit predatory behavior.” There hasn’t really been a lot of widespread institutional thought in the field around those things. In some ways, when I took it to Eve, I was thinking of how we could be of service to people like us, and also to ourselves.

EE: Yeah, and help people think explicitly about all the skills that you engage as a poet that have nothing to do with actually writing poems. What we’ve done is create a gathering space for these twenty-seven poets who all self-identified as community-engaged poets, so poets for whom interacting with a community in some way is an integral part of their artistry, and we’re like, “We’re not just going to have them come together, and talk and learn from each other, let’s put our ideas into practice.” So after they come to this twoday incubator, where they’re going to meet all these wonderful people and learn all these

great skills and share ideas, they’ve all agreed to help us out on Saturday with throwing the block party. And it’s understood as part of the agreement everybody’s not going to be on the main stage. There will be some people that are performing, there will be some people who are maybe taking photos, leading workshops, there are some people who might be passing out water bottles on that day. Because each of us—our poetry upbringing has included a lot of that type of work. We both have done a lot of that physical labor and unglamorous organizing and stuff like that that makes these kind of events happen, and so we felt like it was important to use those folks as a resource and it’s going to be really exciting. Some of them will have done an event like this before, and some of them won’t, so they’ll get a handson opportunity to practice those skills.

engaged in community, and was engaged in teaching poetry with the Blackstone Rangers in Woodlawn, and teaching poetry to children in classrooms. I’ve had multiple people tell me, “Yeah, when I was a kid, Gwendolyn Brooks came to my school and spoke to me.”

Several years ago, I had a chance to go look through some of her archive, her personal archive and letters, and I could see letters that children had sent her, and she corresponded with them. And this is somebody that was a Pulitzer Prize–winning person, one of our greatest American poets, who always thought that it was really important to root herself in community, not only in her writing but in her everyday practice. For me, and I think for Nate as well, she’s always been a model of what that work looks like, and a guidepost about who we are and what we’re trying to be.

You’ve both discussed community; Crescendo’s website relates that to Gwendolyn Brooks. Could you talk a little about place and poetry, Chicago and poetry, and also how you feel you work in relation to literary precedent like Gwendolyn Brooks?

What distinguishes the way the poetry scene works in Chicago for you, having been elsewhere?

EE: That is incredibly important to both of us. Starting with the question of place, growing up in Chicago, it’s a place with an unparalleled legacy of poets who not only are at the top of their craft, but also made community involvement and partnership part of who they were and who they are. I have this phrase I like to use to hearken back to the Sesame Street song: an artist is a person in your neighborhood. I’m very passionate about trying to figure out ways for the broader public and especially young people to understand artists as not these people that live behind a wall of mystique but as people who are like you and me, who have chosen a career path that is viable, and to help make that a viable and exciting career path. Chicago is the epicenter of that, and Gwendolyn Brooks in particular is a—hero doesn’t really even begin to describe it—kind of a life guide in terms of the blueprint of what that kind of work looks like. She really, very early on compared to a lot of other artists, was always very, very

EE: I think that something we talk about a lot just comparatively is the ethic of collaboration as opposed to competition.

There’s an understanding that the work we do together is always better and stronger than the work we do individually. And also the idea of abundance—if I’m doing something and I have this program and idea, and I invite you to do it with me, or we both do similar things, that is a beautiful and celebratory thing, and not something to be threatening, like you’re encroaching on my territory. That’s not found in every community and it really makes a difference, between working with people that you can also not only admire their work but trust them as human beings and rely on them and call them friends, and the contrary, which is not pleasant.

NM: That, and to continue to build: in Chicago, the people that are deeply and meaningfully engaged in artistic communities, specifically poetry, are also deeply engaged in political movement and political thought.

I don’t know if that happens everywhere.

Certainly everywhere writers are writing and AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

thinking about the politics of the day, but it is not in every city that the people you might find at the meeting organizing or at the table talking to policymakers or at the protest are also the people you’ll find hosting the open mics, publishing in the journals. That’s pretty damn near one-to-one here, at least in the communities in which we are most a part.

Ideally, what would the relationship between art and political activism look like for you, and how does something like Crescendo fit into that?

EE: I think that all great political movements have an aesthetic movement that parallels them. Whether that takes center stage or is sort of off to the side is up for debate, but I think that artists are always necessary. What is the quote from Toni Cade Bambara that I had the other day? “The job of artists is to make revolution irresistible.” I think that that’s true. I would add to her words that the job of an artist is also to convey, illustrate, and make clear what’s at stake when we are fighting for a more just world. And I think that sometimes when people think about political art or activist art, they think it has to be very explicit—like a painting of a labor strike or a poem about police killing black children with impunity.

That kind of art is very, very important, but I think also it’s important to remember that for marginalized people, our very being, our very desire and ability to create and make art that reflects our own humanity in the world in which we live is also revolutionary and has an important role to play. As black poets, I say and think all the time, it used to be against the law for us to read and write. I think about that very often as a framing context for the work that we do. I think that the role of the artist in activism is really crucial, and also that artists are really good at thinking about space and thinking about social change in a different way. Some of our friends have been leading an activist group in Chicago called Let Us Breathe that has a disproportionate number of artists in it, and the way they think about what protest looks like tends to make a much

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

bigger space for beauty and celebration than folks might normally think of.

NM: The notion of Crescendo is all about where art intersects with community, and it does not seem to me either profitable or ethical to intersect with community in sort of benign, nice, navigational, non—not non-disruptive— but sort of— EE: Non-confrontational.

