Black History Month Series (III)

Q: Why is “different” still a dirty word?

A: Because of the normalcy fantasies of the skin privileged.

I am not a member of mainstream-, middle class-, Judeo-Christian-, WASP-modeled society. That is one of the major differences between being a “truly multicultural artist” and being “a multiculturalist.” Multiculturalists are usually skin privileged, thus closer to the imagined American cultural norm, and they use phrases such as “explore” when discussing interacting with Other races or cultures. They might announce: “I’m in the mood for ‘ethnic’ food tonight. How about you?” Theirs is an external, superior, sometimes overly-analytic rather than participatory stance, a pseudo-liberal approach to acting like a hip American.

“Multiculturalists” often react and overreact to difference in non-consumerist settings even while pretending that the differences do not matter to them one bit. This requires a pretense of enjoying the “melting pot” while simultaneously positing the self as customer and Others as a product to be sampled or its waitstaff. That is, the Normal seems gracious (at least to himself) for acknowledging the value of the Other, much like a big tipper.

Truly multicultural people, even minus the art, like what we like, believe what we believe, with no need for applause or an audience to our transgressions across social, racial, or cultural boundaries. The multicultural artist is an observer, but one who sees herself as part of many cultures, a true participant, so superior to none. It is the art that makes us different; we observe naturally, not to prove or disprove anything. An artist of color, viewed as different just as a human being, need not try to be different. She only needs to embrace difference, within herself and without, as a positive or neutral factor.

Black History Month Series (II)

Q: What does it mean, really, to be a multicultural writer?

A: I write as I live, through all of my valued private and public traditions and experiences…as an American. There’s no pie chart for my cultural percentages, and 9 times out of 10, the Black part is not open for discussion.

Blackness is a state of being shaped by experiences, not just a biological “marker,” so when I say “Black” I am not talking about physical packaging—9 times out of 10. Why is that such a difficult concept for non-Black Americans to get, especially women? Is “woman” just a biological fact or marker for them? When a man relates to a woman’s “femaleness” or refers to her as a woman when that specific fact seems irrelevant to the current human communication or interaction, doesn’t that woman get angry, defensive, feel insulted, maybe think “sexist jerk”?

If so, why do I get labeled an ABW or militant for thinking “race-obsessed jerk” when my race is gratuitously or inappropriately “related to” or referred to? When is it inappropriate for another person to refer to my race? 9 times out of 10 that the person is not one of my oldest and dearest friends, and yes, especially if the person is not a Black American and/or of African descent. It’s a cultural understanding thing, complicated by both historical and present racism. I catch a lot of heat for mentioning my own race, asserting that it “makes a difference,” so all non-me’s should have even stricter racial gag orders than I.

Turning specifically to the question of art, when I apply pen to paper, it is not with the pressure of a monocultural agenda. That is, if I’m in a Black state of mind, my pen writes about race, or culture, or racism. When I’m feeling my “woman-ness”, I write about sex, or gender, or sexism. Major holidays bring out my inner American; that’s when I write about friends and family, or mistletoe and pie, or anti-patriots. Some days, when socio-economic inequities are especially noticeable and infuriating, I write about class prejudice. In other words, I write what I write, with neither boundaries nor pretenses of belonging to any one literary tradition. To write with respect for the past, appreciation for the present, and an eye on the future is perhaps my subconscious, apolitical, multicultural agenda. A reader who possesses a monocultural agenda or monomaniacal obsession with any one part of a writer’s personal features or demographic categories (i.e., with her “markers”) will probably find my work disappointing.

Black History Month Series (I)

In honor of Black History Month and the impending publication of my first collection of poems, which are autobiographical, I will be posting a series of personal essays.

Q: What does it mean to be Black, and multicultural, and a woman writing into the 21st century?

A: It’s a race, class, gender tale of nature versus nurture.

Here in the twenty-first century, on the cusp of publication of my poetry, there is still such an unpleasant focus on the biology and social status of Americans that I am stuck under the label “Black,” which I will gladly keep, and “ghetto girl,” which I reject as racist, sexist, and elitist. For I am not from the ghetto, street, or inner city. My inner child is indeed a girl from the ‘hood, but the term is short for “neighborhood,” and it is for me an internalized term, not one that is merely suggestive of a past or current geographic or socio-economic location/status but also representative of a complex now-woman’s identity.

It means that I am confident, sassy, strong, yet love being a woman: wearing lipstick, skirts, and shiny new shoes if I please; being unashamed to have feelings; keeping secrets or indulging in a bit of harmless gossip; saying thank you when a man swings open a door in front of me rather than being insulted. Any so-called “low-class” woman will tell you, there are more manners in the poor and blue collar men of Dorchester, Eastie, and Roxbury than in the Financial District, Newton, and West End. “Class” to me means that one actually recalls having been raised right, with common manners and sense, respect for both genders, and an old-fashioned notion of decency.

