I MET MYSELF I met myself coming around the corner one day, and I almost didn’t recognize me. We so seldom see ourselves as we actually are. Even in a mirror we often see what we hope to be or what we fear we are, exaggerating both flaws and beauty. But when we see ourselves in the faces of others, then we really see. Would you know yourself if you saw yourself the way others see you? Of course, when we are young—or at least when I was first moving beyond my teen years—it never occurred to me that the past had anything deep to do with me personally. My father was from the country. I was from the city. I didn’t really see how his life was shaping my life. One African proverb says you can’t truly judge the man until the man has reared a child. So when can you truly judge the child? Somehow, in the way most of us in America have been acculturated, I thought of myself as distinct from my parents. I did not consciously know their ideas about life except by inference in terms of what they encouraged and/or discouraged in me, and therefore I was blissfully unaware that much of my own ideas were shaped and influenced, if not outright determined, by the ideas my parents held. When my mother was battling Hodgkin’s disease, she would have her three sons take turns driving her across the city to the hospital that was located in the next parish to the west of New Orleans. During these long drives for chemotherapy treatment she would talk to each of us, not about anything in particular, but many years later I realized she was consciously spending her last days conversing with her sons. I’ll never forget how well she knew us, how after hurricane Betsy hit my mother had written a long letter to her youngest sister, my aunt Narvalee who was by then living out in California, a single mother with one child, my first cousin Frieda. My mother was a college graduate and a third grade school teacher. I knew she could write, but she opened her letter saying if she could write like Paul in the bible or like me, Lil Val. Wow, my mother admires me as a writer. That was in 1965 three years before I joined the Free Southern Theatre and became a professional writer. By 1973 she was dead. If she saw me now, would she still admire me; would I remind her of the young man she loved; or would I be so strangely changed that she would know who I was but not know the me who came to be over the intervening years between now and when she last saw me back in the early seventies? I wish I could see me the way she would see me if she looked at me today, she who knew me before I knew me. Have you ever had a long talk with someone who knew you well but had not seen you in over ten years? Say, you’re having a quick drink with Gilbert after seeing him at Walgreen’s; he was purchasing a prescription for diabetes medication and you were getting a refill of blood pressure medicine. Gilbert was your best friend from elementary school with whom you used to share lunch. You and Gilbert had even planned and literally started to run away together just for the romanticized adventure of two adolescents exploring the world away from the dictates of parents. Or maybe you are hugging Eric and laughing with your arm still around his shoulder and he is playfully punching you in the chest the way y’all used to do while playing sandlot football games on the crisp autumns of weekends decades ago, and Eric would laugh at something you said and retort, “boy, you still talking all that shit.” Or maybe it was Woodrow you encountered. He was coming out of Picadilly’s, and you were going in planning to meet your wife for dinner. Woodrow was someone you used to laugh with pulling pranks in high school and now, even though he walks with a cane and has only half a head of hair, Woodrow gains your admiration as he tells you about the business venture he’s started. His enthusiasm is contagious as he describes all the wonderful skills and information he’s learning. His eyes are animated as he leans into you, one hand familiarly resting on your right shoulder as he describes the joys of getting into a whole new area and keeping up with thirty-year-old guys who are not even half his age. Or you see Sandra in some office hallway, she who could outrun a cheetah back in eighth grade. She is still slim and vivacious. She greets you not only with a girlish giggle and bubbly “hello” but waves a well-manicured hand at you while balancing a cup of steaming coffee in her other hand; she’s married and has a beautiful diamond ring that literally shoots off a flashing rainbow of refracted lights as she waves good-bye. Seeing her brisk walk and the swing of her lithe hips makes you self-conscious about all the weight you’ve gained. I temporarily quieten some of my concerns about who really knows me by insisting people who have not seen me in years can not really know me. The two questions—who knows me and do I know me the way other people know me—take turns as the focus of my mind. Then I wonder how much of me today is the old me that friends knew decades ago. The old folks say it’s easy to change your mind but hard to change your ways. Is the way I am today more or less the way I was way back when, and if so where did that constant part of me come from? Was I born the way I am, or are all of us shaped by our interactions with and responses to our nurturing environment? Over a life time do we remain essentially the same or is it possible to fundamentally transform ourselves? The things we think about can surprise us. Where did that come from, we ask ourselves while looking around to see if anybody saw us thinking these crazy ideas. I remember riding a subway in Manhattan. I hallucinated for a minute and thought I saw my mother and father at a train stop, standing close