NM: Yeah, non-confrontational ways. What it means to be artists specifically talking about community, and working with and in and among communities and being a part of communities, is a political statement, because much of a Eurocentric framework for art and artists is this notion of a lone genius locked away who then brings their work to the people—I should say, his work to the people, and then is lauded and supported by benefactors.

EE: By a patron. By a wealthy patron. Like Ernest Hemingway sits alone in a room, and writes tortuously, and goes and takes a walk alone in a park. And then someone gives him money to do that. And that’s art.

NM: So us just saying we’re going to hang out on the corner and read poems and hand them out to young people—and we’re going to do that on that corner because that’s just where we live—is some political shit, deeply political.

You’re now mentors holding incubators, no longer purely participants. How does that feel and how’s that looking?

EE: It’s a multi-faceted thing. Both of us take teaching and pedagogical thinking really, really seriously. I was a classroom teacher in Chicago Public Schools and I teach college students and graduate students, so the way we think about teaching is really central to how we do our work. At the same time, peer mentorship is also really important to both of us, so being in a position to mentor somebody doesn’t mean

that we’re omniscient or anything like that. But rather that we’re trying to be intentional about creating spaces where people can learn from each other. We’re also trying to learn a lot from the mentors that we’ve had, both positive and not-so-positive learnings, and trying to think intentionally about what kind of mentors we want to be and how we can improve on some of the really impactful mentorship we received as young people, and, I’d like to add, continues and scales up, so the people that were our mentors ten years ago are still our mentors and our partners but now they have different things to teach us.... That goes back to what we said about thinking about community.

Nate went to Michigan and got an MFA, and in some places, it’d be like, “Wow, he left the hood, and went and got an MFA, and now he’s up here, and the rest of us are still down here.”

In fact, it really felt like Nate went and brought back an MFA for the squad.

NM: We all got an MFA. EE: And now, other members of his collective are going to be in that same program next year.... In the same way that I went to graduate school and I spend a lot of my time now teaching other people how to apply to graduate school. It’s this thing of like, we’re all we got, basically, and we can’t rely on any institution to help us or teach us, especially as people of color—that they’re not really looking for us or checking for us all the time. It’s our job to be like, “This is how you do this,” “I’m going to teach you how to do this thing,” so all of us can be better and have more resources.

How does—not just political work—but this type of community engagement or Crescendo Literary or thinking about teaching influence your creative practice?

NM: It changes my relationship to art in the sense that my work is rigorous, my work is real, but I have no interest writing or creating things that people cannot access on some level. I’ve had that sort of debate with a lot of artists and I get a lot of pushback. But I want my work to

sing in languages that the people who I care about can understand—even if they don’t get all the meaning, all the shades of meaning.

That to me is a political decision as well as an aesthetic decision. It comes from being deeply rooted in many communities.

EE: It also has to do with how I think about distribution of work and who it’s for. My first book is coming out next fall, and I’ve been thinking a lot about things I want to do with it and ways to get it in the world that don’t involve bookstores. Like, do I want to do teach-ins in public schools? Do I want to give the book away? Do I want to send class sets to different places? Do I want to do radio or podcast? We often grossly underestimate how much audiences—even audiences in some of the communities that we come from that maybe people don’t think of as traditional audiences for these things—how much people are willing and excited to get down and engage and meet you where you are. I’ve been telling people, millions of people in this country watched Lemonade—that is an experimental film. Avant-garde, experimental film. If Beyoncé was not the person that created that film, you could see it in the MCA or in a cinema studies classroom. I think that we underestimate how much, when you bring work to people and really make a case for it, how much people will go there with you. I recently defended my dissertation at Harvard, and I Periscoped my dissertation defense, so I had a friend sit in the audience and he used Periscope to livestream it on Twitter, and five hundred people watched my dissertation defense. I don’t believe that was five hundred grad students, or five hundred faculty members or academics. And I know that for a fact. I met a girl at a reading we did last week. She came up to me and was like, yeah I watched your dissertation. These are people—they don’t have an academic background in what I do, but they have a vested interest in the nature of my work.

We can surprise ourselves when we share with people how much they get it. ¬

COMMUNITY

On the Block

Ravyn Lenae, sidewalk chalk, and neighbors at Crescendo Literary’s poetry block party

BY MAHA AHMED

R

avyn Lenae’s demands for her audience were simple. In between the R&B singer’s spacey electro-soul verses, she would say: “Dance,” or, “Y’all can just close your eyes, okay?” She electrified the crowd—all from onstage while sitting down. Listeners mumbled “okay” in response, and started moving their bodies; people who had been sitting on the ground to just listen became active participants in the performance.

This back and forth between performer and audience echoed throughout last Saturday, when poets, artists, musicians, and community members gathered on the street to revel in art with each other at Bronzeville’s historic YMCA. Crescendo Literary’s and the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Block Party, at 37th Street and Wabash Avenue, sought to bring together Chicagoans in appreciation of poetry, regardless of their familiarity with the medium. Tables manned by local political and arts-oriented organizations like Assata’s Daughters and For the People Artists Collective welcomed newcomers. Beyond the entrance, local poets led workshops, and audience members had their turn onstage too, for an open mic. Interspersed throughout were performances by Fatimah Asghar, Jose Olivarez, Porsha Oyaliwola, and Ric Wilson, as well as event organizers Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall.

A surprisingly natural intimacy took hold as poets delivered their lines a few feet away from block partygoers chalking their own poetry and doodles on the street.

