WordUp - kalamu’s words

In Defense of SLAM! Nation. 

What could be more Afrocentric than poetry in performance given our strong oral/aural traditions? A report on diversity in spoken-word art today 

Just as there are some who don't think rap is music, there are writers who don't think slam is poetry. Detractors announce that slam is bad for poetry, as though it were a disease that infects, adulterates, contaminates and might even debilitate poetry. 

In Extraordinary Measures--Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Univ. of Alabama Press, September 2000, $19.95, ISBN 0-817-31015-0), critic and professor Lorenzo Thomas says, "The United States has been enjoying a sort of poetry renaissance. Currently the poetry slam, an event where drunken audiences hoot down sensitive poems about dying grandmothers or inevitable divorces and bestow twenty-dollar prizes on scatological doggerel, is sweeping the nation. It's an amusement that seems to be a goldmine for saloon keepers too sophisticated for Hot Buns contests. It has recently been possible to find at least three such events every week at different venues--even in a city like Houston." 

It is ironic that such a screed would be written in a book about "Afrocentric Modernism." What could be more Afrocentric than an emphasis on poetry's performative aspects growing out of the oral and aural tradition? An alumni of New York City's Lower Eastside-based Umbra Collective, Thomas is no neanderthal academic bemoaning the loss of poetic values. He is instead a perceptive critic whose evaluation of slam seems to be the result, unfortunately, of what poet Wanda Coleman would call a bad night at the taco house. 

Regardless of the nay-sayers, night after night, all around the world, poets are slamming in front of large and lively audiences. Obviously, there is more to slam than meets the ear. Slam has a history, a mission and a future. 

Marc "Slam Papi" Smith is the founder. "The Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill was an outgrowth of the Monday Night Poetry Reading and open mike I started at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago, November 1984. At that time, poets were scoffed at if they `performed' their poems. Critics said it cheapened the art of poetry. Us ill-bred poets of the Get Me High did not care. We began to attract more audience than our critics could." 

In 1985, Smith formed the Chicago Poetry Ensemble with fellow poets Mike Barrett, Rob Van Tyle, Jean Howard, Anna Brown, Karen Nystrom, Dave Cooper, John Sheehan, and a year later they staged the first poetry slam at the Green Mill. "There was no competition," says Smith. "It was a variety show directed by myself and performed by the Chicago Poetry Ensemble. My initial goal was to increase the audience for poetry. In the early 1980s even the most established poets in Chicago had little or no audience. From a handful of people at the Get Me High Lounge the slam audience has grown to tens of thousands across the world." 

Can tens of thousands of people worldwide be wrong? Is slam really serious or is it just a case of fooling a lot of the people a lot of the time? Slam poet and literary activist Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is clear in his assessment of slam's importance, "Slam has opened poetry to an entire generation that had no use for it thanks to our educational system. It is kind of the America of the poetry world--the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It has provided a forum for those who have no home in the ivory towers of academia and an alternate outlet for those that do. These people do not contemplate the trees. They do not believe that politics have no place in poetry. They are activists, often whether they know it or not. Slam audiences are often the most diverse of any of the art forms, especially within poetry itself. It is slowly and subversively creating a more enlightened society." 

Unlike the overwhelmingly white "beat movement" to which it is too often inaccurately compared, slam is a truly diverse, multicultural movement. And make no mistake, slam is as much a social movement as an aesthetic movement. As Smith suggests, "slam has changed people's lives. Thats what art is supposed to do. If it does nothing but entertain, it might as well be a sit-com. The slam moves people to be passionately involved with art and performance, with words and ideas, with the people who come to listen. It has given people purpose and direction. It has challenged people to examine themselves, to take chances, to get to know people and ideas they would have otherwise just passed by. The families, friendships, and communities that have grown up out of the slam are truly a blessing to all of us involved in its creation and development." 