to each other. My old man handsome, with a dimpled smile and a seriousness dripping from his eyes, his dark head held high; my short mother looking up, her eyes shining. He had one hand lightly on her waist, and she was leaning into him, two hands caressing his chest. I had never seen my mother touching my father like that, never thought of them as head-over-heels infatuated with each other. But there they were. Suddenly I started wondering about what momma and daddy were thinking and feeling, how it was to be young and black in the late forties. How did fighting in two wars affect him: once in the pacific and later in Korea? Before she died, my mother’s younger sister told me why we used to alternate going by the Robinson’s on Mardi Gras one year and the Robinson’s coming by us the next. Frank Robinson and my father were best friends, and daddy asked Mr. Robinson to look out for mama while daddy was in the war. I wonder now how it was to be a pregnant woman with two small children and her man returning to war after surviving World War II. I can’t believe how dumb I was to ignore them. How could I be so uninterested in the roots of myself. Even though in my early manhood years I served in Korea on a missile base located on a remote mountaintop, I never really discussed Korea with my father. Like most youth, I was too self absorbed to want to learn anything about my origins or any of me that wasn’t actually embodied in my physical person. When I was still in elementary school I gave a Frederick Douglass speech and won a prize in a church contest, and later in junior high school, playing Crispus Attucks, I jumped out of a closet—well, actually from behind a curtain—hoisting a sword fashioned from a coat hangar, proclaiming “I’m a proud black man who is willing to fight and die for my freedom.” I liked that kind of black history but ignored my father’s fight to be hired as a laboratory technician at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He wrote letters all the way to Washington. DC, kept arguing his rights and finally a directive came down to hire him. They did, but they wouldn’t promote him even though he was the best lab tech they had, so good that he was the one training the college interns, some of whom were hired after his training and even promoted because they had a degree while he languished in lower grade positions because he had no sheepskin. I never heard him complain about mistreatment—was I deaf or did he just silently suffer, nobly carrying on despite slights heaped on him? Now that I’m old as history, now that my teenage years are on page five hundred-and-something in the American history book, the textbook someone had thrown on the floor, in the corner of our classroom; now that what I went through does not seem relevant to what teenagers today are going through; now I want to know my father’s history, I want to embrace my mother’s hardships. There they were again and again, at each train stop. That must have been me my mother was carrying in two arms, gently bouncing up and down. I had on a funny, green knit hat swallowing my big head. I am the elder of their three sons. Should I get off and at least walk close to them, hear what they are saying to each other? Look, my mother is talking to me. What was she saying? Before I can muster the courage to stand up and go eavesdrop on my parents, the train pulls off. I am strangely more anxious about how I bungled the chance to get to know my parents when they were standing at the last stop than I am curious about what I will see at the next stop. But the next stop is my stop. I get up and wait at the door as the train jerks to a stop. The door abruptly opens. People pour in and out of the train simultaneously. As I push through the throng, I look up and down the platform. They are not there. My parents are gone, or more likely, never were here. I feel alone, making my way in the world. I promise I will never forget my parents as young lovers. I was so fortunate that they were my fate—Inola and Big Val. My mother, a school teacher who never forced me to do homework and who did not even try to dissuade me from taking an F in high school one trimester because I didn’t want to do an assignment a teacher forced on me. My father forcing us to grow food in the city and pick up all the trash on our block to keep it clean but who never once tried to discourage us from picking up the gun in the sixties—that was my brother on the cover of Time magazine brandishing a shotgun during the take over at Cornell University. Big Val and Inola always encouraged us to fight, and they never made us conform to anything. It is obvious to me now, but I have not always recognized this truth: I can not fully know myself if I don’t intimately know my past, intimately know the forces that shaped and influenced me, the people who gave birth to me, and especially the culture and era within which I lived. My head was spinning as my mental fingers tapped the codes of past experiences into the calculator of my consciousness. I was literally engrossed in my own world. So there I was coming around the corner thinking all these thoughts, totally unaware that I was about to really peep who I was; suddenly I see someone I grew up with. That person looks old as they hug me, greet me, and playfully say, heyyyy man, long time no see. They enfold me in a long, warm embrace, holding the me they remember. I am struggling to remember their name. In that moment I see both their obvious joy and also see how much they have changed, how they have aged. I wonder what they are doing, what is their life like, what part of the city they live in, what kind of work they do, all the personal profile sort of information. That’s when I had this weird desire; I wanted