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Showing posts with label black history month. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black history month. Show all posts
Poem Therapy at 12:40 P.M. - Aya de Leon
Aya de LeonIcon/I have a dream
Aya de Leon
Martin Luther King fought for justice, not integration
Don’t confuse the method of transportation with the destination
But history remembers our heroes distortedly
like black & white kids holding hands is all he stood for
& completely forgets his opposition to the viet-nam war
& what’s more
his ideas are intellectual property &
if Ghandi can be an icon for apple computers, then
everything in this nation is for sale
I can just imagine what advertisers would do with
King’s letter from the birmingham jail
picture this: it gets bought by corporations in the
prison industrial complex
& they take it all out of context
putting up billboards in the hood that say:
hey young black men, MLK went to jail; if you’re
lucky, you can be next>
Or imagine this one
Let’s say the NBA buys his speech at the march on
washington
talking about I have a team
I have a team so the sons of former slaves can sweat
and toil up and down basketball courts like modern day cotton fields
for the profit & amusement of the sons of former slave owners;
it is deeply rooted in the american dream; I have a team>
Or perhaps it would be bought by developers talking about
I have a scheme.
I have a scheme that little white yuppies can live next to
little black and brown boys and girls,
digging the convenience & flavor of their hood
& when the black & brown folks get moved out
white yuppies will say in their newly acquired hipster slang
don’t trip peeps, it’s all to the good
yes, I have a scheme
still deeply rooted in the American dream
feeling like a dij` vu, except without the smallpox blankets
& then developers can go to black church testimony meetings
talking about
I’m not here to testify
I’m here to gentrify!
can I get a witness?>
Or maybe it would be bought by a multinational
pharmaceutical conglomerate
talking about I have a cream
I have a cream & even if the red hills of georgia are
nothing compared to the acne on your face, I have a cream.
A cream that guarantees that every pockmark will be
exalted and every pimple made low, I have a cream.
I have a cream that fights against itching,
anti-government bitching and encourages snitching.
I have a cream that is spermicidal, herbicidal,
pesticidal & genocidal, I have a cream today!
I have a cream that will turn little black boys into little white girls
& we sold some to michael jackson & he said
white at last, white at last, thank god almighty I'm
white at last!
yes, people, we must be very careful who we let
control our past.
Black History Month: Muhammad Ali
Muhammad AliFloat like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
I remember watching Ali and Howard Cosell verbally spar on television when I was a kid and it wasn't until I was older that I realized that it was an act, that they actually liked each other.
I am a closet boxing fan. It's embarassing to admit to enjoying watching grown men pound the light out of each other. I will admit that since Tyson reinvented himself as boxing's grindhouse Gorgon and went completely off the grid, I haven't been interested in the sweet science. I'd have to google the current heavyweight champion. Instead of watching live boxing, I watch documentaries and films about boxing.
For me, Ali is still the boxer at the center of the sport.
Ali is still the most recognizable man on the planet. Check out the website to see for yourself the man, the boxer, the legend still worthy of being considered The Greatest of all Time
Here's an excerpt from Google books The Soul of a Butterfly : Reflections on Life's Journey
If you haven't seen Ali yet, get it for this weekend.
Check out the history of boxing in America and in Ancient Greece.
Black History Month: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieRead an excerpt from the Minneapolis-St.Paul's Star Tribune series: Purple Hibiscus
Read an excerpt from The New York Times "First Chapters" feature: Half of a Yellow Sun
Check out her latest book, a collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck
Listen to an interview from New American Media on Nigerian in America
Search Adichie's website for novel, poetry, short story, and essay excerpts, interviews, and more
Poem Therapy at 12:45 P.M. - Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef KomunyakaaFacing It
Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Today. 2:15.
Poem Therapy at 8:23 P.M. - Harryette Mullen
Harryette MullenShedding Skin
Harryette Mullen
Pulling out of the old scarred skin
(old rough thing I don't need now
I strip off
slip out of
leave behind)
I slough off deadscales
flick skinflakes to the ground
Shedding toughness
peeling layers down
to vulnerable stuff
And I'm blinking off old eyelids
for a new way of seeing
By the rock I rub against
I'm going to be tender again
Poem Therapy has become very much like searching for treasure at a vintage or thrift store: I get a feeling that treasure awaits discovery and then I am drawn, and often stumble upon the very thing I've been searching for, even if I wasn't aware I was looking for it.
Mullen's Shedding Skin is the exact treasure I needed at this very moment to articulate what is happening this year, so far. I think the universe is the horde of barbarians at the gate, battering the stone wall I've spent decades building, stone by rough hewn stone. My fortress has served me well, but, armaments eventually crumble to ruin. It's time to drop the gate, jump the moat and sprint headlong into the wilderness that waits.
I will be tender again.
Black History Month: Toni Morrison
Nobel Laureate Toni MorrisonBeloved
I
124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.
Toni Morrison is my favorite author, and Beloved is my favorite book. It is a book that grabs you by the neck and shakes you. Hard.
The book's dedication is for "the sixty million and more" who perished in the institution of slavery. The book is far more than a polemic on the evils of slavery. Beloved haunts us with the certain knowledge the past may be forgotten, but it is not dead.
Black History Month 2010
Martin Luther King Jr.Check out Biography.com and History.com for links to almost every imaginable topic on black history.
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