How a child was born and raised and who an adult has chosen and still chooses to be and become—two different things. A truly multicultural artist, like me, embraces nature via self-acceptance and spirituality as well as nurture via accepting the best, most interesting, most compatible people, concepts, pleasures, responsibilities that exist outside of the self. For me, allowing the internal marriage of nature and nurture, of high and low culture, has created an identity. It is bothersome, to say the least, to be answering the same questions about my bookish and artsy self that I was answering twenty-five years ago. At 20, I was a confused and misfit girl, student, living in one tiny area of the world. At 45, I am an educated woman who has discovered, and who constantly stretches the limits of, her current power and her artistic and human potential. Recognition of that fact respects the general process of learning, growing, and maturing in a society that is still less than kind to its minorities and its poor. Artists, Black Americans, and women fall into at least one of those categories.

It’s all about the ball

Man, the second and third quarters were snoozeable—but the first and fourth, well, they are why football keeps winter hot.  The 100-yard TD dash, the Fitgerald sprints that said “I’m making you old boys run for your money today!” and that gorgeous Baryshnikov-worthy, tippey-toe TD catch in the end zone.  Aw, baby!

Add music—lip-synch away, JH, you’re still amazing! and the still-steamy rocker babe Boss—and that is how to end football season.  Damn!

Miss you, Mike!

My friend, spoken-word poet Mike Amado, died two weeks ago. I was kinda hoping if I didn’t ever write that he is gone, somehow I could pretend it was all in my head. When I think of Mike, I can almost hear his unique laugh, remember the funny e-mails he sent that kept me company during long afternoons and evenings spent writing in the library, re-appreciate the supportive comments he made after reading every poem I’ve ever posted. A few of his comments are on this blog. I’m a citygirl who loves the sounds of Boston. We both dug vinyl rock, and we had some good conversations about my beloved Steven Tyler. Mike could tell you which flipsides of 45’s became bigger Aerosmith hits than the singles originally released, and he was very proud of his Native American heritage; what I miss most is the musician’s spirit, best heard through his drumming while reciting poems.

How the City Sounds Without You
[For Mike Amado]

“Oh, yeah, life goes on…long after the thrill of living is gone.”
–John Cougar Mellencamp

First, I’m on Huntington, singing all loud and wrong
with my radio, but people look at me funny, so I gradually
quiet down, turn it off. Odd that it’s okay to scream into
invisible phones, but singing to one’s self is just, plain weird.

It’s been a few weeks since word came that you were gone.
But, suddenly, just now something’s gone wrong with my ears.
Cars, trucks, bikes glide down Mass Ave into noiseless gridlock.
Angry faces flame red, moving, but saying nothing at all.

That couple waiting at the bus stop–well, they appear to be
arguing, faces scrunched and rude, then turned on that dude
on his way to McDonald’s with his hand out for contributions.
He’s speaking to me now. Hunh? Did he ask for a dollar?

I guess the bells still ring at the Christian Science church.
Berklee boys tumbling in the snow must be laughing. For, surely,
music still exists. I wouldn’t know. All that I can hear, finally, is
an Earth grown far too silent without the voice of your sweet drum.

Prose Poems and Flash Memoir

You decide which is which:

When Dearly Departed

     Why the heck were most of my aunts single and kidless? Simple. Aunt Stella–living happily in the sticks with her thirteen cats, root cellar, famous rhubard pies, old stereo with an automatic arm working through a stack of 78’s–knew the score. You have to marry a big baby to give birth to little ones. Oh, just go with the cats, borrow other people’s kids once-per-week for Sunday school, keep the colorful, took-months-to-make-’em quilts vibrant and tear-free for years. Sigh with Mario Lanza and Sinatra as you doze in a room lit only by fire, soft purring ball in your lap.   

     And there was Sara, in a Boston ‘burb wearing silver slippers and African turbans on Sunday, pouring cream from a little cow pitcher at ladies’ brunches with just her twenty-something nieces putting monogrammed, starched-white napkins in their laps, grateful to learn the difference between British tea and Asian, delighted by the homemade mayonnaise on her crustless cucumber sandwiches. She zipped to the city and hopped a plane with her always-packed overnight as easily as the Europeans do. 

     Aunt Mignon haunts bookstores by day, lurks nights in Irish pubs with crazy-fun artists of all types, hearing about who’s slept with whom, what anti-depressants so-and-so is on. Min rolls her eyes at all the political talk from older poets who marched in the ’60s, and she tolerates burn-outs who call her a square for never puffing a ciggy much less pot in her life…and only dating one spoiled-brat guy at a time. She graduated in Faneuil Hall, goes to rock shows there decades later–under the shiny white Christmas lights and blue neon clock of the Custom House. What a life to put before “she never married” in post-mortem bios. Oh, wait. That wasn’t my namesake. That’s me!