to be able to fully embrace myself and know myself the way this old friend thinks they know me, and I was really curious to know myself from the perspective that my parents knew me. I wanted to know all of me, and that’s the moment when I had a news flash: now that your life is almost over, who are you really? Am I only who I think I am or am I really the complex summation of all that I have also been in relation to others and in response to the world within which I have lived. As I walked to my car I had a funny thought: my mind is not me. My mind may in fact be the biggest impediment to me getting to know me. Maybe my mind is the least reliable map of who I have been, a distorting lens when it comes to recognizing the self. All personal intentions aside, all individual desires sublimated, all intellectual self-reflections and second guesses ignored, is it possible for any of us to truly know ourselves without the help and input of others who know us? Is it possible to move beyond letting our minds judge who we are? Would it be too overwhelming to consider letting the world we live in judge who we are? Can we shed the shackles of our own mind and be both free and fortunate to see ourselves the way others see us? And if that portrait was actually presented to us, would we recognize ourselves? —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
Sadness Is Not Fair
i eat the air
and the cling of your
vagina after my climax
and an after the rain drive
across the dripping mountains above
port-of-spain and a sunday walk
through morning waves’ wash on tobago beach
and the sound of coltrane and i eat
milton nascimento, the quiver of his voice,
the suppleness of it, sinewyly climbing into a
realm of distinct sadness brasil calls saudade,
moaning unspeakably beautiful melodies, this
man was born to seductively shoulder the endurance
of pain like the ache in billie’s tortured
knowing, knowing there is always, no matter
the sweetness, always a tasteless after-love
that will unflinchingly flay happiness’ thin
fragileness, a fragileness that can seldom
wholly survive reality’s roughness
i drink disjointed memories
i walk down the sidewalk with an armful
of written words, humming aloud trane’s “peace
on earth,” my hard won serenity
at that moment simple as the dull
purple luster of a ripe plum about to be bitten
into or whatever else one finds delicious,
admiring the stylish way we wear troubles
one would think our anguish was a tailored shirt
instead of just a disappointing moment
we turn into music
i do not understand portuguese
i do not understand why i am
thinking these thoughts
sadness is so unfair
—kalamu ya salaam
Charles Lloyd
dear charles,
(a dream note to charles lloyd, 29apr96)
you came to me in a dream
early this morning
the silver of your saxophone
glistening whole notes
long trane tones unfurling
lester subtle young tendernesses
rhythmically sophisticated lyrical flags
flowing within the wind melody
of your breath
so i had to write to you
you were passing through
the audience sharing great helpings
of honest horn musings
pain but no anger, bliss
that blossomed
watered by the dew of tears
as your gentle noise
whooshed into our ears
some of us inhaled sharply
& held the bellowing of the music
bottled within our bosoms
the seriousness of your song
transmuted into tangy blue smoke
& we became fiends
addicted to the music
you know, i had to write you
at one point you dressed in loose garments
i remember the off-white of natural cotton
a touch of blue (perhaps a knit cap) & a slash
of muted red, a belt? or was the flash
a sash or scarf? & sandals, no, slippers
yes, backless slippers
& yr legs were crossed
& some sister was singing
& your elegant obbligatos
sensuously caressed
with the patient thoroughness
of a mature man
more interested in intimacy
than the immediacy
of climax, you did a little jump riff
that set toes to tapping
& you also sang (in a funny soft voice,
slightly off-key) "lady,
lady,
oh lady
be good"
such gentle blessings as these
are necessary evidence
to persuade our sisters
that it is possible
for men to be humans
so i write just to say
i heard you
in my sleep &
realizing the depth
of dreams
i strive now to keep
the blessings of your sound
ringing within me
during my every waking hour
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
In A Sentimental Mood…
yr voice approaches
a timid fawn cautious
about crossing
a previously untrod path…
but what do i know of deer,
the cold efficiency of cars and
planes power my traveling
this deer image is just a
sentimental conceit–or is
it a secret wish I have hidden
from myself to taste
some wild unmanufactured
emotion that my urban
life can only imagine?
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
MAAFA: Remembrance & Renewal
The past we inherit. The future we create.
We ask you to bear witness to your ancestors
the human bridges that bore you cross
slavery's turbulent & troubled waters
& made a way out of no way
for our arrival into a diaspora
in another country we have transformed
into home
We ask you to consider those whose bodies & souls created you
those who made it possible for us
to breathe & be in this time & place
this space where & when nothing should be taken for granted
we were not even supposed to survive but we are here
& should never forget how we first arrived
We ask you to remember that whether in times of feasting or famine
we are never alone, both those departed & those yet to come
are watching over us
the universe is our witness
Today we say we have not forgotten from whence we came
and we recommit ourselves to cherishing our history
as we keep the faith & spread it into the future
The spirit & struggle of each & every one of us
always makes a difference
pamoja tutashinda—together we will win!
