Did he just wipe his hand after shaking that of a Haitian?

Excerpt from "Benediction"

Let me tell you about hate.
A bayonet on the end of a rifle run through
a teenager's bony chest by a swarthy soldier
frothing from the pleasure of it, amazed
at the sound of it, flesh sucking on metal.
And this boy dying and
his eyes do not lose their burn,
staring at his killer as though to say,
Do it, do it now because I will do it to you,
and even as I die, I am doing it to you.
© Chris Abani
[source...]

The Acacia Trees (by Derek Walcott)

I

You used to be able to drive (though I don't) across
the wide, pool-sheeted pasture below the house
to the hot, empty beach and park in the starved shade
of the acacias that print those tiny yellow flowers
(blank, printless beaches are part of my trade);
then there were men with tapes and theodolites who measured
the wild, uneven ground. I watched the doomed acres
where yet another luxury hotel will be built
with ordinary people fenced out. The new makers
of our history profit without guilt
and are, in fact, prophets of a policy
that will make the island a mall, and the breakers
grin like waiters, like taxi drivers, these new plantations
by the sea; a slavery without chains, with no blood spilt—
just chain-link fences and signs, the new degradations.
I felt such freedom writing under the acacias.


II

Bossman, if you look in those bush there, you'll find
a whole set of passport, wallet, I.D., credit card,
that is no use to them, is money on their mind
and is not every time you'll find them afterwards.
You jest leave your bag wif these things on the sand,
and faster than wind they jump out of the bush
while you there swimming and rubbing tanning lotion,
and when you find out it is no good to send
the Special Unit, they done reach Massade.
But I not in that, not me, I does make a lickle
change selling and blowing conch shells, is sad
but is true. Dem faster than any vehicle,
and I self never get in any commotion
except with the waves, and soon all that will be lost.
Is too much tourist and too lickle employment.
How about a lickle life there? Thanks, but Boss,
don't let what I say spoil your enjoyment.


III

You see those breakers coming around Pigeon Island
bowing like nuns in a procession? One thing I know,
when you're gone like my other friends, not to Thailand
or Russia, but wherever it is loved friends go
with their different beliefs, who were like a flock
of seagulls leaving the mirror of the sand,
or a bittern passing lonely Barrel of Beef,
or the sails that an egret hoists leaving its rock;
I go down to the same sea by another road
with manchineel shadows and stunted sea grapes
dwarfed by the wind. I carry something to read:
the wind is bright and shadows race like grief,
I open their books and see their distant shapes
approaching and always arriving, their voices heard
in the page of a cloud, like the soft surf in my head.
© Derek Walcott
[source...]

Revenge vs. Forgiveness

"Revenge and retribution are easy," Tutu said. "Forgiveness is not for sissies."
[source...]

Second Day

Rethabile Masilo created this poetry postcard in GIMP with a photo by Fernando de Sousa. It’s one of six winners from Postal Poetry's September 2009 contest. Click on postcard to enlarge it a bit more.

Untitled

This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges
a headland with mountains appears brokenly
then is hidden again until what emerges
from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea
and the whole self-naming island, its ochre verges,
its shadow-plunged valleys and a coiled road
threading the fishing villages, the white, silent surges
of combers along the coast, where a line of gulls has arrowed
into the widening harbour of a town with no noise,
its streets growing closer like a print you can now read,
two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes,
as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes
white again and the book comes to a close.
© Derek Walcott
[source...]

RIP, Ai

Conversation

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

© Ai

Ai, who has described herself as 1/2 Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas, in 1947. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona.

She legally changed her name to "Ai," which means "love" in Japanese. Ai holds a B.A. in Japanese from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine.

She is the author of Dread (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003); Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Greed (1993); Fate (1991); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets; and Cruelty (1973).

She has also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College. She teaches at Oklahoma State University and lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Ai died on March 19, 2010.
[source...] and [source 2...]

Sexuality and Christianity

Bishop Tutu was born on 7 October 1931.


“Jesus did not say, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw some’.”

Jesus said, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw all, all, all, all, all. Black, white, yellow, rich, poor, clever, not so clever, beautiful, not so beautiful.

It’s one of the most radical things. All, all, all, all, all, all, all, all. All belong.

Gay, lesbian, so-called straight. All, all are meant to be held in this incredible embrace that will not let us go. All.”

~~ Desmond Mpilo Tutu

Africa's Image in Western Media

Do African countries deserve the negative coverage due to the exploits of some of the continent's corrupt dictators? Some of the most vocal critics of corruption and tyranny have been Africans --Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Okot p'Bitek and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-- yet these writers don't use any of the pejorative terms --"tribesmen" "savage wars" "dirt poor Africans" -- favored by some Western writers.

What are some of the consequences of decades --indeed centuries-- of negative representations of Africa in Western literature and journalism? Inferiority complexes? Racist attitude towards Africans and people of African descent? Manufactured enmity amongst Diaspora Africans --after all, not many people would want to be associated with an "uncivilized" and "backward" continent.

Have some of the stereotypical representations --of Africans and people of African descent-- generated negative perceptions and even created hostility among Diaspora Africans? After all, as Malcolm X once said "You can't hate the roots of a tree without hating the tree."

These are some of the questions and issues that will be frankly explored during a gathering of Diaspora Africans --African Americans, African immigrants, Afro-Latinos, and Caribbean immigrants-- at The Brecht Forum on Saturday, March 13 from 4 PM to 7 PM during "Conversations: Embracing Our African Roots...."
[continue there...]