The political side of slam is the focus for ongoing discussion and debate. Recently online at the slam listserv, the role of women in slam was the topic and members weighted in pro and con on whether slams in general had been helpful or harmful to women slammers. Much like the poetry one hears at slams, the quality and content of the discussion was both passionate and diverse. 

Walidah Imarisha, 21, an Iowa-born, Philadelphia-based black woman wrote: "The slam was set up to allow a space where anyone can get up on the mic, without a book under their belts or a publishing deal in the works, and have their three minutes and reach out directly to people with no interference. And, hell yeah, that's a good thing. [We] have all had our minds colonized by this patriarchical, racist, sexist and homophobic society. We have all been imprinted with those ideas and paradigms of oppression, and if we don't consciously think about it, if were not always dialoguing and reconsidering our ideas and our structures, we are simply doomed to reconstruct the same oppressive restrictive model we were trying to get away from in the first place." 

The first seven national slam champions were women, and the reigning diva of slam is four-time national champ Patricia Smith. The Chicago native and professional journalist was introduced to slam by Marc Smith (no relation). Patricia Smith went on to win the first national slam championship in San Francisco in 1990. In looking at the development of poetry as a result of the unforeseen popularity of slam, Patricia philosophically notes: "There is so much heat, and motion, and energy, and sound in what we do. It's hurtling along so fast that you don't know where it's going to go. You can't prescribe roads for these things to take, but you do have to recognize them when they have arrived. 

"Poetry is a wild and restless art," she says, "and contrary to what people assume, the rowdy ambience that slam thrives in has not only brought audiences to poetry, but has made both the poets and the audiences more, rather than less, critical. "The longer you stay in it, especially if it's at a venue where the slams are held weekly or every other week, you will find that the audiences become increasingly more sophisticated. Something that bowled them over performance-wise a week or two ago, won't work again and again." 

Roger Bonair-Agard, the 1999 national slam champ, acknowledges that "there are people who get more caught up in the competition of slam then they do in wanting to make good art. However, I don't believe that slam intrinsically lends itself to the worst elements of an audience. I believe that it is possible to write good work and also be victorious at slam. One need not dumb down one's art in order to be successful." 

Roger is widely recognized as one of the nation's leading slam coaches. In the last three years, teams that Bonair-Agard has coached have won one championship and lost two on time penalties (in the nationals, points are taken away when a slammer goes over three minutes). But winning is not the only consideration. Roger believes it is important to believe in your work and to "write the best poem you can." 

Bonair-Agard went to school in Trinidad, under a British system that emphasized the classics, and moved to New York where he attended Hunter College. "I'm still a little bit tied to the idea that people need to read and that's why I'm putting a book out, but I'm also in the initial stages of putting together a CD. I'm coming more and more to the feeling that poetry is a spoken art and I think people need to hear it. I'm incorporating a lot of music in my CD because I feel that one needs to understand music as a language onto itself. 

Slam has changed the way we write, perform and think about poetry. At its best, slam is a vital and dynamic addition to, rather than a detraction from, the body of artfully expressed words we call poetry. 

VIVA SLAM! Where to go if you want to know and hear more

VIDEO

Slam

Starring: Saul Williams, Sonja Sohn. Director: Marc Levin. Vidmark/Trimark, 1998, VHS, $14.99 UPC 31398676836 

This popular movie and critical success story brought international attention to slam. Although many slam poets dismiss the movie because the poetry is only briefly presented (some even argue, misrepresented), after this movie the whole world knew that there was a new poetry movement called Slam.

SlamNation 

Director: Paul Devlin 1998, VHS, $29.95 SlamNation is a compelling documentary of the 1998 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon. The video features dynamic performances by a wide variety of slam phenoms such as Saul Williams, Patricia Smith, Taylor Mall, Jessica Care Moore, Beau Sia, Daniel Ferri and mums the Schemer. Director Paul Devlin captures the tension and elation of the slam competition, the inside jokes and take-no-prisoners rivalry. Short of attending the nationals, there is no better introduction to the art and entertainment of slam.