“Halfway to Hell”*

     Oh, it’s fine ’til I’m walking over the River, my three-seasons-per-year companion. 200 smoots in, I know it’s entirely too cold for a long walk today. What was I thinking? My handsome appointment made me feel twenty-five again. Back then, what was an hour’s walk at dusk in late, cold, windy November? Back then, a marathon night of making love had no effect on rolling out of bed for work on a Friday morning. What was sleep to me?  

     So here I am, knowing why some name that point Hell. One fourth of the way, you want to stop when meeting the wind.  But the stars, and the sky-high towers, and the lights so shiny on the midnight ripples, all pull like a tug-o’-war rope. Halfway, you’re stuck. Know you’ll lose your voice. Hear the chill, laughing at your cotton hood, seeping into the tips of your ears that will ache tonight as you sip spiced chai in pink thermals and fuzzy purple socks, longing for a man to rub you warm. 

*Painted on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge over the Charles River that connects Cambridge to Boston.

   

We Three Kings    

I.  My father banned Christmas. No lights, photos, tree-trimming. Ham was out too. If it snowed, morning was a sledfest for us Three Little Ones–Sammy, and H., and me. We zipped down the hill from the old Shirley House, rich people’s spirits sipping hot toddies and looking down on us, destined for Hell. What madness it seems now. Man, that hill was steep and slippery, and I was not the boldest girl on earth, hated snow inside my mittens. But that’s what you do with boys for playmates when you’re avoided like the plague by normal girls who eat sweet potato pie and don’t have to braid down their hair. My teen sisters made bean pie, wore dresses down to right-below-the-knee, smuggling mini skirts to switch, fake normal, in school. And my big sister had outweirded the whole neighborhood by going away to college. Only the invisible girl across the street who dumped oatmeal out her gabled window was stranger than us. 

II.  We Three’d pretend it was fine, and had never known anything else. But the older ones griped, said how it had been before the tin men took the house, back when there was a dog, Daddy had smoked cigars, and Christmas began with Momma poking little pushpin things into a juicy, scored ham. That, my sister said, was in the good ol’ days, back when you were dead. Her spirit-twin sister got upset at that, but I wouldn’t find out for another ten years that I was the only one of us nine who almost didn’t make it home from the hospital, so tiny, wouldn’t eat. Eventually, I swept into the family like part of the blizzard, on the Epiphany, cuddled in Daddy’s arm and a purple plaid blanket; named after a dead aunt, and a gypsy, and a faerie too…which explains a lot, really. 

III. But enough about me. On Christmas afternoon, we went to Grammie’s house. The door swung open to a world that would do the Sugar Plum Faerie justice, tables draped in handmade ivory lace, white cotton and green-foam village with a tiny man actually ringing the church bell. The tinsel-dripped tree scraped the ceiling, its spiraling rainbow tube splashing star shapes on the walls. And, oh, the cookies. Snow-sugar-covered raspberry sandwiches, gingerbread men (and girls, just for me), all stacked like a Seuss tale on a three-tiered goody tree. There were hundreds of presents, even for family I’d never met, curlicued and bowed. The five of us feasted, my mother happy that I’d wolf down anything, even peas, if you poured gravy over it. And we laughed, Sammy and I singing Later on, we’ll Perspire! as we sit by the fire… with Johnny Mathis until nightfall, then stuffed ourselves, all those presents, and tin-foiled pie for our siblings into a cab, giggling all the way home. To this day I wonder: what did the older ones do while we three were playing normal for a day?

What Really Counts at the End? 

It reminds me of my aunts in their 80s–seeing two 
tiny elderly ladies who must be sisters, one 
with a crushed-velvet burgundy clutch, three   

feathers on her matching veiled hat. Eighty- 
something years of bickering or ignoring for six 
days per week, then going to church on the seventh! 

Her sister, in a crushed navy dress, matches too. 
They competed for a lifetime. I wonder who won.

Hair It Comes!

Renewed dialogues on Black women wearing naturals (that’s wearing our hair unchemically-processed). With the economy in a state of non-luxurious living, who can afford to plunk down $100 for salon relaxing? I’m biased on the topic, having chemically altered my hair for a maximum of 5 years in my entire life.  It was long, $200+, and I didn’t love it.  It felt weird, sounded weird, looked alien with my veggie-burger-loving personality, and took for-ev-er to blowdry on non-salon weeks.  I was in my 20’s.  In honor of my turning 45 in January, I’ve cut my possessed hair.  It’s soooo soft and curly, silent, and it “looks like me.” I adore it.   Here’s the link that prompted this confessional burst of kinky-haired self-love:

http://www.ebonyjet.com/living/fashion/index.aspx?id=10534

November Poems

My rare political poetry, part of a 7 in 7 challenge:

Must’ve Bumped My Head

Must’ve bumped my head. Could swear I heard
on the 11 O’Clock news that a Black person
just became president of the U. S. of A.