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
STILL RUNNING
(meditations on integration)
1.
escaping plantations is not
simple
simply
a matter of running
away / for
to getaway successfully
you must not only run
from
but establish yourself
in
the place
to which
you run
somehow
create a home
create community
some how
shape space
transform
the alien air
of here & now
where ever
you are
into the welcoming
embrace
of home
2.
now that the big house
is on fire
and none of the world
is offering water
the progeny
of our former masters
hang out welcome signs
and proclaim
we are all the same
we can even sleep
in their beds with them
if our amnesia is deep enough
the price of admission:
leave your soul at the door, preferably
outside, not even on the porch
but in the yard
the back
yard
now pledge
allegiance
to this system
your history does not
matter
that the jails are full
of us
does not matter
that our illnesses
are at record levels
does not matter
that we own less
have less wealth
than ten years after
slavery
does not matter
if we forget
who we were
who we are
does not matter
3.
when we think
the other
is our problem
we have become
our own problem
after all
aren’t we all
wayfaring pilgrims
just passing thru
a strange
land, all of us
in need
of a helping
hand?
4.
regardless
of what those who own
to live
tell you
you can only really own
whatever you brought
into this world
whatever you brought with
you is all that you can
take when you leave
5.
you can not escape
the plantation
if you are carrying
their architecture
in your head
in your heart
6.
some of us
run
away
some of us
run
towards
until we die
all of us
are
running
7.
zig zag
brother
reverse field
stutter step
skip, hop, & jump
zig zag
sister
they’ll catch us
if we stand still
8.
our people
are our hills
—amilcar cabral
I think we should live
up in the hills
—burning spear
9.
no rest for the weary
believe
I’ll run
on and see
what tomorrow brings
—kalamu ya salaam
WE ARE GUILTY OF FORGETTING WHO WE ARE i am in a room 4 walls, ceiling, floor 2 windows, a door outside the window is the world no walls, sky, earth death, birth, & the relative briefness of life inside is the same as outside only smaller, less complex outside is the same as inside only bigger, more choices & possibilities there are only three questions to ask/to answer 1. who am i, 2. what is the world & 3. how do i change, love or leave it nothing else except maybe god sitting somewhere marveling at our transformation, god mystified, unable to explain the logic of how we have become just like the pseudo-human creatures who enslaved our ancestors wow after all the centuries of racist bullshit, lynchings, chattel slavery & such that we black people have suffered who would have thought that violent savages & impotent religious fanatics is what we would be come wow —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
photo by Alex Lear
CAN WE?
(for Ken Saro Wiwa)
1.
suppose
the thot
/police
took our words
seriously
treated us like the real po-po:
cut us down
on suspicion
of being
dangerous, just in case
we actually
are serious
2.
some of us forget
ken’s killers
were the folk
who threw fela’s mother
out the window
3.
a little while ago
i took a hot shower
was ken able to wash
before the hanging?
4.
everybody be talking abt
the morning after
what abt
the night before
any thots
on that?
5.
when i look into the mirror
of my life
experiences
do i see anything
that would lead me to believe
that i would be willing
to die for my beliefs?
6.
suppose
you had to take full
responsibility
for every word
you uttered
no matter how little
you meant it
“really, i was just joking around
i didn’t mean to tell the truth”
7.
can we
afford
not to be
serious?
can we?
can we be
like ken
saro wiwa was
strong
straight up
‘til
the end?
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
FORCES OF NATURE: HOPE SONG
/para Steph & Percival/
do not be bound by your mind
you are more than your thots
we don't just trod down time
mere materialist bricks of sod
we are immanent energy
both of & from the earth
our breath is wind
our flesh is soil
each smile an array
of sun warmth
each tear a droplet
of dew
but there is also another world
which animates us
delve into the forest
of your emotions
squat before the fire
of your imagination
sleep with the reality
of your dreams
our spirit surge is
stronger than computers
the dialectic
of human touch & feelings
an endless motor
self recycling
in the manner of oceans feeding
clouds & rain replenishing sea
while our being is as definite
as the texture of rocks
our mellifluous souls
are majestic
as the stoic millennium
of mountains
our essence is
two in one
both an awesome
aspect of nature
& a spiritual
projection
of life's
creative force
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
YESTERDAY WAS SO BEAUTIFUL
(and its passing so sad)
when the day transitions
it goes to night
first, before
there can be another
day
sometimes
a day has been
so beautiful
that in the night
instead of looking
forward
to another day
we can only grieve
for what is gone
but each day
is its own being
each being
has their own
day
whatever beauty
we find missing
tomorrow, whatever
we might miss
from yesterday
well, that beauty
we must become
tomorrow
we must be
as beautiful
as the departed day
we mourn in the anguish
of night
—kalamu ya salaam