BOOKS 

Poetry Slam--The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry 

edited by Gary Mex Glazner Manic D Press, September 2000, $15.00 ISBN 0-916-39766-1 Glazner is the organizer/producer of the first National Poetry Slam. He is also the director and producer of the film SlamNation. His anthology is the bible of slam. Not only are most of the major slam poets represented, but there are also mini essays and group e-mails. You want to know the basis rules for slams? Go to page 13. Poet-provocateur Taylor Mali gives you inside tips on how to win at slam, and slam veteran Daniel S. Solis outlines strategies for both teams and individuals. From haikus to rants (including "I Don't Want to Slam," Staceyann Chins remarkable anti-slam-poem declaration), Poetry Slam is a comprehensive, truly representative book on slam.

Burning Down The House Selected Poems from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe National Slam Champions 

Roger Bonair-Agard, Stephen Colman Guy LeCharles Gonzalez Alix Olson & Lynne Procope Soft Skull Press, May 2000, $13.5 ISBN 1-877-12848-4 Although slam started at the Green Mill Bar in Chicago, it's the Nuyorican Poets Cafe that is the mecca of slam poetry. There is some resentment and some jealousy about the Nuyoricans acclaim, but there is no denying that the institution is responsible for producing an amazing number and variety of slam poets. Plus, the Nuyorican has a rule prohibiting poets from repeating as slam team members, thereby insuring that there is always fresh blood flowing through the house. In 1998 the Nuyorican team, coached by Roger Bonair-Agard, won the National Poetry Slam:Burning is an anthology of their work. While Poetry Slam covers the waterfront, Burning makes its mark by focusing on five poets whose styles and backgrounds are widely varied.

ON THE WEB 

www.poetryslam.com 

Poetry Slam, Inc. is the official organization and website for slam. Here you will find rules, history, news, archives, chat rooms and a catalogue of poetry books, CDs and videos. The site also includes information on the upcoming College Union Slam Invitational to be held April 14 & 15, 2001 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as well as information about the 2001 National Poetry Slam in Seattle, Washington.

slam@datawranglers.com 

The slam family has an open listserv on which an amazingly wide range of issues are passionately argued, discussed, cussed, aired and sometimes beat to a pulp. Whether trying to decide on rules and regulations for the upcoming slam championship or discussing racism and sexism in the slam community, the back and forth has all the energy of an orgasmic slam. If you want to get the lowdown on whats happening with slam day to day, this listserv offers the full 411.

New Orleans editor and writer Kalamu ya Salaam is founder of Nommo Literary Society, a black writers workshop; leader of the WordBand, a poetry performance ensemble; and moderator of e-Drum, a listserv for black writers and diverse supporters of their literature. His latest book is the anthology 360 [degrees] A Revolution of Black Poets (Black Words Press). Salaam's latest spoken word CD is My Story, My Song. Salaam can be reached at kalamu@aol.com. Read his feature on the black leaders of the Poetry Slam movement beginning on page 46.

-March 1, 2001

 —kalamu ya salaam

Cracking Up - Post Katrina New Orleans

Our driveway is cracking. Horribly. Really cracking.  Just saying “cracking” is an understatement. One ridge sticks up two or three inches higher than the rest. And the door that leads from the den to the washroom (which itself is just a small extension behind the garage), that door does not fully close. Above the door sill inside the den there are very, very ugly, highly visible cracks in the wall. And we're lucky. Our house did not receive flood waters.