One of these chalking partygoers was Yara Daoud, a Palestinian-American poet from the south suburbs, who told me she was “trying to make a name for [herself ] in the Chicago poetry community.” As Daoud chalked her original lines, “these words sting more than your oppression,” about the complexities of learning Arabic, onto the block’s concrete, people gathered round and asked about her experiences as a Palestinian-American. A few feet away, Lenae continued to groove from her seat onstage, as people stood snapping their fingers and moving their hips.

In this sense, there was little distinction between performer and audience, or artist and consumer; as the sunlight turned from bright yellow to gold to orange, the block party seemed to become a block party not just in name but in spirit, a nebulous and sprawling conversation between sidewalk chalkers, performers, poets, organizers, children, and even the food truck guys selling sandwiches. A conversation on the block between neighbors who were all in on the South Side’s many secrets— and, from that knowledge, the ability to speak in verse about 107th Street, Harold’s Chicken Shack, and the rest of what Eve Ewing called “The Fire City.”

During Ewing’s performance later in the evening, she asked the audience to repeat after her, pointing to cue us in; together, we neighbors declared: “I am magic.”

“I am alive.”

“My hands can shake but they can hold me or another.” ¬

SARAH CLAYPOOLE

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

TAKING BULLETS

Confronting Evil A conversation with Haki Madhubuti

BY KEVIN COVAL

W

e are in the midst of a youth revolution & renaissance in Chicago, the beacon/ center for the country/planet. Young artists & activists are using their voices & bodies & organizing abilities to change the way the city/country listens & thinks about the vibrancy & beauty of Black narratives.

Haki Madhubuti has been doing this work as a poet & builder of independent Black institutions on Chicago’s South Side & across the globe for over fifty years. An architect of the Black Arts Movement & founder of Third World Press, a Black independent publishing house, this moment in culture would not have been possible without his contributions. Haki is the cultural son of Gwendolyn Brooks & we are the sons & daughters & inheritors of their tradition of a socially engaged, radical Black poetics that represents the working body in realist & super-realist portraiture, creating a new canon for those interested in a just & fresh future world.

We talked recently about his new book of prose, Taking Bullets: Terrorism and Black Life in Twenty-first Century America Confronting White Nationalism, Supremacy, Privilege, Plutocracy and Oligarchy. In conversation, as in the book, Professor Madhubuti drops serious gems.

Kevin Coval: This book is tragically timely. It would be impossible to plan the right moment for such a work. The origin and conception for Taking Bullets begins where?

Haki Madhubuti: I was taken aback after the murder of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the twelveyear-old boy playing in the park with a toy gun when two policemen rolled up on him and in less than fifteen seconds he was dead. I couldn’t sleep, and in my mind it was pretty clear that if Tamir Rice were white he would still be alive.

That was the genesis.

I’ve written about the plight of Black men before (most notably in the best-selling Black Men, Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?) I’m not a sociologist or a political scientist. I’m a poet.

And unlike most poets, I’ve worked primarily in the Black community building institutional structures like Third World Press and the African-centered education we have at our schools, three schools, servicing over one thousand children per day.

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I have been dealing with this community, all of my adult life, as a poet, as an educator, as a father; I have sons and daughters, so this subject is close to my heart. With the uptick in the killings of young Black men and Sandra Bland and Black women within our community, I felt that I cannot not say something, so I started writing and it unfolded.

KC: Taking Bullets is addressed to the twenty-first century. You worked very hard thru the later half of the twentieth century to counter white supremacy and create new Black-centered institutions. Are things getting worse for Black people now?

HM: We have to always be as honest as possible. Most white people, in the United States, are struggling and trying to live their lives, but you have a substantial number of white people, who I would call white white people. These would be the white nationalists, the white supremacists, the white-skin privileged people, even though all white people take advantage of white skin privilege at some point in their lives and might not realize it.

The problem has been, white men—not all white men, but a great many white men— still fear Black people and most certainly Black men. That fear is transmitted to the Black community, in many different ways, but the people who actually make the decisions and run things are the one percent of the ruling elite, who we would never meet for the most part. Not only do they live in gated communities, they buy islands.

KC: And I’m also thinking of the service sector, the thousands of Black people working minimum wage jobs in the Gold Coast, serving a new class of white, white collar workers.

HM: And that is where we run into difficulty, essentially police departments resemble an occupying force. You have these outliers who may have been KKK four or five years ago, but can’t be public with that stuff anymore, so they join the police department. At the same time, one doesn’t want to make the same mistake some people make with us and say all Black people are like this or all white people are like that,

because it’s just not true. But one of the points I am trying to make is that these white people don’t care about white people. The right wing always wants to say we are the richest, most prosperous country in the world. If we are then why can’t we educate our children...without charging them an arm and a leg?

KC: In Taking Bullets you address these issues of empire and neo-liberalism and have made a life countering institutions of the homogenized narrative. And at times it seems we live in an eternal moment in this country, a story stuck on repeat. But the public nature of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and others make this moment seem ripe for continued movement making, and it feels that this book, and all your books, interrupt the traditional story.

HM: Those murders were caught on tape and were undeniably murders. Keep in mind the only reason we are made aware of those murders and others is because of the technology, phones with cameras. These murders have gone on ever since our forced migration to this land.

What Black Lives Matter means to me, is that they have taken the mantle we took up in the 1960s and 1970s. The question becomes why, after fifty years, are we fighting for the same thing? Things have changed, but it is obvious they have not for a great many Black people and Brown people and poor people and people of different sexual orientations. This struggle continues.

KC: You mentioned the tool of the camera, which makes me think of the importance of the document and the work you have done in the Black Arts movement and the role of the writer, of the artist, in the movement.