This is true everywhere, in the streets of the west as in the heads of its populations. There's a commercial on French radio that somebody is running. In it, a voice talks about Africa, Africa is this, Africans are that, and so on. At every adjective, all of them negative (poor/lazy/doomed/etc), a positive adjective is voiced over in a different voice (rich/hard-working/hopeful/etc). The stereotyping becomes much more obvious.

Whenever I go get a piece of music from the web, I've realised that many songs by African artists are labelled "ethnic" -- never by artists from anywhere else on the planet. An African will play the blues or jazz, and it'll usually be labelled "ethnic".

Africans in this context are therefore wholly tribal and ethnic and undeveloped and uncivilised. And barbaric. Yet most westerners who use such terms when referring to us, have never even set foot on the continent. That's how well the stereotyping has stuck.

Not long ago I was reading accounts of the latest attempt by Kenyans beaten or tortured by the British during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s to gain redress. Most accounts were factual and highlighted the growing body of evidence of the extent and institutionalised nature of torture – just as with US policy in Iraq and the 'War on Terror' – that makes it clear that it wasn't a few bad apples.

But the Telegraph website just couldn't stop itself reverting to revert to type with this description: 'The Mau Mau was an armed movement drawn from Kenya's majority Kikuyu tribe which launched a series of attacks against whites and pro-British blacks.' First of all, the attacks were aimed at the colonial system and not just simply 'whites' – it was not racially motivated. Secondly, the Kikuyu are not the majority community in Kenya, just the largest single group. And, finally, why tribe? Why in Europe do we have nations, or communities or ethnic groups, but in Africa tribes, with all the connotations of the word.
[continue there...]

Unfortunately some Africans themselves have fallen for this and describe themselves according to the divisive terms brought on by the west. The truth is that the reasons for Rwanda and the Kenya unrest and many other conflicts on the continent, also exist in the west, as well as the conflicts.

Else what are the Irish doing but engaging in tribal killings? Yugoslavia's violence was fomented by tribal bloodlust? Corsicans have blown up things and killed: tribalism? And the Basques in Spain, have you heard of more traditional tribal hatred?

Won't you celebrate with me

42

for Lorna Goodison

This prose has the gait of a mule urged up a mountain road,
a slope with wild strawberries; yes, strawberries grow there,
and pines also flourish; native trees from abroad,
and coffee-bush shining in the crisp blue air
fanning the thighs of the mountains. Pernicious ginger
startles around corners and crushed lime
leaves its memory on thumb and third finger,
each page has a freshness of girlhood's time,
when, by a meagre brook the white scream
of an egret beats with the same rhythm as crows
circling invisible carrion in their wide dream;
commas sprout like thorn-bush alongside this curved prose
descending into some village named Harvey River
whose fences are Protestant. A fine Presbyterian
drizzle blesses each pen with its wooden steeple over
baking zinc roofs. Adjectives are modestly raised in this terrain,
this side-saddle prose on its way to the dressmaker
passes small fretwork balconies, drying clothes
in a yard fragrant as Monday; this prose
has the sudden smell of a gust of slanted rain
on scorching asphalt from the hazed hills of Jamaica.
From White Egrets (Faber, £12.99)
© Derek Walcott
[source...]

Dear Mr. President, I Thought You Should Know

It’s February and the wind’s so bitter
my toddler, in the front pack, slides his hands
under my armpits and buries his face in my scarf.
I’m sorry to report that some people are still nasty
on the number 1 subway and my son’s teacher
has acute leukemia. I don’t expect you to change
everything or for everything to change. But every day
it does. My older boys, with their heavy school bags,
struggle to remain standing as we jolt along
these old, old tracks. Someone offers me a seat
but I can’t reach it. Someone else won’t let me past.
Later, I’ll nurse the baby, write some poems, and wait
to hear if the swab I twirled inside my cheek predicts
my bone marrow might save anyone. Until then, I’m held
upright by the press of your citizens, the city’s embrace.
© Rachel Zucker
[source...]

Interview with Geoffrey Philp

CLS: Mr. Philp, you have been blogging enthusiastically since 2005. What made you start doing it and how has it rewarded you?

Geoffrey Philp: I began blogging at the suggestion of my daughter and the rewards have been tremendous. I am not only doing something that I love, but it has served as a viable platform for advertising my work.

CLS: On your blog, you dedicate a significant number of articles on Caribbean writers. What are your thoughts on the present volume and quality of prose and poetry produced in the Caribbean?

Geoffrey Philp: I am amazed that we have so many active published writers in the Caribbean and its diaspora. The quality of the prose and poetry that has been produced in the past few years has been extraordinary. I’m thinking about, for example, the work of Jennifer Rahim, Frances Coke, Opal Palmer Adisa, Kwame Dawes, and Kei Miller to name a few.

I’m also gratified by the work of critics such as Heather Russell and Donna Aza Weir Soley, whose work has opened up a new critical appreciation of our writers.

CLS: You also teach class. Please tell us a little about that. How long have you been teaching and who are your students? What makes you love your work?

Geoffrey Philp: I have taught introductory creative writing classes to freshmen/sophomores at Miami Dade College and workshops for writers of every age for over twenty years now. Many students come into the class eager to express themselves, and they want to learn how to write short stories and poems. If they are willing, I teach them, for instance, the basics of a scene: narration, dialogue, setting, and point of view. One of the hardest things to do is to balance their exuberance against the cold hard fact of the craft which is writing and rewriting and rewriting…
Yet when they understand a simple concept such as character change through the beginning, middle, and end of the story, it makes everything worthwhile. I still receive books in the mail from students whenever they’ve published their first book or nth short story.

Knowing that I have helped someone to follow his/her passion is a wonderful feeling and it's why I teach.
[continue there...]
[more Geoffrey Philp...]