The phone has been ringing daily with requests. Right now there are three or so interviews to do (or not do) this week—we'll see how I'm feeling when the time comes.

a system of thot

we must survive we must

survive we

must survive death

to

the system

—kalamu ya salaam

LOOKING (sitting on the dock

of the bay - for Otis)

the sea gulls are looking for fish

circling on the warm air currents rising over the lake

i am looking at them submitting to the laws

of their nature

what type of natural law do we black people

submit to

is it natural to be a negro

is it natural the way we dress and express ourselves

sometimes

the sea gulls are looking for fish

what are we looking for as we cruise thru the

twentieth century down the boulevards of slow extinction

what glimmering brightness are our eyes attracted towards

i am looking at them turning and twisting

what ever way they feel is best, flying just

like they want to

when we turn and twist is it like we want to

are we flying the way we want to

the sea gulls are looking for fish

they are not fooled by empty cigarette packs

floating in the dirty waters

what are we looking for, what kinds of brightness will

we dive into the lakes after

and call them fish

i am looking at them scanning the waters

and diving down head first

fishing

when we move, is it head first

do we look and examine the waters we dive into

the sea gulls are looking for fish

actively searching over the white cresting lake for food

i am looking at them and am searching too

i seek the black world and know that

i must scan quickly, choose well and dive

head first

or else

it will elude  me like the wet slippery

undersides of fish;

—kalamu ya salaam

The Meaning Of Life

sometimes I sit

and I wonder

what is the meaning

of life

I sit

sometimes

and I wonder

and then I realize

I am the meaning

of my own life

the meaning is me

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

That’s Christmas

We sat silently at the table. Keith, the youngest of us, was maybe five, six at the most, I probably was around eight, sneaking up on nine. My daddy had said go by the table in the front room and dutifully we waited quietly.

There was no tree in the living room, no lights around the windows, no radio on playing Nat King Cole singing The Christmas Song—a song that unfailing marks time for me ever since I was driving back from a holiday party my senior year in high school and the song came filling the car with a strange sentiment, which in years ahead I would easily identify as a combination of desire and satisfaction. Nat’s voice had a very reassuring quality, and at the same time the music made you want to have someone near to share that moment, someone you could touch in an intimate albeit unembarrassing way, like her hand between your legs or vice versa, and catching green lights all the way on the slow drive home.

When my daddy walked in the room we all looked up, certain that this was an important moment. My daddy was a man of few words, he didn’t joke around and when he told you to do something, well, as young as we were we understood.

It was maybe a week before Christmas. In future years by then we would have already strung lights around the grillwork on the front porch and on the edge of the roof fronting the sidewalk, and during the holiday seasons when we went all out, we would put color-coordinated blinking bulbs in all the windows facing the street, but at that moment there was only the lonely dining room ceiling light illuminating the bare table and the close-cropped heads of my father’s three sons as our giant of a man stood in front of us.

I don’t know where my mother was. She wasn’t in the room. Was she even home? I don’t remember.

Maybe I looked up at the fixture, a sort of frosted glass plate that muted the harsh illumination, the same kind of covering I broke one day while bouncing a rubber ball in the room. Boom, it shattered and a falling shard cut my top lip—the scar is still there, you just don’t notice it because of my heavy mustache. 

Then my father pushed his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, opened the leather, extracted three five-dollar bills, gave one to each of us, said “that’s Christmas,” turned and walked out the room.

Nothing further was said. No lecture. No sugar-coating the naked truth. We continued celebrating Christmas for years after that but inside each of the three Ferdinand boys there was a calculator that added up each sentiment, every desire, all our feelings as part of the emotional audit we routinely did at key moments for the rest of our lives.

Thanks to my father, my brothers and I viewed Christmas and everything else in life with cold, clear, unsentimental eyes. We could and often did go through social feel-good motions but the mask of mythology had been ripped off our eyes early in our lives when our father taught us the true meaning of Christmas: give what you can and move on.

—kalamu ya salaam

I Am Ashamed Of Myself

(Post-Katrina New Orleans)

I woke up this morning. I was ashamed.

I couldn't remember what I was doing in 1994. In April. The rainy season. Even if my life depended on it, I could not recall any specifics. I just couldn't remember.

Over 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered then. I don't remember what I did but not having anything that I remember tells me that I did nothing memorable.

I don't even have a poem specifically about the genocide. Did I write a letter, a petition, an article? Did I do anything? It is depressingly banal how often the reality registers: when the good do nothing, the bad do everything.