HM: In the Black Arts Movement, we felt the role of the artist was to confront evil. It’s interesting that we were so young, most of us in our twenties, and just like young people of all cultures, the fear factor never entered our mind.

We felt injustice existed most certainly within the context of our relationship to the people that forced us here, into this nation. This country has never been able to face its racial anxieties and syndromes. Its unevenness. Very seldom do you hear in the academy or secondary school or K-8, any serious discussion of the first genocide that happened in this nation when Europeans landed here and wiped out millions of First Nations people. And then of course they went and got Africans and raped

Africa. And as long as the ruling elite and those that control the media and social media and so forth, do not confront those realities, there is not going to be any serious change.

If you don’t know who you are, anybody can name you. And they will.

One of the real serious problems is that too many people do not love themselves. There is absence of self-love and an absence of communal love. One of the formidable acts against Black people is we have been taught to hate ourselves. If I love myself and I love people who look like me, I’m not going to be killing them.

My job is, and what I’ve always tried to do since I became conscious, and I became conscious as a young Black boy at fourteen years old, was to ask, and I write about this in Taking Bullets, why do white people hate us? What did we do? I mean what did we do to deserve what we receive from the people who run this country? The question has never been asked publicly. And for me, we cannot approach that question with a victim’s mentality. In all of my work, I try to give clear alternatives to this problem.

KC: The Chicago-based and nationally-focused organizing group BYP 100’s poignant campaign is to fund Black futures. You have been building Black futures for over fifty years.

What does the Black future look like to you now and how does one stay committed to building one?

HM: What keeps me going, and I think what keeps people who have been involved in the struggle going, is we have created community.

We have created family. We do not see ourselves as being alone. There are very few lone wolves in this struggle—therefore we see that our backs are being covered to a large extent, and as a result of that, we do see a tomorrow in front of us. What we are trying to do in our own modern way is create independent Black institutions. It’s not enough for me to be just a poet or a writer. I have to get my hands dirty. ¬

Kevin Coval is the editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and author of nine collections of poems, including the forthcoming A People’s History of Chicago, out in spring of 2017 from Haymarket Books.

YOUMEDIA

A New Take on YA at the Library YOUmedia provides unconventional learning opportunities for teens at the CPL

BY NATALIE FRIEDBERG

O

n a sunny July afternoon, four teenage girls are sitting around a table, walled off from the rest of the Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Library (CPL) by a green curtain. They are reading out lines from Macbeth but, despite all appearances, this isn’t summer school— it’s YOUmedia, one of the first Chicago Public Library programs devoted specifically to teenagers.

Started in 2009 at Harold Washington Library, YOUmedia has since spread to twenty-nine libraries in cities across the country, from Portland to the South Bronx.

In Chicago, it’s now at twelve local branches and, according to one librarian, intake forms show that the program serves teens from every zip code in the city. Librarians at South Side YOUmedia sites in Chinatown and Back of the Yards say that the increasing popularity of the program comes as a result of its engagement with teenagers through new forms of technology. This engagement comes in ways both political, such as projects highlighting gun violence in students’ neighborhoods, and fun—video games are an effective honeypot. Research has also found that the independence given to YOUmedia’s participants leaves them with a sense of community, and a self-directed willingness to create their own workshops and projects.

That independence isn’t accidental; it’s built into YOUmedia’s educational philosophy, which centers around a three tiered model of “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out” or HOMAGO for short.

The hope for the model is that teens will come to YOUmedia sites and spend time playing games or on Facebook (hanging out) where, with the programs and tools made available to them, they will try out a range of different activities (messing around), and then hopefully gain more specialized skills in a particular area of interest (geeking out).

HOMAGO is based on a three-year ethnographic study performed by the Digital Youth Project to investigate the ways in which teens make use of new media technologies in their everyday lives and how that affects the way they learn. The report, titled

“Living and Learning with New Media” drew qualitative data from more than twenty case studies. It found that youth are developing new sets of media practices and that learning environments should engage with this “media literacy” in terms that are relevant to the specific social and cultural environments of teens.

That’s why YOUmedia centers provide a smorgasbord of gadgets for teens to play with: there are laptops, a flat screen television, DSLR cameras, miniature DJ mixing sets, 3D printers, PlayStations and stacks of games to go with them, all free to borrow for any teen with a library card.

YOUmedia site manager Heidi Gustad served as teen services librarian at the Back of the Yards branch library for a year before YOUmedia came to the library. Since the program arrived in 2014, she has seen a noticeable difference in the quality and frequency of library programming.

“I felt like my programming became a lot more relevant,” said Gustad. “I had to get really creative before I had access to this equipment…[now] I am able to give teens informal learning opportunities with twenty-first century equipment.”

Teens at the Back of the Yards branch have used the DSLR cameras to start a library news vlog and the circuitry tools to build miniature solar-powered cars. The branch has also partnered with the National Veterans Art Museum for a project in which teens make quilt blocks to express how they experience gun violence. These quilt blocks will be put on display around the city and then added to a national quilt in D.C. One of the biggest draws to YOUmedia is gaming; video games, according to Gustard and Christina Freitag, the YOUmedia site manager in Chinatown, get teens through the door and using the library space where further informal learning opportunities can follow. Super Smash Brothers competitions attract as many as thirty to fifty players and are run by the teens themselves, who take responsibility for the planning and scheduling.

The organizational experience the teens gain from planning Smash Brothers tourna-

ments demonstrates that playing videogames at the library often has the unexpected side effect of helping teens learn new skills. Freitag spoke about a group of teens that started a YouTube channel to make play-by-play commentary on the video game NBA 2K16. In the process of making these videos, the teens learned how to use the DSLR camera and microphone. That’s not the kind of learning opportunity one would find in a traditional classroom, but it’s exactly what YOUmedia is aiming for.