Fell asleep waiting to watch the old white guy
pull another fast one like that woman
as running mate ploy. Tricky bastard!

Well, there must be an ice-pack around here
somewhere. This’ll all be over, come morning.
The chickens will be roosting. The cows will

still be chewing, lowing, waiting to be milked.
Everything will be the same as always. Same
old red roosters, blue skies, white house.

On the Balcony [For Jesse Jackson]

Standing on the balcony of
perhaps we can, you watched
the future crumple, dreamcatcher
rejoining the sky. Your country,
on the thresh-hold of tomorrow,
stepped back, wayyy back. And it
was about time for outrage.

On the balcony of tomorrow,
you look into the face of hope–
that promised land of unity,
the sea of shining faces–
and join a collective leap in faith,
believer standing before
the flag as many truly

pledge allegiance to this
first time, realizing that
there was an era for anger
and there is an hour for
tears of jubilation as well
as sheer disbelief and pride.
Now is exactly that time.

Short-cut to Peace

Some short-cuts aren’t much faster
than the long ways. This route might also
be prettier.

Don’t push, extend, breathe
too hard. It’s alright to take it easy.

No need to build or tear down, just renew,
re-build, reinforce. Bricks are good. It takes
a while to make them.

And it’s okay to get your hands dirty,
pause, think a bit, then push on, ahead.

Why, that really is a long path you’ve started,
and you’re starting to look a bit tired hauling
all that heavy stuff alone.

Me? Oh, sure. I’d be happy to help.
All you had to do is ask.

Cabinet Selections

This might be the most important
decision for a figurehead to make.

All eyes will register, judge, base
at least four long years of scrutiny

on past patterns and setting precedent.
There will be lots of mumbling about

the dirt and skeletons you’re hiding.
Girlfriend, go with the glass fronts.

Exotic-elect Without Campaigning

A new friend of mine, Bee,
says she’s running out of room
in her head for certain friends,
and I was so happy, happy, happy
to hear that.

I was thinking it must be just
me after all. Can’t be friends
with others anymore, expecting
too much, left in a daze, daze, daze
by their pure fantasies.

Wasn’t my idea to volunteer as tanned
Exotic, then mess up by showing there’s
an independent brain behind this mask
of sameness. I hear, I hear, I hear
the contradictory “just like us.”

A child of the ’60s. Grew up drinking
Dr. MLK, so passively resisting is my
trip that has its stumbles when
trespassed again, again, again.
I’m no bridge.

Spokes People

[For Native American Heritage Month]

There is no medicine on that wheel, the one
called “I have heard this story already.
Let me cut you off right there. No words.”

What one speaker might have meant,
revealed, shared, where she could have
re-directed…all is lost when a nonlistener

raises a louder voice. Where would we
have gone, connected spirits? What could
we accomplish as a spectrum of minds?

Spokes that are free to speak and hear do
more to keep the world revolving than
each tiny rodent mind that owns one wheel.

In Hard Times

From the bridge over the Mass Pike
you can look in the rec room
of the Cask ‘N’ Flagon, watch college kids
drinking beer, guitarist riffing his shiny red wood,
pretend that all remains as it was.

The lights at Fenway Park stay on all night.
At Kenmore Square, the Citgo sign glows,
jerseyed in red, white, and blue neon bulbs.
Good old Hotel Buckminster graciously hosts
Chicken & Biscuits in its yellow-brick belly,

foreign students emerging from its concrete
toes. Then, just as you begin giving up
on idyllic tomorrows of same-old-thing
at the sight of a veteran beggar on a milk crate
in front of the worst Mickey D’s in Boston,

teen lovers approach, wearing silly grins of shiny
-new, ragged jeans, swinging locked fingers. All
really is as it has been, should be, and will be again.

(This last, drafty one is screaming to be edited, I know, but that’s a wrap. Hope you had fun.  I’m exhausted.  Whew!)

“It’s Alive!”

Yay! My blog finally pops up as the first item when I’m googled.  Yay!  Hurrah!  Eureka!

Never thought I’d see the day…

I haven’t much to say here, trying to write a poem that’s not cooperating at all. I guess even the muse has been rendered speechless today.  Yes, everybody saw the polls, heard the preliminary numbers, watched Palin add buckets of water to the tanking campaign, but….  I never thought I’d see the day.

Congratulations, President Obama.  Congratulations, USA!