Why is goodness always cast as a coward? The truth is, if we do nothing, we can not be good. Doing nothing is a collaboration with the worst of ourselves.

Less than four hours earlier at three-something in the morning when I should have been sleeping I had just finished watching Sometimes In April, Raoul Peck's movie about genocide in Rwanda a dozen years ago. I staggered to bed emotionally drained.

I assume while I was asleep my subconscious was taking inventory. When I awoke, a terrible truth appeared: if I did nothing during Rwanda, I had no high ground from which to expect others to do something for New Orleans.

All of the tasks I should be doing but for whatever reasons I have not done, each of them stood at my bedside and took turns whacking at my conscience.

My discomfort was not just Rwanda. Kysha, Robin and I are working on a poetry anthology appropriately entitled The End of Forever. Over the last couple of weeks I have come up missing in action. I am mired in a swamp of inaction, emotionally overwhelmed at times. The book is in the last stages, just a little more effort and it would be finished, but I lay in bed, dilly-dallying for no good reason-I don't know what I'm waiting for and I'm not sleepy, it's just . . .

But the book is not the only thing. More and more people are calling me about LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE. If I push harder I could make more happen, faster. We should have been up and online by now. There are specifics I can not do, technical matters others have to address, but I could put my shoulder to the wheel and make things turn faster. I could, but . . .

My wife is patient with me, never once complaining as I leave the house every evening and don't come back until round midnight, going to spend hours with Doug who is battling cancer and dueling with the after-affects of chemotherapy. Nia and I have not gone to the movies at all this year, and it has been some months since we have gone out to dinner together.

There have been days when I freely gave my full attention to visitors needing assistance with this, that or the other. On more than one occasion I have spent more time with someone I may never see again than I have with my wife whom I see almost every day-you see, I can not even say I see my wife everyday because some days . . .

Do you understand why I am ashamed? Yes, I know that I do so many good things for the cause, but I do not remember what I did in April of that killing season occurring in a ten-thousand-square-mile country of around eight million souls. Count off eight people you know, if they had been Rwandan, most likely at least one of them would be dead-and not just dead, but smashed like an insect. Thus the marauders crowed, explaining why they used machetes: we do not waste bullets on cockroaches.

I have not completed the book we planned to have ready by the end of August. Our LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE website is not fully operational yet. My wife and I eat separately. Do you understand how it feels to see yourself like that?

I tell myself to get up. Get moving. It is another day. We're alive. There's so much we can do. But . . . it's raining outside, just like April in that breathtakingly beautiful land of a thousand hills.

Most of us never know when our end will arrive. I stared at my computer screen as actors under Peck's direction portrayed people who knew they were about to die. At one point I hit the space bar to pause the action. I reached up, wiped my eyes, and then continued watching. If I had been there, what would I have done?

Lying on my side, face to the wall, a hard answer severs my sense of self half-in-two: Had I been in Kigali, I may have done nothing but watch, that is, if I were lucky enough not to be a Hutu hacking a Tutsi, or a Tutsi being hacked, I probably would have been a so-called innocent onlooker... after all, that is what I was as I sat in Houston in my brother-in-law's living room watching on CNN as the Tutsis of my city were abandoned at the Ernest Morial Convention Center.

When we evacuated, our car was full but I left a working automobile behind. I can say: I did not expect the levees to break, I thought I would be back in a few days. I can say if I had stayed I would have been one of the locals, like Malik and Jerome, rescuing people before outside help arrived. But regardless of what I say or want to believe I might have done, the hard question remains. What did I do? When the deal went down, there I sat, just watching.

Now, I realize: every day is April. Whether it's Rwanda or New Orleans, the same question wakes me: what am I doing about it today?

A dozen years from now will I have done anything worth remembering?

—kalamu ya salaam

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

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"Blues Zephyr"

"Haiku #102"

"Call Of the Wild"

haiku #82

in twisted silence

we bandage dreams battered by

exposure to life

—kalamu ya salaam