“We are trying to make things not feel like school as much as possible,” says Jennifer Steele, the YOUmedia Partnerships Coordinator. “We don’t want there to be any association that when our teens are coming in that they are going back to school. But, even with that, we do plan, we have clear outcomes.”

In addition to her administrative position, Steele also coached the YOUmedia slam poetry team.

“For me, being a writer and being a poet, [there is] opportunity to engage with young people who share the same interests,” she said. “So while at the same time we can discuss our interest in writing and practice writing, I also have the opportunity to help them develop creatively. More than just encouraging them to write, it’s also developing themselves as artists and understanding the industry and their options.”

YOUmedia teens at various branches have competed in slam poetry contests, recorded music, started podcasts and created a whole host of other “artifacts,” as student work is called. Chance the Rapper famously recorded his first mixtape at the Harold Washington YOUmedia site. As the Weekly reported in 2015, Chance and other local artists such as Calez, Vic Mensa, and Noname (formerly Noname Gypsy) established fan followings by building on support from the YOUmedia community.

YOUmedia represents a broader shift by the CPL to place a greater focus on engaging with teens. Two years ago—five years after the YOUmedia program had first been put in place—the CPL created a new teen services department, separate from the de-

partment of Children and Young Adult Services, which had previously encompassed all non-adult library users. The formative years of YOUmedia, said Steele, made it clear to the CPL that teens have a very distinct set of needs.

“When I was a teen you would get the occasional intrepid teen librarian who would be thoughtful enough to put all the teen books in one spot and label it, maybe get like a bean bag chair,” said Gustad. “And she would get an arts and crafts program once or twice a month and that was usually the extent of it, even as recently as ten years ago.”

Teen usage of the Back of the Yards Library has significantly increased, according to Gustad. The YOUmedia site has about fifteen to twenty regulars who use the space daily, and the group is considering a move to a larger space. Numbers are similar at the Chinatown branch and higher at Harold Washington, which is more centrally located and has larger facilities. The recording studio is always booked for producing music, podcasts, or other projects.

In 2013, the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago Schools Research partnered up with the Digital Youth Network to publish a study on the implementation of the past three years of the YOUmedia program.

The study found that teens had been building communities in these public library spaces and considered YOUmedia a place where they “feel free to explore their interests and express themselves.” YOUmedia teens have begun to lead their own programming and take charge of their own learning processes, which is exactly what the program design intends for them to do.

“In the past, libraries were always connecting people with knowledge in the form of books, but what we’re doing is teaching kids where to access knowledge in any format,” said Gustad. “Whether that’s a book, an eBook, a YouTube channel on aquaponic farming, or a blog that’s all about designing e-textiles. Making those connections for the teens that they wouldn’t inherently get in another space—that’s why it’s the future of library services.” ¬

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27

MLK

To Be Free

A new book of essays explores Martin Luther King’s time in Chicago

BY ANNE LI

F

or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the politics and priorities of Freedom Summer never stopped. King’s arrival in 1966 from the embattled South ignited the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the conditions in northern, urban, and de facto segregated Chicago changed King and his beliefs. It was in Chicago that King intensified his call for economic justice as a goal both beyond and including racial integration.

The recently released book The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North chronicles King’s time in Chicago in 1966. King’s fellow activists Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette, Jr., James R. Ralph, Jr., and Pam Smith edited the volume. These luminaries of the Chicago Freedom Movement document the time they spent working with King and how King’s stay in the city fits into the context of both his life and Chicago activism.

The book is really an anthology of the Chicago Freedom Movement’s different voices. Even the introduction weaves together different narratives about the movement’s impact. The bulk of this volume is made up of chapters written by people who made an impact on or were affected by King’s time in Chicago. These contributors range from movement organizers to public figures, from local mothers to political experts, and their accounts include stories of how the movement’s work can be traced directly to the present day. Their diverse perspectives lay out the background, the action, and the legacy of the Chicago Freedom Movement, highlighting the breadth of viewpoints in a movement often granted undue cohesion in historical memory.

Attention to housing rights and economic opportunity did not begin with King’s arrival. For years, Chicago groups had campaigned against housing discrimination and a lack of jobs that disproportionately affected predominantly black neighborhoods. Often-

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times these campaigns were centered on tenements. Low-income renters generally lived in very poor conditions, with homes in disrepair and water and heating services intermittent. Their landlords ignored their complaints. Whole neighborhoods were closed to African-Americans. Housing segregation was economically enforced despite being legally forbidden.

Poor tenant conditions were exacerbated by real estate offices and lenders through the practice known as “redlining.” As Mary Lou Finley describes in her chapter “The Fight for Fair Lending,” predominantly black neighborhoods were classified as unworthy of regular loans, and their residents were charged much higher rates. Additionally, real estate agents would sometimes choose “gray areas”—areas next to black neighborhoods— and transform them into redlined areas by convincing white homeowners to sell their homes at cheap prices, saying a supposedly soon-to-come influx of black homeowners would lower neighborhood property values.

These same homes were then sold at much higher prices to prospective African-American homeowners, who were then given unfavorable loans. Since real estate offices offered different home options for black and white buyers of equal stature, African-Americans once again had no options except the exploitative deals.

The book explores the collaboration between existing activist efforts around housing in Chicago and King’s newly arrived staff. John McKnight, a community organizer, first heard about housing inequities in the late 1950s from West Side attorney Mark Satter. McKnight lacked the resources to fully tackle the issue at the time, but his conversations with King’s staffer James Bevel brought the issue to the fore of King’s July 10, 1966, Soldier Field rally. Fair housing and fair lending became the central focuses of the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the

influence and experienced staff that accompanied King gave greater visibility to ongoing organizing efforts.

The book argues that one key success of the Chicago Freedom Movement was the attention it brought to inequities, which paved the way for continuing activism. Many organizations that began with the Chicago Freedom Movement, like Operation Breadbasket or Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, continued to provide services to communities for decades afterward. The book’s contributors make clear that many of these organizations were directly founded during the Chicago Freedom Movement or were sustained by strong community involvement first inspired by King’s presence in Lawndale, where he and his family lived for several months in tenant housing.

The Summit Agreement between housing stakeholders at the end of the summer of 1966 as a result of King’s activism is often regarded as a failure. However, this book presents a link between King’s focus on fair housing in Chicago and the decision to honor him after his assassination with the passing of the Fair Housing Act at the national level.

In this way, lasting local change aligned with national change, a phenomenon highlighted by Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. in his chapter of the book. Jackson argues that while the struggle then was one for freedom, the struggle now is one for equality, since freedom of movement was achieved during King’s era.

In Jackson’s view, the Fair Housing Act inspired by the Chicago Freedom Movement ended regulatory barriers to integrated communities, leaving behind the right to the same lifestyles enjoyed by whites, just not the means. Adopting the economic justice theme that was so central to King’s later beliefs, Jackson focuses the current struggle on turning the widely accepted goal of “freedom” into actual equality in the workplace,

schools, and beyond.

In a panel discussion hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Mary Lou Finley shared with the audience just how many links and outgrowths of the movement she had discovered while putting together this book with the other authors.

When asked about maintaining motivation even though many of the movement’s goals were not accomplished for many years, she advised celebrating small victories. “See them as important, not as failures,” she said.

“We didn’t end slums in eighteen months, but we did get a tenant union.”

Sherrilynn J. Bevel, James Bevel’s daughter and the author of a chapter on lead poisoning, added that continuing to work against long odds is sometimes about belief.

“It’s a matter of faith that eventually justice is going to prevail. God will be with us; as well, we will be with God,” she said.

Both Bevel and Finley emphasized the role of nonviolence in the movement, saying that nonviolence provided the fundamental basis for loving the other enough to bring about change. Throughout the book and the panel, it was evident that the Civil Rights Movement created by these activists imagined more than creating opportunities for African-Americans. The stories told in this collection are about striving toward true equality in a city even as the legal barriers in Chicago were quickly being torn down.

Looking towards activism that has emerged since the Chicago Freedom Movement, Finley said that for the Black Lives Matter movement, a key step now is to identify an objective. According to Finley, “the goal of protesting is to get yourself to the negotiating table in a stronger way, not just to freely express yourself.” That being said, the most important thing for Finley was the people’s spirit: “There’s a lot of creativity and courage that should be honored,” she said. ¬

EVENTS

BULLETIN Sound of the Black Metropolis Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Thursday, August 4, 4pm–6pm. Free; registration required. Includes reception with food and drink. Register online at bit.ly/2aqaFB5.

(773) 702-2388. bmrc.lib.uchicago.edu Two fellows of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium present their work: Ayinde Jean-Baptiste’s audio documentary explores how Haiti and black Chicago have interacted since Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black Haitian, became the city’s first permanent resident; Rami Gabriel looks into “the Sounds of Chicago, Black Metropolis.” (Adam Thorp)

Violence and Race Relations In America: Where Do We Go From Here?

Chicago Citizen Newspaper, 806 E. 78th St. Friday, August 5, 7pm–9pm. Free. RSVP by calling (773) 783-1251 or at chicagocitizen.eventbrite.com In 1966, MLK was confronted and violently attacked by angry white protestors during a fair housing demonstration in Marquette Park. Fifty years later, the Chicago Citizen Newspaper will hold a panel discussion on the violence that persists today, asking what we can do to overcome it and build stronger communities. ( Joe Andrews)

Takin’ It to the Streets Marquette Park, 6734 S. Kedzie Ave. Saturday, August 6, 10am–8pm. $5 suggested donation. (773) 434-4626. streets2016.com Be a part of the nation’s largest Muslim-led international festival! This year’s Streets festival will commemorate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., replicating a part of his historic march into Marquette Park. The event features critically acclaimed artists and inspirational speakers. (Adia Robinson)

by Black Creativity. (Bridget Gamble)

Workshop on Black Organizing PUJA, 728 W. Maxwell St. Wednesday, August 10, 5pm–8:30pm. Free. RSVP at bit.ly/2aAOQOa. (312) 355-5922. sji.uic.edu Charlene Carruthers of BYP100 will lead a workshop on black organizing for economic justice and police accountability.

She will discuss competing models for organizing, offering a variety of perspectives and concepts to those interested in community-based organizing and social justice movements. ( Joe Andrews)

Play For All: For Families with Children with Disabilities

his film practice, as well as his residency in Chicago. (Isabelle Lim)

Black Fashion Week: Pop-Up Shop and Networking South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. Saturday, August 6, 11am– 3pm. Tickets $12; $20 at the door. (773) 3731026. sscartcenter.org If you love supporting local business, but would love it even more while listening to live music and with the taste of the Purple Ribbon Chef ’s fine cuisine on your lips, then you’re in luck. Stop by Black Fashion Week’s Pop-Up shop to explore an array of styles from Chicago’s up-and-coming designers. (Corinne Butta)

Chicago Children’s Museum, 700 E. Grand Ave. Saturday, August 13, 9am–10am. $14.

Free for first 250 registered. RSVP at bit. ly/2aGIKyI. (312) 527-1000. chicagochildrensmuseum.org

Amir Berbić: On Branding Places

Before the museum opens to the public at 10am, children with disabilities and their families are invited to explore exciting multisensory exhibits for one private hour.

Don’t wait; the first 250 registrants receive free admission. Pre-registration is required.

(Bridget Gamble)

In a global moment of mass migration and population change, what can graphic design do? In talking about his practice, artist and professor Amir Berbić delves into this question to explain how place identity is established through design, and works to build bridges between spaces and the people who travel within them. (Corinne Butta)

Social Security and Women Summit

Saul Aguirre: Reload Antena, 1755 S. Laflin St. Opening Friday, August 12, 6pm–10pm. Through Friday, September 9, by appointment. Free. antenapilsen. com

This program, put together by the AARP and the National Commission to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, brings together a panel of experts to look at how to protect the program’s fiscal health while growing coverage for women and pushing expansion for all. (Adam Thorp)

Artist Saul Aguirre’s upcoming solo show, Reload, will make you do exactly that: pause, consider, and reconsider the opinions and positions you held before you walk in the door. His performances and paintings depict his responses to social issues and investigate the way our society manipulates images.

(Corinne Butta)

VISUAL ARTS Artist Talk: Basim Magdy

Ford City Mall, 7601 S. Cicero Ave. Saturday, August 6, 11am–5pm. Free. RSVP online at bit.ly/2arBhij. chicagosouthsidemakerfaire.com

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Wednesday, August 3, 6pm–7:30pm. Free.

(773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Producing the world’s most diverse Mini Maker’s Faire is a tall order, but if anyone is capable, South Siders are. From telepathic computer science magicians to 3D printed hands, it’s all created by local makers of different ages and backgrounds and sponsored

Starting as a visual artist primarily concerned with paintings, current HPAC artist-in-residence Basim Magdy has since moved to film, constructing extended images with Super 8 and 16mm film. His talk will feature a focused discussion about

Income Inequality: A Cartoon Exhibit Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Opening Friday, August 12, 6pm–10pm. By appointment through Friday, September 2.

Free. (312) 852-7717. uri-eichen.com While cartoons may not be the first thing that come to mind when exploring income inequality, editorial cartooning has long been a platform for confronting national issues. Uri-Eichen Gallery will be showing works from a star-studded list of cartoonists—including multiple winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning— in this show, the fourth in a five-month series examining income inequality. (Carrie Smith)

Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave. Thursday, August 11, 6:30pm–8pm. Free with $20 museum admission. artic.edu

Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson Blvd, main lounge. Wednesday, August 17, 11:30am–2pm.

Free. Lunch and parking provided. Register at bit.ly/2ajuxnA. (202) 216-0420. ncpssm.org

4th Annual Chicago Southside Mini Maker Faire

shaped America. (Isabelle Lim)

The Great Migration in Three Movements: The First Movement Blanc Gallery, 4445 S. King Dr. Friday, August 5, 6pm–9pm. Free. (773) 373-4320. blancchicago.com David Anthony explores the history of The Great Migration, the movement of over six million African-American people from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest and beyond from the 1910s to the 1970s. Using the portrait as his focal point, Anthony incorporates avian allegory and gives a face to the mass movement that

MUSIC Wye Oak Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Wednesday, August 3. Doors 7:30pm, show 8:30pm. $20 standing room, $23 seats. 17+. (312) 5263851. thaliahallchicago.com Wye Oak comes to Chicago off the surprise release of Tween about a month and a half ago—a muscular doubling down on the sound they consolidated on 2011’s Civilian, and a temporary detour from the guitarless mood they explored for 2014’s Shriek. It’s anybody’s guess which sound they’ll bring to Thalia Hall on Wednesday, but regardless, the show is sure to get heads bobbing and feet moving. (Austin Brown)

Planning For Burial Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Wednesday, August 3, 10pm. $7 in advance, $12 day of show. 21+.

(312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Coming off their exciting 2014 album Desideratum, Planning for Burial comes to Reggies this Wednesday. Expect slow-moving songs, a little bit of crying mixed with headbanging, and mumbled lyrics that nevertheless hit deeper than your average Death Cab line. Don’t worry about it being excessively doomy, though—as if on cue, the piano lines help balance the guitar crunch right when it’s most needed. (Austin Brown)

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 29

6th Annual Greatest Enterprize House Picnic Jackson Park, 60th St. and Stony Island Ave. Saturday, August 6, 10am–10pm. Free. All ages.

It’s all been leading up to this—some of the biggest and best names in South Side dance (including Teklife legend Corky “Traxman” Strong) are putting on the Greatest Enterprize House Picnic once more in Jackson Park. This year promises to outdo even the last few, with eye-catchers like Paul Johnson and Mike Love, host of Soul 106.3 FM, on the lineup. Get there early: you’ll want some time to set up the grill. (Austin Brown)

Jody Digital ChiTown Futbol, 2343 S. Throop St. Saturday, August 6, 9pm–2am. $10. 18+. chipandyfest16.eventbrite.com

Fidel: The Untold Story Pop Up Just Art Gallery, 729 W. Maxwell St. Wednesday, August 3, 6pm–8pm. Free. RSVP at bit.ly/29r5EK9. (312) 355-5922. sji.uic. edu The documentarian Estela Bravo received remarkable access to Fidel Castro for this unabashedly positive portrayal of the Cuban leader and revolutionary. The screening caps a month-long series of films on Cuba.

(Adam Thorp)

Alice Bag

Studio Movie Grill, 210 W. 87th St. Thursday, August 4, 7pm. $6. RSVP at bit.ly/2aa2Gt2. blackworldcinema.net

In which the Weekly’s music editor dismisses all attempts at neutrality to say: go see this! Really! As one of the originators of punk itself back in the mid-1970s, Alice Bag also holds the honor of being one of the most prominent female punk progenitors, holding her own against bands like Black Flag, X, and the Germs as the 1980s rolled in. I’m serious, though: go! As far as raucous and essential punk goes, this is as good as it gets. (Austin Brown)

STAGE & SCREEN Shakespeare in the Park: Twelfth Night

¬ AUGUST 3, 2016

“If music be the food of love, play on,” Duke Orsino extols in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This traveling tour of the play, part of a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, establishes that appreciation of the playwright’s work continues.

(Adam Thorp)

Jody Digital, member of footwork crew The Era (profiled in the last issue of the Weekly), will be spinning a set at ChiTown Futbol on August 6. DJing since he was fifteen, Jody’s also affiliated with the late, great DJ Rashad’s Teklife crew, and loose Chicago collective Stack or Starve. (Christian Belanger) ChiTown Futbol, 2343 S. Throop St. Sunday, August 14, 8pm–1am. $7. All ages. alicebag. com

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Marquette Park, 6743 S. Kedzie Ave. Wednesday, August 3, 6:30pm; Dvorak Park, 1119 W. Cullerton St. Friday, August 5, 6:30pm; Hamilton Park, 513 W. 72nd St., Wednesday, August 10, 6:30pm; Ping Tom Memorial Park, 1700 S. Wentworth Ave., Sunday, August 14, 4pm. Free. (312) 595-5600. chicagoshakes.com

Touki Bouki

At its monthly screening, Black Cinema House presents this critically acclaimed 1973 Senegalese film. In it, a pair of lovers dreams about escaping the harsh realities of Dakar for the promise of Paris; the film explores the clash between the traditional and the modern in the colonial aftermath.

(Hafsa Razi)

The Bluest Eye Staged Reading Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S. Woodlawn Ave. Friday, August 5, 8pm. $5. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org The Hyde Park Community Players come together to present a staged reading of excerpts from Toni Morrison’s disconcerting story of insanity, incest, and death. The reading will be directed by Oroki Rice, a

EVENTS newcomer to the Players. (Adam Thorp)

5561. bingartbooks.com

Gordon Parks in Cinema: The Super Cops

In this Diana Ross vehicle, the famous diva plays a poor Chicago department store worker who finds success as a fashion designer in Rome, ditching her beau, “a proto-Barack activist,” in the process. Come watch Mahogany, if only for the endearingly schmaltzy theme, “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” (Christian Belanger)

Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Sunday, August 7, 4pm–6:30pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Come to Black Cinema House for a screening of director, writer, and photographer Gordon Parks’s 1974 The Super Cops, a movie based on the real-life story of a pair of free-wheeling, maverick New York policemen famous for their cornucopian drug busts. A panel will follow; in the interest of full disclosure, we should note that it features Weekly affiliates Darryl Holliday (board member) and Maha Ahmed (Managing Editor). (Christian Belanger).

BCH@BING: Diana Ross: Boss— Lady Sings the Blues BING Art Books, 305 E. Garfield Blvd.

Thursday, August 11, 7pm–10pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. bingartbooks.com BING’s next monthly screening series, of Diana Ross’s cult classic films, starts with her 1972 depiction of Billie Holiday, that inimitable artist of “luminous self-destruction,” as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote. Stick by afterward for a discussion with jazz musician Maggie Brown and Black Cinema House curator Jacqueline Stewart. ( Julia Aizuss)

Movies Under the Stars: Beginnings...

Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, 1456 E. 70th St. Friday, August 12, 7pm–9:30pm.

(312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Another night outdoors takes a look at Africa through the lens of the obscure work of famous filmmakers and writers: Black Cinema House and Chicago Film Archives team up to screen short films by Jean Cocteau, Langston Hughes, and Ousmane Sembene. ( Julia Aizuss)

BCH@BING: Diana Ross: Boss— Mahogany BING Art Books, 307 E. Garfield Blvd.

Thursday, August 18, 7pm–10pm. (312) 857-

LIT Word Games, Word Winder Chicago Public Library Beverly, 1962 W. 95th St. Wednesday, August 3, 2pm–3pm. (312) 747-9673. chipublib.org Children ten to twelve years of age are invited to spend an afternoon with toy inventor and wordsmith David L. Hoyt. Learn about what inspired him to create Jumble word puzzles, and then play his word game GIANT Word Winder. (Anne Li)

Shakespeare and Gender: Twelfth Night Chicago Public Library Chinatown, 2100 S. Wentworth Ave. Saturday, August 6, 2pm– 4pm. Free, online registration required. (312) 747-8013. chipublib.org The Viola Project and Shakespeare 400 Chicago share Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. Young people ages ten to sixteen who identify as girls are invited to examine the ways gender and gender-bending affect the play, as well as perform a scene. (Anne Li)

Invisible Man and Nobody Seminary Co-op, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Tuesday, August 9, 6pm. (773) 752-4381. semcoop.com From Ferguson to Flint, America’s attention has been wrenched towards its forgotten places and people. Mychal Denzel Smith’s memoir and Marc Lamont Hill’s reporting and analysis respond to the shift. Charlene Carruthers, executive director of the Black Youth Project 100, will be the interlocutor.

(Adam Thorp)

AUGUST 3, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 31